Detective

North Greenwich. Late May. Three hours before sunup and the river was

deserted. Dark barges strained upstream on their moorings and a spring tide

gently nosed small sloops free of the sludge they slept in. A mist lifted from

the water, rolling inland, past unlit chandlers, over the deserted Millennium

Dome and on across lonely wastelands, strange, lunar landscapes – until it

settled, a quarter of a mile inland amongst the ghostly machinery of a half derelict aggregate yard.

A sudden sweep of headlights – a police vehicle swung into the service

route, blue lights flashing silently. It was joined moments later by a second

and a third. Over the next twenty minutes more police converged on the

yard – eight marked area cars, two plain Ford Sierras and the white transit

van of the forensic camera team. A roadblock was placed at the head of the

service route and local uniform were detailed to seal off riverside access.

The first attending CID officer got onto Croydon exchange, asking for

pager numbers for the Area Major Investigation Pool and, five miles away,

Detective Inspector Jack Caffery, AMIP team B, was woken in his bed.

He lay blinking in the dark, collecting his thoughts, fighting the impulse to

tilt back into sleep. Then, taking a deep breath, he made the effort, rolled

out of bed and went into the bathroom, splashing water onto his face – no

more Glenmorangies in standby week, Jack, swear it now, swear it – and

dressed, not too hurried, better to arrive fully awake and composed, now the

tie, something understated – CID don't like us looking flashier than them –

the pager, and coffee, lots of instant coffee, with sugar but not milk, no milk

– and above all don't eat, you just never know what you're going to have to

look at – drank two cups, found car keys in the pocket of his jeans, and,

bolted awake now on caffeine, a roll-up between his teeth, drove through

the deserted streets of Greenwich to the crime scene. There his superior,

Detective Superintendent Steve Maddox, a small, prematurely grey man,

immaculate as always in a stone-brown suit, waited for him outside the aggregate yard – pacing under a solitary streetlight, spinning car keys and

chewing his lip.

He saw Jack's car pull up, crossed to him, put an elbow on the roof, leaned

through the open window and said: 'I hope you haven't just eaten.'

Caffery dragged on the handbrake. He pulled Rizlas and tobacco from the

dashboard. 'Great. Just what I was hoping to hear.'

'This one's well past its sell-by.' He stepped back as Jack climbed out of the

car. 'Female, partly buried. Bang in the middle of the wasteland.'

'Been in, have you?'

'No, no. Divisional CID briefed me. And, um-' He glanced over his

shoulder to where the CID officers stood in a huddle. When he turned back

his voice was low. 'There's been an autopsy on her. The old Y zipper.'

Jack paused, his hand on the car door. 'An autopsy?'

'Yup.'

'Then it's probably gone walkabout from a path lab.'

'I know-'

'A med-student prank-'

'I know, I know.' Maddox held hands up, stalling him. 'It's not really our

territory, but look-' He checked over his shoulder again and leaned in

closer. 'Look, they're pretty good with us usually, Greenwich CID. Let's

humour them. It won't kill us to have a quick butcher's. OK?'

'OK.'

'Good. Now.' He straightened up. 'Now you. How about you? Reckon you're

ready?

'Shit, no.' Caffery slammed the door, pulled his warrant card from his

pocket and shrugged. 'Of course I'm not ready. When would I ever be?'

They headed for the entrance, moving along the perimeter fence. The only

light was the weak sodium yellow of the scattered streetlamps, the

occasional white flash of the forensic camera crew floods sweeping across

the wasteland. A mile beyond, dominating the northern skyline, the

luminous Millennium Dome, its red aircraft lights blinking against the stars.

'She's been stuck in a bin liner or something,' Maddox said. 'But it's so dark

out there, the first attending couldn't be sure – his first suspicious

circumstances and it's put the wind up him.' He jerked his head towards a

group of cars. 'The Merc. See the Merc?'

'Yeah.' Caffery didn't break step. A heavy-backed man in a camel overcoat

hunched over in the front seat, speaking intently to a CID officer.

'The owner. A lot of tarting up going on around here, what with the

Millennium thing. Says last week he took on a team to clear the place up.

They probably disturbed the grave without knowing it, a lot of heavy

machinery, and then at oh-one-hundred hours-'

He paused at the gate and they showed warrant cards, logged on with the

PC and ducked under the crime-scene tape.

'And then at oh-one-hundred hours this a.m., three lads were out here doing

something dodgy with a can of Evostik and they stumbled on her. They're

down at the station now. The CSC'll tell us more. She's been in.'

DS Fiona Quinn, the crime scene co-ordinator, down from the Yard, waited

for them in a floodlit clearing next to a Portakabin, ghostly in her white

Tyvek overalls, solemnly pulling back the hood as they approached.

Maddox did the introductions.

'Jack, meet DS Quinn. Fiona – my new DI, Jack Caffery'.

Caffery approached, hand extended. 'Good to meet you.'

'You too, sir.' The CSC snapped off latex gloves and shook Caffery's hand.

'Your first. Isn't it?'

'With AMIP, yes.'

'Well, I wish I had a nicer one for you. Things are not very lovely in there.

Not very lovely at all. Something's split the skull open – machinery,

probably. She's on her back.' She leaned back to demonstrate, her arms out,

her mouth open. In the half-light Caffery could see the glint of amalgam

fillings. 'From waist down is buried under pre-cast concrete, the side of a

pavement or something.'

'Been there long?'

'No, no. A rough guess' – she pulled the glove back on and handed Maddox

a cotton face mask – 'less than a week; but too long to be worth rushing a

special. I think you should wait until daylight to drag the pathologist out of

bed. He'll give you more when he's got her in the pit and seen about insect

activity. She's semi-interred, half wrapped in a dustbin liner: that'll've made

a difference.'

'The pathologist,' Caffery said. 'You sure we need a pathologist? CID think

there's been an autopsy.'

'That's right.'

'And you still want us to see her?'

'Yes.' Quinn's face didn't change. 'Yes, I think you need to see her. We're not

talking about a professional autopsy.'

Maddox and Caffery exchanged glances. A moment's silence and Jack

nodded.

'Right. Right, then.' He cleared his throat, took the gloves and face mask

Quinn offered and quickly tucked his tie inside his shirt. 'Come on, then.

Let's have a look.'

Even with the protective gloves, old CID habit made Caffery walk with

hands in pockets. From time to time he lost sight of DS Quinn's flagged

forensics torch, giving him moments of unease – this far into the yard it was

dark: the camera crew had finished and were shut in their white van,

copying the master tape. Now the only light source was the dim, chemical

glow of the fluorescent tape the CSC had used to outline objects either side

of the path, protecting them until AMIP's exhibits officer arrived to label

and bag. They hovered in the mist like inquisitive ghosts, faint green

outlines of bottles, crumpled cans, something shapeless which might have

been a T-shirt or a towel. Conveyor belts and bridge cranes rose eighty feet

and more into the night sky around them, grey and silent as an out-of season

roller coaster.

Quinn held a hand up to stop them.

'There,' she told Caffery. 'See her? Just lying on her back.'

'Where?'

'See the oil drum?' She let the torch slide over it.

'Yes.'

'And the two reinforcing rods to its right?'

'Yes.'

'Follow that down.'

Jesus.

'See it?'

'Yes.' He steadied himself. 'OK. I see it.'

That? That's a body? He'd thought it was a piece of expanding foam, the

type fired from an aerosol, so distended and yellow and shiny it was. Then

he saw hair and teeth, and recognized an arm. And at last, by tilting his

head on one side, he understood what he was looking at.

'Oh, for Christ's sake,' Maddox said wearily. 'Come on, then. Someone stick

an Incision over her.'

By the time the sun had come up and burnt off the river mist, everyone who

had seen the body in the daylight knew that this was no medical-school

prank. The Home Office duty pathologist, Harsha Krishnamurthi, arrived

and disappeared for an hour inside the white Incitent. A fingertip search

team was corralled and instructed, and by 12 p.m. the body was being freed

from under the concrete.

Caffery found Maddox in the front seat of B team's Sierra.

'You all right?'

'There's nothing more we can do here, mate. We'll let Krishnamurthi take

over from here.'

'Go home, get some kip.'

'You too.'

'No. I'll stay.'

'No, Jack. You too. If you want an exercise in insomnia you'll get it in the

next few days. Trust me.'

Caffery held his hands up. 'OK, OK. Whatever you say. Sir.'

'Whatever I say.'

'But I won't sleep.'

Fine. That's fine. Go home.' He gestured to Caffery's battered old Jaguar.

'Go home and pretend to sleep.'

The image of the rich-yellow body under the tent kept pace with Caffery,

even when he got home. In the new whitish light she seemed more real than

she had last night. Her nails, bitten and painted sky blue, curled inwards to

the swollen palms.

He showered, shaved. His face in the mirror was tanned from a morning

near the river, there were new sun crinkles around his eyes. He knew he

wouldn't sleep.

The accelerated-promotion new blood in the Area Major Investigation Pool:

younger, harder, fitter, he recognized the resentment coming from the lower

ranks, he understood the small, grim pleasure they took when the eightweek standby rota circled back to B team, coinciding neatly and nastily

with his first case duty.

Seven days, twenty-four-hour standby, wakeful nights: and slam straight

into the case, no time to catch a breath. He wouldn't be at his best.

And it was looking like a complex one.

It wasn't only the location and lack of witnesses that muddied it; in the

morning light they had seen the black ulcerated marks of needle tracks.

And the offender had done something to the victim's breasts that Caffery

didn't want to think about here in his white-tiled bathroom. He towelled his

hair and shook his head to free the water in his ears. Stop thinking about it

now. Stop letting it chase its tail around your head. Maddox was right, he

needed to rest.

He was in the kitchen, pouring a Glenmorangie, when the doorbell rang.

'It's me,' Veronica called through the letterbox. 'I'd've phoned but I left my

mobile at home.

He opened the door. She wore a cream linen suit and Armani sunglasses

tucked in her hair. Shopping bags from Chelsea boutiques clustered around

her ankles. Her postbox-red Tigra convertible was parked in the evening

sun beyond the garden gate and Caffery saw she was holding his front-door

key as if she had been on the point of letting herself in.

'Hello, sexy.' She leaned in for a kiss.

He kissed her, tasting lipstick and menthol breath spray.

'Mmmmm!' She held his wrist and drew back, taking in the morning's

suntan, the jeans, the bare feet. The bottle of whisky dangling between his

fingers. 'Relaxing, were you?'

'I was in the garden.'

'Watching Penderecki?'

'You think I can't go in the garden without watching Penderecki?'

'Of course you can't.' She started to laugh then saw his face. 'Oh, come on,

Jack. I'm joking. Here.' She picked up a Waitrose carrier bag and handed it

to him. 'I've been shopping – prawns, fresh dill, fresh coriander and, oh, the

best muscatel. And this-' She held up a dark green box. 'From Dad and

me.' She raised one long leg like an exotic bird, and rested the box against

her knee to open it. A brown leather jacket nestled in printed tissue. 'One of

the lines we import.'

'I've got a leather jacket.'

'Oh.' Her smile faltered. 'Oh. OK. Not to worry.' She closed the box. They

were both silent for a moment. 'I can take it back.'

'No.' Jack was instantly ashamed. 'Don't.'

'Honestly. I can swap it from stock.'

'No, really. Here, give it to me.'

This, he thought, kneeing the front door closed and following her into the

house, was the Veronica pattern. She made a life-altering suggestion, he

rebutted it, she pushed out her lower lip, bravely shrugged her shoulders

and immediately he became guilty, rolled onto his back and capitulated.

Because of her past. Simple but effective, Veronica. In the six short months

they'd known each other, his worn, comfortable home had been transformed

into something unfamiliar, crammed with scented plants and labour-saving

gadgets, his wardrobe bulging with clothes he would never wear: designer

suits, hand-stitched jackets, silk ties, moleskin jeans, all courtesy of her

father's Mortimer Street importing company.

Now, as Veronica made herself at home in his kitchen – the windows open,

the Guzzini buzzing, peanut oil sizzling in bright green pans – Jack took the

whisky onto the terrace.

The garden. Now there, he thought, unstoppering the Glenmorangie, there

was perfect proof that the relationship was on a tilt. Planted long before his

parents had bought the house – full of hibiscus, Russell lupins, a gnarled,

ancient clematis – he liked to let it grow each summer until it almost

blocked the windows with green. But Veronica wanted to trim, prune and

fertilize, to grow lemongrass and capers in painted pots on the windowsills,

make garden plans, talk gravel paths and bay trees. And ultimately – once

she'd repackaged him and his house – she'd like him to sell up, leave this,

the little south London crumbly-bricked Victorian cottage he was born in,

with its mullioned windows, its tangled garden, the trains rattling by in the

cutting. She wanted to give up her token job in the family business, move

out of her parents' and get started on making a home for him.

But he couldn't. His history was embedded too deeply in this quarter acre of

loam and clay to pull it out on a whim. And after six months of knowing

Veronica he was sure of one thing: he didn't love her.

He watched her through the window now, scrubbing potatoes, making

butter curls. At the end of last year he had been four years in CID and

slacking – treading water, bored, waiting for the next thing. Until, at an offthe-rails CID Hallowe'en party, he realized that wherever he turned, a girl in a miniskirt and strappy gold sandals was watching him, a knowing smile on

her face.

Veronica triggered in Jack a two-month-long hormonal obsession. She

matched his sex drive. She woke him at six each morning for sex and spent

the weekends wandering around the house in nothing but heels and sorbetbright lipstick.

She gave him new energy, and other areas of his life began to change. By

April he had Manolo kitten-heel marks in his headboard and a transfer to

AMIP. The murder squad.

But in spring, just as his drive towards her faltered, Veronica's agenda

swerved. She became serious about him, started a campaign to tether him to

her. One night she sat him down and in serious tones told him about the big

injustice in her life, long before they had met: two of her teenage years

taken from her by a struggle against cancer.

The ploy worked. Brought up short, suddenly he didn't know how to finish

with her.

How arrogant, Jack, he realized, as if you not leaving might be

compensation. How arrogant can you get.

In the kitchen she tucked her thin, asymmetric chin down onto her chest,

her tongue between her teeth, and ripped a sprig of mint into shreds. He

poured a shot of whisky and swallowed it in one.

Tonight he would do it. Maybe over dinner-

It was ready in an hour. Veronica switched all the lights on in the house and

lit citronella garden candles on the patio.

'Pancetta and broad-bean salad with rocket, prawns in honey and soy sauce,

followed by clementine sorbet. Am I the perfect woman or what?' She

shook her hair and briefly exposed expensively cared for teeth. 'Thought I'd

try it out on you and see if it'll do for the party'.

'The party.' He'd forgotten. They'd arranged it when they thought that ten

days after standby week was a good, quiet time to throw a party.

'Lucky I haven't forgotten, isn't it?' She pushed past him, carrying the Le

Creuset piled with baby new potatoes. In the living room the French

windows were open onto the garden. 'We're eating in here tonight, no point

in opening the dining room.' She stopped, looking at his crumpled T-shirt,

the dark feral hair. 'Do you think you should dress for dinner?'

'You are joking.'

'Well, I-' She unfolded a napkin on her lap. 'I think it'd be nice.'

'No.' He sat down. 'I need my suit. My case has started.'

Go on, ask me about the case, Veronica, show an interest in something other

than my wardrobe, my table linen.

But she started pushing potatoes onto his plate. 'You've got more than one

suit, haven't you? Dad sent you that grey one.'

'The others're at the cleaner's.'

'Oh Jack, you should have said. I could have picked them up.'

'Veronica-'

'OK.' She held her hand up. 'I'm sorry. I won't mention it again-' She broke

off. In the hallway the phone was ringing. 'I wonder who that is.' She

speared a potato. 'As if I couldn't guess.'

Caffery put his glass down and pushed his chair back.

'God,' she sighed, exasperated, putting the fork down. 'They've got a sixth

sense, they really have. Can't you just let it ring?'

'No.

In the hallway he picked up the phone. 'Yeah?'

'Don't tell me. You were asleep.'

'I told you I wouldn't.'

'Sorry to do this to you, mate.'

'Yeah, what's up?'

'I'm back down here. The governor OK'd bringing in some equipment. One

of the search team found something.'

'Equipment?'

'GPR.'

'GPR? That-' Caffery broke off. Veronica pushed past him and walked

purposefully up the stairs, closing the bedroom door behind her. He stood in

the narrow hallway staring after her, one hand propped up against the wall.

'You there, Jack?'

'Yeah, sorry. What were you saying? GPR, that's Ground Probing

something?'

'Ground Probing Radar.'

'OK. What you're telling me is-' Caffery dug a small niche in the wall with

his black thumbnail. 'You're telling me you've got more?'

'We've got more.' Maddox was solemn. 'Four more.'

'Shit.' He massaged his neck. 'In at the deep end or what.'

'They've started on the recovery now.'

'OK. Where'll you be?

'At the yard. We can follow them down to Devonshire Drive.'

'The mortuary? Greenwich?'

'Uh huh. Krishnamurthi's already started with the first one. He's agreed to

do an all-nighter for us.'

'OK. I'll see you there in thirty.'

Upstairs, Veronica was in the bedroom with the door shut. Caffery dressed

in Ewan's room, checked once out of the window for activity over the

railway at Penderecki's – nothing – and, doing up his tie, put his head round

the bedroom door.

'Right. We're going to talk. When I get back-'

He stopped. She was sitting in bed, the covers pulled up to her neck,

clutching a bottle of pills.

'What are they?'

She looked up at him. Bruised, sullen eyes. 'Ibuprofen. Why?'

'What are you doing?'

'Nothing.'

'What are you doing, Veronica?'

'My throat's up again.'

He stopped, the tie extended in his left hand. 'Your throat's up?'

'That's what I said.'

'Since when?'

'I don't know.'

Well, either your throat's up or it isn't.'

She muttered something under her breath, opened the bottle, shook two pills

into her hand and looked up at him. 'Going somewhere nice?'

'Why didn't you tell me your throat was up? Shouldn't you be having tests?'

'Don't worry about it. You've got more important things to think about.'

'Veronica-'

'What now?'

He was silent for a moment. 'Nothing.' He finished knotting the tie and

turned for the stairs.

'Don't worry about me, will you?' she called after him. 'I won't wait up.'

Two-thirty a.m. Caffery and Maddox stood silently staring off into the

white-tiled autopsy suite: five aluminium dissecting stations, five bodies,

unseamed from pubis to shoulders, skin peeled away like hides revealing

raw ribs marbled with fat and muscle. Juices leaked into the pans beneath

them.

Caffery knew this well: the smell of disinfectant mingling with the

unmistakable stench of viscera in the chill air. But five. Five. All tagged

and dated the same day. He had never seen it on this scale. The morticians,

moving silently in their peppermint-green galoshes and scrubs, didn't

appear to find this unusual. One smiled as she handed him a face mask.

'Just one moment, gentlemen.' Harsha Krishnamurthi was at the furthest

dissecting table. The corpse's scalp had been peeled from the skull down to

the squamous cleft of the nose, and folded over so that the hair and face

hung like a wet rubber mask, inside out, covering the mouth and neck, pooling on the clavicle. Krishnamurthi lifted the intestines out and slopped

them into a stainless steel bowl.

'Who's running?'

'Me.' A small mortician in round glasses appeared at his side.

'Good, Martin. Weigh them, run them, prepare samples. Paula, I'm finished

here, you can close up. Don't let the sutures overlap the wounds. Now,

gentlemen.' He pushed aside the halogen light, lifted his plastic visor and

turned to Maddox and Caffery, gloved, splattered hands held rigidly out in

front. He was handsome, slim, in his fifties, the deep-polished woodcoloured eyes slightly wet with age, his grey beard carefully trimmed.

'Grand tour, is it?'

Maddox nodded. 'Have we got a cause of death?'

'I think so. And, if I'm right, a very interesting one too. I'll come to that.' He

pointed down the room. 'Entomology'll give you more – but I can give you

approximates on all of them: the first one you found was the last one to die.

Let's call her number five. She died less than a week ago. Then we jump

back almost a month, then another five weeks and then another month and a

half. The first one probably died Decemberish but the gaps are getting

closer. We're lucky: not too much in the way of third-party artefacts –

they're pretty well preserved.' He pointed to a sad loose pile of blackened

flesh on the second dissecting table.

'The first to die. Long bones tell me she hadn't even turned eighteen. There's

something that looks like a tattoo on her left arm. Might be the only way we

can ID her. That or odontology. Now.' He held up a crooked finger.

'Appearance on arrival: I don't know how much you saw in the field, but

they were all wearing make-up. Heavy make-up. Clearly visible. Even

after they've been in the ground this long. Eyeshadow, lipstick. The

photographer has it all covered.'

'Make-up, tattoos-

Yes, Mr Maddox. And, thinking along those lines, two had pelvic

infections, one a keratinized anus, plenty of evidence of drugs use;

endocarditis of the tricuspid valves. I don't want to jump to conclusions-'

'Yes, yes, yes,' Maddox muttered. 'So we're saying they're toms. I think we

already guessed that. What can you tell us about the mutilations?'

'Ah! Interesting.' Krishnamurthi edged in next to a cadaver, beckoning them

to follow. Caffery thought, not for the first time, how like a side of hung

meat the skinned human body is. 'You can see what I've done is to bring the

second TA incision in tight, missing the one our offender did and avoiding

the breasts so I could biopsy the incisions and get a look inside to see what's

going on in there.'

'And?'

'Some tissue has been removed.'

Maddox and Caffery exchanged glances.

'Yes. It's roughly consistent with a standard beta mark breast reduction

procedure. Stitched up, too. I suppose it's significant that your offender

hasn't bothered with this decoration on the smaller-breasted victims.'

'Which ones?'

'Victims two and three. And let me show you something interesting.' He

beckoned them to where a mortician was stitching up the crumpled torso

he'd taken the intestines from. 'The nail scrapings look dismal – and the

very strange thing is I can't find any signs of a struggle. Except for on this

one. On victim number three.'

They gathered round the corpse. It was small, as small as a child, and

Caffery knew that for this accidental resemblance, rational or not, she

would be set aside in the team's considerations.

'She weighed in at forty kilos, that's not much more than six stone.' Reading

Caffery's mind Krishnamurthi said, 'But she wasn't an adolescent. Just very

petite. Perhaps that's why the breasts were not mutilated.'

'The hair colour . . . ?'

'Hair dye. Hair degrades very slowly. That aubergine colour – it won't have

changed much since death. Now, look.' He pointed a wet black finger at a

scattered pattern on the wrists. 'It's difficult to distinguish from the normal

lesions of decomposition, but these are actually ligature marks. Antemortem. And a gag around here on the face. On the ankles, too, chafing,

bleeding. The others died as cool as ice; they just' – he held out his hand

and mimed cresting a summit – 'just tipped over the edge there. Like

falling off a log. But this one – this one's different.'

'Different?' Caffery looked up. 'Why different?'