A Species of Revenge (11 page)

It had been a week of disasters, one of those weeks that occasionally descend like the wrath of God, even on well-conducted police stations such as Lavenstock Divisional Headquarters. Murphy's – or somebody's – Law, saying that if something can go wrong, it will, with Detective Superintendent Gil Mayo under pressure too, and – just another natural law of life – passing on the heat to the Poor Bloody Infantry below. A week best forgotten, but not yet over, culminating in this.

This
was something the Super hated more than any other single crime, as his bleak face showed, and the reason he'd been one of the first on the scene. And not alone in that, Abigail Moon thought. Professionals, accustomed, but not yet, thank God, desensitized to the murder of a young person, a child – and this one not much more than a child, fifteen, sixteen at most. Life barely begun for her. Thought at first to be much younger, so small in stature was she, but underneath the dark-green school uniform the small round breasts, the smooth curves of her developing young body confirmed she was older. Yet the face of innocence looked up at them from the fallen carpet of leaves. Unblemished, but dead. Oh, certainly dead.

Patti Ryman, the paper girl.

Poor, poor child, poor creature, muttered Doc Ison, tight-lipped, he who had brought her into the world, and never thought to see her out of it. He knelt, shaken out of his usual professional detachment, beside Timpson-Ludgate as the pathologist delicately probed and examined: bluff and hearty, renowned for his mordant humour, he too was silenced by the terrible waste of a young life.

‘What could she ever have done to deserve that?' Ison asked.

Probably nothing, thought Mayo grimly, overhearing the muttered question. Nobody knew better than he that the times we live in mean that murder doesn't necessarily require provocation any more – or only one so slight as to be incomprehensible to any sane person, to anyone but the killer.

On the other hand ...

There were many things on the other hand. Youth, however innocent it seemed, was rarely completely so these days. They knew more at eight years old than Mayo had known at twenty-eight – which wasn't to say he hadn't always wanted to know. He'd been born with an avid curiosity about the human race and what makes it tick, what causes it to go off the rails. It was what made him a good copper and occasionally a bad risk as a friend and companion. It was why he raged inwardly, in tune with Ison, against what could have brought little Patti Ryman to this violent end.

The playground drugs scene? A quarrel with a boyfriend, after experimenting with sex, becoming pregnant? Teenage prostitution, leading to murder? Unthinkable only a few years ago, any of them, but now all too possible.

But there was that other thing, the possibility of this being one out of a series of murders, which until now had been principally Hurstfield Division's problem, but now was in everyone's mind here: two other young girls over there had been raped and brutally battered to death within the last few months, another was missing. Younger than Patti, but two of them in school uniform, like her, and all of them with fair hair, like Patti's.

And yet ...

Murder this undoubtedly was, though possibly not a sex crime. It seemed unlikely that she'd been raped or sexually assaulted, for although she'd been discovered lying on her back with her skirt rucked up around her thighs, she'd been fully clothed and there was no indication so far of any sexual interference. Timpson-Ludgate had refused to be categoric about it until he'd had the chance to do a more detailed examination, but it wouldn't be what he expected to find. And, now that he'd gently turned her over, it could be seen that her mane of crimped fair hair was clotted with blood.

‘There you are. Her skull's been smashed. With,' he added, looking more closely, ‘what looks like a single blow to the back of her head. Savage, though, some weight behind it. And if you ask me what with, I can only say,' he went on, parting the hair carefully, ‘it was probably something narrowish, flat, heavy, what say you, Henry? We'll get a better picture later, but take a look.'

Thus called upon, Ison squatted further down beside Timpson-Ludgate so that he, too, could examine the wound. Mayo didn't feel a minute inspection was called for on his part. He looked briefly, then at the rest of the body, the way her skirt had been dragged up, and at her black leather school shoes. He frowned.

There'd been no problem with identification. Everyone around her knew Patti. Knew her and liked her, a cheerful girl, delivering papers for pocket money before she went on to school. No problem with establishing the time of death, either: the doctors were saying she couldn't have been dead much more than an hour, which tied in with the time she normally arrived here on her round.

‘PM nine a.m. tomorrow morning,' Timpson-Ludgate announced, peeling off his gloves. ‘Best I can do.'

It was quicker than Mayo had expected.

As the doctors took their leave, the SOCOs moved in. Mayo took the opportunity – while the cameras flashed and captured the scene on video and Dexter applied his forensic skills to collecting the usual samples – to walk around and fix the scene in his mind: a roughly rectangular wooded area which sloped down behind the gardens of Edwina Lodge, Ellington Close, and the house called Simla, running down to the car park of an engineering factory on the lower road, from which it was separated by high chain-link fencing surmounted by barbed wire. The rest of the wood, except where the residents had put up their own more decorative woven fencing panels, was fenced off with wire strung between concrete posts, fronted with scrawny quickthorn hedging. A narrow dirt path between the first house in the Close and the garden of Edwina Lodge – six-foot boarded fencing on the one side and a high brick wall on the other – led into this shared piece of private woodland, to which all the residents had legal access and where the older children played. Scruffy woodland of little more than an acre, the children probably thought it paradise. Ropes hung from trees, ‘camps' had been dug, a stream, little more than a trickle, had been dammed with stones and diverted.

But now, apart from the shirt-sleeved police swarming all over the wood, and the sounds of their voices, the Close itself was silent as he guessed it rarely was – older children now in school, younger ones kept protectively indoors. Murder close to home had a sobering effect.

He completed his circuit of the wood and came back full circle. ‘Somebody's going to miss this,' Dexter was saying. ‘These don't come cheap. Hundred and fifty nicker at least, I'll bet, probably more.'

‘Hundred and fifty, for a biro?' Kite echoed. ‘Strewth!'

‘It's a fountain pen. Last you a lifetime, this would.'

‘If you don't lose it,' Kite said, looking at the slim, mottled brown-and-gold plunger-action pen with the gold fittings, engraved with a stylized gold flower, which Dexter was carefully putting into a polythene evidence bag. ‘Or drop it at the scene of a crime.'

‘There'll be prints, hopefully,' Dexter said, moving off.

‘Who was it found her, Martin?'

‘Chap at number thirteen,' answered the lanky sergeant, running his hand through his curly, fair hair. ‘Name of Lawley, looking for his cat. He was going to take it to the vet today, for an operation on its ear, but he can't find it. Maybe the moggy's got wind of what's to happen to it and it's taken off, you know what cats are. Anyway, Lawley came in here calling for it and found the girl, recognized her immediately.'

His usually cheerful face was grim. ‘Lucky it was him, and not any of the children.'

Every other policeman there, those who were parents and those who weren't, was undoubtedly thinking the same thing. ‘Anyone taken his full statement?'

‘On my way now.'

‘Don't forget to ask him if he's lost a pen,' Abigail reminded him.

As she spoke, someone called out to Kite from the other side of the wood. The sergeant raised a hand in reply, but the dead girl was being placed in a body shell, and he remained quietly with the others while she was removed to the waiting ambulance, thence to be transported to refrigeration in the mortuary.

Her parents would have to be told.

‘There's only one, her mother. Divorced,' Abigail said, ‘and she was an only child.' She looked up from her clipboard, pushing her hair back. ‘Life's rotten, sometimes.'

She didn't usually let things get to her, but this was different. This he could understand. In the rare moments when he was feeling low, when he'd been a parent coping on his own, his wife dead and his daughter Julie still a teenager, this was the sort of thing Mayo had always dreaded. But Julie had never remotely encountered any violence, she was alive and well and living abroad at the moment, he'd never personally had to confront such an appalling tragedy as was facing this unknown woman, Patti's mother, whose life would never be the same again.

And it was Abigail who was going to have to tell her.

Informing a parent that their child's life had just been snuffed out was the worst task any of them ever had to perform, but it was something they'd all had to do, and would no doubt have to do again. He thought about suggesting someone else do it, but he knew Abigail wouldn't appreciate it. She never asked for concessions.

He watched her for a moment, and was reassured. Cool, apparently unruffled, wearing a summer skirt and a light cotton shirt this hot morning, her bronze hair drawn back into a thick plait. She'd cope.

‘There's also an aunt,' she was saying, brisk with herself once more. ‘She lives here in the Close, a Mrs Bailey, the mother's sister, and she wants to be the one to tell her ... it seems they're very close. I'll give her time to break the news, get the worst over, before I go and see Mrs Ryman. By the way, she's asking to speak to you personally, before she goes to see her sister. She won't speak to anyone but the "top man''. Claims she knows who did it.'

‘She does?' He gave her a sharp glance. ‘With good reasons? Or just suspicious?'

‘I don't know. She wouldn't say anything more.'

‘I'd better see her, then.'

Was this, after all, going to be one of those open-and-shut cases, where it was immediately apparent who the perpetrator was? Murder occurring out of the blue, for no reason, by some anonymous stranger, was a far rarer phenomenon than some of the more lurid press would have their readers believe. Trouble had more often been openly brewing before suddenly erupting, with disastrous repercussions. Friends, relatives, neighbours could, and often did, point the police in the right direction, leaving them few problems, save those of calming down the participants enough to make a coherent statement. If it was so in this instance, nobody would be better pleased than Mayo, but he doubted it. With nothing more than his gut feeling to go on, he somehow doubted it very much.

‘We've talked to the neighbours, all sixteen houses in the Close, but no joy,' Abigail went on, tapping her clipboard, ‘from those we've asked so far, that is – nobody saw or heard a thing. A lot of them had already left for work before she was found, mind, we'll have to see them later ... and two families are on holiday. The rest are mainly mothers with young children, one or two retired couples. I'm just about to start on the two big houses, then we'll do the rest of Albert Road down as far as Patel's, the newsagent she worked for. It's going to be manpower-intensive again,' she added wryly.

Mayo's mind was already working on it, on the transfer of personnel from the Ensor case, which was now going to have to be put on to the back burner. With the department still working through the backlog of summer holidays, several people on annual leave, everything else would now have to go by the board. This investigation would take priority, he would personally see to it that it did. They'd give it all they'd got, work round the clock. Exhausted men and women, stretched resources, escalating overtime figures and budget allocations were the least of it.

‘It might help if you left those two houses to me. I've met the owners – briefly, but at least it gives me a bit of an edge. I can make a start with them.' It was doubtful that they could have seen anything behind their shrubberies and high walls. But he knew instinctively that his personal involvement was needed here, that the occupants – the Kendricks at Simla, certainly – should be handled with care. They knew everybody that mattered, they still had poke. He couldn't afford any cock-ups where they were concerned. But there were other, less obvious reasons why he should concern himself with them, reasons he couldn't explain even to himself, but were amounting almost to a conviction ... shades of the party he'd attended, of something he'd missed, or subconsciously sensed out of kilter. Catches of that old tune, ‘Alice Where Art Thou?', which had haunted him maddeningly ever since, began another replay in his mind.

‘Right,' he went on, suddenly realizing that he'd been elsewhere while Abigail had been putting him in the picture, a bad habit of his that he knew irritated the hell out of other people, who thought he wasn't paying attention, especially since he rarely missed anything. The ability to think and operate on two levels was a facility he'd developed out of necessity. ‘That seems to be it, then, so far?' he said, recapping correctly on what she'd been saying.

Patti, it appeared, had left her bicycle where she invariably parked it, just inside the gates of Edwina Lodge. After leaving the papers there and at Simla, she'd gone on to deliver in the Close. The canvas bag, with most of the newspapers and magazines still in it, had been found at the entrance to the path leading into the wood. Traces of blood, still wet and sticky, indicated that she'd been attacked when she was halfway along it, and presumably by someone who must have come up behind her. But she'd actually been found here, a hundred yards further into the wood.