Bad Blood (17 page)

‘Run!’ Dixie said, legging it.

The two of them sprinted away from the club, up Union Street and towards the town centre. They dodged traffic and crossed over the road – Rab almost colliding with a night bus – and ran past the Two Trees pub and turned onto Western Approach. On the left was a Toys R Us, and through the windows of the store Dixie glimpsed a massive water pistol with a strap-on backpack water tank. He’d wanted one for Christmas, but Santa hadn’t delivered.

Santa? For fuck’s sake he was still a kid, this couldn’t be happening.

They whizzed by the shop and Dixie risked a glance behind. The bastards were still coming. Up on the left an emergency help point stood at the side of the pavement, but Dixie reckoned he would barely have time to press the button before he got the shit kicked out of him.

They ran past, skirting the Toys R Us car park. Rab ran into King Street, but for some reason Dixie decided to dart into the slip which led into the car park. He realised too late that the gates to the car park would be closed, but up ahead a door to a stairwell was open. He ducked in, hearing someone clump along the slip after him.

Shit.

He moved to the stairs and began to climb, his feet splashing in unseen water or piss, or something sticky like spew.

‘Got you now you little wanker!’

The voice echoed up through the stairwell and Dixie went up another flight. A bulkhead light flickered off and he touched the wall, finding a metal handrail leading up into the darkness. Below, he could hear the man was out of breath and puffing hard, but the scrape, scrape, scrape of his feet on the stairs told Dixie he hadn’t given up.

Dixie reached a landing, the area black with shadow. Through a barred metal gate the upper level of the car park spread out into the gloom. Deserted, not a car in sight, just concrete pillars dotted amongst yellow lines which appeared to fluoresce in the glow from a light far in the distance. He moved to the gate and rattled the catch. Locked. He moved away, searching out the deepest shadow and then knelt like a cat ready to spring. His hand touched something soft and sticky and at the same time the bulkhead light came on again.

‘What the fuck?’ The guy stood a couple of metres away, his mouth open. He was staring right past Dixie, at a bundle of clothes lying next to the gate.

Dixie turned his head and caught a glimpse of something pink and red. Then the light flashed off and the guy was sprinting back down the stairs. Dixie thinking that getting the fuck out of there was a pretty good idea as well.

The breath steamed out from Savage’s mouth, mimicking the cloud of smoke surrounding DI Davies. Davies took another puff on his cigarette, stamped his feet and uttered a string of expletives ending in something about how he could murder a bacon butty. The word ‘murder’ emphasised. Moronic idiot, Savage thought. Still, in this situation she understood his emotions: 4.30 a.m., cold, dark and not a good time to be about to view a dead body.

If there ever was a good time.

The call had come through an hour earlier, starting her awake from a dreamless sleep so deep that for a moment between the phone’s rings she had been unsure what had roused her. She’d struggled out of bed and taken the phone out onto the landing so as not to disturb Pete. She began by lambasting the PC on the end of the line, asking him why the hell he wasn’t calling the duty DI instead of her. The PC apologised and said the DI
had
been called and it was him who had suggested Savage should come out because this was something to do with operation
Corulus
.

She cursed and got the details before hanging up and stumbling around looking for clothes, all the while trying not to make a noise but in the end making a good deal.

‘Mummy?’

Jamie had come down from his room in the attic and stood on the landing, his eyes mere slits and his head lolling. She propelled him into her bedroom and tucked him up in the bed next to Pete who groaned, but managed to put an arm out to reassure Jamie. By the time she had come out of the bathroom after a quick wash they were both fast asleep again, Jamie’s head nuzzled in under his dad’s chin.

Now she stood with Davies next to the bottom of a car park stairwell where a uniformed officer unravelled the obligatory blue and white tape from a roll and attached one end to a concrete pillar. Some sort of liquid had run down the stairs and pooled at the foot and the officer tiptoed round the edge, careful not to step in the mess.

The car park sat alongside the Toys R Us store on Western Approach and the bright primary colours of the shop’s logo contrasted with the gloom on the manager’s face. He had been woken earlier than Savage to come and open the store’s own car park so Layton and his crew would have somewhere to park their vans. They hadn’t arrived yet and the manager was asking how long the whole process was going to take. If people couldn’t park then people wouldn’t shop, so could they please get a move on. Savage wanted to tell him the mums and dads would be better off without a trolley full of the type of crap toys consisted of these days, but instead she smiled and said they were doing their best to speed things up.

A car rolled to a stop somewhere out on the street and a door clunked open and a moment later, slammed shut. Footsteps shuffled closer and the stooped figure of Nesbit came through the gloom of the car park entrance.

‘They don’t pay me enough for this, Charlotte,’ Nesbit said, nodding a greeting to Davies as an afterthought.

‘More than the likes of us anyway,’ Savage said.

Nesbit looked at the mess at the bottom of the stairs, where the light from the orange bulkheads on the stairwell walls glistened in the ooze. His eyes tracked the trickle of liquid upwards, to where it turned a corner.

‘I assume someone has already certified death?’

‘A paramedic. And I’ll bet he was in a better mood than you.’

‘Most likely, since he wasn’t woken up. Have you been up there?’ Nesbit asked.

‘No. Only the kid who found the poor guy, the first officer on the scene, the paramedic and a photographer so far. We thought we’d wait for you rather than go trooping up and down.’

‘To hold your hand,’ Davies said. ‘Not for the faint-hearted, according to the photographer.’

‘Hand-holding,’ Nesbit said with a scowl, seeming to take Davies’ joke at face value, ‘will not be necessary.’

The three of them stayed silent as they struggled into their PPE items, a ritual Savage found useful in distancing herself from the thought of death. The process of putting on the suit and bootlets, pulling her hair back, tying up the hood and sliding on the gloves removed her identity somehow, made her feel she was simply doing a job.

‘Ready?’ Nesbit turned to Savage and Davies.

Savage nodded and the three of them ducked under the tape and climbed the stairs, keeping to the right, out of the way of the slick which dribbled down the left-hand side.

‘Jesus.’ Davies gulped a mouth of air and put his hand to his throat.

Sausage, not bacon. Red and pink and strung out like the blue and white tape, the sausage led up the inside of the stairwell and disappeared into the dazzling glow of a light above.

Nesbit stopped and bent, touching the bloodied tube and shaking his head.

‘Ileum. Interesting.’

‘His guts?’ Davies said.

‘Yes. Part of the small intestine.’ Nesbit stood and continued up the stairs, following the snake-like object round until it ended in a pile of offal.

‘Colon. Among other things.’ Nesbit paused only for a moment before walking up another two flights, a faint smear on the concrete steps the only sign something was amiss.

They reached a landing area and another bundle of gut came into view, but this time it was attached to a body sliced open at the abdomen, the mass of pink covering the man’s blue jeans, as if the whole lot had flopped out the way shopping tumbles from a split in a grocery bag. One arm lay at an odd angle, twisted behind the man’s back; the other hand groped at the stomach area as if it could push the intestines back inside and undo the damage. A puddle of blood and body fluids surrounded the corpse and Nesbit couldn’t avoid stepping in the liquid as he moved closer.

‘Clever guys, those paramedics.’ Davies. Starting on a joke. ‘Maybe they should get a pay rise. You wouldn’t know he was dead from just looking, would you?’

As well as the exposed guts, the man’s face bore signs of severe trauma. The nose appeared flattened and bent to one side, a mass of flesh and blood, and the top and bottom of the jaw didn’t line up. A dusting of white clung to the blood, as if icing powder had been sprinkled across the face or the man was an arctic explorer, the white like shards of snow or frost. Whoever he was it was unlikely even his mother would recognise him in his current state.

‘When did the call come?’ Nesbit asked.

‘Around one-thirty,’ Savage said. ‘Some kid ran in here to escape a beating. After he found the body he went to a nearby help point, blurted something about murder and then scarpered. No idea who he was, but the guys in the CCTV control room confirmed his story about being chased. Any idea how long before that he died?’

‘Charlotte, patience please.’ Nesbit turned and moved to the side of the stairwell, where he deposited his black bag clear of the bodily fluids. He opened the clasp and rummaged inside the bag for a moment before pulling something out. ‘I’ll take a rectal temperature reading in a moment which will give us some sort of time frame.’

Nesbit moved back to the body and knelt. He took the man’s right arm and lifted it, moving it up and down. Next he placed his fingers on the face and neck, palpating the skin.

‘Rigor?’ Savage said.

‘No, not yet. He’s not been dead for more than a few hours.’ Nesbit lowered the arm and studied the body for a couple of minutes. ‘That powder on the face is reminiscent of the cocaine on the other body.’

‘The duty DI called me because he believed there was a connection. If that’s it, then I am thinking I might as well have stayed in bed.’

Savage looked away from the body and around the stairwell. The landing they were on led out to the first elevated level of the car park. At street level, a wire mesh door on the stair block was supposed to have been locked the previous evening. The toy store manager didn’t know why it hadn’t been. For the poor guy lying with his guts all strung out, that had been his undoing. He’d likely as not run in and up the stairs, but when he’d got to the first floor he’d found the door out onto the first level
had
been locked. He had been cornered and the rest of what happened lay spread out on the floor, a Rorschach blot of red, pink and grey for Nesbit and the CSIs to analyse, interpret and argue over.

‘Charlotte?’ Nesbit had pulled the other arm out from underneath the body. The sleeve of the sweatshirt was ripped at the end and two white sticks poked out from the sodden mess of black cotton. Savage tilted her head, trying to work out what the shiny material was, and then Nesbit mumbled something about radius and ulna. ‘Shattered, not cut this time. I’d hazard a guess by something like an axe. A bit of a coincidence though, don’t you think?’

‘Not exactly the same MO though.’

‘No, but here’s another connection to the killing in the toilet.’ Nesbit tugged at the sleeve and revealed a patch of black and white stripes high on the forearm.

By the time Savage had organised and briefed the local inquiry team, liaised with Layton concerning the release of the crime scene and extracted everything she could from Nesbit it was pushing seven o’clock. A grey dawn began to displace the street-lighting as the city awoke to another murder.

Dan Phillips, the
Herald’s
crime reporter, had somehow managed to sniff out the action and stood on Western Approach, begging Savage to be allowed closer. His photographer braced himself against a metal railing, the long lens on the camera pointing in the direction of the goo trickling from the bottom of the stairwell.

‘Quiet as church mice,’ Phillips said. ‘That’s what we’ll be like. You won’t even notice us. Two minutes and we’ll be gone.’

‘Dan, even if I let you go up the stairs to take pictures you wouldn’t be able to print the things anyway.’

‘That bad, huh?’ The statement came out deadpan and matter of fact, but Phillips’ eyes twinkled.

‘No comment. You won’t trick me like that.’

‘Seriously though,’ Phillips said, cocking his head to one side, the twinkle gone from his eyes, ‘what do you think? Two murders this week. Are they connected?’

‘Off the record, let’s say there are similarities, but don’t print that, OK?’

‘Of course not.’ Phillips smiled at her and turned away, then walked across to where Davies was talking to a PCSO who’d been given the unenviable job of preventing people from using the car park.

Savage realised she hadn’t eaten, so she crossed Western Approach and walked the short distance to Market Avenue, where she found a cafe which was just opening. A cheese and tomato sandwich provided the calories and the coffee tasted better than the stuff available at the station.

When she got back to the scene Nesbit was supervising two mortuary technicians as they loaded a black body bag into the back of a van, the poor victim about to make the same journey as Franklin Owers had. The missing hand and the strange black and white pattern on the forearm meant the two men had something else in common too; quite what remained to be seen.

As one of the men closed the doors to the van, John Layton appeared from the stairwell with a smile on his face and a plastic ziplock bag in one hand. He held up the bag as he came over, the brown leather wallet inside glistening with a coating of blood.

‘Three hundred in notes in there, cards and everything. I guess the killing wasn’t a robbery gone wrong. Name of Gavin Redmond, according to his driving licence. Any idea who the poor bastard is?’

Savage only half heard the question as she stared past Layton to where liquid still oozed from the bottom of the stairwell. Gavin Redmond. The MD of Tamar Yachts.
Sternway
.

‘Fuck,’ she said.

‘I’ll take that as a “yes” then, shall I?’ Layton said.