Born in a Burial Gown (31 page)

Fluke spent the next ten minutes getting her to tell him as much as she could. There wasn’t much. It wasn’t that Penny couldn’t remember, it was more like there wasn’t actually anything that stood out. Handsome, polite, always put his change in the charity jar, always had a black coffee. Dark hair, cut short. Unremarkable clothes. No earrings or visible tattoos.

It was clear that Penny liked him. ‘There was a melancholic quality to him, Inspector. He always had a smile for me but it was like the smile painted on a clown’s face. It seemed to hide a sadness. I assumed he was very ill.’

‘Why was that?’ he asked.

‘The Henderson Suite isn’t a place where babies are born, Inspector,’ she said simply. ‘I always make sure I give everyone a smile when they come from there, but I’m aware they’re all going through terrible experiences.’

‘Did he have a name, Penny?’ Fluke said.

She thought for a while. ‘Do you know something, I don’t think he ever offered it.’

Fluke and Leah got up and they all shook hands. He asked her if it would be okay for a police artist to come and work with her, and she agreed.

Fluke had walked halfway out of the dining area when he turned and ran back to Penny. She’d just reached her cart.

‘Sorry Penny, one last question. How often is the charity jar emptied?’

‘Ah, excellent,’ Doctor Weighman said when they handed him a cup of coffee and doughnut on their return to his office. ‘Never get time to eat properly these days.’ He looked down at what he had in his hand, seemed to recognise the contradiction and said, ‘Oh, well, a doughnut’s hardly going to kill me.’

The three of them sat in silence for a minute. The coffees weren’t cool enough to drink. Fluke took the lid off his and blew gently on it. The sooner he finished the sooner he could get away. He could feel himself getting closer to their killer and every moment was precious.

Doctor Weighman stood up suddenly. ‘Well, I can’t wait here for this to cool. I have patients to see, managers to harass, nurses to frighten. I’ll be back in about twenty minutes, Inspector.’

Fluke stood up.

‘No, please stay here. Finish your coffee. It’s the least I can do. I feel as though I’ve not been as helpful as perhaps I could.’

As he put on his white coat and opened his door to leave, he turned back round. ‘Twenty minutes, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Leah, there’s a patient I wouldn’t mind your opinion on if you have the time?’

‘I’d be delighted,’ she replied, and together they left the office, shutting the door behind them. Before she walked out, Leah turned and gave Fluke a small smile.

Fluke stared at the door. What was that all about? He didn’t have twenty minutes to wait; he wanted to be back on the road in ten. He picked up his coffee impatiently and took a small sip. Doctor Weighman was right, it was rather good. And him asking for Leah’s help had clearly been staged. They’d either wanted to talk about something without him being there or needed to be away from him for some other reason.

He looked round his office and stood up to take a better look at the photos. As an ex-marine, he’d been trained in arctic warfare. Skiing, mountaineering and simply surviving temperatures down to -40ºC had been core skills. By the looks of things, Nick Weighman had been to places even colder. He turned to look out of the window, curious to see if he could see the crime scene from that one as well. His eyes glanced at the doctor’s desk and immediately smiled.

The desk wasn’t empty.

Everything made sense. Doctor Weighman wasn’t able to help. He knew Penny wasn’t going to be much help either. But the murder had happened on hospital grounds. It was likely one of his patients had committed it. He knew who it was. He also knew he couldn’t tell him and that Fluke would never get permission to trawl his files. What had been left on his desk was the reason why Leah couldn’t be in the room either. Doctor Nick Weighman had given him twenty minutes to find Samantha’s killer. He stared at the item on the desk, afraid to touch it. He reached out then withdrew his hand quickly as if he’d been burnt. Irrationally, he looked round and checked the door was still shut. He reached out again but this time didn’t withdraw his hand. He picked up the item on the doctor’s desk.

It was a patient’s file.

‘Dalton Cross!’ Fluke shouted into his phone over the noise of the car. He listened to Jo Skelton on the other end to make sure she’d got everything correct. ‘Yes, that’s the name we have now. Don’t ask how I got it. I want a full search. Every database we have. Every database we can tap into. Get Longy to lead on it but I want an update in fifteen minutes. I’m coming back in now but I have to stop off in Carlisle first. And I want a SOCO team standing by for me. I may have his fingerprints.’

He finalised his immediate plans and ended the call.

Fluke had asked Leah to drive so he could concentrate on what he needed to do next.

He’d spent the full twenty minutes with the file, only stopping when Doctor Weighman knocked on his door and waited a strategic ten seconds to ensure he didn’t see anything untoward. By that time, Fluke had read it cover to cover.

The man’s name, or the name he was using anyway, was Dalton Cross. He had dual citizenship; American and British. American father, English mother. He’d had to go through a bureaucratic process to get treatment over in the UK but as he was technically a Brit, it was never in doubt. There were reports and documents from hospitals in different parts of the UK. Manchester, London, Norwich, Glasgow, Plymouth as well as West Cumbria. No obvious pattern with the locations or the dates. He’d been zigzagging.

Or hunting.

Ironically, Fluke also knew what he looked like, but only from the inside. MRI scans, X-rays and sonograms, they were all in the file.

Dalton Cross had leukaemia and had just finished his treatment. The last entry on the patient notes were handwritten by Doctor Weighman, detailing the blood test results from a sample taken that Monday. They were an exact match with the numbers on Fluke’s card. A nurse had called Cross with his results and the time fitted the chronology Fluke had in his head. She must have called while he was in Samantha’s flat, waiting.

He’d given an Allerdale address when he’d arrived in Cumbria two months before, and had been allocated to West Cumberland Hospital. A quick check revealed the address’s real occupants had never heard of him.

Despite all the internal photos, Fluke still only had Penny’s and Ackley’s vague descriptions of what he actually looked like. Patient files didn’t have pictures. Jo Skelton would arrange for an artist to do some photofitting with Penny but he wasn’t holding his breath for anything useable. It seemed no one could remember what he looked like. A trained grey man.

There were other phone numbers in the file but Jiao-long told him they were all burners and were no longer in service. He seemed to have a new one every time he moved. He assumed the most recent was the one Doctor Weighman’s staff called him on.

Fluke had asked Penny if he could take the charity jar if he promised to put twenty quid in when he returned it. It was half-full but Fluke was hopeful that at least one coin would produce a useable print. With a print, he could check more databases. With a positive print would come a photograph.

Without the fingerprints, he wouldn’t be able to get a warrant for the file. Although he knew beyond all doubt he had his man, he couldn’t reveal how he’d linked the blood test numbers to a particular file without exposing Doctor Weighman’s involvement. He’d worry about that later. His number one priority was catching Cross before more people died. Having a legally sound case was a low second. He was pulled from his thoughts when his phone rang. Jo Skelton.

‘That was quick, Jo. What you got?’

‘Nothing on that yet, boss. Longy’s still doing his stuff. But we do have news. We’ve found Kenneth Diamond.’

Fluke’s spirits, already high, were lifted even higher. When cases broke, they broke fast. He knew Diamond wasn’t the killer but he was involved somehow. Nathaniel had as good as told him. He’d do the interview himself.

‘Right, Jo, listen to me carefully. Nobody interviews him before I get there. Nobody. And he doesn’t get to speak to a brief until I say so. We need to do this right.’

‘Won’t be a problem, boss.’

A sixth sense stopped him asking why. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

Fluke arrived at Kenneth Diamond’s Stanwix address less than half an hour later, and parked at the side of the road. He’d dropped off Leah and promised to call in when he could. She hadn’t said anything about the forged letter and he hadn’t been able to read her expression.

Police and SOCO vehicles were already there in abundance. In the dimming light and glare of the emergency lights, Fluke could see most of his team milling round, waiting for him.

The crime scene was the house next door to Diamond’s own. The team that had gathered his DNA had been less than thirty yards from his corpse.

Fluke took his bearings. Stanwix was a prosperous part of Carlisle and the houses on Diamond’s street were all detached and large. Mock Tudor, or similar.

Towler was waiting for him at the drive entrance which had been set up as an external cordon.

‘How did he die, Matt?’ he asked as he signed in.

‘Screaming,’ was all he’d say in return.

Fluke followed him into the house. The entrance vestibule had an umbrella stand and a coat rack. He could see a kitchen at the end of a long hallway. A middle-aged man was sitting at a breakfast bar, talking to a uniformed officer. The owner of the house he presumed.

‘Down there, boss,’ Towler said, pointing towards a door under the main stairs. It opened onto stairs descending to a cellar.

Fluke walked down them carefully. Sean Rogers, who must have been regretting not taking his holiday that week, followed him down. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked into the room.

The owner was using it as a wine cellar, gym and a workshop. The room was lit by a bank of fluorescent tubes and Fluke could hear the buzz of the starter motor as one of the lights flickered. The cellar had bare brick walls but seemed dry enough. A rowing machine sat in the middle of the floor. Tools were on a large shadow board on the far wall above a workbench with a vice and a bench drill. There was a half-full wine rack.

He didn’t know much about the best way to store wine but was fairly sure that clean air was a prerequisite for any cellar. If that were the case, then the owner’s collection was ruined. The heavy stench of a decomposing body was oppressive and cloying. Fluke’s mouth flooded with saliva, the first warning of nausea. He swallowed and continued into the room.

Towler hadn’t been kidding. Diamond had not died well. He had a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead but Fluke didn’t need a pathologist to tell him he’d also been brutally tortured.

‘Shit,’ Fluke said to himself, as he circled the body, not getting too close. The scene hadn’t been processed.

Diamond was sitting on a high-backed wooden chair, probably taken from the kitchen. He was naked apart from a tea towel covering his groin. It was soaked in dark blood. A pool of blood had congealed on the floor underneath the chair.

He’d clearly been there for some time. The corpse had swelled as bacteria dissolved bodily tissue. Fluid was leaking from Diamond’s orifices and the smell was worse, the nearer the body Fluke was. It seemed to get into the very mucus of his nose and he knew it would remain with him long after he left the room.

Blisters had formed on his body and some had burst. Diamond’s eyes were sunken and milky grey. Despite that, they seemed to be staring directly at Fluke through the swollen eyelids.

His torso was pale, almost translucent. Fluke bent down and looked at his legs. The blood, following the laws of gravity, had settled there and turned them purple. He made a mental note; Kenneth Diamond hadn’t been moved, it was where he died. In that room, tied to that chair, and by the expression on his face, screaming in absolute agony.

A lone fly buzzed around and settled on some fluid leaking from his ears. Fluke knew that the body broke down fairly quickly and estimated it had been
in situ
for the best part of a week, possibly longer. When the pathologist got there, he hoped it was Henry and that he had Lucy with him. The corpse had been here long enough for her to find insect activity.

His face was swollen but Fluke couldn’t be sure whether that was due to the decomposition process or the beating he’d been subjected to. Threads of drool and blood hung from his gaping mouth. The lips had stretched and he could see that some of Diamond’s teeth were missing. He looked down at the carpeted floor and saw white bloody fragments scattered around the base of the chair.

Fluke walked round the back of the body and saw he’d been secured using wire coat hangers. The swelling of his wrists had enveloped the wire against his skin but he could see it joining his hands together. He thought he saw something and bent down for a closer look. Diamond no longer had any fingernails. He looked at the floor again but couldn’t see them scattered among the teeth.

‘Fingernails?’ he said to Rogers, who until that point hadn’t said a word.

‘Over there,’ he replied, pointing towards the workbench.

Fluke looked up, squinted and walked over. On top of the bench was a pair of bloodied pliers. Even Chambers could have worked out what they’d been used for. Lined up in two rows of five, were Diamond’s fingernails. Fluke looked back in to check something and confirmed that his chair was facing the bench. Someone had been making a show of it, letting him see how many he had left to go.

The bench had two other tools on it: a hammer and long bladed knife. Both were encrusted with dark blood. There was also a plastic bottle containing a clear liquid.

It was easy to see what the hammer had been used for. Diamond no longer had knees. With tremendous force and accuracy, they’d been reduced to a pink, jelly like mush. Fluke forced himself to look closer. He could see the indent of the ball-peen end. He looked down at what had been his feet. They’d been reduced to same bloody pulp as his knees.