Die With Me (9 page)

He went into the sitting room, put REM’s
Around the Sun
on the CD player and dimmed the lights. He sank down into the middle of the large, comfortable sofa, shoes off, feet up on the glass coffee table, and closed his eyes momentarily. Henry appeared from nowhere and jumped onto his lap, purring loudly, settling himself down into a tight pale beige coil. Tartaglia took another slug of wine and lit a cigarette, trying to lose himself in the music, watching the smoke snake up towards the ceiling. The sound was good. Like his motorbike, the player had been an extravagance, but well worth it. Thank God, he had nobody to dictate how he spent his money.

Donovan had called to tell him about her meeting with Rosie Chapple and he had spoken to Superintendent Cornish to brief him about what they had discovered. Not a man to show emotion easily, Cornish had sounded a little rattled as Tartaglia outlined his theory that Gemma’s death might be part of a series. Cornish had refused to give him extra resources to help search the records for matching suicides, saying that he couldn’t justify such a thing on the basis of a ‘pure hunch’. But he had promised to come down to Barnes for the next day’s morning meeting, clearly wanting to keep closer tabs on things, considering what Tartaglia had said. Tartaglia hoped that that was going to be the limit of his hands-on input. Unlike Clarke, Cornish had almost no murder experience, having risen through the ranks in other departments, almost entirely on the uniform side. Cornish could handle the media, for all he cared, and he would keep him fully briefed, but he wanted to be left in overall day-to-day charge of the case.

He could still feel the reheated lasagne from the pub sitting in his stomach, and wondered whether he’d be able to sleep. He shouldn’t have had it, but he was so hungry after seeing Kramer that he would have eaten almost anything. Kramer, the hard man, had gone to pieces once he discovered that they knew about the suicide note. Tartaglia felt deeply sorry for the man. Kramer had handed over the note, written on flowery paper in Gemma’s childish handwriting, folded neatly in a pink envelope with her mother’s name on the front. But it had revealed nothing new, the wording being identical to what Tom had ordered Gemma to write. Kramer and his two friends’ alibis had checked out and they had let him go with a severe bollocking for withholding evidence. Kramer was a dead end. They would have to look for Gemma’s killer elsewhere.

Monday, six thirty a.m., and Tartaglia sat at Clarke’s desk in his large, comfortable corduroy chair, struggling to focus on the file in front of him, a half-drunk mug of lukewarm black coffee at his side. He had had no sleep in the previous twenty-four hours and was finding staying awake a challenge. Contrary to Tartaglia’s initial hopes, Cornish had continued to refuse to give him any additional resources to scour the registers at the coroners’ offices in the various London districts. It wasn’t clear whether this was because he doubted Tartaglia’s instincts or whether he feared what might be found, although Tartaglia suspected it was a combination of both. In the end, Tartaglia’s team had spent the last couple of days painstakingly going through the books page-by-page, clocking up hundreds of man-hours, complaining vociferously that it was all a complete waste of time. Eventually, they had turned up two suicides that appeared to fit the pattern. The case files had been retrieved from central records and, after Tartaglia had read through the documents in detail, Donovan and Dickenson had been immediately dispatched to interview the families.

Laura Benedetti, aged fifteen, had fallen to her death eight months before in a church in Richmond, her body found by a local woman coming in to change the flowers. Laura lived in a council flat in Islington, several miles away, very close to Tartaglia’s sister, Nicoletta’s house. According to Donovan, Laura was the only child of a couple from Sardinia who seemed to work all hours of the day and night, the mother cleaning houses in the smarter streets of the area, the father a head waiter in the restaurant of a West End hotel. The photo Tartaglia had seen of Laura reminded him instantly of Nicoletta at the same age, oval face, soft brown eyes and long, dark hair, although there was something dreamy about Laura’s expression which was very different to Nicoletta’s. Donovan had told Tartaglia how Laura’s father had wanted to return home to Sardinia immediately after the tragedy but her mother had so far refused. She was unable to leave the country where her daughter had died, making a shrine of Laura’s tiny bedroom and visiting her grave almost daily. Donovan seemed more than usually affected by what she had heard, stating with glistening eyes how some people found it impossible to move on in any way from such a tragedy.

The other girl, Elinor Best, known as Ellie, had died four months after Laura in similar circumstances in a church in Chiswick, her body discovered by a tramp taking refuge inside during a storm. Ellie had lived several miles away in a prosperous residential part of Wandsworth with a younger brother and sister. Her father was a solicitor, her mother a journalist, and her background couldn’t have been more different to Gemma and Laura’s. Aged sixteen, with reddish-brown hair, a rash of freckles and a pert, turned-up nose, she had been a budding violinist, chosen a few weeks before her death to play in one of the London youth orchestras. Her parents had recently separated and Donovan and Dickenson had only been able to see the mother so far, who was living alone with her two remaining children in the house in Wandsworth, apparently blaming the father for what had happened to Ellie.

But most striking of all had been the fact that both girls had left brief suicide notes and the wording was almost identical to the note left by Gemma Kramer. No doubt they too had been dictated by Tom. There were no witnesses to either Laura’s or Ellie’s death and with nothing to arouse suspicion, no further investigation had seemed necessary. The local coroners had duly recorded verdicts of suicide. With the deaths happening in two different areas, there had been no chance of anyone spotting the similarities and linking the two cases.

At the time the parents of both girls had adamantly refused to believe that their daughters had any reason to kill themselves. However, the local CID investigation had revealed that both Laura and Ellie had been badly bullied at school, echoing what Tartaglia’s team already knew about Gemma. Like her, the two girls seemed to be misfits. Laura, small for her age, uncommunicative and sensitive, had been teased about her poor English, whilst Ellie had been overweight and lacking in self-confidence. Struggling academically, music had been her only area of achievement. According to the case notes, Ellie had been prescribed anti-depressants by her GP. Whilst a visit from the police several months later must have been intensely painful for the families, Tartaglia took some comfort from the fact that both Laura’s parents and Ellie’s mother seemed relieved to learn that their daughters’ deaths were being looked into again.

Ellie Best had been cremated. But Laura Benedetti had been buried. Her exhumation had taken place a little after three a.m. that day in an anonymous North London cemetery. Tartaglia and Feeney had attended, together with Alex James, the crime scene manager, Dr Blake, and an annoying middle-aged man from the Coroner’s Office who had a streaming head cold and seemed purely concerned with the inconvenience of missing a night’s sleep. None of them wanted to be standing there in the middle of the night huddled together around the grave, listening to the rain drumming on the sides and roof of the forensic tent while the undertakers did their work. But the cover of darkness was necessary in order to reduce the chance of anyone finding out what they were doing. The last thing they needed were the prying eyes of local residents, let alone the press. Laura’s remains had been taken away to the mortuary for a post mortem and Tartaglia was due there in a couple of hours to see what Blake had found.

He got up from the desk, about to head for the kitchen to make some fresh coffee, when his mobile rang. As he answered it, he caught sight of himself in the small round mirror on the wall, which Clarke used for the occasional morning shave. He looked like shit, with a day’s growth of beard and deep, dark circles under his eyes. He ran his fingers quickly through his hair in an attempt to smooth it down, and heard Superintendent Cornish’s voice muffled at the other end.

‘Has the exhumation taken place?’

‘Yes, and the post mortem’s being done as we speak.’ Tartgalia cradled the phone under his ear as he pushed aside a packing case full of Clarke’s things, which Sally-Ann was due to collect at some point. He closed the door firmly against the background noise coming from the main office opposite and tried to focus on what Cornish was saying.

‘When do you expect to get the results?’ Cornish said.

‘They’re rushing them through, so hopefully within the next twenty-four hours. I’m on my way over shortly to see the pathologist.’

The pathologist. The words had a nice, detached ring to them, the opposite of what he really felt, if he was honest. Glancing again in the mirror, he rubbed the thick black stubble on his chin with his fingers. With the morning meeting due to start shortly, there’d be no time to go back home for a shower, a shave and a change of clothes before meeting Fiona Blake later at the mortuary. Clarke’s electric razor was in one of the many boxes in the hall but it looked like a health hazard and he preferred a wet shave anyway. Sod it, he thought, smiling at his own vanity. Why should he care about pleasing Fiona? She would just have to take him as she found him. He turned away and sank down in the chair, putting his feet up heavily on the desk.

‘The press haven’t got wind of anything, I hope?’ Cornish said, chewing something loudly as he spoke.

Tartaglia heard the clatter of china and the sound of a woman’s voice in the background. Cornish must be at home having breakfast. Knowing Cornish, it would be muesli, granary toast with a low-fat spread and a pot of a particular brand of Earl Grey tea. According to Clarke, the muesli and tea travelled with Cornish everywhere, even when he went away for a work conference. He was a creature of habit in everything he did, imagination not being his strong point.

‘Not as far as I know,’ Tartaglia replied, irritated that he didn’t have Cornish’s full attention.

‘Did you find the rings?’ Cornish’s mouth was still full, the final word sounding like ‘wings’.

There were few things Tartaglia found more irritating than trying to have a conversation with someone who was eating, particularly when he’d been up all the night and had had no breakfast. Trying to stifle his annoyance, he replied: ‘Laura Benedetti’s mother thinks she was wearing one but she’s not a hundred per cent certain. If there was a ring, nobody knows where it is.’

Cornish made a dissatisfied grunt at the other end. ‘What a pity.’

‘But Ellie Best was wearing one when she died and her mother kept it. It’s identical to Gemma Kramer’s, plain gold, eighteen carat, same hallmark. It looks like Tom bought a job lot. We’re still trying to trace the manufacturer.’

‘When do we hear back about the girls’ computers?’

‘Again, it’s being treated as a priority,’ Tartaglia said. ‘But they couldn’t give me a precise time.’

The computers had been retrieved from other family members, who had been using them, and sent off for analysis. But even if the emails could be recovered, they were unlikely to be much help in finding the killer. According to the experts at Newlands Park, it had proved impossible to trace Tom from Gemma’s computer.

‘You’re sure there are only two deaths that fit the pattern?’ Cornish asked, taking a slurp of what Tartaglia assumed was tea.

‘As I told you last night, there’s one other death we’re looking into. But it’s not an instant fit. Marion Spear was single, just turned thirty, so she’s quite a bit older than the others. She fell from the top storey of a car park nearly two years ago, just within the time frame we’ve been searching. There was an investigation at the time as there were no witnesses and no suicide note. But in the end, short of any conclusive evidence to the contrary, the coroner recorded an open verdict.’

‘Why are you bothering with her?’

‘Purely on the basis of location. The car park was just down the road from where Gemma died.’

Cornish coughed as if something had gone down the wrong way. Tartaglia heard the sound of a chair being scraped back, followed by running water. Growing increasingly impatient as Cornish spluttered and cleared his throat, he stood up and started to pace around the small room.

‘What about a ring?’ Cornish gasped, after a moment.

‘We’re checking to see if she was wearing one. If not, I think there’s no reason to get an exhumation order at this point.’

‘So, apart from her, you think we have three victims?’

‘Subject to confirmation from the pathologist on Laura, yes. First Laura, then Ellie and then Gemma.’

‘Just the three?’

‘As far as we can tell.’ Of course, there was no way to be a hundred per cent certain but they’d trawled the records as thoroughly as possible, given limited time and resources. The phrase needles and haystacks came to mind. ‘Would you like me to widen the search, maybe start looking outside the London area?’ As he said this, he knew what the answer would be.

Cornish took another noisy gulp of something and cleared his throat again. ‘It’s too much of a long shot and we haven’t got the manpower. Also, I don’t want to risk a leak and have the press crawling all over us before we’re ready. Call me when you’ve seen the pathologist.’

Holding a handkerchief over his nose to dampen the overpowering stench of decay, Tartaglia stared down at the shrivelled, greenish-black remains of Laura Benedetti stretched out before him on the steel gurney. Eight months in a London cemetery had reduced her to something barely recognisable as human and with a momentary pang he remembered the photo of her he had seen.

Thanks to the ring, they were sure about Ellie Best. But he needed some sort of confirmation from Fiona Blake that Laura Benedetti was also part of the series. However, Blake was taking her time. He had only just arrived at the mortuary when she had rushed out of the room to the corridor outside to take a call on her mobile. Judging from the peal of what sounded like flirtatious laughter that echoed through the doors, it was personal and he’d put money on it being a man at the other end.

He was on the point of going out to insist that she come back and talk to him, when the double doors swung open and she strode briskly back into the room as if nothing had happened, shoes squeaking on the lino, her white coat hugging her hips as she walked towards him.

‘We should get the tox results back by tomorrow,’ she said matter-of-factly, coming over to where he was standing, hands in the pockets of her coat. ‘But they’re unlikely to tell us much, as you know.’

He hadn’t expected anything else, given the state of decomposition of Laura’s body and the time it had spent in the ground.

‘Are you telling me then that there’s nothing suspicious about her death?’ he said levelly, removing the handkerchief temporarily and trying not to inhale. His stomach churned and he hoped this wasn’t going to take long.

‘The girl died from a fall onto a hard surface, just as it says in the coroner’s report. Nothing wrong there. But there is one thing,’ she said, catching his eye. ‘It’s useful that I saw the last victim. I knew what I was looking for.’

As she brushed past him and went over to the gurney, putting on a fresh pair of surgical gloves, he caught a faint, fleeting whiff of her perfume and found himself momentarily wanting to reach out and touch her hair, stroke the soft skin of her neck.

Using both hands, she gently shifted the remains of the head to one side, then looked round at him. ‘Look. Here, by the base of her scalp.’ She pointed with a finger.

Clamping the handkerchief back over his mouth and nose, he stepped forward and peered down at the blackened mess of flesh, trying to see what she was indicating. It was almost impossible to make out anything meaningful. Then, peering even closer, he saw the razor-sharp line, dark against an even darker mass.

‘He’s taken a lock of hair?’ he guessed, excitement starting to bubble up.

‘Yes,’ she said, with a satisfied smile, as if she had just given him a wonderful present. ‘It’s easy to miss because of the decomposition and the colour of her hair. But do you see here?’ As she ran her finger over the spot she met his eye again. For a second, he wondered again who she had been speaking to on the phone.