Left for Dead: A Maeve Kerrigan Novella (Maeve Kerrigan Novels) (3 page)

A thin middle-aged woman was standing on the pavement, her arms folded. She raised one hand once she noticed we were looking at her. Chris pulled in to the nearest empty space, which was not all that close to her. Instead of walking towards us, she stayed where she was and glowered, her lips a thin line.

‘She looks like fun.’

‘Your window is down,’ I said, barely moving my lips.

‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot. She didn’t hear me.’ Chris sighed. ‘Let’s find out what she has to say. If she’s chatty, leave her to me. You have a look around.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, surprised. He usually kept me on a short lead. Maybe two months of hard work had convinced him I could be trusted.

Or maybe Chris wasn’t all that interested in prowling around locked premises in the dark, on a wild goose chase.

As we walked towards the woman, I realised she wasn’t as old as I’d thought – thirty, maybe – but she was painfully thin and her shoulders were hunched.

‘You took your time. They’ve packed it in.’ She woman sounded hoarse, like a magpie. She had a proper South London accent, the vowels as thin as skimmed milk.

‘Who’s packed in what, love?’

‘The pair who was shouting. Why I rung you.’

Chris had told me never to assume that what came over the radio was accurate. It was garbled in transmission, more often than not. Ask, check, check again.

‘First things first. What’s your name?’

‘Sadie Grey.’

‘And where do you live, Miss Grey?’

‘Sadie,’ she said automatically. ‘Number forty-three.’

It was the house behind her. The front door was open so I could see a narrow, dark hallway with peeling wallpaper. It looked damp. A vast one-eyed tabby sat on the front window ledge. As I watched it yawned hugely and slid off the ledge into the tattered shrubs that filled the front garden.

‘All right, Sadie,’ Chris said. ‘Who was shouting?’

‘Well, a woman. And there was a man too, only he weren’t doing so much shouting but I heard him talking to her. Then it went quiet. Then she started up again and I called you, didn’t I?’

‘Where were they, this pair?’

‘I dunno.’

‘In a house?’

‘Maybe. Or in the yards. I thought it was maybe over that way. Hard to tell, with the trains and that.’ She glanced across at the industrial units, then turned her back on them.

‘Been over to check?’

‘No, I ain’t. That’s your job.’ Her eyes glittered as she felt in the pocket of her cardigan, coming up with a pack of cigarettes and her lighter. ‘Why don’t you go and look?’

‘Because I’m talking to you. Now then. Ever heard anything like it before?’

‘Never.’

‘Did it sound like any of your neighbours?’

‘Nah.’

‘Did any of your neighbours hear it?’

She pointed. ‘Forty-five is deaf. Forty-seven is full of young kids and the baby was crying so Lucia wouldn’t have heard nothing. Forty-nine’s empty. So’s forty-three. Don’t know forty-one – they’ve just moved in. Thirty-nine is too snobby to look out the window and anyway she probably ain’t come home yet. She’s never there. And thirty-seven is a perv. If he heard screaming he’d have assumed it was someone watching a porno.’

‘Do you live on your own?’

A nod.

‘So it was just you who heard it and called it in.’

She bared her teeth in what was meant to be a smile. ‘Good citizen, me.’

‘Tell me what you heard again,’ Chris said, patient as a monk.

Not hurrying, I walked away from them, crossing the road to look at the yards. The main building was a square block with tinted windows and stained brickwork, a product of the seventies. It was dark, the doors securely locked. Behind it to the left was the builder’s merchant, complete with high metal gates and spiked fencing. I shoved the gate experimentally but it didn’t budge. I headed back towards the railway bridge. Across the road, a flame flared in the gathering darkness. Sadie’s face glowed for a second, her cheeks hollowed as she inhaled.

I had my torch in my hand as I rounded the corner of the building and approached the garage. The shutters were down, the ground in front of them black with engine oil and grease. Two courtesy cars were parked opposite the garage, parallel to the building, the garage’s logo on the front doors. This side of the building wasn’t fenced off and I kept walking, the beam of the torch sweeping the ground methodically as I went. The ground was littered with bits of rubbish – old clothes, scraps of paper, a pen cap, squashed tin cans, an ancient toaster spilling
its electronic entrails, mouldy bread scattered by pigeons or scraggy urban foxes or, though I tried not to think about it, rats. These scraps were the things that were always dumped in the unadopted places in a city, the definition of worthless, no good to anyone. I wasn’t surprised to see the two large bins squatted at the back of the main block, their lids padlocked. People came here to put their rubbish in the bins and, thwarted, dumped it nearby. Someone else’s problem.

Someone else’s shoe was another matter. I stepped over it, shining the torch on it briefly as I went. Black leather, a strap across the instep, a three-inch heel. I walked on.

I stopped.

I walked back.

I squatted beside the shoe and stared at it, but it took me a moment to work out what bothered me about it. The strap ended in a buckle, and it was done up.

Which meant that someone had taken it off without undoing it. And someone had thrown it away, without its pair. I shone the torch around to see if I could spot the other one, without finding anything. I stared at the one I’d found for a couple of seconds longer, then stood up. Chris would be just thrilled if I showed him.
I found a shoe. I think it’s lonely
.

I walked on, trying to ignore the nagging feeling that I was missing something. Training had conditioned me to expect clues in a crime scene but this wasn’t a crime scene, as far as I knew. This was just a deserted, unlovely place that would look completely different during the day. I turned my radio down so the constant hum of control room chatter was muted, trusting that Chris would tell me if there was anything I needed to know. I came to the fence that secured the back of the builder’s merchant premises and stopped, checking along it to see that it was all secure. A low whine announced a train was approaching, long before I could hear the clickety-clack of the wheels on the track and the hum of the engine. Bright rectangular windows zipped by as the train passed over the bridge, picking up speed.
As the sound died away into the distance, the silence in the yards seemed to press against my ears. I stood for a moment, listening. All of my senses were on high alert, tension prickling along my arms and the back of my neck, although I couldn’t have said why. There was nothing to hear, nothing to see. Nothing to make my mouth dry. And nothing to make me shiver as if I was cold when the air was as hot and thick as soup.

I gave up and moved away, my boots crunching on broken glass, and it was the purest chance that I heard anything at all. It was a low sound, wordless and brief, and I thought at first it was an animal – a cat snarling, or a fox. Even so, I stopped. I stood completely still, tuning out my own breathing.

I heard it again.

I could place the direction now, over near the bins, and I was even more certain that it was an animal as I strode towards it impatiently, eager to be gone. There was nothing behind the bins or under them, though I got down on the ground to check. The bins stank with the sweetish, rancid cabbage smell of food waste in high summer. There was a pool of something on the ground, a kind of horror soup with little bits of raw meat and more glass mixed in with it from a broken beer bottle. The neck of it had survived with an inch or two of the bottle, I saw. It glinted under one of the bins. I wiped my hands on my uniform trousers as I got to my feet, feeling dirty as well as too hot. Back to Chris, to report that I had found nothing. And at the end of my shift, a long cool shower. There were clean sheets on my bed, too. It would be bliss to lie down, to sleep. To let the day slip through my fingers like water until it was time to get back in my uniform and start all over again.

When the beam of my torch passed over the missing shoe, where it stuck out behind one of the parked cars, it took me a moment to realise what I was looking at.

It took me even longer to realise that inside the shoe was a foot.

I wasn’t aware of moving but I must have run because the next second I was crouching as near to her as I could get. She was in the narrow space between the car and the wall, lying on her side, huddled with her knees up to her chest. I could tell she was alive because I could hear her breath rasping through her throat, but I couldn’t reach far enough in to check her pulse. Her dark hair hung down over her face. Her nails were painted pale pink. She wore a red skirt and a pale yellow top that was ripped down the middle from collar to hem. One shoe on, one shoe in the middle of the yard. No handbag. No watch. No bra. Blood on her skin. Blood in her hair.

‘Can you hear me?’ I couldn’t seem to get my voice to work properly. It came out thin and reedy. I tried again. ‘I’m a police officer. Can you hear me, miss?’

She made the low noise I’d heard before. I had taken a pair of blue protective gloves out of my pocket without even thinking about it, and now I slid them on and reached out to lift the hair off her face. Some of it stuck to the blood that had run across her cheek from a gash on her temple. Her eyes were swollen, her cheekbones puffy. Her face was so badly damaged that I couldn’t even guess at her age or her usual appearance, although judging by her clothing, she was in her mid-to-late twenties. Acting on autopilot I got on the radio, keeping my voice under control with an effort.

‘Lima Delta Two Six, priority. I’ve found a badly injured female outside a commercial premises on Filford Street showing signs of a serious sexual assault. I need ambulance and more units. And could someone notify night turn CID, over?’

‘Two Six, that’s received. What is the female’s condition, over?’

‘Two Six. Unresponsive, breathing, serious facial injuries. Aged in her twenties, over.’

I heard Chris arrive behind me, his breathing laboured. ‘I just heard it over the radio. What happened?’

‘Looks like a sexual assault. I think she crawled in here to hide.’ I leaned forward. I didn’t know if she could hear me or not, but I wanted to reassure her all the same. ‘It’s all right. There’s an ambulance on the way.’

‘Who is she?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t reach her to check for ID. I think she’s unconscious so I don’t really want to try to search her until the paramedics are here. No bag, though, as far as I can see.’

‘Shit.’ Chris spun around in a circle, the light from his torch skittering over the ground. ‘Looks bad.’

That was the understatement of the century.

Bad
was enough to bring two other units immediately – four male officers. Barry Allen, Andy Styles, a quiet Scottish PC called Paul Fraser and Gary Lovell. I stayed where I was, crouching on the ground. I wasn’t sure my legs would bear my weight when I did stand up; I was shivering like a whippet. Besides, I didn’t want to leave the woman on her own. Chris directed the others to secure the scene and started searching for anything that might help us to ID her. I told him about the shoe I’d found. I told him about the clothes on the ground, and the rubbish, some of which could have come from a woman’s handbag if someone had emptied it out to paw through the contents.

Inspector Saunders got to the yards at the same time as the ambulance crew and watched, her face pinched, as the paramedics tried to squeeze behind the car to examine the woman on the ground. I managed to stand up to get out of their way and went to hover near the inspector.

‘We need to move this car,’ she said, tapping the roof of the courtesy car. It was a navy-blue Nissan Micra.

‘It belongs to the garage under the arches. I can try to get hold of an owner or whoever’s got the keys for the garage—’

The inspector put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. ‘Boys. Over here.’

They came at a run.

‘Move this car, will you?’

Gary Lovell took out his ASP, the weighted extendable baton we all carried, and swung it from his shoulder to his hip so it shot out to its full length. He looked to the inspector, who nodded. He hit the driver’s window square in the middle. The glass fractured into hundreds of tiny pebbles that fell like hailstones, mainly into the vehicle. Gary used his baton to knock most of the rest out of the window frame. Then he leaned in and released the handbrake.

‘We’re going to move the car,’ Inspector Saunders said to the paramedics. ‘Hold her so she doesn’t get run over.’

Barry and Andy leaned against the bumper and heaved, and Gary turned the wheel to steer it away from the wall.

‘That’ll do.’ Inspector Saunders’ voice was uncharacteristically quiet. Like me, she was looking at the ground, where the car had hidden the spreading pool of blood that came from our victim. The paramedics had turned her a little and I could see that her skirt hadn’t been red originally: it was soaked in what seemed to be her own blood. One of them unfolded a foil blanket and laid it over her. That was for shock, I remembered. My brain was moving sluggishly. I was struggling to form thoughts.

‘She’s moaning. Is she awake?’ the inspector asked.

‘No. Just in pain.’ The more senior paramedic was a tough, thickset man in his forties with the name DAVIS stencilled on his uniform.

‘What did he do to her?’ Inspector Saunders’ face was grim.

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’ He jotted a note on the back of his hand; they all used their gloves as notebooks. To the victim, he said, ‘Sorry about this, love, but we need to see where you’re bleeding.’

He lifted her skirt gently, his crewmate standing behind him to shield the woman from the rest of us. I heard him swearing, very quietly. ‘Give us a dressing, Laura. Where’s the doctor?’

‘On her way,’ his crewmate said. ‘Two minutes.’

‘I’m not moving her until the doctor’s had a look.’ He leaned back so he could see the inspector. ‘I’m no expert, but whoever did this used something to cut her.’