Read This Body of Death Online
Authors: Elizabeth George
Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adult
This Body of Death (11 page)
Isabelle doubted this. He was as frail as the wild snapdragon that grew along the path they followed.
He took them down trails that grew increasingly narrow as they coursed their way into the heart of the cemetery. Where paths were wide, they were stony, pebbled so variously that they looked like representatives of every possible geological period. Where they were narrow, the paths were thick with decomposing leaves and the ground was spongy and aromatic, sending up the rich scent of compost. At last the tower of a chapel appeared and then the chapel itself, a sad ruin of brick and iron and corrugated steel, its interior thick with weeds and made inaccessible by iron bars.
Over there, the pensioner told them needlessly. He indicated a gathering of white-suited crime scene officers across a parched lawn. Isabelle thanked the man and said to Nkata, “Track down whoever discovered the body. I’ll want a word.”
Nkata gave a look towards the chapel. Isabelle knew he wanted to see the crime scene. She waited for him to protest or argue. He did neither. He said, “Right,” and she left him to it. She liked him for his response.
She herself approached a small, secondary building abutting one side of the chapel, near to which a body bag waited next to a collapsed ambulance trolley. The body was going to have to be carried out upon it, as the uneven paths in the cemetery would make rolling the trolley impossible till they got near the exit.
Scenes of crime officers were engaged in everything from taping and measuring to marking off footprints, for what little good this would do, as there appeared to be dozens. Only a narrow access route consisting of end-to-end boards made the immediate site of the body available, and Isabelle donned latex gloves as she picked her way along it.
The forensic pathologist came out of the secondary building. She was a middle-aged woman with the teeth, skin, and disturbing cough of a chain-smoker. Isabelle introduced herself and said, “What is this place?” with a nod at the building.
“No idea,” the pathologist said. She did not give her name, nor did Isabelle want it. “No door from it into the chapel, so it can’t have been a vestry. Gardener’s shed, perhaps?” The woman shrugged. It didn’t really matter, did it?
Of course it didn’t. What mattered was the corpse, and this turned out to be a young woman. She was half seated and half sprawled inside the little annex, in a position suggesting she’d stumbled backwards upon being attacked and had subsequently slid down the wall. The wall itself was mottled by the weather, and above the body a graffito of an eye inside a triangle proclaimed, “God Goes Wireless.” The floor was stone and littered with rubbish. Death had come to mingle with crisps bags, sandwich wrappers, chocolate-bar wrappers, and empty Coke cans. There was a pornographic magazine as well, a much more recent bit of rubbish than the rest of the debris as it was fresh and uncrumpled. It was also open at a gleaming crotch shot of a pouting, red-lipsticked woman in patent leather boots, a top hat, and nothing else.
Ignominious location in which to meet your end, Isabelle thought. She squatted to have a look at the victim. Her stomach rolled at the scent coming off the body: a smell of meat rotting in the heat, thick as yellow fog. Newly hatched maggots writhed in the body’s nostrils and mouth, and her mouth, face, and neck—where they could be seen—had turned greenish-red.
The young woman’s head lolled on her chest, and on the chest itself a vast amount of blood had coagulated. Flies were doing more business there, and the sound of their buzzing was like high-tension wires in the close space. When Isabelle carefully moved the young woman’s head to expose her neck, more flies rose in a cloud from an ugly wound. It was jagged and torn, suggesting a weapon wielded by a clumsy killer.
“Carotid artery,” the pathologist said. She made a gesture towards the body’s bagged hands. “Looks like she tried to stop the bleeding, but it couldn’t have done much good. She would have bled out fast.”
“Weapon?”
“Nothing left at the scene. Till we get her on the table and have a close look, it could be anything sharp. Not a knife, though. The wound’s far too messy for a knife.”
“How long d’you reckon she’s been dead?”
“Difficult to say because of the heat. Lividity’s fixed and rigor’s gone. Perhaps twenty-four hours?”
“Do we know who she is?”
“There’s nothing on her. No handbag here either. Nothing to suggest who she is. But the eyes …They’re going to give you some help.”
“The eyes? Why? What’s wrong with them?”
“Have a look for yourself,” the pathologist said. “They’re clouded over, as you’d expect, but you can still see something of the irises. Very interesting, you ask me. Don’t see eyes like that very often.”
From Alan Dresser’s account, later confirmed by the takeaway’s employees, McDonald’s was unusually crowded that day. It may be that other parents of young children were also using the break in the weather to get out of the house for the morning, but whatever the case, most of them seem to have converged on McDonald’s at the same time. Dresser had a querulous toddler in tow, and he was, he admits, anxious to appease him, to feed him, and to be on his way in order to put him down for a nap. He established the boy at one of the three remaining available tables—second in from the doorway—and he went to place their order. Although hindsight demands one castigate Dresser for leaving his son unattended for so much as thirty seconds, at least ten mothers were present in McDonald’s at that moment and, in their company, at least twenty-two small children. In such a public setting in the middle of the day, how was he to assume that inconceivable danger was approaching? Indeed, if one thinks of danger at all in such a location, one thinks of paedophiles lurking nearby and seeing an opportunity, not of three boys under the age of twelve. No one present looked the least bit dangerous. Indeed, Dresser was himself the only adult male there.
CCTV tape shows three boys later identified as Michael Spargo, Ian Barker, and Reggie Arnold approaching McDonald’s at 12:51. They had been inside the Barriers for more than two hours. They were doubtless hungry, and although they could have assuaged their hunger with the bags of crisps they’d taken from Mr. Gupta’s snack kiosk, it seems to have been their intention to take food from a McDonald’s customer and to make a run for it afterwards. Both Michael’s account and Ian’s account agree on this point. In every interview, Reggie Arnold refuses to talk about McDonald’s altogether. This is likely due to the fact that, no matter whose idea it was to take John Dresser from the premises, it is Reggie Arnold who has the toddler by the hand as the boys walk towards the Barriers’ exit.
In looking upon John Dresser, Ian, Michael, and Reggie would have been gazing at the very antithesis of their own past selves. At the moment of his abduction, the child was dressed in a new, azure snowsuit, with yellow ducks marching across the front of it. His blond hair was freshly washed and had yet to be cut, so it fell round his face in the sort of cherubic curls one associates with Renaissance putti. He had bright white trainers on his feet and he was carrying his favourite toy: a small brown-and-black dog with floppy ears and a pink tongue partially torn from its mouth, a stuffed animal later found along the route the boys took once they removed John from McDonald’s.
This removal was apparently accomplished without difficulty. It was a matter of moments, and the CCTV film that documents John’s abduction makes for chilling viewing. In it, one clearly watches the three boys enter the McDonald’s (which, at the time, did not have closed-circuit filming of its own). Less than one minute later, out they come. Reggie Arnold emerges first, holding John Dresser by the hand. Five seconds later, Ian Barker and Michael Spargo follow. Michael is eating something from a conical container. These appear to be McDonald’s French fries.
One of the questions relentlessly asked after the fact was how could Alan Dresser have failed to notice that his son was being taken? Two explanations exist. One of them is the noise and the crowded conditions of the takeaway, which covered any sound John Dresser might have made when approached by the boys who took him. The other is a mobile phone call that Dresser received from his office as he reached the till to place his order. The wretched timing of this call kept him with his back turned from his son longer than he might otherwise have had it turned, and as many people do, Dresser lowered his head and maintained that position as he listened and responded to the caller, likely to avoid distractions that would have made it more difficult for him to concentrate in the raucous atmosphere. By the time he had concluded this phone call, paid for his food, and returned with it to the table, John was not only gone but likely had been gone for nearly five minutes, more than enough time to get him out of the Barriers altogether.
Dresser did not at first think that John had been taken. Indeed, with the takeaway so crowded, that was the last thing on his mind. Instead, he thought the boy—restless as he’d been in Stanley Wallingford’s DIY shop—had climbed down from his seat and wandered off, perhaps attracted by something inside McDonald’s, perhaps attracted by something just outside the takeaway but still well within the arcade. These were vital minutes, but Dresser did not see them that way. Not unreasonably, he looked round the take away first before he began asking the adults therein if they had seen John.
One wonders how it is possible. It is midday. It is a public place. It contains other people, both children and adults. Yet three young boys are still able to walk up to a toddler, take him by the hand, and make off with him without anyone apparently noticing. How could this happen? Why did it happen?
The how of it is, I believe, contained within the age of the perpetrators of this crime. The fact that they were children themselves made them virtually invisible because what they did was beyond the imagination of the people present in the McDonald’s. People simply did not expect malevolence to arrive in the package in which it was presented that day. People tend to have predetermined mental pictures of child abductors, and those pictures do not include schoolboys.
Once it became clear that John was not in the McDonald’s and had not been noticed, Dresser widened his search. It was only after he had checked the four nearest shops that he tracked down the arcade’s security force and an announcement was made over the public-address system, alerting the patrons of the Barriers to be on the lookout for a small boy in a bright blue snowsuit. An hour passed during which Dresser continued to look for his son, accompanied by the shopping arcade’s manager and the head of the security team. None of them considered looking at the CCTV tapes because none of them at that point wished to think the unthinkable.
B
ARBARA
H
AVERS HAD TO USE HER
ID
TO CONVINCE THE
constable that she was a cop. He’d barked at her, “Hey! Cemetery’s
closed
, madam,” as she’d approached the main entrance, having finally found a place for her decrepit Mini just behind a skip, where a building was being renovated in Stoke Newington Church Street.
Barbara chalked it up to the outfit. She and Hadiyyah had managed the purchase of that staple of all women’s wardrobes—the A-line skirt—but that was it. After returning Hadiyyah to Mrs. Silver, Barbara had donned the skirt in a hurry, had seen it was several inches too long, had decided to wear it anyway, but had done nothing else about her appearance other than to loop the necklace from Accessorize round her neck.
She said, “The Met,” to the constable, who gaped at her before he managed to gather his wits enough to say, “Inside,” and to offer her the sign-in sheet on a clipboard.
How bloody helpful, Barbara thought. She replaced her ID in her shoulder bag, fished out a packet of fags, and lit up. She was about to make a polite request for a wee bit more information as to the pre
cise
location of the crime scene when a slow-moving procession emerged from beneath the plane trees just beyond the cemetery fence. This comprised an ambulance crew, a pathologist with professional bag in hand, and a uniformed constable. The ambulance crew had a body bag on a trolley, which they’d been carrying like a stretcher. They paused to lower its legs. They then continued towards the gates.
Barbara met them just inside. She said, “Superintendent Ardery?” and the pathologist nodded vaguely in a northern direction. “Uniforms along the way,” was the limit of the guidance she gave although she added, “You’ll see them. Fingertip search,” to indicate there would be enough of them to give Barbara further directions should she need them.
She didn’t, as things turned out, although she was quite surprised she managed to find the crime scene at all, considering the maze that constituted the cemetery. But within minutes, the spire of a chapel came into view and soon enough she saw Isabelle Ardery with a police photographer. They were bent over the screen of his digital camera. As Barbara approached them, she heard her name called. Winston Nkata was emerging from a secondary path near a lichenous stone bench, flipping closed a leather notebook in which, Barbara knew, beautifully legible observations would be written in his maddeningly elegant cursive.
She said, “So what is it?”
He filled her in. As he was doing so, Isabelle Ardery’s voice cut in with a “
Ser
geant Havers,” which was spoken in a tone that indicated neither welcome nor pleasure, despite her orders that Barbara was to come posthaste to the cemetery. Nkata and Barbara turned to see the superintendent approaching. Ardery stalked, no walking or strolling here. Her face was stony. “Are you trying to be amusing?” she asked.
Barbara knew her expression was a blank. She said, “Eh?” She glanced at Nkata. He looked equally mystified.
“Is
this
your idea of professional?” Ardery asked.
“Oh.” Barbara gave a look at what she could see of her kit. Red high-top trainers, navy blue skirt dangling a good five inches below her knees, T-shirt printed with “Talk to the Fist Cos the Face Ain’t Listening,” and necklace of chain, beads, and a filigree pendant. She saw how Ardery might take her getup: a bit of I’ll-show-you. She said, “Sorry, guv. It’s as far as I got.” Next to her, she saw Nkata lift his hand to his mouth. She knew the lout was trying to hide a smile. “Really,” she said, “God’s truth. You said to get out here so I came on the run. I didn’t have time—”
“That’s enough.” Ardery gave her a once-over, her eyes narrowed. She said, “Remove the necklace. Believe me, it does nothing to improve.”
Barbara did so. Nkata turned away. His shoulders quivered slightly. He coughed. Ardery barked at him, “What have you got?”
He pivoted back to her. “Kids who found the body’re gone now. Locals took them to the station for a complete statement, but I managed a word before they left. It’s a boy and girl.” He recited the rest of what he’d learned: Two adolescents had seen a boy come out of the murder site; their description was so far limited to “he had a huge bum and his trousers were falling” but the male adolescent claimed he probably could help with an e-fit. That was all they were able to contribute because they’d evidently been heading towards the annex for sex and “likely wouldn’t’ve noticed the crucifixion if it had been going on in front of them.”
“We’ll want whatever statement they give to the locals,” Ardery said. She filled Barbara in on the details of the crime and called the photographer over to run through the digital pictures once again. As Nkata and Barbara looked them over, Ardery said, “Arterial wound. Whoever did it was going to be, literally, covered in blood.”
“Unless she was taken by surprise from the back,” Barbara pointed out. “Her head grabbed, pulled back, the weapon driven in from behind. You’d have blood on the arm and the hands, then, but little enough on the body. Right?”
“Possibly,” Ardery said. “But one couldn’t be taken by surprise where the body was, Sergeant.”
Barbara could see the secondary building from where they were standing. She said, “Taken by surprise then dragged in there?”
“No sign of dragging.”
“Do we know who she is?” Barbara looked up from the pictures.
“No ID. We’ve got a perimeter search going on, but if that doesn’t turn up the weapon or something telling us who she is, we’ll do a grid of the entire place and take it in sections. I want you in charge of that. Coordinate with the locals. I want you in charge of a house-to-house as well. Concentrate first on the terraces bordering the cemetery. Handle that and we’ll reconvene at the Met.”
Barbara nodded as Nkata said, “Want me to wait for the e-fit, guv?”
“Do that as well,” Ardery said to Barbara. “Make sure their statement gets sent over to Victoria Street. And I want you to see if you can squeeze anything else out of them.”
Nkata said, “I can—”
“You’ll continue to drive me,” Ardery told him. She looked towards the perimeter of the clearing in which the chapel sat. Constables were conducting the search there. They’d move outward in circles till they found—or didn’t find—the weapon, the victim’s bag, or anything else that might constitute evidence. It was a nightmare location that could produce too much or nothing at all.
Nkata was silent. Barbara saw a muscle move in his jaw. He finally said, “Due respect, guv, but don’t you want a constable driving you? Or a special, even?”
Ardery said, “If I wanted a constable or a special, I’d have got one. Do you have a problem with the assignment, Sergeant?”
“Seems like I could best be used—”
“As I want to use you,” Ardery cut in. “Are we clear on that?”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Guv,” politely, in affirmation.
B
ELLA
M
C
H
AGGIS WAS
utterly drenched in sweat, but in a good way. She’d just completed her hot yoga class—although
any
yoga class would have turned into hot yoga in the current weather—and she was feeling both virtuous and peaceful. She had Mr. McHaggis to thank for this. Had the poor bloke not died on the toilet seat, member in hand and Page Three girl spread out buxomly on the floor in front of him, she’d have likely still been in the shape she was in on that morning she’d found him gone to his eternal reward. But seeing poor McHaggis like that had been a call to arms. Whereas, before his death, Bella hadn’t been able to climb a flight of stairs without losing her breath, now she could do that and more. She was particularly proud of her limber body. Why, she could bend from the waist and put her palms on the floor. She could lift her leg to the height of the fireplace mantel. Not at all bad for a bird of sixty-five.
She was on Putney High Street, heading for home. She was still wearing her yoga kit, and she had her mat rolled beneath her arm. She was thinking about worms, specifically the composting worms that lived in a rather complicated setup in her back garden. They were amazing little creatures—bless them, they ate virtually anything one handed over—but they needed some care. They didn’t like extremes: too much hot or too much cold and off they’d go to the big compost heap in the sky. So she was considering how much constituted too much heat when she passed the local tobacconist where an
Evening Standard
placard stood out front, advertising the day’s last edition of that paper.
Bella was used to seeing some dramatic event reduced to three or four scrawled words suitable for bringing people into the shop to purchase a paper. Usually, she walked on by on her way to her home in Oxford Road because as far as she was concerned, there were far too many newspapers in London—both broadsheets and tabloids—and, recycling aside, they were eating up every woodland on earth, so she was damned if she would contribute to them. But this particular placard slowed her steps: “Woman Dead in Abney Park.”
Bella hadn’t a clue where Abney Park was, but she stood there on the pavement with pedestrians passing her by and she wondered if it was at all possible …She didn’t want to think it was. She
hated
the idea that it might be. But since it
could
be, she went within and purchased a copy of the paper, telling herself that at least she could shred it and feed it to the worms if it turned out that there was nothing to the story.
She didn’t read it at once. Indeed, since she didn’t like to appear the kind of person who could be seduced into buying a tabloid because of an advertising ploy, she also purchased some breath mints and a packet of Wrigley’s spearmint from the shop. She rejected the offer of a plastic bag for these items—one had to draw the line somewhere and Bella refused to participate in the further littering and destruction of the planet through the means of the plastic carrier bags one saw blowing along high streets every day—and went on her way.
Oxford Road wasn’t far from the tobacconist, a narrow thoroughfare perpendicular both to Putney Bridge Road and to the river. It was less than a quarter hour’s walk from the yoga studio, so in no time at all Bella was through her front gate and dodging the eight plastic rubbish bins she used for recycling in her small front garden.
Inside the house, she went into the kitchen where she brewed one of her two daily cups of green tea. She hated the stuff—it tasted like what she imagined horse piss would taste like—but she’d read enough about its value, so she regularly plugged her nose and tossed the brew down her throat. It wasn’t until she’d drunk the ghastly cuppa that she spread the paper on the work top and took a look at its unfolded front page.
The photograph was not illuminating. It showed a park entrance guarded by a cop. There was a secondary picture cutting into this one, an aerial shot depicting a clearing in the midst of what looked like a forested area and in the centre of this clearing a church of some kind with white-suited crime scene people crawling round it.
Bella consumed the accompanying story, seeking the relevant bits: young woman, murdered, apparently stabbed, nicely dressed, no identification …
She made the jump to page three where she saw an e-fit with the words
person of interest being sought
beneath it. E-fits, she thought, never looked like the person they turned out to be depicting, and this particular one looked so universal that virtually any adolescent boy on the street could have been picked up by the police and questioned as a result of it: dark hair falling over his eyes, chubby face, wearing a hoodie—at least the hood was down and not up—in spite of the heat …Totally useless as far as a description went. She’d just seen a dozen such boys on Putney High Street.
The article indicated that this particular individual had been seen leaving the crime scene in Abney Park Cemetery and, reading this, Bella dug out an old
A-Z
from the bookshelves in the dining room. She located this place in Stoke Newington, and the very fact of Stoke Newington, miles upon miles from Putney, gave her pause. She was in the midst of this pause when she heard the front door being unlocked and steps coming down the corridor in her direction.
She said, “Frazer, luv?” and didn’t wait for his reply. She made it her business to know the comings and goings of her lodgers, and it was the hour at which Frazer Chaplin returned from his day job to freshen up and change his clothes for his evening employment. She greatly admired this about the young man: the fact that he had two jobs. Industrious people were the sort of people she liked letting rooms to. “Got a moment?”
Frazer came to the doorway as she looked up from the
A-Z
. He raised an eyebrow—black like his hair, which was thick and curly and spoke of Spain at the time of the Moors although the boy himself was Irish—and he said, “Blazing today, eh? Every kid in Bayswater was at the ice and bowl, Mrs. McH.”
“No doubt,” Bella said. “Have a look in here, luv.”
She took him to the kitchen and showed him the paper. He scanned the article then looked at her. “And?” He sounded perplexed.
“What do you mean ‘And?’ Young woman, dressed nicely, dead …”
He twigged then, and his expression altered. “Oh no. I don’ think so,” he said although he did sound slightly hesitant when he went on with, “Really, it can’t be, Mrs. McH.”
“Why not?”
“Because why would she be up in Stoke Newington? And why in a cemetery, for God’s good love?” He looked at the photographs once again. He looked at the e-fit as well. He shook his head slowly. “No. No. Truly. More likely she’s just gone somewhere for a break, to get away from the heat. To the sea or something, don’t you think? Who could blame her, like?”
“She would have said. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to worry. I expect you know that.”