Down into Darkness (3 page)

Since then it hadn't been necessary for Stella to talk to Davison; nor had she answered his little flurry of emails. Now he stood close enough to kiss, and she remembered that he had been a good lover. The air was thick with things unsaid.

‘Full report when?' Stella asked.

‘We're backed up.'

‘You're always backed up.'

‘The world is full of nasty people doing nasty things, DS Mooney. Our workload is a sad reflection of a society in crisis.'

She knew that addressing her by rank and surname was his method for pointing up the tension between them; calling her Stella would have been friendly and undemanding.
Forget it
, she thought;
it was something and nothing
.

‘As soon as you can…'

He smiled. ‘Goes without saying.'

She turned to leave, but he didn't step back. Her arm brushed his as she passed. She felt him watching her out of the room and wondered whether she could have avoided that tiny contact if she'd really wanted to. She had promised herself that she would tell Delaney about that night, that one night, but she'd tell him when the time was right. Four months had passed, nearly five, and she hadn't found the moment.

She never would, and she knew it.

Up above the Strip, on the crest of the rise that looks down on the neon blaze, the whoring and the hustling, stood a long terrace of three-storey houses. They were faced in dark red brick and had little stone porticoes over the windows; a hundred years ago they would have been the town houses of respectable merchants. Now they were apartments – mostly rentals, mostly short let – with shopfronts at street level.

The house at the centre of the terrace had caught fire a year back. The owner had made some basic repairs and sold it on to a company who needed a store for their product, which was safes of all strengths and sizes. The ground-floor window carried a display of their basic models. You could buy a safe that bolted to the cellar floor, thereby making it impossible for criminals to remove it. Instead, they would wait until you got home, then hold a knife to your child's eye to encourage you to reveal the combination. Or you could buy a small safe that looked exactly like a power socket. In this you could store your most precious items: jewellery, for instance, or the combination to the big safe in the cellar. This item was generally referred to by criminals as the ‘crap power-socket safe'.

The first and second floors of the building were storage space, but the uppermost floor had been let through an agency. It wasn't much: a room with a living space, a sleeping space, a kitchen space and a bathroom the size of a phone box. After the fire, the new owner had done little more than replace unsafe floorboards. Since the room was at the top of the house, it had four exposed rafter-beams, and these showed
the rough edges and fissures of fire damage. The walls had been stripped back to the bare plaster, which still bore scorch marks, and there was a persistent smell of charring that nothing could mask.

Unsurprisingly, the rent on the place was pretty low. It wouldn't have suited many people, but it suited Gideon Woolf. He hadn't signed the rental agreement in his own name, but he paid cash and he paid on time, so he could have signed Mickey Mouse and no one would have cared. As a child, ‘Gideon' wasn't a name that had done him many favours, but he knew that Gideon meant ‘great warrior', and it was a name that suited him now.

Gideon had been renting the burned room in the burned house for a few months. He lived alone, and he liked it that way. He liked being up high, being able to look down. He liked the simple life he led: fast food, canned food, packet food; a good supply of whisky; his laptop and his computer games. He was crazy about his computer games. There was one called
Silent Wolf
; initially, he had bought it for the name – his name – but now he played it all the time.

Silent Wolf was a man with a narrow face, heavy sideburns and a mane of coarse yellow hair that fell to his neck. The pupils of his eyes were yellow; his incisors were thick and took a slight curve. He wore a cloak like a pelt, beneath which he was all muscle and sinew. He wore a single glove to let people know that he carried a weapon; its fingers were cut short to just above the knuckle. He had a small arsenal at his disposal, but his weapon of choice was the knife.

Silent Wolf's history was what you might expect: abandoned as a child, brought up by
canis lupus
, lived in the wild until hunters spotted him, and his entire pack was killed in order that he might be rescued. That slaughter broke him, though he healed quickly, as an animal does. The problem was that he healed crooked. Attempts to tame him failed.
Now Silent Wolf lived in the no-go areas of an unnamed city, the badlands and borderlands, where he stood for swift justice. His body, like his mind, bore scars, but he walked the city streets at night, alone and unafraid, ready to kill if there was killing to be done.

The game was aimed primarily at pre-teen boys, but 26-year-old Gideon was both addict and aficionado. Like Silent Wolf, Gideon Woolf was on a mission.

In the post-mortem room of the morgue, there was music in the air along with ethanol and a faint underlying whiff of decay. Sam Burgess liked easy listening in the autopsy room, because looking was often far from easy.

Steel tables, steel drains, steel instruments, blood on the slab, Grieg on the CD player. Sam had a monkish fringe of hair turning mottled grey, deft hands and a soft voice with which to describe death in all its forms.

‘People think that your neck breaks and you're gone,' he said. ‘That's what the drop was for, or so they imagine. Those stories about the hangman secretly sizing up his victim, calculating height and weight, making the calculation… Truth is, no matter how you hang someone, they strangle. Death by strangulation. The effect of the drop is to sever the spinal cord and make things a bit more humane, that's all: breaking the neck renders the person unconscious, so the strangulation takes place without a lot of jerking and writhing. It's painless.'

‘Did her neck break?' Stella was looking at the body of Tree Girl lying on the dissecting table. There was a stillness about her that was unlike any other: not the stillness of something inert – a rock, a piece of furniture, something that had never moved – no, this was an unnatural stillness, a kind of absence.

‘No.'

‘Was she dead when he hung her up there?'

Sam shook his head; his voice grew a little quieter. ‘No, she died of asphyxia. Clear evidence of that: facial congestion,
swollen tongue, cyanosis as a result of constriction of the large blood vessels in the neck. The brain is gradually starved of oxygen; the technical term is anoxia.'

‘How long would she have taken to die?'

‘Brain death or whole body death?'

It was a distinction that hadn't occurred to Stella. She said, ‘Both. Either…'

‘A conscious person might take, say, two or three minutes before they start to close down. They'll struggle during that time: kick, squirm, you know…' Sam paused. ‘Is this need to know?'

‘Well, it's not
want
to know.'

‘From that point to brain death… three minutes? Four? It depends. After that it's just a slow, natural process: asphyxiation or maybe cardiac arrest. Anything between five to fifteen minutes.'

‘Fifteen?'

‘Could be. The person's deeply unconscious, though.'

‘Oh, well…' Stella looked again at Tree Girl's dark, distorted face. ‘Oh, well… that's okay, then.'

‘If it makes you feel any better,' Sam said, ‘she probably didn't know a thing about it. Look.'

He moved to the top of the table, and Stella followed. A patch of hair, close to the crown on the right side, had been shaved from Tree Girl's skull. Stella could see a cut, surrounded by a dark contusion.

‘The head wound caused a hairline fracture of the skull; the bone is slightly depressed; I'm pretty sure we're going to find a subdural haematoma.'

Sam worked with an assistant called Giovanni, a man of smiles and little speech. He brought to the table a trepanning saw and a bone saw and set them down with a conscientious deftness: tools of the trade. He and Sam had already examined Tree Girl's body, had combed her and swabbed her
and touched her in places where even a lover would have hesitated to go. Now they would get to the heart of her – literally. As Sam prepared to make the great ‘Y' incision that would lay her body open from clavicle to pubis, Stella turned away.

Sam worked swiftly and surely as Giovanni sprung the ribcage to let him in among the delicate wet tubers and strange blooms: the lung-tree, the rich red pod of the heart which might, at some stage, have held all manner of secrets but now was empty and still. It was this that Stella turned from: the first long cut that made flesh meat and exposed the inner workings, the moving parts, the cogs and wheels, the plumbing. The human body as mere machine.

‘There'll be some handwriting experts along; sometime this afternoon,' Stella said.

‘Yes,' Sam nodded. ‘I saw the writing on her back. It's in capitals. Will they get much from that?'

Stella shrugged. ‘Who knows? Can you tell how old she is?'

‘Forensics,' Sam said. ‘Bone –'

‘Sample, hair sample, I know. Take a guess?'

‘From the musculature, physical development, elasticity of skin and so on –'

‘I won't hold you to it.'

‘Twenty or younger.'

After that, Sam didn't speak for a while: too absorbed in his work. He handed Giovanni the liver, which Giovanni took to a scales to be weighed, carrying the organ carefully, as if it were something rare. Finally, he said, ‘Okay. We'll have her looking presentable by the time the graphologists arrive.'

Stella said, ‘A couple of questions.' Sam waited. ‘Evidence of recent sexual activity?'

‘Not sure; not unprotected, anyway.'

‘So, no semen.'

‘No semen.'

‘But she could have had sex –'

‘The swabs might tell us. I'll get back to you.'

‘Okay,' Stella said. Then: ‘The head wound… and how long before she died?'

‘Not sure yet. More to do on that.' Sam was bent over Tree Girl's body like a mechanic over a faulty engine. He paused and looked up. ‘You want to know whether he took her there conscious or unconscious.'

‘Might make a difference: potential witnesses, what they saw, what they didn't see. If she was conscious, people might have noticed a struggle, something of that sort.'

‘Someone seeing a struggle would have intervened, surely,' Sam observed. ‘Gone to help.'

Stella smiled. ‘Would you?'

Sam said nothing. Giovanni positioned a body block to elevate the head, and Sam made an incision at the back of the head and took the cut from behind the right ear across the forehead to the left ear; then he peeled back the scalp. Giovanni switched on the bone saw. A high, thin whine filled the room. He handed the implement to Sam, who made a cut line just where Tree Girl's hair line would have been.

Stella hadn't expected an answer. There was no aggression in Sam's world, no fear, no sudden cries for help, no moral dilemmas. When he cut the connection with the spinal cord and eased out the brain, Stella took a step forward, as if half expecting the face of Tree Girl's killer to be found there, like an image on a screen, her last sight of any living thing.

The Harefield Estate is a war zone: sometimes guerrilla war, sometimes all-out war, but always war. The timid non-combatants walk the battle lines with their heads down and their hands full of bags from Primark or Shoprite.

Between the land of civilians and the high-rise blocks of the estate was the DMZ, which, like all stretches of no man's land, bore the scars and detritus of conflict. Everything out there was ripped up or burned out: stoves, fridges, cars, sofas, a lone bed; and, topping all that, a strewage of condoms, syringes, fast-food boxes. An enterprising art-dealer could have thrown a rope round the whole thing and claimed it as a vast installation.

Alongside the tiny, wind-buffeted apartments of the innocents who prayed for a few days' ceasefire were stills, casinos, armourers, whorehouses, drug factories, drug-distribution centres and drug-wholesale facilities. The blocks surrounded a circular area that locals called the Bull Ring, but to reach it you would first have to negotiate the maze of pathways that only those who lived there had mapped. You would also have to risk the walk spaces under each stilt-lifted block.

On a day that was too warm, and in a way that was all too usual, drug deals were going down along the pathways, hookers were going down in doorways, and, in the walk space under Block C, one man was killing another. The killer's name was Arthur Dorey, but no one called him that. He was Sekker: it was short for secateurs, because that particular garden tool was the method of persuasion he most often chose. Shake hands with Sekker, people said, and then
count your fingers: after which they would laugh. Well, some of them would laugh. Just at that moment, though, Sekker wasn't too interested in persuasion. He was getting a job done. It was a paid job, and Sekker needed the money because he was hoping to take his girl to Barbados before the hurricane season.

The job involved ending the life of a man whose name, Sekker thought, was Barry. Barry or Gary: that sort of a jerk-off name. Barry or Gary owed money to some people who didn't tolerate debt. The job wasn't proving difficult. Some one had pointed Barry or Gary out in the pub, and Sekker had followed him out into the street and across the DMZ until he took the short-cut under Block C. Sekker's method of execution was messy and somewhat gruesome, but Barry or Gary had upset some unforgiving people, and they were anxious that he should suffer before he died.

Sekker was wearing protective clothing for the job, and he sweated freely. When it was over, he shrugged out of the heavy cotton overalls and put them into a small rucksack along with the rest of his equipment. This left him in just his chinos and a polo shirt. He sauntered across the DMZ and walked on for half a mile or so – far enough from the job site – and found a bar, where he ordered a long, cold glass of export lager. It had been hot work, and he needed to slake his thirst.