Fire Damage: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked. Kate Medina
A wind had picked up, whipping the water of the harbour into a frothy, gunmetal soup, cutting straight through his leather jacket. Hauling up his collar, he hunkered down, wishing that he’d brought a scarf, put on a windproof fleece, anything more sensible than his battered biker.
‘DS Workman. Take Ms Bass-Cooper to the Command Vehicle to get her out of the cold. Switch the engine on to get the blowers going. I don’t want our one witness freezing to death before we’ve drained her of information. Take a written statement while you’re there.’
As DS Workman led Jeanette Bass-Cooper back up the garden towards the gaggle of police vehicles haphazardly parked on the gravel drive, Marilyn turned and strode across the crispy, frostbitten grass towards the narrow strip of pebbles that Bass-Cooper had termed a beach. Not one he fancied sunbathing on.
Looking out across the water to Itchenor, he felt a shot of déjà vu. He had worked on another murder last spring, around the bay in Bosham, a small village of expensive detached houses like the one behind him. Murder in this part of West Sussex was so rare that it had made the national newspapers. A house-sitter, stabbed to death in her bedroom in the middle of the night; her sister, brother-in-law and elderly father in adjacent bedrooms who had heard nothing. It had him stumped for close to a fortnight, until he had found out that the sixty-year-old owner of the house, who had been on holiday with his wife at the time, had a penchant for swinging. Over the telephone from Florida he had explained to Marilyn that he had ‘absolutely no idea’ how photographs of himself, posing naked on a sandy beach, came to be posted on a swingers’ website under the moniker, ‘The Director of Fun’. It turned out that the murderer was a fellow swinger, a fifty-five-year-old woman who thought she was dispatching the director’s wife.
This case, Marilyn feared, would be tougher to crack.
The forensics teams, dressed in their identical navy-blue waterproof onesies, looked, on fleeting glance, like a group of harbour day-trippers – only the masks covering their mouths and noses dispelling that image. They had got here quickly and erected a forensic tent over the body – what remained of it at least. Marilyn didn’t fancy the tent’s chances if this wind picked up. The occasional white flash of the forensics’ camera crew lit it up from the inside, giving him some uncomfortable memories of last night. A nightclub in Portsmouth. He was too old to stay out until 3 a.m., should get sensible, get himself a girlfriend knocking forty, rather than Cindy, virtually half his age and beautiful, but sharp as a blunt instrument.
‘So what have we got?’
Tony Burrows, the lead Crime Scene Investigator pulled his hood back, slid a latex-gloved hand over his bald spot, fingertips grazing the dark hair that ringed his scalp. He reminded Marilyn of a Benedictine monk, the impression emphasized by his short legs and softly rounded stomach. ‘Male.’
Marilyn waited. When no more information was forthcoming, ‘Yup. And …?’
‘That’s about it, at the moment. The body is not what could be termed fresh kill, and we only have half of it.’
Marilyn winced. Despite his chosen profession, he didn’t have a strong stomach, had failed, even after nearly twenty years in Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, to fully acclimatize to the visceral assault on the senses that dead bodies rendered.
‘Where is the other half?’
‘Anybody’s guess. But the cut is clean, if messy. Chops—’ Burrows made a vertical hacking motion with his hand – ‘rather than tears or rips. An axe, perhaps? A butcher’s chopper, maybe. The body is very badly decomposed, most of the skin and a good part of the flesh missing, as you can see, so identifying the cause may be difficult.’
Marilyn’s eyes hung closed for a moment. ‘Do you think he was dumped here?’
‘Could have been. There’d be no traces left if someone had carried the body down the garden and tossed it on to the beach. Not given how long this Doe has been dead for. Unless he was stored somewhere else and then dumped recently.’ He paused, massaged the dome of his head, eyes raised to the grey sky in thought. ‘But that’s unlikely. Our victim has been exposed to the elements for some time, I think, by the looks of him. Dr Ghoshal will be able to tell you more once he gets him on the slab.’
Marilyn nodded. Cupping his hands in front of his face, he blew into them, stomped his feet to get the circulation going. The house had been vacant for four months, Ms Bass-Cooper had said. His mind turning inwards in thought, he moved away from Tony Burrows and his team, buzzing like flies around the corpse, followed the curve of shingle to the rotten wooden fence that signalled the extent of the garden. Leaning against a wooden upright, he gazed out across the water. Yachts and motor cruisers bobbed at anchor, straining against their moorings in the swell. Though he’d lived in Chichester for almost all of his working life, the best part of twenty years, he wasn’t a sailor – struggled to envision anything less appealing than squatting in a damp little boat being pushed around by the wind. But having lived and worked near the sea for so long, he knew something about tides.
Where was the other half of that body? Had it been dumped in another part of the harbour and taken in a different direction by the tide? Or was it being stored in the killer’s freezer, a sick kind of trophy? Trophy-taking was a common feature when the victim and murderer were strangers: the killer wanting to keep the victim, the moment of death, clear in his or her memory, the trophy a physical tool to aid that process.
The cut was clean – chopped, Burrows had said. An axe? A butcher’s cleaver? For sure, a killer who meant business.
Shrugging his jacket sleeves down over his frozen hands, Marilyn sighed. A killer who meant business was all he needed right now.
He looked so different in his Military Police uniform – olive-green trousers, shirt and tie, a knife crease running down the front of each leg, the shirt buttoned up and starched resolutely, the red beret of the Military Police that gave them the nickname Redcaps, pulled low over his eyes – that Jessie almost walked straight past him.
‘Dr Flynn.’
She stopped, did a double take. ‘Oh, God, you scrub up … different.’
Callan smiled, but there was tension in the smile and it was gone almost before she’d registered it.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely.’
They walked side by side up the grey vinyl-tiled stairs to the second floor, their twin footfall emphasizing the silence that had settled after their initial greeting, and the tension that crackled from him. Removing his beret, he held the door at the top of the stairs open for her, and then pulled up, turning to face her in the corridor. At the far end, she could see a room crowded with desks, hear the ambient hum of conversation drifting down the corridor towards them, the tap of fingers on computer keys, the ring of a telephone, a sudden burst of laughter.
‘You’ve read the file?’ He was all business now.
‘Yes.’
‘Give me a rundown.’
She met his gaze. ‘You are joking?’
‘I want to be sure that you’ve got the background.’
‘I’ve got the background and I’m not ten, so I’m not doing any damn test. You’re going to have to trust me.’
His tie wasn’t straight.
He sighed. ‘Fine. So the bit the file doesn’t include. Starkey was raised on a council estate in West London. Before his sixteenth birthday he had racked up a couple of minor criminal convictions, for stealing cars and selling cannabis. He was put under the control of social services, given the option of remaining with his family and seeing a psychologist rather than going to a young offenders’ institution.’
‘Don’t