French Nicci Page 7
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On the radio they said it was the wettest summer since 1736. I parked in a puddle and sat for a minute, while water cascaded down the windscreen and bounced off the hood. I closed my eyes and heard the rain inside my head like a roaring. I have not become used to seeing dead bodies. The pathologist was waiting for me. Alexandra Harris. I'd met her before. She didn't look like a pathologist, whatever a pathologist is supposed to look like, more like an aging B-movie actress from the thirties, 127 voluptuous in her white coat, with dark hair falling in ringlets around her creamy oval face and a dreamy, passive air about her. Or maybe she was just tired. There were dark rings under her eyes. "Alexandra," I said, as we shook hands. "Thanks for giving me your time." "That's OK. It's my job. Guy said you'd already looked through the files." "Yes. It wasn't you who did the autopsy, though?" "No, that was his lordship. I mean Brian Barrow. Sir Brian. He's teaching today. What are you looking for exactly?" "I just want to get an impression," I said. "An impression?" She gazed at me doubtfully, as if suddenly this wasn't such a good idea. "A feel for her," I added inadequately. "Lianne." "Have you seen a cadaver before? There's not much to see." "Seen one?" I asked. "I trained as a doctor. I had one of my own for six months." "Sorry. Do you want me to take you straight through?" "Might as well." My fingers slipped on the handle of my briefcase. I wanted to see Lianne; really see her, not just flick through the ghastly color photographs looking for clues. She'd had a short, lonely life, with no one to miss her much now that she'd died. I wanted to touch her; stand by her body for a while. I didn't think Alexandra would understand that, and I'm not sure I understood it either. "Do I need to change?" I asked. "You mean into a ball-gown?" Alexandra said, with a grin. "No, we dress pretty informally around here." "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm fairly new to this. I haven't learned to treat it all as a joke yet." "You want me to talk like an undertaker?" "I want to see Lianne," I said gently. Alexandra's smile faded. She wasn't quite as friendly anymore. I followed her through two sets of swing doors, hearing the click of my heels across the linoleum. Here we were in another world, cold and silent and sterile. An underworld, I thought. Beneath my thin summer clothes, my 129 skin was covered in goose-bumps. I could hear my heart thumping--how strange, all these bodies in here, but only our two hearts beating.
* * *
I could see what Alexandra had meant. Lianne looked as if every trace of evidence that she had lived in the messy crowded world outside had been scoured off her body. She was very, very clean. Not clean like when you wash your hands. Clean like when you've been scrubbing a sink and your hands are wrinkled and raw. With her head exposed, the one scrap of her life I could see was the tiny fold of a hole in an ear-lobe. Sir Brian Barrow had had a tricky job. He had cut round her neck slightly above the laceration. His own incision had now been sewn back up. The knife wound remained but, cleaned up with no blood, it had a look of padded plastic. I had attended surgical operations before and the strong cat-food smell of meat and blood had never left me. But this was different. Just a sharp medicinal odor that burned my nostrils. Lianne's face was round. There was a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her mouth was small and colorless. I laid one finger against her cheek, felt the stony flesh. Death at my fingertips, so chill and hard it made me gasp. She had coppery hair, long, shaggy, and parted crookedly in the middle. When I leaned forward, I could see the split ends. Hair appears to go on growing after death, everyone knows that. Hair and nails--but when I cautiously lifted up one side of the sheet to expose an arm, I saw that Lianne's fingernails were chewed to the quick. She had tiny plump hands. Somehow, it was the hands that moved me most. They still looked soft, as if they could curl and hold. I touched her palm, and it was stony too. I took a deep breath and pulled off the covering, so that only her feet were still hidden. I took in her whole body; it was as if the sight of her was pouring into my skull and fixing there. Once more there was Sir Brian's long incision down from her neck to her reddish pubic hair. Not quite straight. There was a little cut around her belly-button, like a road forking at an ancient monument. The wound had been neatly sewn up, like a demonstration in a home-economics lesson. I needed 131 to concentrate on the relevant wounds. Her throat was neatly and efficiently cut, side to side, but there were also these small stab marks on her stomach, her shoulders, her thighs. There were seventeen of them--I lost count the first time and had to start again. Her high, shallow breasts were untouched; so too was her genital area. I knew from the autopsy report that there had been no injuries inside either the vagina or the perineum. I stepped closer to Lianne. I tried to keep calling her that in my mind. Her legs were unshaved. Her arms were downy. There were a couple of violent scratches on her left wrist--those would be from where she'd lain among brambles by the canal. A scar on her left knee. Maybe she'd fallen over when she was little. I imagined her when she was still in pigtails, with gaps in her teeth, running around some garden one summer when it didn't rain, thinking life would be happy. That's what is so touching about children: They are sure that life will be grand for them. Ask a six-year-old what they want to be when they grow up, and they say, a pilot, a prime minister, a ballet dancer, a pop star, a footballer, a millionaire. What had Lianne wanted to be, I wondered. Well, whatever her dreams had been, there were no dreams now. Here she was-- except, of course, Lianne wasn't here at all, only her wrong-colored, chilled corpse. There was nobody here except me. No breath of life in the room except my breath. I had never before had such a sense of absence. I lifted the sheet off her feet, and saw that the nails were painted red, the varnish chipped. I touched the scar on her knee. I touched her hand again, with its pathetic bitten nails. I lifted up a strand of copper hair. Even her hair felt dead. Each cell and particle of her had stopped in its track. I could feel the blood hammering round my body, the air rushing through it, the images flooding through my eyes, the hair prickling on my clammy skin. Enough. I pulled up the sheet, made sure it entirely covered Lianne, not even a strand of hair showing. I wanted to say something, anything, to break the silence, but I couldn't think of anything to say so I cleared my throat loudly instead. Immediately Alexandra clipped back into the room. She must have been waiting just outside. "Finished?" 133 "Yes." Lianne was lying in a drawer and with an effort, Alexandra pushed it back as if into a giant filing cabinet. "Nothing you couldn't have found in the report, was there?" she asked, with a touch of sharpness. "I wanted to look at the wounds," I said. I collected my case, my mac, stumbled through the door into the drenching downpour. I lifted my face up to the sky and let rain stream over it like tears.
* * *
I went back to my boxy room at the station and rifled through Lianne's file again, though I knew it pretty well by now. I looked first at the sparse sheet of biography: young woman known as Lianne, estimated age around seventeen, thought to have turned up in the Kersey Town area seven to eight months ago, stayed briefly in a hostel run by a man called William Pavic, otherwise--according to the couple of fellow drifters the police had managed to track down -comslept in parks and on benches and in the doorways of shops or, every so often, on the floor of a luckier friend who lived in a BandB. That was all--notothing about her character, her friendships, her sexual history. It didn't say whether she had been a virgin or not. I picked up the map of where her body had been found, X marks the spot. Then I dialed through to Furth. "I'd like to see where she was found," I said. "Maybe this afternoon, after my clinic work? Say five o'clock, is that possible?" "I'll get Gil to take you there," he answered. I could almost hear him smile.
* * *
"Here's where Doll did her," he said, glancing sideways at me. He stood back to let me see. Lianne's body had been found on a steepish bank behind the stump of a dead tree, where ragwort, cow parsley and nettles grew. You could still see from the crushed and broken stems where she had sprawled face down. Her head had been pushed right into the green forest of weeds. Her feet, in their white pumps and perky red-striped socks, had been resting against a broken b
ottle. Tatters of plastic hung from the brambles and floated in the oily brown water. There 135 were cigarette packets and old stubs ground into the mud of the canal towpath. A tiny plastic horse lay just in front of Lianne's hiding place; probably some toddler had let it drop there. Just behind it I could see a bike wheel, rusting and bent. "And a young man found her?" "That's right. Darryl something or other." "Pearce?" "Yeah, a jogger. Serves him right. Did you read his statement? He found her as she was dying. More or less. He was staggering along here and heard her crying out." "But she had died by the time he found her." "Wanker--that's Darryl, not you. He pissed around her for ten minutes, he said, deciding what to do. Scared out of his wits, more like. Then, by the time he got his bottle back and looked and then called us and we got there, she was dead. If he'd walked straight round, she could have told him who'd done it. Saved us an inquiry." "Wasn't he a suspect?" "Course. But he didn't touch the body. Old Lianne looked as if she'd been sprayed with blood. The killer must have been covered. We did swabs on Darryl, fiber tests, everything. Not a sausage." "And there was the woman, Mary Gould," I said, half to myself. "Yeah, the old dear with bread for the ducks. She came from the other side of the bushes, from the flats. She saw the body and just legged it back home. She didn't phone until the next day. We've put her medal on hold." I turned back to the spot and stared at it. "And then Doll came forward a couple of days later to say he'd been lurking in the area," said Gil. "He didn't exactly use those words." I frowned and he gave me his cocky grin again and whistled through his teeth. I tried to picture the scene to myself. When she was found, she had been wearing a very short red Lycra skirt, pulled up over her buttocks. Her underpants had not been removed. She had been wearing a purple cotton shirt with no bra underneath. She had been wearing the clothes when she died and they hadn't been removed subsequently. The stabbings had been through the shirt. On her left wrist she wore one of those digital watches they give away 137 free at garages, and round her neck was a tacky gilt locket in the shape of a broken heart. It had curly pink writing on it: "Best ..." Was someone, somewhere, wearing the other half of the heart, bearing the legend, his... Friend"?
* * *
I rang up Poppy, my best friend. I needed to hear a warm voice again. "Kit! How's it gone, your first week back?" In the background I could hear children shrieking and yelling. Poppy was stirring something, the chink of a spoon. Only a week, I thought. Four days. "Odd," I answered. "Very odd." "I tried to ring you before. Some woman I didn't know answered." "Julie. Did you ever meet her years ago? Maybe she was before your time. She's been away." "Didn't she give you my message?" She hadn't. "Who is she? Hang on--Megan! Amy! Come and get your hot milk and honey! Sorry. This Julie ..." "She's been away, traveling round the world. She's staying here. For a bit." "Oh. Do you mind?" "Not yet, not really." "But are you all right? Oh, Christ, clear that up now. Now! Get a cloth or something, it's running everywhere." "Do you have to go?" "I think so. Call you back."