Dance With the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller

Desperate to get my right leg finally over, I swung too fast. I felt my left leg buckle and my arms flap like a penguin in an oil slick. Too late. As I slumped helplessly onto my back, I saw only sky and a pretty face etched with alarm.

‘Smooth,’ cackled Fintan with undisguised glee, my humiliation complete.

‘Who’s in charge?’ I babbled, springing up instantly, as if the whole thing had been a pre-planned manoeuvre.

‘DS Spence,’ she managed to squeak through suppressed laughter.

She clamped her hand over her mouth and nodded towards a wiry little man strutting about in a tight mac.

‘The one with the short legs,’ she wheezed, about to burst.

‘Does he bite?’

‘Sometimes,’ she chirped through her muffling hand, ‘but I’m sure you’ll get over it.’

Laughter exploded from so deep within her that she had to bend over to cope.

‘Sorry,’ she said finally, hauling herself back upright and sleeving her wet eyes.

Her expression had changed but the tears kept coming.

‘It’s just been such a horrible morning. I really needed that. Sorry if … no offence.’

‘None taken,’ I deadpanned. ‘With my talent for slapstick, I should be working in family liaison.’

‘Thanks for not being a dick about it,’ she said, her sad watery smile somehow reducing the earth’s gravitational pull on me a second time.

‘I think I’ve been plenty dick enough already,’ I smiled, walking on.

‘I hope you’ve got a strong stomach,’ she called after me. I turned to register her worried round eyes, instantly bringing to mind Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona.

‘It’s really horrible,’ she added.

Her stark warning set my heart on a club-footed gallop around my chest. Sudden shocks of any kind – physical, mental, even a really good joke – could cause me to suffer total collapse. It’s called Cataplexy, a rare side effect of insomnia and narcolepsy. An attack turns my bones to liquid; I simply capsize like an Alp, fully lucid but unable to move anything except my eyeballs.

I gave myself a stern talking to: You’ve already fallen at the first today. You can’t go over again. They’ll label you a total flake.

I galvanised myself by studying DS Spence’s dour, pinched face. He looked about as forgiving as a scalded hornet.

He never stopped stomping about. Underlings had to build up to his ferocious pace, then fall in beside him to talk, veering and turning as he did in a surreal crime scene speed tango. When, finally, they left him alone for ten seconds, I set off in pursuit.

‘DC Lynch, sir, from the Cold Case Unit. I’ve been sent by my supervising officer, DS Simon Barrett, to take a look at the killer’s MO.’

His lifeless, powder-blue eyes locked sullenly onto mine.

‘Is that a statement or a request?’ he barked in paint–peeling Glaswegian.

‘Sir?’

‘What is it that you want, Constable?’

‘I’m analysing the unsolved murders of prostitutes in the city over the past few years, sir, establishing links and connections between cases.’

He squinted at me in irritated disgust. ‘We don’t even know who she is yet.’

‘I only need a few minutes, sir, maybe a chat with the pathologist.’

‘Why didn’t you just say so?’

He continued to pitilessly survey my face, then laughed sourly. ‘I doubt if you could link this to another murder on the planet, son. It’s outta this fucking world.’

Two gore warnings had me snorting air like a rhino with the bends. I stole one final lungful, banked it and pulled back the forensic tent flap. It felt like someone had just yanked open my rib cage and let my heart topple out onto the grass. All the blood in my head went south as my misfiring brain struggled to register the horror. I shifted from foot to foot, subconsciously trying to earth the shock. But it just ricocheted about my insides like a charged cannonball. I breathed in and out hard, willing the head swoon to pass.

‘Christ,’ I finally managed.

A pathologist and a Scenes of Crime officer padded about in white overalls, shoeless and joyless, taking swabs and snapshots. I reached for my black, Met Police-issue notebook and pen. Jotting down the date, time and location steadied me. Falling back on training and routine, the clerical somehow formalised the grotesque chaos that lay at our feet. I reminded myself of my task here – to record the facts, not comprehend the crime.

Her naked body, flat out on its back, had been sliced in two around the waist. The lower half had been positioned about a foot away from the torso and head. I started at the top.

Jet black hair. A troubled forehead. Wide, thick eyebrows that looked like a four-year-old’s attempt to draw two straight lines. Tiny, narrowing, vivid grey eyes that looked puzzled. Early 20s. A ringer for actress Juliette Lewis. The corners of her mouth had been slashed right up to her ears, giving her a grotesque, purple ‘Joker’ grin, known as a Glasgow Smile – the city’s blade gangs had patented this sick ritual during the 1920s. You make a little incision in each corner of the victim’s mouth, then hurt them so that their screams do the rest.

Her arms had been raised over her head, her elbows at right angles.

Her breasts and stomach sported spoon-size gouges, red-rimmed. The lack of blood anywhere confused me.

My eyes moved down to her spread-eagled lower half. Her intestines had been tucked neatly beneath her buttocks. Her pubic hair trimmed into a ‘landing strip’. More spoon-size gouge marks around her thighs.

I watched the pathologist insert a thermometer into her rectum and wondered why anyone would choose such a profession. Especially this woman. Mid-40s. Sculpted blonde hair. Strong nose and chin. Imperious, rigid, poised, she clearly hailed from Britain’s ‘red trouser and Land Rover’ country elite. I could picture her astride a stallion sipping a pre–hunt sherry, or flagellating the local magistrate with a bullwhip. Yet here she was, crouched at the business end of a murder victim’s arsehole, the Last Judgement in a florid, shoulder-padded jacket and pearls.

‘Right,’ she said brightly, springing up, ‘let’s pop her into a bag and get her back to the mortuary.’

Peeling off her polythene gloves, she turned to me.

‘Dr Edwina Milne,’ she announced, ‘and how may I help you, young man?’

‘DC Lynch,’ I said, offering a hand, ‘from the Cold Case Unit.’

She gave my outstretched arm an arched eyebrow.

‘I don’t think so, DC. Not where my hands have been. Besides, they get very sweaty in these things.’

She sealed the gloves in a transparent plastic pouch. She then squirted pungent splodge into her palms, rubbed them vigorously together and looked at me with a hint of impatience.

‘I’m analysing the unsolved murders of street girls from the last ten years, ma’am. I need to report to my chief today about any possible links between this and the others.’

‘Oh please. Ma’am makes me sound so bloody ancient. Edwina, if you can stand the informality.’

‘Donal, if you can stand the name,’ I said, wondering why so many upper-class British women seemed to be saddled with androgynous Christian names. I’d never met a working class Henrietta, Georgina or Jemima. Was there some sort of unspoken but institutionalised aristocratic distaste for femininity?

Edwina’s hand rubbing slowed to a hypnotic, almost suggestive dandle: ‘Cause of death is, as yet, unknown. As is time of death. All I can say for certain is that she’s been dead for more than ten hours but less than three days. Hopefully I’ll be able to ascertain more after a full internal and external post-mortem.’

I glanced over at the body, fly-tipped here like a busted fridge. Now the final indignity: every organ removed, analysed, bits of her sent away in jars for further tests. The rest of her poked and prodded, her most intimate parts photographed, scraped, swabbed or cut open. Body fluids, fingernail dirt and pubic hair sealed in plastic glass in the hope that it will trap her killer. But I knew from all the other unsolved cases that prostitute murders are notoriously difficult to crack. Street girls don’t talk. When you find a way to make them talk, their chaotic lives and suppressed memories make them unreliable, easy to discredit. Punters are too ashamed to come forward. The media sees no value in publicising the death of ‘a desperate skank’. Family or friends rarely come forward, pressing for answers.

And so the girls lie in refrigerated cabinets for a year until the case is quietly shelved and what’s left of them swiftly buried in unmarked municipal graves. I wondered if this woman had family searching for her. Anyone who cared? Was there a person on the planet willing and able to identify her body?

Edwina’s erotic hand motions stopped suddenly. ‘She has two perfectly round indentations on her skull which were delivered with moderate force. These blows didn’t kill her; they subdued her. I’d say almost certainly from the rounded head of a ball-peen hammer.

‘If you look closely at her ankles, wrists and neck you’ll see ligature marks. The marks are red, so the ligatures would have been applied when she was alive. She was held somewhere else, tortured, killed, cut up with considerable expertise. Her body was drained of all its blood prior to being dumped here, probably sometime between 3 and 5 this morning. There’s no grass discoloration beneath her. She hasn’t been here for very long.’

Two young men in forensic overalls burst in, the second dragging a black plastic body bag behind him like a sleigh.

‘Dedwina!’ they cried.

‘Oh Christ,’ she muttered, ‘these clowns.’

‘We’re like the DHL of death,’ the first explained to me.

‘Dead Haulers of London,’ beamed the second.

‘Oh look,’ said the first, pointing to the dead woman’s face, ‘it’s the Joker.’

‘It’s me, sugar bumps!’ called the other, imitating Jack Nicholson’s star turn in the Batman movie.

The lead man got in on the impromptu Jack/Joker tribute: ‘As my plastic surgeon says, if you gotta go, go with a smile.’

‘Stop this at once,’ snapped Edwina, flashing the steel beneath her cultivated cosiness, ‘Show some respect for the deceased.’

She resumed her appraisal: ‘You can tell your Chief that this woman wasn’t a drug user or a streetwalker.’

She registered my surprise, and seemed to enjoy it.

‘She was a fit, healthy young woman. Good skin and teeth. Manicured hands. Very toned legs, I’d say a sportswoman of some kind, or a dancer.’

‘So how did she end up here?’

‘I think that’s your department,’ she said, a little sharply.

The corpse couriers stood between her two halves, taping transparent plastic bags around her smooth hands and painted feet while humming a tune I recognised but couldn’t place. As they bagged her head, the humming got louder. Finally, as the chorus arrived, they took one shoulder each and sang into the dead woman’s face: ‘Stuck in the middle of you.’

Edwina planted balled fists against her hips and sighed. But her dominatrix stance and whip-crack tuts failed to chastise our madcap crime scene gagsters.

‘I hope we haven’t mortally offended you?’

‘This is how we get through our day,’ protested the straight man, and I could see his point.

They rolled both halves of Jane Doe up in a large plastic sheet, gaffer taping it shut as you might an IKEA return. They hefted the load into the body bag, zipped it shut and hauled it away like a condemned old carpet. I almost expected them to break into a chorus of ‘Heigh Ho’.

‘There’s scant enough dignity in death without it being reduced to panto,’ harrumphed Edwina.

She looked at me conspiratorially. ‘Now, let’s turn our attention to the notable features not for public consumption. You may have noticed the penny-sized gouges on her fleshier parts. At first I thought she had been hacked at by something very pointed, like an ice pick. But on closer inspection, I could make out very tiny but very sharp serration marks. I’ve only ever seen wounds like this on a drowned body, when fish have nibbled at the flesh. I need to do more tests but it’s very strange.’

‘Maybe they kept her body somewhere with rats or mice?’

‘I’d recognise rodential incisions. Also, she bled from these wounds,’ she said, looking at me gravely. ‘She was alive when they occurred.’

She throat-coughed back her composure: ‘There are a few other elements that may interest you, detective.

‘We removed very tiny fragments of unidentified matter, deep red in colour, from inside those hammer wounds to her skull. They look to me like flecks of paint, but are almost certainly too minute to test.

‘We removed an A3 battery from her anus. The significance of its insertion is not my department. However, my assistant reminded me that we came across the same thing about three months ago. The victim on that occasion had been a street prostitute named Valerie Gillespie.’

She fixed me with a hard stare and sighed. Pathologists are natural storytellers. She’d been building up to this final twist.

‘Between the clasped thumb and index finger of this woman’s right hand, we found human hair, just a few strands.’

I couldn’t stop my mind skidding across assumptions like a well-hurled pebble: ‘This has to be the hair of her killer, surely Edwina? Or someone party to her murder? An accessory?’

She eyed me as you might an over-exuberant toddler. ‘Hair identification isn’t an exact science. Far from it. There could be hundreds of people out there whose hair follicles would appear very similar to these under a microscope. However, it may prove useful for confirming or eliminating a suspect.’

‘I see,’ I said, nodding solemnly as if mentally storing her points. But I’d already drawn my own cast iron conclusions. The victim here had clearly known her killer. The hair belonged to someone in her circle. Find the owner of the hair clasped between her stiff dead fingers, and we’d find her killer.

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