Part 6 (1/2)

Delaney sighed and Sally Cartwright and Bob Wilkinson had to try hard not to smile. 'Just tell us what happened?'

'I was walking on to the heath-'

Delaney interrupted her. 'You hadn't seen anybody earlier, somebody coming off the heath perhaps?'

The woman shook her head. 'Not a single soul. Weather like this tends to keep people at home or in their cars, doesn't it?'

Sally looked up from her notebook. 'And the man who exposed himself to you . . . ?'

'He was in his late twenties I'd say, maybe thirties. Semi-priapic.'

'I'm sorry?' Sally asked.

Wilkinson smiled. 'He had a hard-on, Sally.'

'Yeah, thanks, Bob,' said Delaney.

'Well, partly so, enough I guess for him to waggle,' added the nurse. 'It was early, and it was pretty cold, mind you.'

Delaney held up his hand. 'Can we concentrate on the man, not just the member?'

'He was about five ten, wearing a fawn-coloured overcoat, he might have had a suit on under his coat, he had dark trousers anyway.'

Sally flicked back through her notebook. 'You called him a raggedy man earlier.'

Valerie Manners nodded. 'Yes, it was his hair.'

Delaney waited patiently, but when there was nothing forthcoming, said, 'And? What about his hair?'

'It was raggedy, you know?'

'No?'

'Sort of wild, curly. A bit like yours.' She pointed to Delaney. 'Only longer and it hadn't been combed, it was sticking out.'

'Like his c.o.c.k,' said Bob Wilkinson, his smile suddenly dying on his lips as Delaney glared at him, the detective inspector's already thin patience finally worn through.

At the mortuary Kate Walker scrubbed her hands, holding them under the hot water and rubbing the brush as if to scratch away the touch of Paul Archer. She felt like dipping them in acid.

'Are you all right, Dr Walker?' Lorraine Simons had come into the room and was watching her, concern evident in her eyes.

'I'm fine.' Kate finished her hands, drying them and slipping on a pair of latex gloves.

'You had a phone call earlier. Dr Jane Harrington. She didn't leave a message.'

Kate nodded. 'It can wait. She can't.' She walked across to the mortuary table where the body of the murdered girl was laid out in cold, clinical repose. Her naked skin pearlescent white under the bright lights, like a dead snow queen.

Kate watched as her a.s.sistant joined her at the table, wheeling across the stack of instruments with which they would try and ascertain the manner of the young woman's death. Quantify it. Render a human life into its const.i.tuent parts. Why was she doing this? she thought to herself. Working with the dead? Maybe her friend Jane was right, she had always been so sure of herself. But suddenly everything was s.h.i.+fting for her, nothing was fixed. Her career had always been a focus, a constant. Now? Now she didn't even know who she was any more.

She glanced across at her young a.s.sistant. 'What made you want to do this job?' she asked.

Lorraine looked at her a little puzzled. 'Don't you remember asking me that in my interview?'

Kate smiled apologetically. 'There were a lot of interviews. A lot of interviewees, all of them saying the same thing. I just wondered what it really was for you?'

Lorraine picked up a scalpel and ran her thumb along the blunt part of it. 'All through medical school I wanted to be a surgeon.'

'What changed?'

'It was a gradual thing, really. But one night, I was an intern on surgical rotation and a couple of children were brought in. A ten-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. They had both been repeatedly stabbed. By their father.'

'Go on.'

'He was a manic-depressive. On a c.o.c.ktail of antidepressants, booze and marijuana. He had an argument with his wife, picked up a carving knife and stabbed both his kids to punish her.'

'Nice.'

'The boy lasted an hour. We did what we could but he had lost a lot of blood. We worked on the girl through the night. There were multiple complications, she had been stabbed nine times. We brought her out of surgery and had to take her back in as she arrested in recovery. She arrested again on the table.' She put the scalpel down and looked steadily at Kate. 'When she arrested again we had to let her go. Even had she survived she would have been brain-dead. There was nothing we could do. We had to tell the mother she had lost both her children. Some hours later the mother jumped in front of a train on the Northern Line at Chalk Farm.'

Kate shook her head sympathetically. 'It wasn't your fault. You did what you could.'

Lorraine nodded. 'I don't blame myself. There's only one person responsible for their deaths. But I couldn't deal with it any more. I couldn't deal with the fact that whatever you do, however much you try, eventually someone will die. And if you are going to be a surgeon you have to be able to deal with that. You have to be able to detach emotionally. And I couldn't. And I didn't want to go into general practice.' She looked down on the cold body of the dead woman. 'At least in here you can't fail. n.o.body pays a price for your mistakes.'

'That's true . . .' Kate looked at the dead woman's face, at her neck, at the start of the first incision, but knew that she was lying to her young a.s.sistant. '. . . and at least you didn't say you had a crush on Amanda Burton.'

'Who?'

'Good answer.'

Kate looked back at the dead woman's neck again and then bent down to get a closer look. 'What do you make of this?'

Lorraine moved around the table to see what Kate was looking at. 'It appears to be some kind of puncture wound.'

'Get the camera. Let's take some close-up shots.

Jack Delaney took a big bite out of his second bacon sandwich that day and grunted with approval. 'You're an irritating b.a.s.t.a.r.d at the best of times, Roy, but you make a halfway decent sandwich.'

'From anyone else I'd tell them to stick their head in a pig, but coming from you, Inspector Delaney, I'll take that as a big f.u.c.king compliment.' Roy smiled broadly, his teeth like an old piano with half the keys missing, and turned back to the book he was reading. A new science-fiction blockbuster by Peter F. Hamilton from whom he had nicked the name for his burger van.

Delaney walked across to Sally Cartwright who was delicately eating a bean burger as she leaned against the bonnet of her car. Her small teeth made precise, uniform bites. Delaney leaned beside her on the bonnet finis.h.i.+ng his sandwich and considered matters. Now that the body of the young goth woman had been removed to the morgue, the SOCOs and uniforms were conducting a fingertip search and dusting any suitable surface. Given the overnight rain Delaney doubted there would be any chance of lifting any prints. Kate Walker had barely said three words to him since returning to the scene-of-crime tent. He hadn't expected her to be sweetness and light to him but he had hoped she could keep a professional neutrality, at least. He knew he had hurt her, but they had only slept together once after all, and that hardly const.i.tuted a relations.h.i.+p. And the fact of the matter was he had only ended their affair because he didn't want to see her getting hurt. He knew his own failings better than anybody and he knew he wasn't in a place right now to be of any use in her life. He couldn't remember who said it but he remembered the quote about the eleventh commandment. 'Never sleep with anybody who has got more problems than you have.' He reckoned that between Kate Walker and himself that would be a close run thing. One thing was sure, though, she was certainly taking the case this morning a whole lot more personally than he had ever seen her take one before. Kate Walker had always been practically a byword for icy efficiency, but the dead goth had certainly got to her in some way, that much was painfully obvious.

'Sir?'

Delaney blinked out of his thoughts and looked at Sally. 'Sorry, what?'

'I was asking about the raggedy-haired man. You think he's connected with the dead girl?'

Delaney finished his sandwich. 'I don't know. I think we should find him, though.'

'Do you think there is a s.e.xual connection with the murder?'