And it would only be for a few days, a week or so at most, he told himself yet again. The whole thing would blow over in no time.
At about the same time that Charlie was shutting up his flat, the Reverend Roland Morris, accompanied by Sergeant Peter Mellor, arrived in a patrol car at Southmead Hospital in Monks Park.
Southmead is an old army hospital which has grown in a straggly kind of fashion into a major medical complex spread over several acres. The Reverend Morris was driven straight past the main reception area to the detached single-storey pathology block which houses the city mortuary.
Investigations undergone throughout the night had ascertained that Marty Morris was the only son of the popular Baptist minister. The Reverend Morris had duly been contacted at his home in one of the toughest parts of St Paul’s and told, as gently as possible, that Bristol’s latest murder victim might well be his son. And the minister had agreed to submit to the necessary ordeal of identifying the body.
Rose Piper had somehow wanted to be there even though there seemed little doubt that the identification would be merely a formality. But when Mellor brought the Revd Morris into the waiting room and introduced him to Rose, she felt quite ashamed of half wishing, the previous night, for a serial killer. Once again she was confronted with the awful aftermath of violent crime. She suspected she would never get used to it and indeed rather hoped she wouldn’t.
Roland Morris was a small man with a big presence. His hair was almost white, his skin deep ebony — exactly the same colour as the body of the young man they believed to be his son, it quite suddenly dawned on Rose. The Reverend’s eyes were bright with pain, yet warm and gentle. She thought he had about the kindest face she had ever seen. There was about him the sadness of one who has seen pretty much the worst life can throw at the world, and the patient resilience of one who still carries on trying to make the best of it, trying to help. He looked to be in a state of total shock. Hardly surprising, she thought.
Peter Mellor, all six foot four inches of him, bent almost double by his side, leaning towards the older man as if trying by his mere physical closeness to give comfort and support, more considerate in manner than Rose had ever seen him before. The sergeant, a practising Baptist, had already told her that he knew the Reverend Morris and had explained that the older man was regarded, with justification in Peter’s view, as some kind of saint in St Paul’s, which alongside the drug pushers and pimps for which it was famous, boasted a big devoutly religious community. Mellor had asked to break the news to the minister himself, and to be the one to take him to the mortuary for the identification.
Rose accompanied the two men into the chapel of rest, inside the pathology department, where Marty Morris lay, his body having been cleaned up and made to look presentable before any relative would be called upon to identify him. Rose knew that most people who have been fortunate enough not to have to undergo this experience imagine the B-movie concept of mortuary drawers being pulled open to display the body, which doesn’t actually happen in the UK. At Southmead, with its tastefully decorated little chapel, everything possible is always done to diminish the unpleasantness. Nonetheless, as Rose was well aware, formal identification remained a terrible ordeal.
As the little party walked through the door Peter Mellor had a hand under Revd Morris’s left elbow, ready. The older man obviously at once recognised the body, discreetly covered by an ornamental cloth, which lay before him. He seemed to slump against the policeman. He did not speak at first, just nodded his head. Rose saw that tears were starting to roll down his cheeks.
‘I have to formally ask you now, Reverend, is that your son?’ said Peter Mellor.
‘Yes. Yes. That’s Marty.’
Roland Morris seemed even smaller when he left the mortuary than when he had arrived. They sent him home in a patrol car again, but this time Peter Mellor did not accompany him.
‘Forgive me, Reverend, I have a murderer to catch,’ he said quietly.
Although patently deeply distressed, the elder man still had great dignity about him. But he seemed to have no further words. He merely patted the sergeant’s hand.
There was nothing more for anybody to say. The two police officers stood silently together watching the car drive him away. Neither spoke nor moved until several seconds after it had disappeared around a corner out of sight. Then quite suddenly Sergeant Morris smashed a clenched fist against the wall of the pathology unit. Rose, engrossed in her own thoughts, was shocked. Mellor was normally icily controlled.
‘Why the hell did it have to be the Reverend’s boy?’ he half shouted. ‘Can you imagine how he’s going to feel when he finds out what his blessed son did for a living?’
‘Ah,’ said Rose. ‘You didn’t tell him, I gather.’
‘Didn’t see the point in making it even worse for him. I know he has to know. And I know we have to talk to him about it. But I reckoned the shock of his son dying was enough for one day.
‘Fair enough,’ said Rose, who was not used to this degree of sensitivity from the sergeant. ‘You don’t suppose then that he might know already?’
‘No way!’ Mellor spoke quite angrily.
‘All right, all right,’ said Rose, holding up both hands, palms towards him, in a gesture of conciliation. She eyed him with interest.
‘So tell me,’ she continued. ‘Just what’s so special about the Reverend Roland Morris, anyway?’
Peter Mellor turned to look at her. ‘He’s about the most decent man in the history of St Paul’s, that’s all,’ he said. His voice was still clipped and angry. ‘Now he’s going to have to live with knowing that his worthless shit of a son was a male Tom who got himself murdered. Marty Morris hasn’t just let down his family, he’s let down his race. I resent his kind. He had a good father and a good upbringing yet he still turned out rotten — and that’s exactly what the majority of people in this country still expect from a black. Pity the sick little bastard was ever born, if you ask me.’
Rose was again startled. Usually if she had any criticism at all of Peter Mellor it was that he was such a cold fish. Now she thought that might be preferable to this sudden explosion of pent-up emotion. Fleetingly she wondered what lay behind it. Something must, she was sure of it. But she didn’t have the time to play psychiatrist.
‘Peter, it’s not your job to judge,’ she reminded him sharply. ‘We do the police work. That’s all.’
He did not reply. His mouth was set in a thin hard line. For him there were no other standards, no other rules in life than his own, she knew that.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘The PM’s due to begin in ten minutes.’
They walked back into the pathology block just as the body of Marty Morris was being wheeled into the mortuary. It annoyed Rose that she could never quite get used to the sight of the line of fridges along one wall which provided storage space for over thirty corpses. The stench of formaldehyde was already heavy in the air. The other smells would come later. Rose shuddered.
She had watched enough post-mortem examinations to have become reasonably hardened, but her tendency towards a weak stomach still occasionally let her down.
Marty Morris had been naked beneath the cloth which had covered him in the chapel. All his clothing, so wet that it had to be dried first using the facilities at Southmead Police Station, and personal effects had already been removed, bagged up by an evidence officer and sent to the regional forensic laboratory at Chepstow.