‘We’re saying he was dead by the time he went in?’ asked Valentine, switching tack, trying to see what had happened beyond the technical jargon. He risked a glance at the blackened canines.
‘Yes. Or past saving. The lungs…’ She used her gloved hands to spread out the tissue on a metal drainage board. ‘The lungs have some toxic contents, I would say – but we need to test for that. There’s a tiny bit of inhalation from inside the furnace. Ash – as hot as any ash in any fire. He’d have taken half a breath, maybe less. The heat has scorched the tissue.’
Shaw imagined being half-conscious for that excruciating second as the body jerked along the incinerator belt, then in through the opening to the furnace. Darkness, then heat, with a soundtrack out of hell.
‘Hell,’ said Valentine, seeing the same image.
Dr Kazimierz removed the major organs and trepanned the skull, setting what was left of the brain in a glass dish. In another thirty-five minutes she was done. Valentine led the dash back to the coffee machine. As they turned away Shaw caught the movement in the pathologist’s right hand. A sign of the cross.
She followed them back to her desk on the far side of the partition and speed-read a page of handwritten notes.
She nodded once at Shaw, then at Tom Hadden. ‘That’s it.’ She turned away without another word.
Hadden sipped a cup of espresso from the Italian coffee-maker on the desktop. ‘No joy on the snapped match, I’m afraid. Dry as bone. I thought we’d get some saliva if he held it in his teeth, but no go.’
On Hadden’s desk lay an evidence bag holding the torch they’d found beside the hubcap ashtray. ‘Bad news first. I’ve checked MVR online and it’s not a company. We’re talking to the manufacturers of the torch – they’re Finnish.’
That was a detail Shaw liked, so he filed it away.
‘But it’s the dust on the torch itself that’s interesting…’ He touched a key on his laptop and the screen filled with a microscope shot. A mass of fibre, unspeakable horror-movie bugs, chips of material.
‘It’s smeared in this stuff. This is it at ten thousand. All dust is different – like a fingerprint. This sample is very low on human tissue – skin and the like. It’s very high on two things…’
He brought up another shot. ‘This is some kind of fibre – man made, like a polythene. I don’t know, maybe wrapping or packaging of some sort. And this…’
The third shot. Splinters of something red.
‘It’s wood dust – sawdust. But really, really, fine. But it’s the wood that’s odd – Muirapiranga. Bloodwood. A South
‘Right,’ said Shaw. Another detail that didn’t fit. Or did it? He thought of Father Thiago Martin, an exile from Brazil. He’d get Twine to organize a background check on the priest.
‘Other results…’ Hadden flipped a file. ‘The blood on the conveyor is Judd’s – and his alone. The rice you found at the Sacred Heart of Mary is a match for the grains at the scene. But it’s a standard import long-grain variety from the US – Tesco stocks it. Cash ’n’ carry warehouses too. So it helps, but I wouldn’t dream of taking it into court. And we’re still struggling with the waste in the bag under the body. Another twenty-four hours – maybe less. Oh, and I’ve sent the milk bottle away – the one from the electricity sub-station. There’s a trace of saliva round the neck.’
Shaw thought of Andy Judd in his alpha male’s armchair, the pint of milk empty by his foot.
Hadden smiled, as rare a sight as one of his beloved Ospreys. ‘Where we did strike lucky, however, was with this.’ Hadden scrolled through his image file on the laptop until he reached a picture of the metal seat they’d found on the balcony by the hubcap. ‘This was covered with Judd’s prints – and those of his colleagues who cover the other two shifts. But there was a print that didn’t match – and it was on top of Judd’s… It was very
Valentine whistled, delighted that wasn’t going to be his job.
‘Anyway, once we’d got it, I ran it through the database Twine’s set up of all prints taken in the case so far. Suspects, witnesses, victim. I got a direct match.’ He let them sweat for a full second. ‘It’s Aidan Holme’s.’
Valentine clapped once, and started searching for a Silk Cut. At last, a solid piece of forensics which put one of their prime suspects on the spot. Shaw let his naturally contrarian nature kick in, because that single print proved only that Aidan Holme had been there. It didn’t prove he was a killer. But then he told himself that a break was a break and he should be thankful for that.
‘Let’s hope Holme lives,’ he said.
On Erebus Street three pairs of uniformed PCs were working the doorsteps and a team of builders were shoring up the ruins of number 6. DC Jackie Lau was on the kerb to meet them as Shaw parked the Land Rover in the shadow of the Sacred Heart.
‘Sir. Sorry – but I’m absolutely sure you need to see this.’ She led the way inside the church, out of the sun, the nave already a cool haven amongst the red bricks of the North End. Valentine hung back, trying to get a decent signal on his mobile so that he could check Aidan Holme’s condition at the Queen Victoria.
Inside, DC Lau checked a note. ‘According to the warden – Kennedy – there were fourteen homeless men here last night,’ she told Shaw. ‘There’s thirteen here now. All the statements we’ve taken match – except one. Most of them ate a big meal at 7.30, then went to bed because there were no lights. The fracas in the street woke some of them up, and a few went out to have a look. Then they all went back to bed. But one of them has a different story. He woke up some time before the attack on the hostel. He says he saw a man being abducted.’
She let Shaw take that in. ‘The witness is well short of 100 per cent reliable, sir – but I think he’s telling the truth. Either that, or I can’t see why he’d lie.’
Valentine joined them. He studied a text message on his phone. ‘Holme’s still bad,’ he said, sniffing the air, laden with the smell of huddled people.
In front of the altar the team had set up a pair of tables and two uniformed officers were taking statements. The homeless men were sitting in the pews, drinking tea from paper cups or reading bits of newspapers. Lau took them into the vestry they’d seen the night before. A man sat at the table on which stood an empty mug and a single biscuit on a large plate. The door to the boiler room, and Kennedy’s bedsit, was open. ‘This is John William,’ she said. ‘He’s from London, hitched up in a lorry to Cambridge some time ago. He says his surname’s gone. But he might remember it later.’
Shaw shook the old man’s hand, noticing as he often did that age seemed to add weight to the limbs, as if they were seeking a place to rest.
‘It was his first night here at the church,’ said Lau. ‘He’s very tired because he says he walked here from Cambridge – he thinks it’s taken him a month, sleeping rough.’
John William nodded, helping himself to the last biscuit.
‘Can you tell us again, John William?’ asked Lau, putting a hand on his shoulder. Shaw looked into his green eyes, the colour of lichen, floating in watery sockets, like lily-pads. It was the only colour left on him: his skin and thin hair were like parchment and his shirt, which had been washed to destruction, was handkerchief-grey.
‘I slept,’ he said. ‘I was tired, like she says. And the
He grinned, showing wrecked teeth.