POLICE – DO NOT CROSS THE LINE
Somebody had crossed the line, though, I thought ironically as I straightened up again on the other side of it. As ever, it was the smell that hit me first.
Someone had crossed the line big time.
Chapter 15
SCENE-OF-CRIME OFFICERS STOOD to one side, ready to start processing the site once it had been thoroughly photographed.
Bright lights had been mounted on tall stands, illuminating the area as if it were a film set. Adrian fired up the light on his hand-held HD video camera and started shooting.
I looked down at the body, wrapped in translucent plastic. The features just about discernible as a woman’s. Maybe.
‘Who found her?’ I asked.
The detective grunted in what could have been ironic amusement, could have been something stuck in his throat. ‘Little toerag by the name of Jason Kendrick. Fourteen-year-old one-man sodding crime wave. Raped and stabbed a teenage prostitute just two streets or so across. Scuttled here just like a rat when he heard the blues-and-twos. Then ran back out again as soon as he saw this,’ Harman said, pointing at the mutilated corpse.
‘Can’t say as I blame him,’ I said.
The detective grunted again. ‘He does. He ran straight into a police car.’ Harman smiled grimly.
‘And the girl?’
‘She’ll live. She fell on her own knife as she tried to fight him off but missed all her major organs. She was lucky.’
‘I guess, but that’s the kind of luck I can do without.’
‘I hear you.’
‘And the boy rapist?’
‘Again, he’ll live. Scrapes and bruises. Hit the side of the car and
was winded, apparently. Couldn’t breathe and thought he was going to die.’ Harman twisted his mouth into something between a scowl and a smile. ‘Can’t say the world would have been the poorer if he had done.’
I didn’t comment. Seems to me there’s all kinds of bad luck in the world. The kind that gets you working the streets selling your body while you’re still little more than a child. The kind that gets you into trouble with the law when you are five years old and have been taught no different. The kind that gets you running into speeding police cars nine years later after upgrading to the sort of crime that means you’ll live out the rest of your childhood – and then some – in an institutional correction facility.
The kind of luck that gets you laid out on the cold floor of an old workshop. Being the centre of attention in a way that no one would have wished upon themselves in their worst nightmares.
I watched as Adrian put down the video camera, unzipped his case, took out his stills camera, screwed a lens onto its body, and stepped over to begin photographing the corpse.
He was using an MD180 which, according to Jack Morgan, was the best damn camera ever manufactured for the processing of crime scenes. He had insisted that Private London’s forensic unit should use the same and I reckon that Adrian would have kissed him for it. He certainly handled the camera as reverentially as he would a lover.
Wendy Lee stepped under the tape, suited-up but gloveless. I tossed her my car keys.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said.
‘Boss.’
I looked down again at the dead body. Like I said, it had been wrapped in heavy plastic. But rats had eaten away the central section, exposing the torso, pelvic area and upper ribcage. Bones protruded and much of the soft inner flesh and organs had been eaten away. There was no pooling of blood around the area.
A uniformed constable suddenly held a hand to his mouth and dashed out of the room.
I followed him out.
Not the start to the weekend that I had planned.
Chapter 16