Who Dies Beneath Read online

  Who Dies Beneath

  L. J. Hutton

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Sanay

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Justin

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Damien

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Tufty

  Vijay

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Author’s Notes

  Chapter 1

  A country pub near the River Teme

  “WHAT A BLOODY CASE!” Bill groaned as he flopped down onto the bench opposite Carol and Sylvia, a pint of beer in each hand which got carefully deposited on the table. Half of one was gone already, making the two women’s eyebrows rise. Bill was normally scrupulous about drinking and driving, only ever having one pint if it was going to be a long evening and then going on to soft drinks, or not drinking at all if his stay was only going to be short.

  Bill caught their looks. “I caught a bus out here and I’m getting a taxi back. I need pints!”

  Sylvia was shocked. She’d never seen a case get to Bill quite like this. “Good grief! Which case is this?”

  Her partner and pathologist, Carol, immediately answered, “It’s the mechanical slicer one, isn’t it?”

  Bill just nodded while taking another grateful slurp, as Sylvia asked, “That’s the one you gave to Robert, isn’t it?”

  Robert was Carol’s new assistant after her trusty former aide had given up the job to be a full-time mum.

  “Why did you give it him?” Bill wondered. “I know it was excessively gory, but you usually like to snap up the complicated ones yourself, if only because they give you some variety.”

  Carol pulled a face. “I do, but God, he’s naive, Bill! Oh, he’s probably the best qualified new pathologist I’ve ever come across if you’re just talking about the bits of paper. And he even came across well at interview. But once he got into the labs and autopsy room I started to feel that there was something desperately missing.”

  She gave a faint apologetic shrug. “I know it’s all about the science, but nevertheless, there are still times when we get a gut feeling about something just the way you do. Times when you suddenly think, ‘ooh, I wonder if...?’ and run a test you might not otherwise have done, and suddenly the whole case gets thrown into a different light.”

  “And Robert doesn’t have that?” Bill guessed.

  “Well that’s what I was trying to find out. I thought if I gave him something as technically complex as this, but kept a close eye on him, I might work out what it is that’s bothering me about him so much.”

  “And?”

  “And he’s been very thorough. Not like the one who came to me on temporary placement a few years ago, who misplaced and mislabelled things. But when we came to working out how the body had been so effectively cut up into such small pieces, he just couldn’t make the mental leap. Let’s face it, once you’d said that the victim worked in a supermarket on the counters, the obvious thing was to think about what might have been used there – you know, what was already to hand.

  “Robert was totally oblivious to our other colleagues running tests on all the knives from the meat and fish counter, let alone that big hacksaw they use on the lamb and beef bones! He was totally focused just on what he was doing, and running comparisons with every damned knife ever manufactured! We’d still have been waiting for the results now if I’d left him to it. No common sense, you see.

  “And then when you lot turned up with that damned great mechanical slicer and put it on Jeff’s lab counter, well the light bulb went on for me right there and then. It explained everything! Why we had the striations from a saw on certain cuts but only a few. Because that was just the dismemberment, to get the body into small enough lumps to be able to debone it, and then put it through the mincer.”

  Bill nodded. “And that, Sylv’, is when your beloved took over and showed Robert what a proper pathologist can do – thank God! ...Or in this case, maybe not.”

  “Good Lord!” Carol was stunned. “Why on earth would you say that?”

  Bill gave a weary shake of his head. “Because in this instance, although I’ve upheld the letter of the law, I can’t help but think that we haven’t exactly dispensed justice. Hell’s teeth, Carol, it’s been a very long time since I felt like this about a case, but that victim? He bloody deserved what was coming to him! Though don’t tell my boss I said that. I’ve never gone through such a huge mass of statements where so many people had a motive for killing the little shit!

  “He was an absolute tyrant. It’s only a damned supermarket, for pity’s sake, selling loo rolls and cans of beans, and he was only an under manager, but he warped and twisted every ounce of power that came his way. They have this thing called a duty manager, so whenever the two big bosses weren’t in, one of the others stepped up so that there was somebody who was in charge officially, in case of accidents and customer complaints and the like. But this little Hitler used every one of those chances to stick his nose into the sections of the store that weren’t his to interfere with. He reduced nice ladies on the checkouts to tears on a regular basis. He was forever bullying the younger lads. And anyone who stood up to him was subjected to a campaign of vile and petty spite – so he’d make complaints to their own manager about them about times when that manager wasn’t present and where it came down to his word against theirs, or he’d say there’d been a customer complaint against them when there hadn’t. All bits of nothing on their own, but the way that company works, it meant that these people didn’t get annual pay rises – because it’s all supposedly based on merit. Or they never got the holiday times they asked for when they needed them to be off with their families. Stuff like that.

  “Honestly, it just went on and on and on. This catalogue of spite which mounted up and up, and made people’s lives a complete and utter misery. We were overflowing with people who said they didn’t do it, but they could understand why somebody might have snapped under the stress, and were very reluctant to point the finger at any one person. And of course we’ve had to try and work out who the hell had been tipped over the edge out of – and I kid you not, here – thirty-one people who were all absolutely at the ends of their tethers with him, and had had so many run-ins with him that you had to think it was simply the luck of the draw who got in first. You know, people who even if they wouldn’t commit premeditated murder, were at least wondering if they could catch him alone somewhere out of sight on a dark night and kick the shit out of him – and that includes a fair few seriously pissed off husbands! If they’re not on our radar, it’s only because they didn’t have access to the store at the right time. There were even some folk who have left the store, but who were so damaged they have these festering grudges against him – and they gave some of our most vitriolic condemnations of him, because they’d got nothing to lose anymore! I’m just very glad that Sean’s the lead in this one, and I had to join him only because it was so widespread and messy. Otherwise I would be really dreading going into court as the leading detective on this case.”
r />   “But you’ve got someone?” Sylvia said, looking to Carol to confirm that she’d been told right.

  “Oh we’ve got someone,” Bill sighed morosely. “But it’s far from a watertight case. If it was him, I reckon he had help disposing of that body. Just the length of time it would have taken him to do the deed on his own makes me suspicious. And then when you get to the way the counter was totally scrubbed down, and all the sanitizers used properly so that there was nothing for anyone to find – or at least nothing beyond the minute traces of blood you’d expect to find on a meat counter at that level of scientific scrutiny – well, to me that says that at least one of the twenty people who rotate through working on that counter on shifts helped, and probably three or four.

  “And what sickens me is the way the arrested man’s life had been absolutely ground down by the victim. The poor bloke couldn’t leave because he was struggling to find another position, not helped because he said that when he was asked why he was leaving and he said because of bullying, he could see that potential employers were wondering if it was just because he was a trouble-maker. He became such a broken wreck his wife went off with someone else; but he’s still left paying out for his four kids, who he adores but never sees now; and as a result, he’s living in the dingiest bedsit I’ve ever come across, sharing a bathroom with a druggie across the corridor.” Bill wrinkled his nose in disgust. “And when you see the nice little terraced house he used to live in ...God! Poor bastard! That’s all I can’t stop thinking about.

  “I’ve never felt such sympathy for a perpetrator in all of my career. He’s just a nice, normal, ordinary bloke, who under any other circumstances wouldn’t have hurt a fly. And I’m sincerely hoping that a jury will see that and be as lenient with him as they can – and the judge, too – because he’ll never offend again. He’s no threat to society. He’s racked with remorse as it is, though he’s not actually confessed, and he’ll probably be in therapy for the rest of his life even if he doesn’t get convicted. So in my eyes he’s not getting off if he doesn’t get a custodial sentence. Honestly, it’s enough to make me think more than twice about what’s truly justice these days. But I’ve still got to try and help to build this sodding case against him, and that’s why I need several beers tonight to wash the nasty taste of it out of my mouth!”

  “Wow!” Sylvia breathed softly, looking in concern to Carol. For Bill to have doubts about whether he was doing the right thing had never been known, and that meant that it was serious.

  Carol drained her glass of red wine and stood to go and get another round. “Will the case against him hold, do you think?”

  Bill was already working his way into the second pint, and nodded his thanks at Carol’s gesture to the empty glass she was picking up before answering, “I think we can just about make something we can take to court, and if he was the only one with any sort of motive, I’d have no reservations about it sticking. But with all the additional queries we’ve got swimming around in the background? Hmm, I’m not so sure, and for the first time ever, glad of it too. I made sure he got a good defence solicitor who works with one of the best local barristers, and I think she’ll rip into the fact that there are so many other folk who loathed the victim’s guts, for starters. And although we have a blank period on the store’s internal cameras, when it comes to trial, I’d be bracing yourself for some stiff questions about how long it would take to do the grisly deed, if I were you, Carol. If I know his barrister, he’ll be all over that like a rash, and quite rightly too.”

  As Carol vanished into the lovely old pub by the river to refresh their glasses, Sylvia asked, “You talk about time, but aside from the cleaning up, is there more?”

  Bill snorted. “Sylv’, we only just got to bits of the evidence in time! The so-called victim was separated from his most recent partner – and not surprisingly, there were several previous ones, and they don’t seem to have lasted long with a ‘charmer’ like him, some of them barely sticking it out for a month – and so he was living alone and due for a week’s holiday. So nobody reported him missing. It was only the discovery of a bit of the skull in a land-fill site that got us properly started.

  “By the time we got even close to looking for perpetrators it was already two weeks after the event. The victim had been cut up, but then identifiable bits like his fingers had been put through the bloody great industrial mincer they have on the meat counter! Then his fleshy bits and small bones just went into the red bags of meat waste that gets collected from the store in the normal way and gets incinerated. And let’s face it, those bags stink to high heaven while they’re waiting to be collected, so they’re put right at the back of where the delivery wagons come in, not even inside the store itself, which means pretty much anyone could have got in to them – which is something else the barrister is going to have a field day with. Then there’s the fact that when those bags have been taken straight down to the big, specially designated wheelie bins, nobody in their right mind was going to go ferreting through them just out of random curiosity!

  “Years ago it’s the kind of stuff that might have been fed to pigs by a local butcher. But these days supermarkets pay for it to get carted away once a week. And since all the hoo-ha about contaminated beef and mad cow disease, incineration is the safe and hygienic way to get rid of what can’t be used or has gone off. So all we’ve got of our victim would fit into the corner of one of their posh bags-for-life. That’s it. That’s all we have.”

  “Blimey!” Sylvia gulped. “I see what you mean about time! You don’t cut someone up to that extent in five minutes.” As an osteo-archaeologist she didn’t have Carol’s frontline experience of dead bodies, but she’d unearthed enough ancient graves to have a good idea of how long it would take for someone to do that much dismemberment. “And nobody’s coming forward? Nobody’s thinking, ‘oh poor old so-and-so’s taking all of the blame’?”

  Bill leaned back and rotated his stiff shoulders. “Nope. Not a one. ...But to be fair, I don’t think it’s indifference on their part. I think whoever they were who helped him – and I most definitely think it is ‘they’, and not just one person – they’ve already worked out that the time factor isn’t going to add up. They might even have talked to our suspect and been told by him that his solicitor is already challenging that strongly even before we get to court.

  “For God’s sake, some of our own lads might have asked such probing questions that they’ve effectively hinted that we’re still not one hundred percent sure we’ve got the right man. So I honestly think that they, whoever they are, are keeping schtum to protect him, not to leave him to rot. As long as they keep quiet, he’s still in the grey area of ‘suspect’ without absolute proof.

  “That’s what’s creeping under my skin with this, as well. There’s scarcely a scrap of compassion for the victim anywhere, and that’s bloody near unique in my experience. These people, whoever they are, are totally convinced that the victim wholly got what he deserved – and that makes me think that there’s something really dark in his background that we haven’t brought to light yet. Something so completely evil that it would make a group of perfectly normal, sane adults think that he deserved this.

  “And that means that we’ve let somebody else down, too. There’s almost certainly some poor victim in the past who has slid under our radar and been missed. Possibly some poor sod who topped himself or herself, and who we should have looked at a lot more carefully and questioned whether they were deliberately driven to it.”

  And those were all thoughts that would return to Bill in the months to come, and make him wonder whether the experience of this case coloured his later perceptions, and altered the way he would subsequently act.

  Meanwhile, Carol returned, placing a tonic water with all of the trimmings in front of Sylvia, who was taking her turn to drive, and a foaming pint in front of Bill, before sitting down with her own very large glass of Shiraz as Sylvia said,

  “Well the mystically inclined would s
ay there’s been some misalignment of the planets going on, because Carol’s had a weird one of her own – which is why I’m chauffeuring tonight.”

  Grateful to turn his thoughts away from his own case, Bill asked, “Weird? In what way?” Just at the moment he’d be glad to get involved in one of the more mystically weird cases of the kind that had come his way in the past – something spooky would be a blessed relief from the quantity of gore he’d been dealing with of late.

  Carol huffed in disgust. “Because I can’t find a cause of death – or rather, he died of a massive heart attack, but I can’t fathom out why! If I was to be pinned against the witness stand, I’d say that it looks as though he was frightened to death, but that’s an airy-fairy answer, and if I was the coroner it certainly wouldn’t convince me. He wasn’t an obvious candidate for a heart-attack – he was in his thirties, fit, not a scrap of fat on him, and arteries so clear I wish mine were as good. There’s not a mark on him. No signs of foul play of any sort. He’s not been restrained in any way – so I’m baffled as to why he didn’t run if what he was encountering was that bad? Something that terrifying, your natural response would be to run like hell away from it, wouldn’t it? Yet this bloke seems to almost have let it happen.”

  “It offends her professional pride,” Sylvia said affectionately, giving Carol’s hand a gentle squeeze. “And I know how she feels. It bugs the life out of me when I have unanswered questions I think I ought to have been able to get to the bottom of. But at least everyone who comes my way has been dead for centuries...”

  “...Whereas I can’t even prove foul play!” Carol declared in disgust and took another slurp of wine. “The daft sod seems to have just sat there and let it happen! He wasn’t even slumped as though he’d run and run, and then collapsed. Just sat there under the apple tree as though he was waiting for a damned picnic! ...Aside from the expression of blind terror on his face, that is. But his hands were in his lap, and you’d almost have said in a relaxed position. I half want to write on my report that it’s as though he was somehow frozen where he sat and wasn’t able to move, but I can hardly say that when I have no reasonable explanation as to how come he has no signs of restraint, and toxicology isn’t giving me an alternative, either.”