The Neighbour Page 4

  Detective Sergeant Wildeve Stanton had not warned any of her Essex Police colleagues that she was coming into work. They would have tried everything to stop her.

  Simon Quick, a police dog handler and Adam’s best friend, was insisting on dropping by with breakfast, but she had ignored his call. She had known what his offer had meant. But she wasn’t ready to face that yet and was gone before he arrived.

  She slid her car into a space in the hospital car park and removed her sunglasses. The morning sun stung her eyes. One of the capillaries had burst, and it was like a tiny red river had broken its banks. For a moment, she rested her forehead against the steering wheel and considered driving home again, to the vacuum of sleep.

  Her wedding ring was loose around her finger. A month ago it had been tight. Every cloud and all that. A smile ghosted across her face. Adam would appreciate the sentiment. Got to keep your sense of humour, Wild. That’s what he always said. Had said. She blinked twice and replaced her sunglasses with trembling hands.

  Wildeve Stanton had not slept. The first day and night had passed in a blur of sedatives and cheap wine. But she had hated the fuzziness, the numbing blankness that smothered the pain. She wanted to feel the sharp edges, to cut herself on them. Because if she felt something it meant she could not forget.

  A car pulled into the space next to her and a nurse in a blue uniform climbed out, catching her eye.

  ‘Lovely day, isn’t it? Wish I hadn’t swapped my shift now.’ The nurse hoisted her handbag strap over her shoulder and grinned through the open car window. ‘Let’s hope it’s a quiet one.’

  The corners of Wildeve’s mouth twitched upwards into an approximation of a smile. Even now, in the very depths of darkness, she was a slave to social convention. But it was an odd sensation, the knowledge that for others the world continued to turn, that they were still looking forward to barbecues and holidays and trips to the beach. For her, there was a disconnect, an inhalation of disbelief every time she looked down at her feet, her legs, that even though her life had been blown apart into a thousand tiny pieces, she had still managed to pull on trousers and tie up the laces of her boots.

  It was touching nine when she walked across the asphalt to the small building next to the MRI department, and the sun was burning the back of her neck.

  The door to the Chapel of Rest was closed. Wildeve wondered if a family was waiting inside, and if they were finding peace. She dipped her head. Her way of showing respect. Solidarity.

  She drew in a breath.

  She could do this.

  She was Detective Sergeant Wildeve Stanton, investigating the latest in a horrific spate of serial killings, a professional with a job to do.

  She was Detective Sergeant Wildeve Stanton, hungover and cotton-wool-mouthed and full of broken bits. She covered her face with her hands. They were still shaking.

  To steady herself, she began to run through procedure, as if the familiar structures of her work would hold her up and calm her.

  Post-mortem examination this morning. Two hours or so. How long before the coroner agrees to release the body? How many days or weeks or months before it is taken to the funeral home, before it’s prepped for the family viewing?

  Her mind strayed ahead, to the heroic efforts of the embalmer, whose job it was to make the dead look more alive. Skin sliced through to raise an artery. Formaldehyde pushed through silent veins until colour seeped in and cheeks were less sunken. A mouth sewn shut. Eyes dabbed dry.

  Wildeve had once asked why such care was necessary. After all, the dead could not see. But the embalmer, immune to the brutality of his job, had put down the cotton pad he was pressing gently to the tear ducts, and offered a rare smile of sadness. ‘It can look as if they are crying. Heartbreaking for the family.’

  Did the public have any idea of the lengths these technicians went to to preserve a body from the violence of a post-mortem? Wildeve didn’t think so. But that instinct was powerful amongst her mortuary colleagues. To protect the loved ones from the savagery of murder, a car crash, the destruction of fire. To make the viewing process easier. Palatable. As in life, in death. Dressing up the truth, disguising it.

  Adam’s face – pale but familiar – appeared, unbidden, in her mind. Her vision blurred and she forced her shaking hands into her pockets. Pushing away that memory of him, she remembered a happier time. Knocked over, fully dressed, by a wave on a beach in Devon, the sea soaking into his shorts. She had tried to pull him out, but had slipped and followed him into the water. He’d laughed so hard he’d wept, tears rolling down his cheeks.

  The coolness of the building was a relief from the sweating heat outside. She had been here too many times lately, unpicking the Doll Maker’s victims for clues. But Wildeve could not look at the steel refrigerators where the bodies were stored in trays, stacked upon each other, identity tags around their toes. She did not want to think about the vanished lives inside, already waxy with death, or the leaking of gases from their bowels and intestines when the pathologist slit them open and removed the organs.

  She did not want to think about any of that at all.

  The door to the examination room was closed. They had started without her. But she wasn’t offended. No one was expecting her and bodies were like meat. Unless they were frozen, they spoiled within hours, especially in this weather, and there was nothing worse than a rotting corpse.

  Except two rotting corpses.

  A bark of laughter slid from her as the low timbre of Adam’s voice filled her head. She pressed her palms to the swing doors and pushed her way in.

  Six heads turned towards Wildeve, and then Detective Constable Jim Sheridan was grabbing her elbow and trying to propel her back the way she’d come.

  ‘You don’t need to be here, Wildeve,’ he said. ‘We’ve got this covered.’

  She took them all in, the pathologist and her assistant, the crime scene investigators bagging and scribing exhibits, the CSI photographer, and then she was pushing back, heat behind her eyes, in the back of her throat. She did not expect them to understand. She could barely understand it herself. But she needed to be here. At work. And nothing was going to stop her.

  The smell of death crept into her nostrils and filled her mouth. She swallowed, glad she had refused PC Simon Quick’s offer of breakfast.

  Her first post-mortem had been twelve years ago. Some of them had even wolfed down a fry-up first, filling themselves up with bacon and bravado. Three of them had been sick. Wildeve had kept down her coffee, but all these years later, she still couldn’t stomach the way her senses conspired against her, how she could breathe in the essence of the deceased, could taste it, even. The rawness of a butcher’s shop. Urine. Bleach. And that startling jaffa orange of subcutaneous fat.

  She dragged her eyes from the body resting on a metal tray atop the slab, and cast around for something to lessen the tension she could feel crawling across her skin, and the weight of her colleagues’ concerned stares. Music and laughter and chatter would usually lighten the grim task in hand, but this morning, there was silence.

  ‘So, the fifth victim,’ she said finally, prising Sheridan’s fingers from her arm, then squeezing them to show she appreciated his concern. ‘Bastard’s done it again. We knew he would. What have we got so far?’

  The pathologist exchanged a glance with DC Sheridan, who cleared his throat.

  ‘I don’t think now’s the time—’

  ‘Are you trying to fob me off, Jim?’

  ‘I know you better than that. But Mac’s pulling it together back at Rayleigh. There’s a briefing this afternoon. At five.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Wildeve—’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  ‘I’m not sure – I don’t know – Mac asked me to come. There’s a protocol here—’

  ‘Fuck protocol.’

  The Home Office pathologist – Dr Mathilda Hudson – opened her mouth. Shut it again. Shot another glance
at Sheridan, who raised his eyebrows at her, asking an un- spoken question. Hudson shrugged, then nodded. The constable looked like he might cry.

  ‘If you’re sure,’ he said in a voice that was anything but.

  Adam always said there was something disconcerting about seeing a body in the mortuary. The skin was never as grey as expected. The dead looked like they might open their eyes and sit up.

  The body lying on the tray still looked like a friend, a colleague, a lover.

  Human.

  Now that she was so close, Wildeve found she could not look away. Her fingers itched to touch the face, to smooth back the hair, and to cleanse from this body the violence of its death. With a painful clarity, she understood the need of some cultures to wash and purify their lost. An act of worship and love.

  The forensic pathologist cleared her throat. ‘We’ll carry on then, shall we? But you’re here to observe, Wildeve. Any attempt to interfere with this examination and you’re out, and I’ll have no choice but to inform the coroner. Understood?’

  Hudson didn’t wait for an answer, but bent over the body. A Y-shaped incision ran from each clavicle, down the abdomen and finished at the pubic bone. The ribcage had been cut open, and muscle and tissue peeled back to allow access to the internal organs, which were in the process of being removed.

  Wildeve dug her nails into her palms. Tasted blood in her mouth where she’d bitten her lip. She had arrived too late to hear the tearing sound of steel cutters through bone. For that, she would always be grateful.

  Experience had taught her that the organs were taken from the body in three distinct blocks. The incision at the base of the throat confirmed the windpipe and tongue had already been removed, Hudson and her technician working from inside the chest to preserve the face for the relatives’ sake. They were currently cutting free the liver, stomach and pancreas.

  Wildeve swallowed twice, trying to ignore the lightness in her head. She wanted to shake Hudson, to implore her to reveal the secrets of this murder, but the pathologist rarely conversed while she was working, preferring to confer her attention on the dead. Often, she left this kind of preparation to her assistant, but it seemed she had come in early to work this case.

  As a detective and a wife, Wildeve appreciated the gesture.

  Next to the body was a deep plastic trug with two handles, the kind her mother had filled with leaves and garden waste. It was lined with a black bin bag. Wildeve glimpsed the sheen of bodily parts. The first block of organs – heart, lungs, throat, tongue and aorta – were already inside, awaiting evaluation.

  When Hudson had removed the kidneys, bowels and bladder, and all that was left was a raw cavity, the mortuary technician dipped a ladle into the abdomen and decanted the excess blood into the shallow trench that edged the dissection table. It made a wet sound as it trickled into the sump.

  The pathologist, who had a reputation for showing less emotion than the bodies in her morgue, finally broke open the silence.

  ‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’

  Wildeve found she could not speak at all, but Hudson read the answer in her eyes.

  ‘All righty, then. Let’s crack on for now.’

  At the bench, the technician weighed the organs, and Hudson began to work through each block in turn. She used a scalpel to check for fluid in the lungs, assessed the size of the heart, and for vessels blocked by fatty deposits. She lingered here, a frown on her face.

  Her voice was low and even as she recorded her findings into a small dictaphone.

  ‘One atherosclerotic lesion in the thoracic aorta. Signs of pulmonary oedema, possible cause of cardiac failure.’

  Wildeve registered the words, but she could not seem to retain them. All she could think about was how it must feel to be a killer, a thief of life, and the sheer waste of it all.

  If grief created absences, was committing murder a way of filling those gaps?

  Hudson murmured into the machine, deleting all emotion and replacing it with the language of science. The minutes ticked on. Wildeve was conscious of Sheridan’s eyes upon her. The soft, sucking sounds of the mortuary technician at work. The detective had been too distracted to wear plastic shoe covers, and when she looked down, she noticed the pale suede of her desert boots had a tidemark of bodily fluids.

  She could not tear her eyes away from the stain.

  Bile burned the tender spot at the back of her throat, but she would not allow herself to be sick. She had made a pact. This was her duty.

  She swallowed again.

  She knew what was coming.

  In a couple of minutes, Hudson would direct her assistant to slice through the scalp and open up the skull. But Wildeve did not want to hear the whine of blade against bone, the rising of the dust, and the scorched smell of Hell.

  She did not want to watch Hudson bend over in observation as soon as the skull was chiselled open, seeking out signs of haemorrhaging.

  She did not want to see the brain – the part of the body that makes us all human, that lets us sing and laugh and savour and love – pulled free with forceps for analysis, reduced to a lump of meat.

  Her hand gripped the edge of the table. The walls rippled, the start of an earthquake. She breathed. In. Out. In. Out. After a sort of fierce gulping, she was able to compose herself.

  She had wanted to be here. This was her choice.

  But it was too much.

  Too soon.

  In a flash, Sheridan was at her shoulder again, and she leaned into him, the solid mass of his body a comfort as her legs began to shake.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. Repeated it. A lifelong mantra to keep the darkness at bay.

  ‘Let’s get you some water,’ he said, steering her towards the door.

  She wanted to protest, to insist that she could handle it. She was one of the lead detectives on a murder case that was making national headlines, for Christ’s sake. She didn’t need to lean on anyone.

  Three or four black spots in the periphery of her vision began to flash. Lightning bolts of nerve pain struck her jawline, spreading out towards her ear, the back of her head. The beginnings of an attack of trigeminal neuralgia. Extreme stress could do that. It could bring her to her knees.

  Wildeve embraced the hot spikes of physical pain. It distracted from the deadness inside. She wanted to stay here until the organs were returned to the body, until the incisions were sewn closed, the body cleansed and the hair washed. To bear witness.

  And she had promised. They had promised. Not the vows they had made amongst the rain of confetti, although she had meant every word of those too, but in the dark cloak of their honeymoon suite, a confessional for their bleakest fears.

  But the room was growing smaller, the black dots running into blotches that would soon obscure her vision. And the pain was drilling its way deeper, and she needed her fix of Carbamazepine and some water, and her bed. She staggered as another blast of fire exploded in her head. She didn’t want to, but it was time for her to leave.

  Wildeve half turned to get a last glimpse of the eyeless body on the mortuary slab. The fifth victim of the Doll Maker.

  The shock of black hair.

  The birthmark on his shoulder.

  Adam Stanton, police officer, husband and love of her life.

  14

  Now

  I spy with my little eye, something beginning with A.

  Did you ever learn the origins of the word ‘pupil’? I know I did not teach you and it’s not common knowledge, I suppose. Its roots are in Latin. Pupilla. Meaning ‘little doll’. Because when we gaze into another’s eyes, we see a tiny reflection of ourselves.

  Little doll.

  Birdie wanted a doll, a plaything to dress up and do her bidding. She did not want a creature with teeth and nails to scratch a way out. She wanted a dutiful child. With no man in the house, certain responsibilities fell to me. Cleaning and fixing and earning money.

  When I was four and would not eat my dinner, she pressed an iro
n between the dip of my shoulder blades. When I was five and there was not enough money to buy food, she sent me out in the fields of the Essex edgelands to pick peas. When I was nine, she burned the skin from my wrist with caustic soda. When I was thirteen, I blinded her in one eye with a piece of broken glass. An accident, Birdie. I’m such a clumsy boo. Just like she said I was.

  She left me alone for months after that.

  I knew Adam Stanton was a police officer. I recognized his name, of course. His face. He was getting closer, and we couldn’t have that, could we? Asking uncomfortable questions, grubbing around in the dirt of the past.

  His skin stayed warm for four hours. Eyes the colour of estuary mud when the clouds hang low and heavy. No fanfare. No tolling of the bells. No farewell. His final word was . . . there wasn’t one. A grunt. That was all.

  Killing him was a risk. Order. Control. They are my watchwords, but I broke my own rules.

  I do not blame him, though. He was doing his job. Too well, as it turned out.

  No, the fault lies with her. Olivia Lockwood. Because without her, the murders would have been impossible to prove. But she brought down this house of cards upon us all.

  15

  Monday, 30 July 2018

  The Avenue – 9.17 a.m.

  The postman parked his van at the top of The Avenue and switched off the radio. The breakfast news bulletins were full of the latest killing. The murder of a senior police officer involved in the case had raised the stakes and a knot of journalists had already gathered at the cordon blocking the entrance to the woods.

  The man, solidly built and muscular, opened one of the double doors at the back and pulled free a modest-sized bag of mail, hoisting it over his shoulder. Breathing the air was like inhaling tepid water. Even the trees seemed defeated by the heat, their leaves dry and brittle. His shirt stuck to his back despite the early hour, and he prayed for kinder weather.

  The postman’s fingers were pressed against the hot metal of the door, preparing to shut it and begin his round, but something made him hesitate. He glanced down the empty street. After a few seconds of indecision, he sidled closer to the door and peered through the gap to the interior of the van.