Suspect (4 page)

“There is another reason I chose that painting,” she explains.

“Because it was painted by a woman.”

“Yes, but that’s not al . It’s because of what happened to the artist. Artemisia Gentileschi was raped when she was nineteen by her instructor, Tassi, although he denied touching her.

During his trial he said Artemisia was a lousy painter, who invented the rape story because she was jealous. He accused her of being ‘an insatiable whore’ and cal ed al his friends to give evidence against her. They even had her examined by midwives to find out if she was stil a virgin.”

Elisa sighs doleful y. “Not much has changed in four centuries. The only difference now is that we don’t torture our rape victims with thumbscrews to find out if they’re tel ing the truth.” Turning on the car radio, she signals that she doesn’t want to talk. I lean back in the passenger seat and listen to Phil Col ins singing “Another Day in Paradise.” I first set eyes on Elisa in a grotty interview room at a children’s home in Brentford in the mid-eighties. I had just been accepted as a trainee clinical psychologist with the West London Health Authority.

She walked in, sat down and lit a cigarette without acknowledging I was there. She was only fifteen years old, yet had a fluid grace and certainty of movement that caught the eye and held it for too long.

With one elbow propped on the table and the cigarette held a few inches from her mouth, she stared past me to a window high on the wal . Smoke curled into her unruly fringe of hair.

Her nose had been broken at some point and a front tooth was chipped. Periodical y she ran her tongue across the jagged edge.

Elisa had been rescued from a “trick pad”— a temporary brothel set up in the basement of a derelict house. The doors had been rigged so they couldn’t be opened from the inside. She and another adolescent prostitute were imprisoned for three days and raped by dozens of men who were offered sex with underage girls.

A judge had placed her into care, but Elisa spent most of her time trying to escape from the children’s home. She was too old to be placed with a foster family and too young to live on her own.

In that first meeting she looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. She was accustomed to dealing with men. Men could be manipulated.

She shrugged and crossed her legs, smoothing her hands along her thighs.

“How old are you now, Elisa?”

“You know that already,” she said, motioning to the file in my hands. “I can wait while you read it, if you like.” She was teasing me.

“Where are your parents?”

“Dead, hopeful y.”

According to the file notes Elisa had been living with her mother and stepfather in Leeds when she ran away from home just after her fourteenth birthday.

Most of her answers were the bare minimum— why use two words when one wil do? She sounded cocky and indifferent, but I knew she was hurting. Eventual y I managed to get under her skin. “How the hel can you know so little?” she yel ed, her eyes glistening with emotion.

It was time to take a risk.

“You think you’re a woman, don’t you? You think you know how to manipulate men like me. Wel , you’re wrong! I’m not a walking fifty quid note looking for a blow job or a quick fuck in a back lane. Don’t waste my time. I’ve got more important places to be.”

Anger flared in her eyes and then disappeared as they misted over. She started crying. For the first time she looked and acted her age. The story came tumbling out, in between her sobs.

Her stepfather, a successful businessman in Leeds, had made a lot of money buying flats and doing them up. He was a real catch for a single mum like Elisa’s. It meant they could move out of their council flat and into a proper house with a garden. Elisa had her own room. She went to grammar school.

One night when she was twelve, her stepfather came to her room. “This is what grown-ups do,” he said, putting her legs over his shoulders and his hand over her mouth.

“He was nice to me after that,” she said. “He used to buy me clothes and makeup.”

This went on for two years until Elisa became pregnant. Her mother cal ed her a slut and demanded to know the name of the father. She stood over her, waiting for an answer and Elisa glimpsed her stepfather in the doorway. He ran his forefinger across his throat.

She ran away. In the pocket of her school blazer she had the name of an abortion clinic in south London. At the clinic she met a nurse in her mid-forties with a kind face. Her name was Shirley and she offered Elisa a place to stay while she recuperated.

“Hold on to your school uniform.”

“Why?”

“It might come in handy.”

Shirley was a mother figure to half a dozen teenage girls and they al loved her. She made them feel safe.

“Her son was a real dickhead,” said Elisa. “He slept with a shotgun under his bed and he thought he could have sex with any of us. Wanker! The first time Shirley took me out to work, she was saying, ‘Go on, you can do it.’ I was standing on Bayswater Road wearing my school uniform. ‘It’s OK, just ask them if they want a girl,’ she said. I didn’t want to disappoint Shirley. I knew she’d be angry.

“Next time she took me out, I did some hand jobs, but I couldn’t do the sex. I don’t know why. It took me three months. I was getting too tal for my school uniform, but Shirley said I had the legs to get away with it. I was her Little Pot of Gold.”

Elisa didn’t cal the men she slept with “punters.” She didn’t like any suggestion that they were gambling with their money. She was a sure thing. And she didn’t treat them with contempt, even if many were cheating on their wives, fiancées and girlfriends. This was purely business— a simple commercial transaction— she had something to sel and they wanted to buy it.

As the months went by she became desensitized. She had a new family now. Then one day a rival pimp snatched her off the street. He wanted her for a one-off engagement, he said. He locked her in the basement of a house and col ected money at the door from the men who queued up. A river of skin, of al different colors, flowed across her body and leaked inside her.

“I was their Little White Fucktoy,” she said, as she stubbed out another cigarette.

“And now you’re here.”

“Where nobody knows what to do with me.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to be left alone.”

4

The first law of the National Health Service is that dead wood floats. It is part of the culture. If somebody is incompetent or hard to get along with, promotion is an easier option than sacking.

The duty supervisor at Westminster Mortuary is bald and thickset with pouchy jowls. He takes an instant dislike to me.

“Who told you to come here?”

“I’m meeting Detective Inspector Ruiz.”

“I haven’t been told. Nobody made an appointment.”

“Can I wait for him?”

“No. Only family of the deceased are al owed in the waiting room.”

“Where can I wait?”

“Outside.”

I catch his sour smel and notice the sweat stains under his arms. He has probably worked al night and is doing overtime. He’s tired and he’s cranky. I normal y have sympathy for shift workers— in the same way that I feel sorry for loners and fat girls who never get asked to dance. It must be a lousy job looking after dead people but that’s no reason to be rude to the living.

I’m just about to say something when Ruiz arrives. The supervisor begins his spiel again, but Ruiz isn’t in the mood to be lectured by a low-ranking mortuary manager with delusions of power. He leans across the desk.

“Listen you jumped up little shit! I see a dozen cars parked on expired meters outside. You’re going to be real popular with your workmates when we put a boot on them.” A few minutes later I’m fol owing Ruiz along narrow corridors with strip lights on the ceiling and painted cement floors. Occasional y we pass doors with frosted glass windows. One of them is open. I glance inside and see a stainless steel table in the center of the room with a central channel leading to a drain. Halogen lights are suspended from the ceiling, alongside microphone leads.

Farther along the corridor, we come across three lab technicians in green medical scrubs standing around a coffee machine. None of them looks up.

Ruiz walks fast and talks slowly. “The body was found at eleven on Sunday morning, buried in a shal ow ditch. Fifteen minutes earlier an anonymous cal was made from a pay phone a quarter of a mile away. The cal er claimed his dog had dug up a hand.”

We push through double Plexiglas doors and dodge a trol ey being pushed by an orderly. A white calico sheet covers what I imagine to be a body. A box of test tubes ful of blood and urine is balanced on top of the torso.

We reach an anteroom with a large glass door. Ruiz taps on the window and is buzzed in by an operator sitting at a desk. She has blond hair, dark roots and eyebrows plucked to the thinness of dental floss. Around the wal s are filing cabinets and white boards. On the far side is a large stainless steel door marked STAFF ONLY.

I suddenly get a flashback to my medical training when I fainted during our first practical lesson working with a cadaver. I came around with smel ing salts waved under my nose. The lecturer then chose me to demonstrate to the class how to direct a 150mm needle through the abdomen to the liver to take a biopsy sample. Afterward he congratulated me on a new university record for the most organs hit with one needle in a single procedure.

Ruiz hands the operator a letter.

“Do you want me to set up a proper viewing?” she asks.

“The fridge wil be fine,” he replies, “but I’l need an SB.” She hands him a large brown paper bag.

The heavy door unlocks with a hiss like a pressure seal and Ruiz steps aside to let me go first. I expect to smel formaldehyde— something I came to associate with every body I saw in medical school. Instead there’s the faint odor of antiseptic and industrial soap.

The wal s are polished steel. A dozen trol eys are parked in neat rows. Metal crypts take up three wal s and look like oversized filing cabinets, with large square handles that can accommodate two hands.

I realize Ruiz is stil talking. “According to the pathologist she’d been in the ground for ten days. She was naked except for a shoe and a gold chain around her neck with a St.

Christopher’s medal ion. We haven’t found the rest of her clothes. There is no evidence of a sexual assault…” He checks the label on a drawer and grips the handle. “I think you’l see why we’ve narrowed down the cause of death.”

The drawer slides open smoothly on rol ers. My head snaps back and I lurch away. Ruiz hands me the brown paper bag as I double over and heave. It’s difficult to throw up and gasp for breath at the same time.

Ruiz hasn’t moved. “As you can see the left side of her face is badly bruised and the eye is completely closed. Someone gave her a real working over. That’s why we released the drawing instead of a photograph. There are more than twenty stab wounds— not one of them more than an inch deep. But here’s the real kicker— every last one was self-inflicted. The pathologist found hesitation marks. She had to work up the nerve to force the blade through.”

Raising my head, I glimpse his face reflected in the polished steel. That’s when I see it: fear. He must have investigated dozens of crimes, but this one is different because he can’t understand it.

My stomach is empty. Perspiring and shivering in the cold, I straighten up and look at the body. Nothing has been done to restore the poor woman’s dignity. She is naked, stretched out with her arms against her sides and her legs together.

The dul whiteness of her skin makes her look almost like a marble statue, only this “statue” has been vandalized. Her chest, arms and thighs are covered in slashes of crimson and pink.

Where the skin is pul ed taut the wounds gape like empty eye sockets. At other places they natural y close and weep slightly.

I have seen postmortems in medical school. I know the process. She has been photographed, scraped, swabbed and cut open from her neck to her crotch. Her organs have been weighed and her stomach contents analyzed. Bodily fluids, flakes of dead skin and dirt from beneath her fingernails have been sealed within plastic or beneath glass slides. A once bright energetic vibrant human being has become exhibit A.

“How old was she?”

“Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five.”

“What makes you think she was a prostitute?”

“It’s been nearly two weeks and nobody has reported her missing. You know better than I do how prostitutes move around. They take off for days or weeks at a time and then turn up at a total y different red-light area. Some of them fol ow the conference trade; others work the truck stops. If this girl had a strong network of family or friends, somebody would have reported her missing by now. She could be foreign but we have nothing from Interpol.”

“I’m not sure how I can help.”

“What can
you
tel me about her?”

Without even thinking I know I’m col ecting details, although I can’t bear to look at her swol en face. What can I say? Her fair hair is cut short in a practical style that’s easy to wash, quick to dry and doesn’t need constant brushing. Her ears aren’t pierced. Her fingernails are trimmed and wel cared for. She has no rings on her fingers, or any sign that she normal y wore them. She’s slim and fair-skinned, with larger hips than bust. Her eyebrows have been tidily shaped and her bikini line had been waxed recently, leaving a neat triangle of pubic hair.