…other choices. Here is one before you. The need is great. Need leads to action and action to honour.
He’d sought it. Honour, only honour. She’d needed him. He’d heard the call.
It had all turned out wrong. She’d looked at him and he’d seen the recognition in her eyes and he knew it meant surprise because she would be surprised but it also meant welcome. He’d walked forward and he’d known what had to be done and there were no voices in the moment, no chorus of sound, and he’d heard nothing, not even the music from the earphones he wore.
And he had failed. Blood everywhere, on her and on him and her hands at her throat.
He’d run. He’d hidden at first, rubbing himself with fallen leaves to take the blood away. He removed his shirt and balled it up. He turned his jacket inside out. The trousers were bad but they were black and the black obscured the crimson of her that had spilled down the front of him. He’d had to get home, which meant the bus, which meant more than one bus and he hadn’t known when to get off to make the switch, so it had taken hours and he’d been seen, gawked at, whispered about, and it could not matter because-
…another sign and you should have read it. There are signs around you but you choose to guard when you are meant to fight…
– it was his job to get home and to clean himself so that he could do what he had been intended to do.
No one, he told himself, would put it together. In the buses of London there were so many types of people and no one paid attention to anything and even if they had paid attention and had seen and had even remarked upon or remembered what they’d seen, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He’d failed and he had to live with that.
Chapter Six
ISABELLE ARDERY WASN’T PLEASED THAT AC HILLIER PUT IN an appearance at the morning meeting of her team on the following day. It smacked of checking up on her, which she didn’t like, although his claim was that he’d merely wanted to say well done in reference to the news conference she’d held the previous afternoon. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t a fool: She understood exactly why he’d turned up to stand importantly at the back of the incident room and she also understood that the head of an investigation-that would be me, sir-was meant to listen to whatever the duty press officer advised regarding information to be imparted to the media, so she hardly needed to be congratulated on having done her job. But she took the compliment with a formal thank you, sir, and she eagerly anticipated his immediate departure. He’d said Do keep me apprised, won’t you, Acting Superintendent? and again the message was received as intended. Acting Superintendent. She didn’t need reminding that this was her audition-for want of a better word-but it appeared to be the man’s intention to do that reminding at every possible opportunity. She’d said that the news conference and its call for information from witnesses to anything suspicious was already bearing fruit and asked if he wanted a compendium of each day’s phone calls, sir. He eyed her in a way that told her he was evaluating what lay behind her question before he declined the offer, but she kept her face bland. He apparently decided she was being sincere. He’d said, We’ll meet later, shall we? and that was that. Off he went, leaving her to the unfriendly gaze of DI John Stewart, which she happily ignored.
The house-to-house in Stoke Newington was in progress, the slow process of the cemetery search was continuing, phone calls were being fielded and dealt with, diagrams and maps had been drawn. They were bound to get something from the news conference, from the resulting stories on the television news and in the daily papers, and from the e-fit that had been provided by the two adolescents who’d discovered the body. Thus things were clicking along as they were meant to click. Isabelle was satisfied with her performance so far.
She had her doubts about the post mortem, however. She’d never been one for dissection. The sight of blood didn’t make her feel anything akin to fainting, but the sight of an open body cavity and the mechanics of removing and weighing what had so recently been living organs did tend to turn her stomach to liquid. For this reason, she determined to take no one with her to observe the proceedings that afternoon. She also skipped lunch in favour of emptying one of the three airline bottles of vodka she’d tucked into her bag for this precise purpose.
She found the mortuary without any trouble, and within it, she found the Home Office pathologist awaiting her arrival. He introduced himself as Dr. Willeford-“but do call me Blake…let’s keep things friendly, shall we?”-and he asked her if she wanted a chair or a stool “in the event that the coming exploration proves rather more than you feel able to cope with.” He said all of this nicely enough, but there was something about his smile that she didn’t trust. She had little doubt that her reaction to the autopsy was going to be reported, Hillier’s long tentacles reaching out even here. She vowed to keep upright, told Willeford she didn’t anticipate any difficulty as she’d never had difficulty with autopsies before-an outright lie but how was he to know?-and when he chuckled, stroked his chin, observed her, and then happily said, “Right, then, here we go,” she stepped right up to the stainless-steel trolley and fixed her gaze on the body that lay there, chest up and waiting for the Y incision, with her fatal wound making a bloody lightning bolt down the right side of her neck.
Willeford recited the salient superficial details first, speaking into the microphone that hung above the autopsy trolley. He did so in a chatty fashion, as if with the intention of entertaining whoever would do the transcription. “Kathy darling,” he said into the microphone, “we have a female before us this time. She’s in good physical condition, no tattoos and no scars. She measures five feet four inches tall-sort out the metrics, my love, as I can’t be bothered-and she weighs seven point eight five stone. Do the metrics there as well, will you, Kath? And by the way, how’s your mum doing, darling? Are you ready, Superintendent Ardery? Oh, Kath, that’s not for you, my dear. We’ve a new one here. She’s called Isabelle Ardery”-with a wink at Isabelle-“and she’s not even asked for a chair on the chance that just-in-case becomes the case. Anyway…” He moved to examine the wound at the neck. “We’ve got the carotid artery pierced. Very nasty. You’ll be glad you weren’t here, not that you ever are, my love. We’ve also got a tear in the wound, quite jagged, measuring…it’s seven inches.” He moved from the victim’s neck along the side of her body where he picked up one of her hands and then the other, excusing himself to Isabelle as he passed her and letting Kathy know that the superintendent was still on her feet and her colour was good, but they would see, wouldn’t they, once he cut the body open? He said, “No defensive wounds on the hands, Kath. No broken fingernails, no scratches either. Blood on them both but I expect this would have come from her attempt to stop the bleeding once the weapon was withdrawn.” He chatted on for a few more minutes, documenting everything the eye could see. He put her age between twenty and thirty and then he prepared himself for the next step of the process.
Isabelle was ready. Clearly, he expected her to faint. Just as clearly, she intended not to. She found she could have done with another shot of vodka when, after the incision and the exposure of the rib cage, he took out the shears to cut through the victim’s chest-it was the sound of metal cutting through bone that she found most repellent-but after that the rest was, if not easy, then at least more bearable.
After Willeford had done his bit, he said, “Darling Kath, as always, it’s been a pleasure. Could you type that up and get it over to Superintendent Ardery, darling? And by the way, she’s still upright so I daresay she’s a keeper. Remember DI Shatter-what an appropriate name, eh?-falling headfirst into the body cavity up in Berwick-on-Tweed that time? Lord, what an uproar. Ah, ‘but what do we live for but to give’…whatever it is that we give to our neighbours and ‘to laugh at them in our turn.’ I cannot ever remember that quote. Adieu, dear Kath, till next time.”