Blood Work

Delaney threw a 'leave it out' look to the constable who was standing by Sally as she took notes.

Valerie Manners was a bit taken aback by the question and had to think a little, giving up after a few moments of struggle. 'Well, very traumatic I would say.'

Delaney nodded, again with sympathy. The trouble all too often with the public when they were caught up in a crime, was to make too much of everything. The answers to solving a crime were all too often in the everyday, mundane, prosaic details, not in the dramatic and the astounding. Many of the witnesses he had interviewed over the years had a tendency to vicariously sensationalise their own drab lives by way of someone else's tragedy. Memories became embellished with imagined detail. But Delaney was a seasoned enough copper to know how to winnow the wheat from the chaff. At least he hoped he was. 'Go back to the beginning, Mrs Manners.'

'It's Ms Manners.'

'Back to the beginning then please, Ms Manners.'

'I had stopped to catch my breath, leant on the tree over there—'

Delaney interrupted her. 'Before then?'

'When I saw the flasher?'

'Before that.'

'Back to leaving hospital?'

'Yes.'

The nurse looked at him perplexed, like he was an idiot. 'Is it relevant?'

Delaney sighed and looked at her, any sympathy he had for her draining fast. 'I'll tell you what, Ms Manners, let's make a deal. I won't tell you how to dress a wound or change a bedpan, and you let me decide what details are important or not in a particularly brutal murder case.'

'All right, no need to get snitty. I can get that kind of attitude any day of the week, if I want it, from the consultants who think they're better than good God Himself.'

Delaney ignored her. 'What time did you leave work this morning?'

'I left the hospital about eight o'clock.'

'And you always cut through this part of the heath?'

'Yes. It takes me about fifteen minutes to walk home. And a bit of fresh air never hurt anyone. I've learned that much in my job.'

Tell that to the woman in the scene of crime tent, thought Delaney, but didn't say it. 'And you didn't see anything out of the ordinary?'

'I saw a man wagging his penis at me! I'd count that as a pretty unusual event, wouldn't you?'

'Can you describe it?'

'The penis, or the event?'

Delaney sighed and Sally Cartwright and Bob Wilkinson had to try hard not to smile. 'Just tell us what happened?'

'I was walking on to the heath—'

Delaney interrupted her. 'You hadn't seen anybody earlier, somebody coming off the heath perhaps?'

The woman shook her head. 'Not a single soul. Weather like this tends to keep people at home or in their cars, doesn't it?'

Sally looked up from her notebook. 'And the man who exposed himself to you . . . ?'

'He was in his late twenties I'd say, maybe thirties. Semi-priapic.'

'I'm sorry?' Sally asked.

Wilkinson smiled. 'He had a hard-on, Sally.'

'Yeah, thanks, Bob,' said Delaney.

'Well, partly so, enough I guess for him to waggle,' added the nurse. 'It was early, and it was pretty cold, mind you.'

Delaney held up his hand. 'Can we concentrate on the man, not just the member?'

'He was about five ten, wearing a fawn-coloured overcoat, he might have had a suit on under his coat, he had dark trousers anyway.'

Sally flicked back through her notebook. 'You called him a raggedy man earlier.'

Valerie Manners nodded. 'Yes, it was his hair.'

Delaney waited patiently, but when there was nothing forthcoming, said, 'And? What about his hair?'

'It was raggedy, you know?'

'No?'

'Sort of wild, curly. A bit like yours.' She pointed to Delaney. 'Only longer and it hadn't been combed, it was sticking out.'

'Like his cock,' said Bob Wilkinson, his smile suddenly dying on his lips as Delaney glared at him, the detective inspector's already thin patience finally worn through.

At the mortuary Kate Walker scrubbed her hands, holding them under the hot water and rubbing the brush as if to scratch away the touch of Paul Archer. She felt like dipping them in acid.

'Are you all right, Dr Walker?' Lorraine Simons had come into the room and was watching her, concern evident in her eyes.

'I'm fine.' Kate finished her hands, drying them and slipping on a pair of latex gloves.

'You had a phone call earlier. Dr Jane Harrington. She didn't leave a message.'

Kate nodded. 'It can wait. She can't.' She walked across to the mortuary table where the body of the murdered girl was laid out in cold, clinical repose. Her naked skin pearlescent white under the bright lights, like a dead snow queen.

Kate watched as her assistant joined her at the table, wheeling across the stack of instruments with which they would try and ascertain the manner of the young woman's death. Quantify it. Render a human life into its constituent parts. Why was she doing this? she thought to herself. Working with the dead? Maybe her friend Jane was right, she had always been so sure of herself. But suddenly everything was shifting for her, nothing was fixed. Her career had always been a focus, a constant. Now? Now she didn't even know who she was any more.

She glanced across at her young assistant. 'What made you want to do this job?' she asked.

Lorraine looked at her a little puzzled. 'Don't you remember asking me that in my interview?'

Kate smiled apologetically. 'There were a lot of interviews. A lot of interviewees, all of them saying the same thing. I just wondered what it really was for you?'

Lorraine picked up a scalpel and ran her thumb along the blunt part of it. 'All through medical school I wanted to be a surgeon.'

'What changed?'

'It was a gradual thing, really. But one night, I was an intern on surgical rotation and a couple of children were brought in. A ten-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. They had both been repeatedly stabbed. By their father.'

'Go on.'

'He was a manic-depressive. On a cocktail of antidepressants, booze and marijuana. He had an argument with his wife, picked up a carving knife and stabbed both his kids to punish her.'

'Nice.'

'The boy lasted an hour. We did what we could but he had lost a lot of blood. We worked on the girl through the night. There were multiple complications, she had been stabbed nine times. We brought her out of surgery and had to take her back in as she arrested in recovery. She arrested again on the table.' She put the scalpel down and looked steadily at Kate. 'When she arrested again we had to let her go. Even had she survived she would have been brain-dead. There was nothing we could do. We had to tell the mother she had lost both her children. Some hours later the mother jumped in front of a train on the Northern Line at Chalk Farm.'

Kate shook her head sympathetically. 'It wasn't your fault. You did what you could.'

Lorraine nodded. 'I don't blame myself. There's only one person responsible for their deaths. But I couldn't deal with it any more. I couldn't deal with the fact that whatever you do, however much you try, eventually someone will die. And if you are going to be a surgeon you have to be able to deal with that. You have to be able to detach emotionally. And I couldn't. And I didn't want to go into general practice.' She looked down on the cold body of the dead woman. 'At least in here you can't fail. Nobody pays a price for your mistakes.'

'That's true . . .' Kate looked at the dead woman's face, at her neck, at the start of the first incision, but knew that she was lying to her young assistant. '. . . and at least you didn't say you had a crush on Amanda Burton.'

'Who?'

'Good answer.'

Kate looked back at the dead woman's neck again and then bent down to get a closer look. 'What do you make of this?'

Lorraine moved around the table to see what Kate was looking at. 'It appears to be some kind of puncture wound.'

'Get the camera. Let's take some close-up shots.