Hard Evidence

It was small. A sofa, a sink with a hot plate beside it. An electric kettle, once white, now yellowing with grease and use. A TV and DVD player on a brown cabinet. Some DVDs on the shelf beneath them. He flicked through the titles: Head Girl, Sin Sisters, Crime and Punishment, Spunk Junkies. They hadn't come from Blockbuster. Some cupboards. On the floor a faded imitation Persian rug sitting on top of a light oatmeal carpet. A telephone and an appointments book. A basket with a couple of apples and a thick rubber band in it, some magazines. It was clean, tidy. Nothing out of order. Nothing out of place.

Except the smell.

Delaney looked across at the other door and knew what lay beyond. Had he not been told, he'd have known. The smell was unmistakable to him. Death.

Death was particulate and it reached out to him, assaulting his nostrils, invading his lungs. Her life might have fled quickly, but her body was giving up its essence slowly, and as Delaney stood in her living room and inhaled Jackie Malone into his soul, he felt a calm come over him. Displacement activity, they called it. He couldn't bring the dead back to life, but he could do what he could; he could find those responsible and make them suffer.

'Guv.' Snapping him out of his reverie.

Delaney nodded at the large uniformed officer who stood by the door and went through to the bedroom. Jackie Malone's office, her factory floor, her operating theatre.

He quickly looked around. A medieval torture chamber in black and red, with satin sheets and a champagne cooler. The pain and the pleasure. The agony and the ecstasy. Scene of Crime Officers, SOCO, or whatever they were called nowadays – Delaney could never keep up with the ever-changing acronyms of the Met – white-plastic-suited like very poor astronauts, were dusting and photographing. One of them gave him a pair of light blue latex gloves. He snapped them on with a grimace. Jackie Malone kept a box of the same on a cabinet by the door for examinations of a thoroughly different nature. The officer moved aside and Delaney looked down, seeing the corpse for the first time, face up, arms cruelly tied, lying on the floor like a broken and discarded doll.

Corpse: such a cold word for such a warmblooded woman. Except her blood wasn't warm any more. It was cold and still, scored in brown lines on her ivory face and puddled about her mutilated body.

Delaney took a swallow as the acrid taste of whiskey rose in his throat. As he remembered her.

Irish, of course. With those thick black curly locks and bright blue eyes, she had to be. A distant descendant of a lucky sailor who was washed up from the wreck of the Armada on to the rain-soaked fields of southern Ireland. Stumbling into Cork or Waterford, and there, from the eye of the storm and the lash of the rainfilled wind, finding comfort in the welcoming arms of an Irish girl. Love was, after all, a universal language. Just like lust, the commodity that Jackie Malone dealt in. Or loneliness. She always did know how to make Delaney laugh, mind, make him forget himself. He looked at her eyes now. Lifeless, flat, and he remembered them twinkling, remembered them flashing angrily, full of life, just like herself. Thirty-two years old. Several hours dead.

He looked across her ravaged body.

Naked. Hands and feet tied with coat-hanger wire. Her body covered with knife cuts. With stabbing punctures. Her sweet face slashed from forehead to chin. A smile by Bosch carved into her throat. The wound gaping, black-edged and raw. Delaney swallowed again and looked across as Bonner came into the room.

'You okay, guv?'

'Yeah,' Delaney lied. He was good at lying. He looked away to Sally Cartwright, the young constable, who had followed him into the building. Her face was almost as pale as the body on the floor. She had a notebook open and was concentrating on that. Looking away from the horror of it all.

'You've spoken to the neighbours?'

'Sir.'

'And?'

'Nothing. Across the way is empty and downstairs is an old couple. They keep themselves to themselves.'

'And they say there's no such thing as society.'

'Margaret Thatcher did, sir, but then her dad was a grocer. The old folks downstairs know she was a tom. They got used to people walking up and down all hours of the day. They turned a blind eye.'

'And a deaf ear.'

'Have their hearing aids turned off unless they're watching EastEnders, apparently.'

Delaney grunted. They had that the wrong way round. He pointed a finger at the young PC. 'I want a full statement nonetheless. People see things. They might not want to get involved, but they see things.' He looked down at Jackie Malone. 'Even when they don't want to. Even if they don't know they have, people see things.'

'Guv.'

Delaney stood aside as the crime-scene photographer moved in to take shots of the body. Across the bed a forensic officer dusted a large rubber phallus. Bonner nodded at Delaney.

'You think that's the murder weapon?'

Delaney turned expressionless eyes on him and Bonner grinned, unabashed.

'What is it they say? When you've eliminated the impossible, what's left, however improbable, is the whatever. That thing looks damn improbable to me, and I grew up on a farm.'

Delaney turned to Sally Cartwright.

'Why hasn't she been covered up?'

'We're waiting for the pathologist, sir.'

'Where the bloody hell is he?'

'She, sir. Dr Walker's attending.'

Delaney grimaced. 'What's the hold-up, then? She waiting for the second act of Rigoletto to finish?'

'I didn't know you were a fan of opera, Detective.'

Delaney turned round as Kate Walker approached. A tall, slim woman in her early thirties, dressed more for fine dining than forensics. Jet-black hair and a feral tint of green in her eyes. Unamused eyes.

'Oh yeah. Opera and colonoscopies. Top of my list.'

Bonner smirked. 'Ah yes, "The Ring Cycle".'

'Shut it, Bonner.' He turned back to Kate Walker. 'Sorry to spoil your supper party, but there's a woman here needs our help.'

Kate flicked a cursory glance at the dead body of Jackie Malone. 'I'd say she was beyond that.'

Delaney held her angry gaze, meeting her fire with his own. 'I think we can assume that this wasn't a suicide. I want to know what happened.'

Kate smiled disarmingly. 'I can tell you when she died. I can tell you how she died and I can tell you what she had for dinner. You know why?'

'Why?'

'Because that's my fucking job. Now why don't you give me a break with the attitude and let me do it?'

Delaney dug in his pocket, fishing out a packet of cigarettes, and flicked one into his mouth.

'You got a great sense of respect for the dead, lady.'

'What is it with you, Delaney? You don't like a woman doing a man's job? Or you just don't like women?'

Delaney held her gaze for a moment and took the cigarette out of his mouth.

'I just don't like you, Dr Walker.'

Bonner flashed Kate a sympathetic smile, but it slid off her as smoothly as rainwater off a Chelsea girl's gumboot. She looked down at the body on the floor, her eyebrow lifting slightly. Delaney picked up on it. 'Something?'

Kate shrugged. 'Something not quite right.'

'That an expert opinion, is it?'

Kate ignored him and bent down to examine the body, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. 'Let's see if the vitreous fluid can give us a rough time of death.' She pulled out a syringe, attached a largegauge needle and carefully stabbed it into Jackie Malone's lifeless right eye.

Delaney had already turned away. Outside in the corridor he opened the sash window at the end of the hall, swearing as it stuck and grunting as he forced it further open. He palmed the cigarette back into his mouth, flaring a match and drawing a long, abrasive cloud into his lungs. He tensed his lips and let it flow back out in a longdrawnout sigh. Bonner shook his head as he approached.