Barbara did so. Nkata turned away. His shoulders quivered slightly. He coughed. Ardery barked at him, “What have you got?”
He pivoted back to her. “Kids who found the body’re gone now. Locals took them to the station for a complete statement, but I managed a word before they left. It’s a boy and girl.” He recited the rest of what he’d learned: Two adolescents had seen a boy come out of the murder site; their description was so far limited to “he had a huge bum and his trousers were falling” but the male adolescent claimed he probably could help with an e-fit. That was all they were able to contribute because they’d evidently been heading towards the annex for sex and “likely wouldn’t’ve noticed the crucifixion if it had been going on in front of them.”
“We’ll want whatever statement they give to the locals,” Ardery said. She filled Barbara in on the details of the crime and called the photographer over to run through the digital pictures once again. As Nkata and Barbara looked them over, Ardery said, “Arterial wound. Whoever did it was going to be, literally, covered in blood.”
“Unless she was taken by surprise from the back,” Barbara pointed out. “Her head grabbed, pulled back, the weapon driven in from behind. You’d have blood on the arm and the hands, then, but little enough on the body. Right?”
“Possibly,” Ardery said. “But one couldn’t be taken by surprise where the body was, Sergeant.”
Barbara could see the secondary building from where they were standing. She said, “Taken by surprise then dragged in there?”
“No sign of dragging.”
“Do we know who she is?” Barbara looked up from the pictures.
“No ID. We’ve got a perimeter search going on, but if that doesn’t turn up the weapon or something telling us who she is, we’ll do a grid of the entire place and take it in sections. I want you in charge of that. Coordinate with the locals. I want you in charge of a house-to-house as well. Concentrate first on the terraces bordering the cemetery. Handle that and we’ll reconvene at the Met.”
Barbara nodded as Nkata said, “Want me to wait for the e-fit, guv?”
“Do that as well,” Ardery said to Barbara. “Make sure their statement gets sent over to Victoria Street. And I want you to see if you can squeeze anything else out of them.”
Nkata said, “I can-”
“You’ll continue to drive me,” Ardery told him. She looked towards the perimeter of the clearing in which the chapel sat. Constables were conducting the search there. They’d move outward in circles till they found-or didn’t find-the weapon, the victim’s bag, or anything else that might constitute evidence. It was a nightmare location that could produce too much or nothing at all.
Nkata was silent. Barbara saw a muscle move in his jaw. He finally said, “Due respect, guv, but don’t you want a constable driving you? Or a special, even?”
Ardery said, “If I wanted a constable or a special, I’d have got one. Do you have a problem with the assignment, Sergeant?”
“Seems like I could best be used-”
“As I want to use you,” Ardery cut in. “Are we clear on that?”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Guv,” politely, in affirmation.
BELLA MCHAGGIS WAS utterly drenched in sweat, but in a good way. She’d just completed her hot yoga class-although any yoga class would have turned into hot yoga in the current weather-and she was feeling both virtuous and peaceful. She had Mr. McHaggis to thank for this. Had the poor bloke not died on the toilet seat, member in hand and Page Three girl spread out buxomly on the floor in front of him, she’d have likely still been in the shape she was in on that morning she’d found him gone to his eternal reward. But seeing poor McHaggis like that had been a call to arms. Whereas, before his death, Bella hadn’t been able to climb a flight of stairs without losing her breath, now she could do that and more. She was particularly proud of her limber body. Why, she could bend from the waist and put her palms on the floor. She could lift her leg to the height of the fireplace mantel. Not at all bad for a bird of sixty-five.
She was on Putney High Street, heading for home. She was still wearing her yoga kit, and she had her mat rolled beneath her arm. She was thinking about worms, specifically the composting worms that lived in a rather complicated setup in her back garden. They were amazing little creatures-bless them, they ate virtually anything one handed over-but they needed some care. They didn’t like extremes: too much hot or too much cold and off they’d go to the big compost heap in the sky. So she was considering how much constituted too much heat when she passed the local tobacconist where an Evening Standard placard stood out front, advertising the day’s last edition of that paper.
Bella was used to seeing some dramatic event reduced to three or four scrawled words suitable for bringing people into the shop to purchase a paper. Usually, she walked on by on her way to her home in Oxford Road because as far as she was concerned, there were far too many newspapers in London-both broadsheets and tabloids-and, recycling aside, they were eating up every woodland on earth, so she was damned if she would contribute to them. But this particular placard slowed her steps: “Woman Dead in Abney Park.”
Bella hadn’t a clue where Abney Park was, but she stood there on the pavement with pedestrians passing her by and she wondered if it was at all possible…She didn’t want to think it was. She hated the idea that it might be. But since it could be, she went within and purchased a copy of the paper, telling herself that at least she could shred it and feed it to the worms if it turned out that there was nothing to the story.
She didn’t read it at once. Indeed, since she didn’t like to appear the kind of person who could be seduced into buying a tabloid because of an advertising ploy, she also purchased some breath mints and a packet of Wrigley’s spearmint from the shop. She rejected the offer of a plastic bag for these items-one had to draw the line somewhere and Bella refused to participate in the further littering and destruction of the planet through the means of the plastic carrier bags one saw blowing along high streets every day-and went on her way.
Oxford Road wasn’t far from the tobacconist, a narrow thoroughfare perpendicular both to Putney Bridge Road and to the river. It was less than a quarter hour’s walk from the yoga studio, so in no time at all Bella was through her front gate and dodging the eight plastic rubbish bins she used for recycling in her small front garden.
Inside the house, she went into the kitchen where she brewed one of her two daily cups of green tea. She hated the stuff-it tasted like what she imagined horse piss would taste like-but she’d read enough about its value, so she regularly plugged her nose and tossed the brew down her throat. It wasn’t until she’d drunk the ghastly cuppa that she spread the paper on the work top and took a look at its unfolded front page.
The photograph was not illuminating. It showed a park entrance guarded by a cop. There was a secondary picture cutting into this one, an aerial shot depicting a clearing in the midst of what looked like a forested area and in the centre of this clearing a church of some kind with white-suited crime scene people crawling round it.
Bella consumed the accompanying story, seeking the relevant bits: young woman, murdered, apparently stabbed, nicely dressed, no identification…
She made the jump to page three where she saw an e-fit with the words person of interest being sought beneath it. E-fits, she thought, never looked like the person they turned out to be depicting, and this particular one looked so universal that virtually any adolescent boy on the street could have been picked up by the police and questioned as a result of it: dark hair falling over his eyes, chubby face, wearing a hoodie-at least the hood was down and not up-in spite of the heat…Totally useless as far as a description went. She’d just seen a dozen such boys on Putney High Street.