Ball-breaker, Hanlon thought. Is that what I am? Well, she thought dispassionately, I’ve kicked a fair few in my time. She had the rare quality of not caring what others thought of her. She had long ago reached the conclusion that she had risen as far as she was likely to get in the police force. Hanlon didn’t particularly mind.
She’d forgotten Forrest’s old-fashioned turns of phrase. Tittle-tattle. Stuff and nonsense. Argy-bargy. Golly. Those kinds of expressions. He’d never been known to swear. Forrest was a kind of living legend for that alone.
She’d once been with him at the scene of a triple homicide. A drug deal gone wrong. Shotguns had been used. Two of them. Great chunks had been blown out of the victims’ bodies. A shotgun is a very messy weapon; it does an all too predictable amount of damage to a human body. It looked like the room had been painted and decorated in blood and tissue, arterial spray and brains, far worse than an abattoir. Even Hanlon had been impressed by the carnage. Two or three police had to go outside and be sick. It was memorably horrible. Forrest had slowly surveyed the scene, eyebrows raised, cocked his head to one side and said simply, ‘Good Heavens.’ Hanlon had savoured that moment. She appreciated understatement.
‘She’s always been perfectly pleasant to me,’ said Forrest. ‘Now, get this lot cleaned down and I’ll see you outside.’ He was very fond of Hanlon. His voice was suddenly acerbic. The way he emphasized ‘Now’ was like the crack of a whip. His young assistant jumped and set to with alacrity.
She turned and retraced her steps and waited for Forrest to emerge from the bunker. He did so, looking tired and preoccupied, then, as soon as he saw Hanlon, a delighted smile transformed his thin, mobile, slightly ugly face.
‘Hanlon!’
‘James,’ she said. They shook hands, both pleased to see each other.
‘So what brings you down here?’ asked Forrest. The sea breeze whipped again at Hanlon’s hair and she pushed it away from her eyes as she looked out over the water at the mouth of the estuary. She could see in the far distance the low bulk of two tankers heading for the port facilities on the unseen opposite shore.
By way of explanation she said, ‘You heard about my new job?’
‘Vaguely,’ said Forrest. ‘Congratulations on the medal, by the way.’ Hanlon smiled thinly. Her mouth wasn’t designed for humour. In December she had been given the Queen’s Award for Gallantry, a decoration for bravery usually awarded posthumously to dead police. It was almost the equivalent of a Victoria Cross. It was this that Forrest was referring to.
She shrugged, dismissing all talk of the medal. ‘Corrigan gave me this post on the back of it.’ Her hard eyes looked out to sea. ‘He wants the Commissioner’s job, it’s no secret, and he’s worried that there’ll be some internal cock-up that’ll get in the way and screw his chances up.’ Forrest nodded and Hanlon continued. ‘You can imagine, another Stockwell, another police killing, some stupid balls-up that we’ve made.’ She looked out to sea, the wind still whipping her long, dark hair.
‘Like Tottenham,’ said Forrest pleasantly. Hanlon narrowed her eyes; it was the riots that had nearly finished her own career.
‘Exactly. No more own goals, well, not in our bit of the Met anyway. If anyone else cocks up, preferably one of his rivals, so much the better for us. We don’t care if heads roll so long as it’s not ours. If Corrigan’s a bit paranoid, I can’t say I blame him. How many police have we got in the Met anyway? Thirty-one thousand officers the last time I counted. Bound to be a few bad apples.’
‘Well,’ said Forrest diplomatically, ‘Public Relations is part of his job after all. I suppose this one,’ he jerked his head in the direction of the bunker, ‘is going to generate a bit of press interest. It’s not on your patch, though.’
‘May as well be. You’re only down the road,’ she said. ‘So, what have we got here then?’ she asked the forensics man. ‘Witchcraft killing, is it? At least, that’s what I was told.’
Corrigan had heard this might be the case and had sent her down to check up on the facts rather than wait for an official report to be delivered. The AC shared Forrest’s view. A witchcraft killing in his opinion was newsworthy. If reporters were going to ask questions he didn’t want to look uninformed. It was off his patch as Forrest had said, but it was so close to London it might as well be there.
Forrest started removing his protective suit. ‘What we’ve got, Hanlon,’ he said in his gentle, measured way, ‘is the charred body of a pubescent African girl who was killed elsewhere, brought here, and set alight. I’m guessing diesel was the accelerant but we’ll have to wait for the GC results on that. Her teeth and hands are intact so I’m guessing she won’t feature on any UK or Interpol DNA database, she won’t have any dental records and there’ll be no record of her fingerprints on NAFIS or HOLMES.’
Hanlon nodded. Anyone who had the kind of personality needed to do this to a child would not hesitate to remove such obvious clues to identity.
‘That’s only a guess, mind you,’ said Forrest. ‘We’ll obviously know soon enough.’
‘OK,’ said Hanlon. ‘What else, James?’
‘There are also some crude designs scratched on the floor and the remains of a chicken and a couple of candles. And a crucifix. That would seem to indicate some kind of occult mumbo-jumbo, some sort of ceremony, but…’ Forrest looked at her keenly.
‘But?’ asked Hanlon. They were both thinking of two similar cases. The ‘Adam’ killing in 2001 when the torso of an African boy was found in the Thames — just the torso, no limbs or head. That had been a witchcraft killing, most probably Nigerian. Then, more recently, there had been the murder of Kristy Bamu in London by his sister and her boyfriend. They had accused the boy of Kindoki or witchcraft. Attempts to exorcize him had led to horrific injuries and the boy’s death. Hanlon thought that had been Congolese. African Christianity seemed keen on this sort of thing. While driving through London recently she’d been listening absently-mindedly to Radio Four and heard two African Anglican ministers discussing the existence of witches as a verifiable fact. She’d turned angrily to another station.
Forrest smiled at her. ‘But a cursory examination showed extensive vaginal trauma.’ He sighed. ‘The poor girl was naked, legs splayed so it’s just visual evidence. We’ll know more after we’ve examined her properly but she had been circumcised, the clitoris excised, the labia sewn up. It’s partly why it was so easy to see she’d been assaulted.’ Hanlon frowned. FGM, or female genital mutilation, in her view was not taken nearly as seriously over here as it should be. The French, she knew, adopted a much harder line. There were virtually no prosecutions over it in this country. ‘I’d guess, personally, she was Somali. They’ve got a 98 per cent female circumcision rate. Well, she looks Somali anyway. As I said, it’s early days yet. We’ll know more after we’ve run tests. So I think we’ve got a murdered rape victim, not a witchcraft victim. I think I’m correct in saying that witchcraft victims are usually the by-products of African Christianity, often Congolese or Nigerian, not Islam. Do they have witches in the Qur’an?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Hanlon. ‘I don’t think so. I seem to remember that there’s something about women blowing on knots as a form of sorcery, but I don’t really have a clue. Mind you, I don’t think there’s much about them in the Bible, come to that. Witches, I mean. That hasn’t stopped anyone before, has it.’ Certainly not you two idiots, she thought back to the two men of God she’d heard on the radio. The unspoken implication had been that killing a witch was quite reasonable.
‘I guess not. Well, anyway,’ said Forrest, ‘I think it was just staged. The body made to look like a witchcraft killing. I think it’s old-fashioned rape, murder. But, of course, that’s your job, not mine. I just do forensics.’
Hanlon nodded. She could see that if the motive was sexual rather than occult it would widen the search parameters hugely. There were only a certain number of Kindoki practitioners in London, but a vast pool of potential rapists. Several million.