Chapter 1
Ealing, London, 20th June 2011
A human head weighed more than Detective Chief Inspector Calpurnia “Callie” McDonald had expected.
Five minutes earlier, she had pulled on a pair of medium rubber gloves in a searingly bright yellow and started lifting body parts out of the dead lawyer’s freezer. That they were wrapped in black bin liners in no way diminished the grisliness of the task. They were solid and clacked together as she stacked them. When she had finished, seventeen roughly equal-sized parcels formed an untidy pyramid on the floor of the utility room. She closed the freezer door, shutting off the irritating beeping from the temperature alarm.
The packages of – What, Callie? she thought. Human? Meat? They were heavy, anyway. Surprisingly so. Hadn’t she read that somewhere, in a medical journal outside a pathologist’s office? A human head weighed around eleven pounds.
Dreading the next part of the operation, she pulled a box cutter from her jeans pocket and ran it down the freezing plastic shroud of the topmost package.
She pulled the sliced plastic open and gasped.
“Oh, Jesus!”
Looking out at her from eyes like those of a poached fish was the face of Crown Prosecution Service lawyer, Debra Fieldsend. Above the glassy, white eyes, the forehead was cracked open. The massive wound was crusted with blood, which was frozen into obscene red crystals. She pulled the black plastic together again, hiding a view she knew would come back to haunt her.
Reluctantly, she repeated the process with the other sixteen packages, identifying in their turn, the feet, lower legs, thighs, hands, forearms, upper arms, and four grotesquely butchered sections of the torso, the purplish-grey viscera frozen into immobility. Satisfied that she had accounted for Fieldsend’s complete mortal remains, she heaved a sigh and left the room.
In the tiled hallway – oxblood, sky-blue and cream – flat-packed cardboard movers’ cartons leant against a wall. Above them, a coat rack groaned under the weight of Burberry, Armani and other expensive brands Callie would never be able to afford. She took a roll of parcel tape from the bag lying beside them and began to assemble the first carton.
In went one of the larger, cylindrical pieces, followed by what she already knew was the head. She taped the carton shut and began putting the next carton together.
It took her half an hour to assemble, pack and seal the cartons. She’d used nine. When she finished, she pulled out her phone and tried to wake it up with her thumb.
“Shit!” she said to the empty hallway.
She removed the rubber glove and tried again.
“I’m ready,” she said, when her call was answered.
Thirty seconds later, she heard a loud knock at the door. She opened it to a burly man dressed in faded jeans and a dark-grey sweatshirt, a couple of days’ black stubble on his cheeks. He towered above her.
“That her, is it?” he said, jerking his chin in the direction of the cartons, which Callie had lined up in the hallway.
“Yup.”
“Anything missing?”
“Nope.”
“You OK, boss?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Going to hurl?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“OK, good to know.”
He bent to the first carton and lifted it as if it contained nothing more sinister than a table lamp. Ten minutes later, he was slamming the rear doors closed on a white Ford Transit van.
Callie opened a packet of cigarettes as they pulled away from the curb.
“Thought you said you’d quit,” he said, glancing briefly in her direction.
“So did I.”
“Do you mind winding the window down, then?”
Callie put the cigarette between her lips and used her free hand to crank down the window.
“Don’t they have electric windows on these, yet?”
He shrugged.
“Manual gearbox, manual windows. You’re lucky we don’t have to pedal.”
His wisecrack broke the tension and Callie laughed.
“I hope we don’t get stopped by Traffic. Not sure how we’d explain away a dismembered body in the back.”
“Teaching aid?”
More laughter.
With the black humour threatening to engulf them, Callie took another long drag on the cigarette, hoping it would kill off the weird smell of butchers’ shops that lingered in her nostrils. As they turned left out of Corfton Road, a second van was pulling in, metallic grey this time. The driver nodded as they passed.
The traffic between Ealing and the crematorium in Kensal Green was heavy, and it took them just over forty minutes to make the seven-mile journey. The male officer, whose nickname was Titch, passed the front of the building and pulled in at the rear. Here, the ornate brickwork and manicured gardens at the front gave way to a more utilitarian style. Concrete, steel, and barred windows were the order of the day.
Callie pointed at the black-painted window bars.
“What d’ye reckon they’re for? It’s not as if any of the inmates’ll be trying to escape, eh?”
“I think it’s the other way round, boss. Stops the freaks getting in.”
Wondering what kind of person could possibly want to break into a crematorium, and then wishing she hadn’t, Callie climbed out of the Transit’s smoke-fragranced interior.
She rang a bell beside the blue-painted door. Titch was opening the rear doors of the Transit. She heard footsteps. So, a hard floor on the other side. No carpet for the dead and their handlers.
The door opened. She raised her eyebrows. The man facing her was dressed in jeans and a forest-green sweatshirt. Heavy work boots in tan leather emerged from the rolled-up cuffs of the jeans.
“Sorry, this was all a bit short notice,” he said with a small, apologetic smile. “My frock coat and top hat are at the cleaner’s.”
She held out her hand.
“DCI Callie McDonald.”
“Hi. Jack Wilton.”
She turned to Titch.
“This is T—”
She stopped. She realised she still didn’t know the name of the detective sergeant who’d been assigned to help with the cleanup. He stepped forward and held out his own huge hand, saving her embarrassment, though she could feel the heat of a blush on her cheeks.
“Detective Sergeant Tom Collins.”
“Don’t forget the cherry.”
“Yes. Never heard that before. Shall we get going?”
Callie opened the first carton, and the three of them took a plastic-wrapped parcel each. Then Wilton led them into the business end of the crematorium. He put down his package, a thigh, Callie guessed from the heft of it. He opened a metal door to the rear of the furnace, a solid, cuboid construction of sheet steel and cast-iron, and then put the package inside. She noticed with disgust that it had left a dark, damp mark on the concrete floor, and she wrinkled her nose.
Until recently, Debra Fieldsend had been a high-flying lawyer with the Crown Prosecution Service and senior member of a legal conspiracy named Pro Patria Mori. After they’d killed the husband and baby daughter of a Metropolitan Police Service detective inspector, Fieldsend had become first a target and then a victim of DI Stella Cole’s relentless campaign of bloody vengeance.
When all the packages were loaded, Wilton slammed the furnace door shut with a clang that echoed off the room’s hard surfaces. He thumbed a green button set into the wall. The flames, which had been lying dormant below the grille inside the furnace, roared into life, tinting the thick glass viewing window orange.
“How long will it take?” Callie asked Wilton.
“Judging by the amount of, well, you know, the combined weight of the packages, I’d say two hours, but I’m going to allow three.”
“And after that?”
“And after that you’ll have about two and a half kilos of whitish-grey ash. I assume you don’t want it back?”
She shook her head.
“What will you do with it instead?”
He pointed over her shoulder at the open door.
“You see the rose beds?” She nodded. “Nobody round here has better blooms than us.”
An hour later, back in her hotel room, Callie called her boss, Assistant Chief Constable Gordon Wade of Lothian and Borders Police.
“Ah, Callie. How are you?”
“Fine, thanks, Boss.”
“How did it go today? Any problems?”
“No. She’s gone. Apparently onto a rose bed.”
“Aye, well, that’ll be the phosphates in the bones. And the house?”
“The cleaning crew were just arriving as we left. Should be there for another hour or two, then you could eat your dinner off the floor.”
Wade grunted.
“You know, Callie, I never thought when I joined back in the seventies that this was how I’d end up, arranging to cover up a murder.”
“Me neither, Boss. But like you said, what’s done is done. And keeping it quiet is the least worst option.”
“You mean compared to waking up to a headline in the Times that says, ‘Death Squad Conspirator Butchered by Crazed Vigilante Widowed Cop’? Aye, you could have a point. What about the others?”
“A lot easier, thank heavens. Howarth—”
“The barrister?”
“Yes. She appears to have thrown him out of an upper storey window at his chambers. The pathologist’s report indicated his system was flooded with flunitrazepam and alcohol.”
“Sorry, Callie, back up a little. Fluni—?”
“—trazepam. It’s a powerful sedative. Like Rohypnol, the date rape drug?”
“Oh, aye. Carry on.”
“Well, Howarth died instantly. Catastrophic head injuries. It went down as a death by misadventure.”
“And the Indian woman?”
“Hester Ragib was found dead in the bath at a hotel near Paddington Green nick. Six inches of water.”
“Drowned?
“Electrocuted. She was sharing it with a hairdryer. The coroner recorded it as a suicide.”
“So with De Bree dead of a heart attack and Ramage’s death hushed up as a house fire that means there’s only our friend Detective Chief Superintendent Collier left.”
“Him and a few foot soldiers, but with Collier out of the way, they’ll be easy enough to deal with one way or another.”
Callie listened to her boss’s breathing. He had a way of inhaling and exhaling through his nose when he was deep in thought that she and his other subordinates had learned to read. Interrupt his cogitations at your peril.
“Are we doing the right thing, d’ye think, Callie?”
Now it was her turn to pause. Wade had taught her years back that there was nothing wrong with thinking before speaking, even when asked a question by a superior officer. She took advantage of the lesson now. When she eventually did answer, it sounded hesitant to her ears.
“Going public would be a disaster. The media would have a field day. This is the rule of law we’re talking about. If the public learned that judges, lawyers and cops were conspiring to kill people they thought should have been found guilty by juries, well, it would be open season on sex offenders just for starters.”
“I know, I know,” he sighed. “But are we any better? Collier ought to be arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder. Instead we’re using a detective who is plainly mentally unstable as our own one-woman death squad.”
Callie blew out her cheeks and shrugged, even though she knew he couldn’t see her.
“Look, Boss. This wasn’t your decision. It was a political call. This came from the Ministry of Justice.”
Wade snorted. “Aye, and what a very Orwellian name that is, don’t you think?”
“Agreed.”
What neither Wade nor McDonald knew was that as they were speaking, Detective Inspector Stella Cole had just been detained after failing to kill Collier in his own office.
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