Dead Time Page 2

  Big Mikey, Mrs Murphy’s husband – who wasn’t very big at all – was asleep in the corner, a red and white Santa hat on his head. Their son Little Mikey – predictably large – was playing Just Dance on the Wii with his daughter Shavon, who was a year younger than Scout. Little Mikey’s wife Siobhan was nursing Baby Mikey – the latest arrival – while Damon, their middle child, chased a bandy-legged mongrel pup around the flat.

  Mrs Murphy was in the kitchen, next to the remains of what must have been a gigantic turkey. The Christmas tree’s white lights flashed on and off, glittering on decorations of red and green and gold. Shining wrapping paper and already broken and discarded toys were strewn all over the carpet. The little flat was full of a kind of exhausted happiness.

  ‘You’ll have a sandwich before you go,’ Mrs Murphy told me.

  Mrs Murphy was our housekeeper, although that’s a bit like calling Jesus a carpenter. Mrs Murphy held our life together. When my marriage fell apart, and I found myself bringing up Scout alone, it was Mrs Murphy who was always there, always on our side and willing us to make it, happy to help in any way she could. She was the kindest woman I had ever met.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, as Scout shyly approached Shavon, standing quietly by her side as she stomped through the Village People’s ‘YMCA’ with her dad. ‘But thanks for letting Scout hang out.’

  Mrs Murphy shook her head impatiently. She hated me thanking her for her kindness.

  ‘Did they catch that fella yet?’ Little Mikey shouted, glancing over his shoulder as he did the ‘YMCA’ hand movements. ‘I heard another fella had his head chopped clean off.’

  ‘You’ll remember there are children present,’ Mrs Murphy scolded her son.

  ‘That’s what I’m working on,’ I told Little Mikey. ‘So long, Scout.’

  ‘Come back in a thousand years from today!’ she told me, and Scout and Shavon had a good laugh at that.

  Mrs Murphy walked me to the door.

  ‘And how does she like her new bike?’ she said. ‘Red Arrow?’

  ‘It’s a bit big for her at the moment.’

  ‘Ah, she’ll grow into it.’

  When I felt overwhelmed by my parental duties, Mrs Murphy always made me feel that there was no problem that could not be solved. ‘And how did you like your lovely present?’ she smiled. ‘The one that Scout bought you?’

  ‘Nighthawks by Edward Hopper? I love it. Thanks for helping her buy it.’

  Mrs Murphy’s face grew serious as we reached the front door. At first I thought it was because of the murder that had happened right outside our homes. But it was something else.

  ‘And when do you get your break?’ she asked me.

  ‘As soon as this is sorted,’ I said.

  It should not have taken me an hour to get from Smithfield to the Westminster Public Mortuary on Horseferry Road but the crowds were out in force on Oxford Street, spilling into the street as they surrendered themselves to the hysteria of the sales and the promise of all that useless luxury.

  At the mortuary I quickly changed into blue scrubs and hairnet. Elsa Olsen, my favourite forensic pathologist, was waiting for me down in the chilly depths of the Iain West Forensic Suite. She was a tall, good-looking Norwegian, and if she had been called to work from some celebration, she gave no sign of irritation.

  ‘Max,’ she said. ‘Now this is an interesting one.’

  She opened the freezer, slid out a stainless steel tray and pulled back a white sheet. I shuddered. They kept the temperature just a shade above freezing in here, but it wasn’t the cold that made my flesh crawl. There was Lenny Lane, a few inches of nothingness between his body and his severed head.

  Elsa picked up Lenny’s severed head, stared at it thoughtfully and handed it to me. The weight felt strange in my hands. All wrong somehow. I had never held a head before.

  ‘It’s heavier than I expected,’ I said.

  ‘Ten or eleven pounds,’ Elsa said. ‘Mostly bone and fluid. The brain is just a few pounds. But what’s really interesting is the cut. Look.’

  I lifted the head and looked at what remained of Lenny Lane’s neck.

  ‘One would expect the margins of excision to be a mixed pattern of cuts with areas of abrasion and notching,’ Elsa said.

  ‘In English, Elsa.’

  ‘It’s very clean. It was a single cut. Most beheadings – the kind that terrorists carry out – are really throat cutting, and they keep hacking away until the head is severed from the body. But this is actually more what you would expect from a decapitation in a road accident.’

  I looked into Lenny Lane’s lifeless eyes.

  ‘So they cut his head off with one blow,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Elsa said. ‘May I?’

  I gave her the head. She squinted at the severed neck and then placed the head carefully next to the body. Some forensic pathologists treated the dead as if they had never lived. Elsa Olsen was not like that.

  ‘The four questions of death,’ she said. ‘Cause? Mechanism? Manner? Time? Cause was the severing of all of the vital structures of the neck. Spinal cord, trachea, carotid arteries. The neck connects the brain to the body and death would have been almost immediate.’

  ‘Hold on. Death would have been almost immediate?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Decapitation causes a quick death, but not an instantaneous death. Unconsciousness takes approximately two to ten seconds because of the circulation of oxygenated blood in the brain.’

  ‘My God, Elsa…’

  ‘There’s some anecdotal evidence that consciousness can persist for longer than ten seconds. Many contemporary reports of the guillotine, for example, report of limbs and eyes moving after decapitation. But most doctors – and indeed pathologists – will tell you that’s impossible due to the rapid fall of intracranial blood. Reflexive twitching is not a credible sign of life. The only living creature that can survive decapitation is the cockroach. And the decapitated cockroach quickly starves to death. But a cleanly decapitated human does not die instantly.’

  ‘So they cut Lenny Lane’s head off and he was actually alive for those final few moments…’

  ‘That’s right, Max. Shall we move on? Mechanism must have been something incredibly sharp, delivered with enormous force. Manner was homicide.’ A wry smile. ‘Very few suicides by beheading, and even fewer beheadings from natural causes. As I said, this is what a decapitation in a car crash looks like. Time was between one and two a.m. on the twenty-sixth of December. There is no great mystery here. Apart from the fifth question of death.’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  Elsa Olsen slid the steel tray holding Lenny Lane back into the freezer.

  ‘But I leave that to you, Max,’ Elsa said. ‘And to them.’

  Beyond the large observation window of the Iain West Suite, I could see DCI Flashman of New Scotland Yard and his MIT putting on their blue scrubs and hairnets.

  I got out of there without them seeing me.

  As I walked the short distance from the Westminster Public Mortuary to the Black Museum at Scotland Yard, all I could think of were those final few seconds when Lenny Lane had stared into the faces of the men who had cut off his head.

  The Black Museum is in Room 101 in New Scotland Yard and it is where the Metropolitan Police remembers its bloody history.

  The Black Museum looks like a car boot sale of deadly weapons. Many of the weapons on display were used to kill members of the public or the police. There are firearms of every description, from derringers hidden in Victorian walking sticks to submachine guns. But today I was interested in something that could remove a man’s head with one blow.

  Sergeant John Caine, the keeper of Room 101, considered the file of 8 × 10 photographs I had brought from the Iain West Suite.

  ‘What can do that, John?’ I asked him.

  ‘Lots of things,’ he said, taking a sip of tea from a mug that said THE BEST DAD IN THE WORLD. ‘Most of human history has been spent ma
king weapons that can do that to a man.’

  ‘You ever cross paths with Lenny Lane?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I heard of him, of course. Drug dealer. The first and the biggest. Ecstasy by the lorry-load. By the container-load. Started out in a toilet on the Goldhawk Road, didn’t he?’

  I nodded. ‘A pub called Faces. Ended up buying it.’

  ‘And still worked the door.’

  ‘He was a bouncer at a pub he owned?’

  ‘Lenny fancied himself as a bit of a hard man before he got put away. A martial artist – in his imagination. The Bruce Lee of Shepherd’s Bush. Married a very pretty girl, as I recall.’ Sergeant John Caine shook his head at the grisly photographs. ‘Former actress. Or at least she did a few commercials. They spent a lot of that drug money on a big house in Chelsea. And now Lenny Lane’s come to a sticky end. Wow – what were the odds of that happening?’

  John showed me an eighteenth-century cavalry sword taken from a gang of twenty-first-century Somalians. And then a short, thick Chinese sword decorated with Buddhist emblems confiscated from Triads in Chinatown. And then a cutlass that had once done service for Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

  ‘There’s too much,’ I said.

  ‘We haven’t even had a look at the axes yet,’ John laughed. ‘Want to have a look at some axes?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘What about truncheons?’ I said. ‘You got any of those old-fashioned wooden truncheons?’

  ‘Should have a few,’ he said. ‘For most of the Met’s history, we used wooden truncheons rather than a baton.’

  He showed me a table stacked with truncheons. Some of them had leather straps, some of them had rope handles and many of the older, Victorian truncheons were painted black and decorated with gold crowns and laurels. Any one of them looked like the kind of hard-wood club that put me on my knees.

  I felt the back of my head start to throb, and remembered the small, sweet revenge of sticking the broken bottle in the fake cop’s leg.

  ‘He shouted something at me,’ I said. ‘Something in a language I didn’t understand.’ The strange words were just out of reach. ‘But I’ve no idea what it was.’

  ‘Any of these truncheons ring a bell?’ Sergeant Caine asked me.

  I shook my head. ‘Not really, John.’

  ‘But you would know him again?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes. He’ll be limping.’

  4

  There was music playing in Lenny Lane’s home.

  Soft, ethereal music, full of tinkling temple bells and the sound of the sea, music that slowed your heartbeat and made you think of empty Asian beaches at sunset. The music went well with the room, where gold Buddhas sat in dim alcoves looking wise, and the floor was carpeted in soft Japanese tatami mats.

  The housekeeper, a short, sturdy Southeast Asian woman of around fifty, had made me take off my shoes at the door. At the back of the garden I could see a man chopping at the bare branches of a cherry tree. You could almost forget that you were in Flood Street, Chelsea, where prices for a house like this started at around ten million.

  Big money in making Ibiza dance, I thought.

  The housekeeper frowned at me as I crossed the room and picked up the open CD cover by the sound system. Mind, Body and Soul, it said, next to a picture of a beautiful woman sitting cross-legged on the cover, her eyes closed in a state of blissed-out enlightenment.

  ‘I don’t know what you want,’ said the housekeeper, not very friendly. ‘Mrs Lane – she already talked to the police.’

  I gave the housekeeper a reassuring smile. She was small and tough inside the grey housecoat she wore. They liked the help to dress the part in this neck of the woods.

  ‘The big man?’ she said. ‘With the yellow hair?’

  ‘DCI Flashman,’ I said. ‘Yes, he’s the SIO – the detective in charge of the investigation.’

  The housekeeper narrowed her eyes. ‘Then what are you doing here?’

  ‘I have some questions of my own,’ I said.

  Wendy Lane came into the room.

  She was a slim, good-looking woman who was probably around forty but looked ten years younger. Her light brown hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. She was dressed as if for a yoga class – baggy white leggings and neatly laundered T-shirt. Her feet were bare and her face was shockingly pale. She held out her hand and I shook it, feeling the coolness of her skin and thin bones that were as delicate as a bird’s.

  ‘Mrs Lane,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’

  I told her my name and showed her my warrant card, which she looked at for just long enough to be polite, her hands gripping each other and her tongue touching her lips, as if she was wound tight with an anxiety that putting the Mind, Body and Soul CD on repeat play would not cure. Although I knew that every brick of this house had been bought with drug money, I felt a surge of human sympathy for the woman.

  ‘I know you’ve already answered some questions for DCI Flashman,’ I said.

  She raised a hand. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind how many questions I answer. I’ve just lost the love of my life. I want my husband’s killers found. Shall we sit? Do you mind the floor?’

  We sat down on the tatami mats, a small coffee table between us, Mrs Lane easily folding her limbs into a comfortable cross-legged pose, and me getting down on my butt with slightly less grace.

  ‘Ratana,’ she said to the housekeeper, and there was money in her voice, and the habit of having her wishes immediately carried out. ‘Would you bring us some refreshment?’ She looked at me. ‘Green tea? I’m afraid I never have caffeine, sugar or milk in the house.’

  ‘Green tea is fine, thank you.’

  Ratana disappeared, and I wondered about Wendy Lane. Her voice had all the sense of entitlement of any Chelsea lady of the house, but when she said the name of her housekeeper – Ratana – there was something behind those triple vowels that made me think of sink estates in the poorer, flatter parts of Kent and Essex, where the only bright lights are from the oil refinery on Canvey Island. Wendy Lane had come a long way to Flood Street.

  ‘You found him,’ she said, and it wasn’t a question.

  I nodded. ‘The murder happened directly below my home.’

  ‘It must have been … unspeakable.’

  I nodded. ‘Who would want to kill your husband?’

  But she was shaking her head, suddenly beyond speech, and I left her alone for a while as my eyes drifted to the three photographs that were placed on the coffee table.

  Mr and Mrs Lane on their wedding day, grinning inside a blizzard of confetti on the steps of the Kensington and Chelsea Registry Office, both of them with hair like Princess Diana. And a photo of them in a bar with a tropical sunset waiting outside, tanned and happy, wrapped in each other’s arms. Maybe Ibiza, I thought.

  And the third and final photo.

  Lenny and another man in karate kit, both of them wearing black belts, both of them smiling for the camera as they bowed, their hands pressed together. Lenny’s companion was huge, but it was the face that you noticed most. It was a massive slab of a face, too large for his body, and too large for his smile, which revealed rows of pearly white teeth, small and neat.

  ‘I know what your husband did for a living, Mrs Lane,’ I said, and I watched her stiffen. ‘And I know why he did a five-year stretch in Belmarsh. But I have no idea how active he was in that world.’

  She shook her head. ‘Lenny didn’t discuss his business affairs with me. He always said – right from the start, when I first met him – that it was best if I didn’t know. But he had no intention of going back to prison.’

  She paused as the housekeeper came back into the room and placed a tray before us. Green tea for two and two small plates of grilled morsels of meat on a stick.

  ‘You already answered question,’ the housekeeper reminded her.

  ‘Thank you, Ratana,’ Wendy Lane said. ‘That will be all.’

  The hous
ekeeper scowled at me and left us alone. Wendy Lane closed her eyes and she seemed to be listening to the music. It sounded like choirs of angels and a bit of birdsong to me.

  ‘I know Lenny wanted to change,’ she said. ‘I know he wanted to be free of that world. Prison changed him – it’s a horribly dehumanising experience being locked away behind all those doors, all those walls. It takes something away from you that should never be taken away from anyone. Do you know what I’m trying to say?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I had always felt the same way inside a prison. It was a kind of claustrophobia that you felt could kill you.

  ‘Oh, I know what he did,’ she said. ‘And I know what he was. But he paid the price and he’d had enough.’

  ‘So Lenny wanted to get out of the game?’

  She nodded. ‘I can’t give you the details – I wish I could – but I know that there were old business associates who did not want him to retire because it would have had a negative impact on their own businesses.’

  Her eyes fell to the coffee table and I thought I saw her glance at the photograph of the two men in a karate dojo.

  ‘Will you have some turkey satay?’ she asked me.

  ‘Turkey satay?’ I said. ‘That’s a new one on me.’

  I made no move towards the turkey satay.

  ‘Ratana does her best at Christmas,’ she said, and almost smiled for the first time. ‘But she’s Thai. From Phuket. And Christmas is not really part of the Thai tradition.’

  I watched Wendy Lane smile indulgently at the turkey satay. I sipped my green tea. It was boiling and I put it back down.

  ‘Who’s the other man in the photograph?’ I said.

  ‘What photograph?’

  ‘This photograph right here. Your husband in his karate uniform. Who’s the man with him?’

  ‘Goran Gvozden,’ she said. ‘He owns the dojo where Lenny trained for years.’

  I looked at the man with his great slab of a face and his small white teeth.