Post Mortem

Kate London

• Publisher: Corvus
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781838955885
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782396147
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

Post Mortem is a thrilling and vivid crime novel written by a former detective in the Metropolitan Police's murder squad. If you like Sarah Hillary and M. J. Aldridge you will love Kate London. A long-serving beat cop in the Met and a teenage girl fall to their deaths from a tower block in London's East End. Left alive on the roof are a five year old boy and rookie police officer Lizzie Griffiths. Within hours, Lizzie Griffiths has disappeared, and DPS officer Sarah Collins sets out to uncover the truth around the grisly deaths, in an investigation which takes her into the dark heart of policing in London. Grounded in the terrifying realities of policing a city where the affluent middle-classes live cheek-by-jowl with the poorest immigrants, this is a complex, intelligent, thrilling crime novel by an author who has walked the beat.

19 APRIL

21

The man was heavyset, maybe thirty or forty years old, wearing a parka with a furry hood, paint-stained trousers and trainers. Lizzie didn’t know how she had fallen asleep in spite of the cold, but now she was confused and it was hard to wake. The man was standing over her, looking at her. He shook her shoulder and spoke with a foreign accent, Polish probably.

‘You all right?’

‘Mmm.’

‘What you doing here?’

She was trying to get up, but it wasn’t easy. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m going now.’

He reached down and helped her up. ‘You cold. It’s OK. I give you lift. You want lift? I go for breakfast. You want I buy you breakfast?’

In his van he took off his parka and switched the heating on full.

He said, ‘You sleep in garage, you need keep warm.’

‘Yeah, yeah. You’re right.’

‘Serious,’ he insisted. ‘Is serious.’

She ordered the full English – beans, sausages, fried eggs, bacon, bubble and squeak, the works – and tried to warm her hands with a big mug of milky coffee. At first the sounds of the place were distant, but gradually she felt the volume returning to normal. She was able to notice the pictures of footballers on the walls, the large-breasted woman serving behind the counter. The café, it turned out, was piping hot and smelled of fried meat.

He said his name was Janusz but he didn’t say much else. He got himself a tabloid and leafed through it as if she wasn’t really there. After about twenty minutes he gathered himself together and stood up to leave.

‘You want sleep in garage?’

‘Maybe.’

He nodded. ‘OK. But you need keep warm.’

‘Yes, I get it. Listen, thanks.’

She could not bring herself to relinquish the warmth and comfort of the café. She got her phone out of her bag and considered it for a while. It was, she recognized, another sort of warmth, and equally tempting. Could she perhaps just touch her index finger to his name? Kieran. She imagined him picking her up in the Land Rover. She imagined sinking into the leather seat and driving, driving away. She could picture the countryside, a cottage on a hill perhaps. Dry-stone walls. But she knew this was a fantasy. Her phone would summon police, or Kieran would inform – would have no choice perhaps other than to inform – Detective Sergeant Collins.

He had been her protector before, or at least she had thought so.

After her father’s death, when she had found it hard to do anything for herself, she had stayed at his flat. He had bought her takeaways and cooked for her as though she were ill. He had gone to work; she lay in his bed wearing his old T-shirts and watching black-and-white films on his laptop.

Alone, while he was at work, she had wandered his flat. On the wall in the sitting room was a framed black-and-white photo of a six-year-old girl in a tutu. A skinny girl with fair hair tied up in a bun. Her right foot, clad in a ballet pump, pawed the ground in the manner of a horse before a set of Cavaletti jumps.

His bathroom was pungent with the smells of masculine soap and deodorant. The shelf held two toothbrushes in a cup, one a child’s. Lizzie’s face was pale in the steamy mirror as she brushed her teeth with her index finger.

When her mother had left, there had been no shouting, no door-slamming. Lizzie had come down for breakfast, and instead of being at work as usual, her dad had been there in her mother’s place, making golden toast.

‘This is always my favourite breakfast,’ he had said. ‘I can never have too much of it.’

She was putting her plate on the table, her back to him, when he spoke. ‘Mum’s gone away for a bit. Try not to worry. Everything will work out.’

That afternoon her father had taken her on her favourite outing – the traditional sweet shop with the doorbell that pinged against its taut spring. She had stood at the counter and gazed at the panoply of sweets. Banana and custards, sherbert lemons, rosy apples. Her father bought her a mixed bag of stripy bullseyes, barley sugars and fruit rounders. Lizzie had walked out across the playing fields and sat on the stream’s muddy bank. The sweets were like balls of tangy coloured glass, holding a mystery of sugary dissolution within them, but the bag had tipped over beside her and the sweets rolled down the hill, coating themselves in soil. She left them where they fell, like spilled treasure.

That was all she really remembered of that time. It was like a silence inside her. And then her mother had come back. Lizzie had watched from an upstairs window as her father helped unload her suitcases from the boot of the car. There was a little attaché case, pink leather with rounded edges and a zip.

Kieran, she remembered, had brought her gifts of old-edition Penguins from a local junk shop, and when the clothes she had brought with her ran out, he arrived with pants and shirts as though she were a child who had fallen in a stream.

He came home from work and cast off his T-shirt, kicking it to the bottom of the bed. When he slept, she put her hand against the muscle on the side of his neck where her teeth had left a mark.

He had taken his wedding ring off and driven her to her father’s funeral. She didn’t know what it meant that he was there with her except that, for this moment at least, he was by her side. He sat beside her in the chapel, holding her hand firmly.

Before the funeral, her mother had given her a box of photos. She had taken the lid off and flipped through the images. Her father teaching her to ride a bike. Pagham Beach on a summer day, the sky a brilliant blue and the sun shining off the bonnet of the family Volkswagen. On the front of the order of service had been a picture of her father, youthful, dashing in his army uniform, his dates in italics underneath. She had googled him on her phone but he was not to be found. He had left no mark at all. More obscure than an ammonite, he had fallen to the seabed leaving no trace.

His figure in the coffin had been a simulacrum. Her father was no more there than he was anywhere. Her mother had shown her halting colour-bleached Super 8 film: children in duffel coats at a zoo; her father looking at the camera and then pointing towards the penguins; her mother and father emerging laughing from a house in the rain and running to a car.

As they followed the coffin out into the sunlight, Kieran put his arm around her shoulders. The grave was a deep black mouth. Her sister’s children ran to it as to a party and threw red rose petals on to the descending coffin.

After the burial, they cut across the countryside in Kieran’s Land Rover. There had been a late hoar frost. The fields were white and the branches of the trees were crystalline. The lanes dipped into deep banks and threaded between high hedges from which birds exploded like gunfire. The coverage on Lizzie’s iPhone kept vanishing. The Land Rover showed as a pulsating blue blip travelling through a limitless grey grid, as though what she saw through the windows was a mirage. They could be in a boat on an ocean. They could be travelling over the moon.

Kieran had got a handle on it. He didn’t need the sat nav. Somehow he could follow the hopeless pencil-drawn map on the back of the order of service. He always seemed to know where he was.

He said, ‘Have you got a charge agreed for Mehenni?’

Why, she had wondered, was he troubling her with this now?

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll charge him when he comes in on bail.’

The M40 had sped along, grey tarmac and white lines. She had not seen the landscape flashing by as the sun began to fall in the sky, but rather the memory of learning to ride her bicycle, her father running behind holding the seat.

22

Steve was sliding open the office window to step out on to the low roof for a fag, but he paused when he saw Collins pushing open the door.

‘What did Baillie say?’

‘Yes, he’s agreed to go public that she’s missing. He’s going to do a press release in about an hour. We’re using screen grabs from the hotel CCTV.’

‘Cigarette?’

She glanced at her watch: 7:30. If Arif was on time, he would be with them in half an hour.

‘No, it’s fine. I want to crack on.’

‘We’ve got the subscriber’s check back on the phone number in Farah’s pocket.’

‘And?’

‘It’s a historic number. Belonged to Lizzie Griffiths. She changed it on the thirteenth of April.’

A pause.

‘And were there any phone calls between Farah and Lizzie?’

‘Joe’s checking that now.’

‘OK.’

Collins watched Steve step outside. He leaned with his back against the wall and began to smoke. The crow loitered at a discreet distance, hopping about on the edge of the roof.

She opened the working copy of the tape and slipped it into the player. It was the recording of the radio traffic during the incident; the nearest she could get to the experience of the officers at the time. She closed her eyes and listened, imagining it into life. The traffic over the main channel crackled. Officers cut in with routine requests and were told to move to the other channel. The call came out for the person on the roof. Units to attend. 761 s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents