ELEVEN

LONDON

DETECTIVE-SERGEANT SCOBIE LOOKED AT THE BODY ON THE BED. The wrists and ankles had been bound by a sheet torn into strips. The face had been lacerated, obviously by the bloodstained scissors that lay on the bedside rug. The sheet beneath the body was saturated, dark red turning to brown. Scobie thought of the killer’s sick frenzy, the brutality of repetition. It was hard to tell how many times the body had been stabbed.

He raised his face, gazed at the bedside lamp, stared at the blood-red hieroglyphics inscribed on the shade. The words were easy to decipher because they’d been written with obvious care, as if the killer knew he had all the time in the world to leave his mark. Scobie tried to imagine an index-finger dipped in blood moving across the paper surface of the shade. But some things you couldn’t envisage. Some things were just beyond your grasp.

He turned to the girl with the white make-up and eyelashes so black and thick they might have congealed. She was smoking a cigarette frantically.

‘I came in and I found her like this,’ the girl said. ‘She was just lying there. Looking like that. Oh God.’

‘What’s her name?’ Scobie asked.

‘Andrea Brown, I think.’ The girl spilled ash down the front of her coat.

‘You think?’

‘She used different names. I didn’t know her that well.’

‘But you lived with her?’ Scobie asked.

‘Sort of, yeh.’

Scobie stepped back from the bed. ‘Either you lived with her or you didn’t. Which is it?’

‘We shared, see. We weren’t close, nothing like that.’

‘Does she have family?’

‘I don’t know.’

Scobie, a cop for twenty-three years, looked at the girl’s ashen make-up, which rendered her features masklike. She took a pack of Benson and Hedges from the pocket of her jeans and used the old cigarette to light the new. Her hand shook. She inhaled smoke with a tiny wheezing sound.

‘Where’s she from?’ Scobie asked.

‘She never said. Once she mentioned something about Hove, I don’t remember what. She might’ve lived there, might not. Can’t say really.’

‘You’re a right little encyclopedia,’ Scobie said.

‘Well. I can’t help it if I know nothing, can I? She never talked about family or boyfriends.’ The girl stared at the lampshade and shuddered.

Scobie walked to the window and looked down into the street. This corner of Mayfair, defined by alleys located at the rear of business premises, was shabby. He gazed down into a lane where plastic bags of rubbish lay in a pile. He considered the fact that a mere half-mile from this grubby room a bomb had exploded in an Underground station. There was too much violence in the world. When he was a boy the worst that ever happened was that somebody got their lights punched out on a Saturday night outside a pub after a piss-up.

He returned to the bed. The dead girl was naked. Nakedness always shocked Scobie. Somehow he could handle the dead better when they were clothed. The naked dead had no dignity, especially when they were in the appalling condition of this poor girl. The whole room seemed to vibrate with the drumming reverberations of murder. Scobie imagined scissors rising and falling, tearing flesh, the savagery of it all.

He stared once again at the lampshade, at the crazy writing. Odd – but you couldn’t expect to find reason in this room. ‘That writing mean anything to you?’ he asked.

The white-faced girl shook her head.

‘Maybe one of her customers had a bad turn,’ Scobie suggested.

‘Customers? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Don’t play games with me, love.’

‘You insinuating something?’

Sometimes Scobie had an avuncular manner to which people responded. He put out a hand and touched the girl on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m not wet behind the ears, darling.’

The girl blew smoke at him. ‘I’ve got a lawyer,’ she said.

‘You and half the population.’

‘I’ll call him.’

‘You do that.’

The girl didn’t move. Scobie took out his notebook. ‘Let’s get it down on paper, shall we? What’s your name?’

‘Do you really need to know that?’

Scobie sighed. ‘This is a murder case. I need to know all there is to know.’

‘Sandra,’ the girl said reluctantly.