‘You don’t really believe Ben had anything to do with Liam Dunne’s disappearance, do you?’ Easton asked as Dani started the engine and pulled out of the parking space.
‘Why not?’ she said.
‘Because it’s…’
‘It’s what? A coincidence? It’s ridiculous?’
‘Both.’
‘I would have said the same thing years ago. How could I ever have imagined that my own twin brother would kill Alice, kill O’Brady and the others. Could have tried to kill Gemma and me. But he did. The simple fact is that Ben isn’t like you and me.’
Though Dani shivered at that thought because not for the first time it brought her back to the same old question: why was Ben, her twin, a killer? Did the same defects of mind that he suffered from affect her too?
‘I’m just saying,’ Easton said, ‘I think you’re taking a leap. Don’t bite my head off when I say this, but it’s almost as if you’re forcing things to fit. Curtis. Now Dunne. Anything that goes wrong anywhere near your brother and you try to make—’
‘But why do things keep going so wrong around Ben? To me it all being down to coincidence is far more unlikely.’
She glanced over to Easton and could tell he was wholly unconvinced.
‘Ben’s got form for this. Seeking revenge. Getting dirty people to do his dirty work. It doesn’t change the fact that we still believe Victor and his gang are neck-deep in this too. But I can’t not properly explore Ben’s role.’
Despite her words, though, Easton had done a good job of throwing some doubt into her mind. Was she blinkered when it came to Ben? Desperate to find blame in him, however tenuous, and regardless of what evidence and logic were telling her?
She was still pondering that when a call came through to her phone. She recognised the number. The morgue. She clicked on the dashboard to accept the call.
‘Detective Stephens, it’s Jack Ledford,’ came the grainy voice through the car’s speakers.
‘Morning, Jack.’
‘I have Saad Tariq with me here too.’
‘OK?’
‘We were going over the results of the PM for your Jane Doe, and, well, you’ll probably want to get yourselves over here.’
The brief call had left Dani as perplexed as she was intrigued. The morgue was hardly the usual place to find Tariq, an FSI, who was more usually locked away in a lab. But then this case was hardly usual.
As ever the concoction of bleach and death stuck in Dani’s nose as soon as she’d entered the building, and the nauseating mix intensified with each step that she and Easton took towards the theatre.
‘I wish I had somewhere else to be,’ Easton said.
Dani didn’t say anything, though she kind of agreed. There were two parts of her job she really didn’t like, and both involved standing over dead bodies: murder scenes, and post-mortems.
Dani knocked on the door to the theatre then stepped inside to see Ledford and Tariq across the room, standing by a gurney which had a white sheet over the top.
They both turned around.
‘That was quick,’ Ledford said as he pushed his glasses further up his nose.
‘You said it was important.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not sure I exactly did, but I’m sure it is.’
Dani frowned at that comment, but didn’t say anything. Why was he always so obtuse?
‘I actually completed the PM yesterday evening,’ Ledford said, ‘but I wanted to run a couple of things past Tariq before I came back to you.’
Ledford reached out for the sheet and was about to pull it down to reveal Jane Doe’s mutilated corpse when Dani held her hand up to stop him.
‘Actually, rather than the PM, I’m more interested in what Tariq has found.’
Ledford looked a little put out by that. ‘Very well.’
‘Though we will still need to see the body, I’m afraid,’ Tariq said.
On cue Ledford pulled the sheet back and Dani instinctively glanced to the washed-out body before looking back to Tariq. Even the short glimpse filled her with a sense of torment at seeing the remains of the young woman, so vulnerable.
‘We went over the van she was found inside in painstaking detail,’ Tariq said, ‘but you also asked us to consider the body too. As you know, we can get residue transfer onto skin, so we were looking in particular for any foreign fibres, substances or prints. Surprisingly, we actually found quite a few fingerprint fragments around her body. Mostly around her genitals, her breasts and her hips.’
Dani squirmed at the connotations of what that meant. ‘But we also found fingerprint fragments around here…’ He reached out with a gloved hand and pulled up Jane Doe’s right arm to reveal her armpit.
‘The same fingerprints all over?’ Dani asked.
‘Unfortunately we’re only talking about fragments, but I don’t think so. The ones around her body were more developed, and given their locations…’
He handed Dani a sheet of paper with a diagram of Jane Doe’s body with red circles to highlight the areas of interest.
‘It would seem to me they were probably transferred during a sexual encounter,’ Ledford said, filling in the obvious blank. ‘Which is also consistent with the fact that semen traces were found on her hand and her breasts,’ Ledford said.
Dani’s insides twisted.
‘But the ones under the arm, well—’
‘It was from the body being moved,’ Dani said. ‘But you didn’t see anything like that on her ankles?’ Dani could picture the scene. The two burly men from the van, one holding her ankles, one holding her under the arms as they tossed her onto the plastic sheet to roll her up.
‘We didn’t, but—’
‘Latex?’
‘There is residue on her ankles, not from latex gloves, but perhaps from a well-worn leather glove. Nothing unique enough that we can trace with any accuracy, but it at least gives us a glimpse of what happened to her.’
‘What about the semen and prints?’ Dani said. ‘Any matches?’
‘No to the semen. No to the prints from her apparent sexual encounter,’ Tariq said, ‘and a kind of a no on the other.’
‘Kind of?’
‘They are only partials, but…’ He paused as he flicked through his papers. He pulled out two sheets and put his clipboard down.
‘If you remember from Clara Dunne’s home, we had partials there too,’ Tariq said.
‘Yes,’ Dani said. ‘Transferred from a glove, we thought.’
‘These partials don’t directly match those. Which could be for more than one reason. Obviously it could be different people, or it could be different fingers. Or even just different parts of the same finger. And if you look at them like this…’
He moved over to Dani and held the two sheets out for her, before drawing one over the other to give a faint superimposition.
‘If you look at the lines, it’s possible this is the same finger,’ he said. ‘A thumb, more precisely, given the apparent shape, if you carry on the pattern.’
‘So we can link trace evidence at Clara’s home directly to Jane Doe?’ Easton said.
‘It’s certainly a possibility. And there are clothing fibres in the van which are a very close match to those found at Clara’s home,’ Tariq said.
Everyone went silent for a few moments, Dani trying to think over the revelation. It was a huge finding, one which provided further clear evidence that the two men who had been transporting Jane Doe’s body had also been in Clara Dunne’s home.
But had those men actually killed Jane Doe? And Clara?
Dani looked over to the body again, and as much as she didn’t want to, she tried to imagine the woman’s final moments.
‘Nothing was found in the house in Wednesbury, though?’ Dani said.
‘No trace of Jane Doe,’ Tariq said. ‘The room you highlighted there to me had been sanitised really quite significantly. There was nothing of anything in there.’
Dani nodded. ‘OK. So here’s what I think happened,’ she said. ‘We’ve already hypothesised that our victim was likely a sex worker. Probably against her will. And there would have been others in that house, too, who we still need to find. For whatever reason, Jane Doe was attacked. Perhaps in a violent encounter with a punter. She died at his hands.’ She looked to Ledford. ‘Blunt force trauma or strangulation?’
He raised an eyebrow, as if unsure how she’d known. ‘She suffered both, as well as some horrible cuts to her body from a knife of some sort, but asphyxiation was the cause of death.’
He seemed a little disappointed that Dani had determined that without him even getting a chance to go through his PM findings.
‘The two men in the van were called to collect the body, and dispose of it,’ Dani said. ‘This can’t be the first time something like this has happened. The men are professionals, of a sort. Have you run that partial? The superimposed version?’
‘Of course,’ Tariq said. He reached for another piece of paper. ‘And there is a certain amount of guesswork that goes into this, as I’m sure you can appreciate, not just in terms of the orientation of the two fragments, but which finger, on which hand they belong to.’
‘Just tell me. Have you got a match?’
‘But that’s the thing. We have, potentially. But we have more than one possibility. Four people, in the database, to be precise, who the amalgamated print could belong to. And of course, it could even belong to someone who isn’t on record.’
He held the paper out for Dani. She took it and stared down at the basic profiles for each of the four. Name, date of birth, last known address. Her first reaction was disappointment. No Victor Nistor. No Alex Stelea. No name at all that she recognised. But then on second glance her eyes stopped on one of the names. She didn’t know it, but it was the only one that clearly wasn’t anglicised. Silviu Grigore.
She looked to Easton.
‘We need to find this guy. Now.’