and as he walked his bottom swayed like a woman’s.
Maxham folded his hands in his lap. ‘Just going to see what’s what.’
For a few seconds, silence spread through the car. In the front passenger seat Yvonne stared fixedly through the windscreen. The inspector rubbed his fingers on his thigh. Carlow reappeared. He looked paler than ever.
Maxham turned his head towards Sally. ‘You sure you’re up to it? Still time to change your mind.’
‘I’m quite sure.’
‘We can wait till your husband –’
‘No.’ My baby. ‘Can we get it over with?’
Maxham nodded. The three of them got out of the car. It was suddenly cold: the wind funnelled through the cul-de-sac and escaped into the dull, grey sky. Sally forced herself to look away from the porch. She noticed that the gap between the railings and the church had silted up with a thick mulch of empty lager cans and fast-food wrappings, and that the gate at the north-west corner guarded the entrance to a narrow alleyway between the north side of the church and the adjacent building.
According to a notice on the wall, the Anglicans now shared St Michael’s with a Russian Orthodox congregation and a Methodist one. Otherwise it would probably have been made redundant long ago. Perhaps that would have been better than this unloved half-life.
Half a life, half a person?
Sally found herself staring at the porch. From what she could see above the screens, it was about six feet wide and nine feet deep; it was covered with a pitched roof of cracked pantiles streaked with lichen and moss.
Maxham put a hand under Sally’s elbow. They walked towards the screen. Yvonne and Sergeant Carlow fell in behind. A one-legged pigeon with frayed feathers hopped across their path. An amputee. To those in fear, creation was nothing but a mass of portents. Sally pulled away from Maxham and thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her long navy-blue coat. They rounded the corner of the screen.
The light dazzled her. For a moment she stopped to blink and stare. Two floodlights gave the interior of the porch a hallucinogenic clarity. The outer gates were open. On either side were benches, with notice boards above. It should have been sheltered in there, but the notices fluttered and rustled in the wind. A photographer was shooting away seemingly at random, the shutter falling in a stammering rhythm like irregular rifle fire.
The little space was crowded. Beside the photographer, another scene-of-the-crime officer was dictating into a hand-held machine. A third was measuring the dimensions of the porch. A fourth man, with a bag next to him, was kneeling in the far left-hand corner. Sally glimpsed shiny black plastic.
‘This is Dr Ferguson,’ Maxham said. ‘Mrs Appleyard.’
The kneeling man half-turned and nodded, acknowledging the introduction.
Sally swallowed. ‘Where –?’
‘Here, Mrs Appleyard.’ The doctor rose to his feet in one supple movement. He was younger than Sally, fresh-faced, with a healthy tan and a Liverpool accent. His eyes slid to Maxham, then back to Sally. ‘Are you sure you want to see this?’
‘Yes.’ With an effort she kept her voice low, concealing the scream inside her head.
Ferguson nodded. ‘Over here.’
He gestured not as Sally had expected towards the black plastic on the floor behind him, but to a plastic sheet on the bench on the left. Two L-shaped ridges showed underneath in relief, each about twenty inches long. Automatically Sally looked up, unable to keep her eyes on the two ridges. She examined the notice immediately above, noted with furious concentration the yellowing paper, the nearly illegible typed letters and the circular rust stains left by vanished drawing pins.
She was aware that Maxham and Yvonne had moved a step nearer and were now standing directly behind her. The other police officers had stopped what they had been doing. The doctor was watching her, too. All of them were in position, she realized, ready to catch her when she fainted. Ironically, the thought braced her.
‘You’re ready?’
Ferguson drew back the plastic sheet. Beneath was a transparent plastic bag with a neatly written tag. The bag contained a pair of small, white, woollen tights with ribbing on the legs. For an instant they looked as if they had been stuffed with kapok like cuddly toys. The tights were lying in a reddish-brown puddle of blood. Sally compressed her lips and swallowed. She thought of meat from a supermarket defrosting on its plastic tray. Blood need only be blood: nothing more, nothing less: largely composed of water, a means of supplying living tissues with nutrients and oxygen and of removing waste products. Once separated from the pumping heart, it was nothing but a reddish-brown liquid.
Drink ye all of this; for this is my blood.
‘Mrs Appleyard?’ Ferguson murmured. ‘Steady, now.’
‘I’m fine.’
The waist of the tights lay flat against the plastic. There was no kapok in there. The blood was thickest from the top of the thighs to the waist of the tights. You could no longer see the whiteness of the wool.
O Lamb of God –
Sally’s eyes travelled down the length of the legs to the feet. The feet were wearing miniature red cowboy boots. They were dainty things, the leather supple, a delicate pattern stitched in black thread at the ankles. In the toe of the nearer one was a shallow cut about half an inch in length.
You naughty girl. Have you any idea how much those cost?
‘The ankle boots are Italian.’ As Sally paused, she heard a faint, collective sigh behind her. ‘They’re made by someone with a name like Rassi. I bought them at a shop in Covent Garden about two months ago.’ The boots had been an extravagance that Sally had been unable to resist. She had put towards the cost the money that David Byfield had sent for Lucy’s last birthday. Michael had been furious. ‘I wrote Lucy’s name on the back of the maker’s label.’ Not the sort of boots you could afford to lose, she had thought. ‘As for the tights, I’m pretty sure she was wearing ones like that on Friday. It’s hard to be absolutely certain because of the blood.’
Lucy’s blood. Oh Christ – can’t you stop this?
They had known what Lucy was wearing, down to the maker’s name in the boots. But they needed to be sure. Sure? Gingerly, Sally stretched out her hand towards the two legs.
‘Mrs Appleyard –’ the doctor began.
Sally ignored him. She touched the leg very gently with the tip of the index finger of her right hand. ‘It’s icy.’
‘It may have been deep-frozen until recently.’ Maxham’s voice was harsher than usual.
‘Like the hand they found in Kilburn Cemetery?’
‘Yes.’
What struck Sally now was the silence. Here they were in one of the world’s great cities, in the middle of a pool of silence. There must have been at least a dozen police officers within thirty yards and they all seemed to be holding their breath.
Dear God, the pain. Had they had the decency to
