What she found was a very small number of the insect first responders – the blowflies, the greenbottles, the flesh flies and so forth. There were plenty of beetles and mites who target fly larvae though – every decaying corpse is also an insect crime scene, I always say – so they had been present at one time, but the larvae hadn’t matured through their three stages to burrow into the ground and become pupae – or if they had, it was somewhere else and they were left behind when the bodies were moved.’
‘What does that mean?’ Derwent asked.
‘It means he kept the bodies until they weren’t usable any more,’ I said.
‘That’s my interpretation.’ Dr Early looked from me to Derwent, eyes bright. ‘The trouble with necrophilia is that it’s so messy.’
I shuddered. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘Toughen up, Kerrigan,’ Derwent snapped. ‘You do need to think about it, because we need to work out where he kept the bodies between the cupboard in his house and when he dumped them here. Not in Dagenham – there wasn’t a trace of post-mortem body fluids from either Willa Howard or Sara Grey, and from what you’re saying, Doc, there would have been a lot.’
‘Absolutely. The body’s own enzymes begin to liquefy the internal organs even without the help of insects. You can slow the process by keeping a body cold, but unless you find some way of mummifying them, you’re going to find they deteriorate.’
‘And there’s no evidence he tried to do that,’ I checked.
‘None at all. Unfortunately there isn’t much evidence of what he did, either. By keeping them until they had completed putrefaction he reduced the chances of anyone literally sniffing them out at the dump sites and he destroyed a lot of the forensic evidence we might have recovered otherwise.’
‘It was all so well planned, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘We only found Willa Howard by chance, and that led us to Sara Grey. Leo Stone doesn’t strike me as a particularly deep thinker but he managed to kidnap women, keep them for as long as he liked, move them without being spotted and then dispose of them effectively.’
‘He’s spent years in prison. He probably spent the whole time planning what he was going to do when he got out.’ Derwent’s mouth twitched. ‘He had all the luck until he got arrested. You’ve got to think it’s our turn to be lucky now.’
Of course, luck wasn’t with us the next day either. The judges’ decision was a foregone conclusion, and everyone knew it, but the tension in the air was as thick as the mist that pressed against the small high windows. The lights were on, the old pearly shades casting a soft glow that fell on the walls of law books, the high wooden bench where three judges sat, sombre in their full wigs and gowns, and on their clerk who was busy with paperwork, his pen racing across the page. It fell on the attentive barristers at their desks in front of the packed benches of the public gallery. It fell on the tiny dock with its over-arching iron bars that separated the prisoner from the rest of us who sat in the courtroom. We were free and he was not.
Not yet.
I sat in the last row of the public benches. Despite its importance, the Court of Appeal was held in a small room, and it was packed. The court reporters were choosy about which cases they covered but this one was a guaranteed front-page splash. A murderer was always news. A murderer of women was even better, especially if the women were beautiful, especially if they had everything to live for, especially if they met a horrible end at the hands of a perverted stranger. But best of all was a gruesome series of murders combined with a miscarriage of justice. That was a story that had everything.
I looked at the man in the dock. Leo Stone, the man who had been haunting my thoughts, a nightmare made flesh. His eyes were closed, his face pale and impassive, his hair dark and greased back from a low forehead. He was tall but gaunt; his skin fell in loose folds from his prominent cheekbones and sagged from his jawline. Often, prisoners didn’t come to the Court of Appeal. It was quicker and cheaper to make them attend by video link, but on this occasion, I could understand why he had wanted to be present. I knew better than to think murderers always looked like what they were but something about Stone’s physical presence chilled me. The words and images from the files I’d read battered the inside of my skull along with a single word: evil.
‘If he’s stuck for cash he can always write the Leo Stone diet book,’ Derwent muttered, leaning over so his elbow pressed against my side painfully. ‘There isn’t a spare ounce on him.’
‘Not the time or the place,’ I hissed. ‘And give me some room.’
Derwent shrugged and folded his arms across his chest, making himself even broader. His knees moved an inch or two further apart, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. I shifted to my right, trying to put some space between his thigh and mine, and collided with my neighbour on the other side.
‘Sorry.’
Godley nodded, preoccupied. Unlike me, he was concentrating on the judge’s speech and sat statue-still. Beyond him sat DCI Paul Whitlock, who was in his late fifties. I’d met him before the hearing started, in the echoing, cathedral-like main hall of the Royal Courts of Justice. He had given me a quick, bruising handshake, without a smile. He had retired after Leo Stone’s conviction, before the crowning achievement of his career had turned into a messy disaster, and he lived on the Kent coast now. I assumed he spent most of his life out of doors because his skin was like old leather. Under his tan, he looked drawn and tired. What we were watching was the dismantling of a case he had built, painfully and in the full glare of public scrutiny. I could imagine how he was feeling.
The words fell from the bench like wood shavings, dry and dusty, delivered in a refined Anglo-Indian accent.
‘It is one of the abiding principles of the British legal system that a jury trial must be fair. A jury must be impartial. They must base their opinions on the words of counsel, on the evidence they hear and on the judge’s guidance. It is abundantly clear that in this case the jury did not do their duty. Rather, they chose to ignore all instructions and plunged into a world of speculation and ill-informed comment, aided by the media’s distorting lens. The duty of a jury is a sacred one. A defendant is entitled to expect that a jury will conduct themselves fairly. Otherwise justice cannot be done. And it has not been done in this case. The appeal is granted. I order that the prisoner, Leo Stone, be returned to prison and a further application be made to the Crown Court for bail pending a retrial.’
A murmur ran through the courtroom. In the dock, Leo Stone opened his eyes for the first time, staring about him as if he had just woken up. His eyes were dark, the pupils invisible. One of the officers with him took his arm, but gently.
‘Come on.’
Stone didn’t move. His eyes scanned the public gallery, row by row, until they stopped. For a moment I thought he was looking straight at me. Then the man in front of me raised a hand to shoulder height: a salute that received an answering nod from the prisoner. Only then did Stone turn, dropping his head and rounding his shoulders as he trudged down the steps to the cells below the courtrooms, where he would wait for a transfer to prison. Freedom was within his grasp but it wasn’t his quite yet.
The judges rose and filed out through a door behind them, and as the door closed the barristers abandoned their respectful demeanour instantly. The juniors gathered up their papers and legal reference books, moving with the speed born of long experience
