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The Watcher
‘Here or somewhere private?’ Jessie asked, sensing that whatever Workman wanted to talk about didn’t relate to the case.
‘Good morning, ladies.’
Is it? ‘Morning,’ Jessie replied, shifting back against the wall to let Arthur Lawford and another man from the incident room meeting, who she hadn’t been introduced to, walk past.
‘Private. Do you mind?’ Workman replied, when the men had disappeared through the swing doors at the far end of the corridor.
‘No, of course not.’
‘I wanted to ask you a favour,’ Workman said, as the door to the ladies’ toilet shut behind them.
Jessie, backed up against the row of sinks, nodded. ‘Ask away.’
‘It’s a big favour and it has nothing to do with work. I know that I shouldn’t ask, given how much you’ve got on with the case, but I can’t think of anyone else to turn to.’
With the thought of taking more on, Jessie felt a sudden, sharp burst from the electric suit – stress, tension manifesting itself in her old nemesis that she had fought so hard to control. She had no room, in the mess that was the Fullers’ murders, to perform favours, any favours.
‘Anything,’ she said, ignoring the suit. ‘Really, anything.’
Workman smoothed a fidgety hand over her low-maintenance bob. ‘There’s a boy I know. Well, more a young man, really, I suppose. He’s fifteen. I met him at Age UK charity. We both volunteer at a lunch club there on Sundays, serving food to the old folk, washing up, that kind of thing. It’s for people who live alone, to give them company and a decent meal once a week. There’s a minibus that drives around ferrying them back and forth.’
Jessie nodded encouragingly, though she felt anything but.
‘He has a …’ Workman touched her fingertips to her mouth ‘… a severe cleft palate. It was repaired when he was a baby, but he was left with significant facial deformity and a bad lisp. He has been bullied virtually since birth.’ A flickering, nervous smile. ‘Relentlessly bullied.’
Relentlessly bullied.
Jessie tightened her grasp on the steadying edge of the sink behind her back as the electric suit hissed, not for him, but for herself, for her past.
‘He needs help.’
‘What about the NHS?’
‘He’s had everything that the NHS will provide. Mental health among teens is at crisis point and the NHS can’t cope. There aren’t the resources.’
Jessie nodded. She knew about the limits of the NHS mental health provision all too well herself from her own days working as an NHS psychologist before she had left and joined the Defence Psychology Service.
‘The bullying continued the whole time that Robbie was being treated by the NHS psychologist. Allan, his father, said that it was as if the help that Robbie was getting was being undone as soon as he’d received it.’ Workman raised a flat hand, above her head, as if measuring the height of an invisible child. ‘That he could never get any traction, never get to a state where he felt positive enough about himself to stand up to the bullies. He hadn’t had any counselling for eighteen months and he’s gone downhill fast since it finished – become hugely more anxious, terrified about going to school, agoraphobic, and his self-esteem is destroyed. And he’s depressed, clinically depressed. Allan feels that Robbie is slipping away from him, slipping somewhere he may never be able to come back from.’
Jessie nodded, her mind’s eye finding the images of those celluloid corpses papering the walls of the incident room.
Slipping somewhere he may never come back from.
They both knew what Workman was talking about; it didn’t need to be said.
Jamie.
Suicide.
The electric suit hissed and snapped, worse than it had been in weeks, thoughts of her little brother Jamie always a bright red cape to her electric suit’s bull.
‘Robbie asked you for help?’ she managed.
‘Oh, God no, he’s far too proud for that. His father did. He’s a single parent, mother walked out years ago from what I can gather, and he has struggled to bring Robbie up. They can’t afford to move from the area, though the boy has moved schools twice. But with kids linking up on social media, bullied children just can’t get away. It follows them. Robbie’s a fabulous boy – Allan has done a great job – but he can’t do anything about the bullying. He’s a fixer by nature, I think, and he can’t fix this, though he has tried, really tried, for years. He couldn’t stop the bullying and he can’t mend what it has done to his son.’
‘How long have you known them?’ Jessie asked.
‘I met Allan first. He was arrested for assault, four or five years ago now. He pushed some shitty kid at Robbie’s school, a cocky, sporty kid called Niall Scuffil, and Niall’s mum called the police. Niall had broken Robbie’s arm a couple of months before, jumped on him when he was walking home from school. A few other kids were watching, egging him on. Boys and girls.’ Her voice caught on the word ‘girls’ and she pursed her lips, as if she had a bitter taste in her mouth.
If Workman was expecting girls to be above bullying, she would be – clearly had been – sorely disappointed. Jessie knew that well enough from her own teenage experiences that girls could be vile and, from what she heard, many girls now were worse. Tougher, over-sexualized, grown up too soon with all the internal psychological tensions that created.
‘I was the arresting officer. I went around to speak to Niall’s mother, gave her a piece of my mind. She withdrew the charges, but with very poor grace.’
‘And nothing happened to Niall?’
‘It was Robbie’s word against eight others. Though Allan said that Robbie was so ground down by then, he didn’t even complain. He just took it.’
‘Dragging himself through the days probably takes all his energy,’ Jessie said. ‘Just surviving.’ She knew that well enough herself from her own teenage experiences and hers hadn’t been nearly as bad as Robbie’s, from the little Workman had told her.
She grasped the edge of the sink behind her, relishing the feel of the cold porcelain against her skin. She felt nauseous – sick and intensely hot. The tiredness, she reasoned, her sleepwalking episode of last night disrupting what little shut-eye she’d had. Nothing to do with the electric suit scorching her skin, brand-hot with the memories.
‘I can see him later today. After the Fullers’ autopsy.’ The words rushed out of her before her logical mind could intercept them.
‘Are you sure?’ Workman tilted her head, gaze searching Jessie’s face.
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she said, forcing a smile that she hoped didn’t look as fake as it felt. If she didn’t do it today, tomorrow might easily become ‘tomorrow never comes’ and, from what Workman told her, never wasn’t an option for Robbie Parker.
19
‘Remind me again why you want me to attend the Fullers’ autopsy,’ Jessie asked Marilyn, as they walked side by side down the basement corridor that led to Dr Ghoshal’s autopsy suite.
Jessie didn’t know if it was the product of the disturbed sleep or her imagination, overactive in anticipation of what was to come, but the neon-white strip-lit corridor felt freezing cold, as if they were advancing along a horizontal ice shaft. She rubbed at the goosebumps on her forearms.
‘I asked you to attend because this is the first case you will have worked on from beginning to end with Major Crimes and I want you to experience every aspect of a murder investigation,’ Marilyn said, glancing across at her. He raised an eyebrow. ‘And because you might make a useful contribution.’
‘What, like filling Dr Ghoshal’s spotless stainless-steel sink with half-digested bacon sandwich, perhaps?’
Marilyn smiled. ‘You’re making me feel hungry.’
‘Oh God, yuk.’
‘My fridge was empty, so I only managed a couple of well-past-their-sell-by-date Weetabix.’ He clapped a hand on her shoulder. ‘You will thank me for this afterwards.’
‘How did you arrive at that dubious conclusion?’
‘Because I know that you’re the kind of woman who likes a challenge.’
Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t you dare try to dress this one up as doing me good.’
‘You’ll see.’ Marilyn opened the door they had reached and they entered a small room with metal lockers on one side, a fitted bench on the other. A changing room? Or an unprepossessing antechamber into hell, Jessie caught herself thinking.
‘Ready?’
‘You can’t possibly expect an affirmative to that question.’
Suppressing a smile, Marilyn rapped his knuckles twice on the door opposite the one through which they had entered and pushed it open without waiting for an answer. Taking a steadying breath, Jessie followed, stepping into a low-ceilinged white-tiled room, beige vinyl covering the floor and running a quarter metre up the walls, ubiquitous in hospitals and clearly morgues. There were interrogation-chamber-bright lights, a row of metal doors that looked like the entrances to industrial-sized fridges (and probably were) set into the far wall, and three people dressed in green scrubs and clinical face masks occupying the space. Jessie had watched as many crime box-sets as most people, flicking channels late at night and ending up on Silent Witness for want of anything better to watch (though to be fair it did make for great late-night viewing) and the autopsy suite she had stepped into was nothing like the high-tech room that the cast operated in, with its plate-glass viewing gallery and space-age decor.
Dr Ghoshal’s coolly appraising brown eyes met hers over his clinical face mask. ‘Welcome, Dr Flynn. Is this your first autopsy?’
Jessie nodded. ‘Can’t you tell from the colour of my skin, which perfectly matches the colour of your tiles?’ And the colour of the corpses on your dissecting table – she didn’t say it. She had met Dr Ghoshal only a few times, though had gathered pretty much instantaneously that cracking feeble jokes about the contents of his autopsy suite would be strictly verboten.
‘I will make the experience as pleasant as I possibly can then, Dr Flynn.’
‘Thank you.’
Marilyn had admitted, on the walk down the corridor, that the last of Dr Ghoshal’s autopsies he had attended, that of ten-year-old Jodie Trigg, he had excused himself and exited only a few short minutes after he’d entered. He said that he just couldn’t stomach watching that little girl being hacked to pieces, however clinically and dispassionately. He couldn’t recall his excuse, though he knew that Dr Ghoshal would have seen right through it as if through sparkling clean window glass. The weakness of his stomach and of his resolve hadn’t been only because of Jodie’s diminutive age, but also because he blamed himself wholly for her presence on the dissecting table in the first place. If they’d been quicker, made fewer mistakes in the investigation, she would have lived.
‘It’s the first time I’ve ever walked out of an autopsy in my twenty-five-year career in the force,’ he had said, with a slightly embarrassed shrug.
Glancing over at Marilyn now, Jessie saw that his expression was stone, his gaze focused unwaveringly on Hugo Fuller. He looked as if he would very comfortably be able to see this one through. She wished that she could claim the same. She still hadn’t looked directly at either body, had just glimpsed them through the comforting opaqueness of her peripheral vision.
‘Let’s start with Mr Fuller, shall we,’ Dr Ghoshal said.
From the corner of her eye, Jessie saw Marilyn step forward to take up a sentry position by Hugo Fuller’s feet. She forced herself to look at Fuller directly for the first time, at his face, at the pale, naked slackness of his body. Her gaze skipped beyond him, to Claudine. Despite the severity of Fuller’s injuries, the ravaged pits of his eyes, the gouges carving his face, he was easier to look at than his wife. Her corpse was so alabaster pale that Jessie could almost have convinced her brain that Claudine was carved of marble, not made of flesh and bone. But the expression on her face, in death, held a depth of sadness that was heartbreaking. What had Claudine been thinking about when she died? Had she been thinking about the loss of her own life? For some reason, perhaps just a fanciful one, Jessie thought not. Her mind found the photographs lining the mantelpiece – the only photographs – in that depressing mausoleum of a house, of Lupo, Claudine’s baby left behind, no one to care for him or to love him. Had that been her final thought? Jessie was sure that if she had been Claudine, it would have been hers.
Her gaze moved back to Hugo Fuller and she stepped forward as Dr Ghoshal had instructed, taking up a position by Marilyn’s side. Perhaps it was because she knew him to be a shit, suspected him to be responsible for both his own and his wife’s murders, that she didn’t feel as upset as she had expected to.
‘Shall I begin?’ Dr Ghoshal asked.
‘Yes,’ Jessie answered, with only a tiny waver in her voice.
The noise of Dr Ghoshal’s scalpel slicing through Hugo Fuller’s skin was, to Jessie, lions tearing a zebra’s flesh from its bones. The sound of him methodically carving off the top of Hugo Fuller’s skull with the circular reciprocating saw, the sear of a diamond blade through steel, even the low, monotonous hum he was making – ‘his concentration hum’, Marilyn had warned her – like a hive of furious bees. Her stomach felt as if it was filled with bubbling acid that threatened to surge up her throat. She cast her gaze around the white-tiled autopsy suite, until it alighted on a stainless-steel sink behind and to her right. Five strides, a couple of seconds.
‘How did he die?’ Marilyn’s voice pulled her back.
‘Devastating trauma to the brain,’ Dr Ghoshal said.
‘Through one eye?’
‘A single stab wound to the brain can be survivable, DI Simmons,’ he replied, in his perennially prosaic tone.
The man with the nail gun, Jessie thought. And, far more importantly, Callan. She still didn’t know the contents of that letter from his neurologist, still regretted letting her obsession with privacy trump her curiosity.
‘Two stab wounds, however,’ Ghoshal continued. ‘More challenging. And once the instrument was in Mr Fuller’s brain, it was moved around – waggled, for want of a better word. Your man was determined to kill.’
‘What instrument was used?’
‘A knife or skewer perhaps, narrow, thin-bladed, not serrated, driven through each eye socket, into the brain.’
‘Eye socket?’ Marilyn asked. ‘You mean eyeball? Through his eyeballs?’
Dr Ghoshal’s eyes rose fractionally ceiling-wards, enough for both Marilyn and Jessie to clock the movement. ‘Eye sockets, DI Simmons,’ he repeated. ‘The contusions to Mr Fuller’s face, the mutilation to his eyeballs, occurred ante-mortem. I wouldn’t imagine that there was much of his eyeballs left when he was finally put out of his misery with the thin-bladed instrument driven into his brain.’
Marilyn nodded. Jessie took a breath. The bubbling acid was rising up her throat. She gulped, trying unsuccessfully to swallow it down. It would be too humiliating to vomit now. She focused her gaze on the stainless-steel fridge doors across the room, on the three of them in reflection: Dr Ghoshal, a runner bean in his green scrubs, Marilyn, a thin black crow in his suit, she as apparition pale as Fuller’s corpse, even when reflected in steel.
‘Both the mutilation to his eyes and the contusions down his face were caused by the same instrument, I would say,’ Dr Ghoshal continued. ‘And I’m sure that you won’t be surprised to hear that they would have caused very considerable pain.’
‘Torture?’ Marilyn asked.
Dr Ghoshal lifted his narrow shoulders. ‘It would most certainly have been torture for Mr Fuller, though whether torture was the primary motivation is not for me to ascertain.’ His coolly appraising gaze moved from Marilyn to Jessie. ‘What is your theory on the contusions to Mr Fuller’s face and the ante-mortem trauma to his eyeballs, Dr Flynn?’
Jessie forced herself to hold Ghoshal’s gaze, tough given its searching intensity. Was he testing her? Probably.
‘I think that they had two purposes. Firstly, to torture him, cause extreme suffering before his death. But I also believe that they had meaning both for the murderer and for the victim.’
Dr Ghoshal raised an eyebrow. ‘Meaning?’
She nodded, with far more certainty than she felt. ‘My theory …’ she broke off, glancing over at Marilyn, checking in. His face was poker – she was on her own facing Ghoshal. ‘My theory is that the murders are personal and that they are to do with watching.’
‘Watching? Watching what?’ Ghoshal asked.
‘I don’t know. But I do believe Fuller would have known exactly why he was being tortured and why the killer was employing the methods he employed.’
‘Were the contusions done with the thin bladed instrument that was used to kill him?’ Marilyn asked.
Dr Ghoshal shook his head. ‘It’s clear from the pattern of the contusions, which are spaced identically apart from each other, top to bottom, and from their consistent depth, that they were done at the same time, not individually.’
‘With what?’
‘Some type of large, sharp, fork-like instrument, I would suggest,’ Ghoshal said, after a moment. ‘Or—’ he broke off, raising a gloved hand, fingers bent into a claw. He rotated his hand, spreading fingers, moving them closer together. It was the first time since they had entered the room that Jessie had seen him look anything other than entirely unhesitating.
‘Fingernails?’ Marilyn ventured.
Ghoshal shook his head. ‘Human fingernails would be too weak to cause trauma this extensive.’
‘An animal?’ Jessie asked. ‘A dog?’
Dr Ghoshal didn’t answer for a moment. ‘It would have to be a huge dog to inflict contusions this far apart. Also, I don’t believe that a typical dog’s claws would be sharp enough or have enough force to create this depth of trauma.’ He picked up a metal ruler from the tin tray, held it to Fuller’s face. ‘The distance between each contusion is two point eight centimetres. That’s a very big dog. A very big, very strong, very vicious dog.’
‘But a dog could have done it?’ Jessie pressed. ‘A big dog, as you say? A wolf-dog?’
‘Perhaps,’ Ghoshal said finally, his coolly cynical gaze rising to meet Jessie’s. ‘It’s possible. Not probable, not probable at all, but I suppose that it is possible.’
20
Jane Jones, Hugo Fuller’s secretary, lived in north Chichester, on an estate of modern red-brick terraced houses, all bordered by privet-hedge-trimmed front drives and neat, handkerchief-sized back gardens. Workman had telephoned the offices of Winner Fuller earlier and been told that Hugo Fuller hadn’t turned up for work today, though that wasn’t unusual evidently, as he often had meetings out of the office.
She had also been told that Jane Jones, Fuller’s secretary, was working from home today as she was waiting in for a furniture delivery. The man on the phone had sounded young and ‘cat’s away, mice will play’ delighted that neither the boss nor his wing-lady were in evidence today; he clearly hadn’t connected news reports of a couple brutally murdered in their Sussex country house with Hugo Fuller. Marilyn had, so far, managed to hold back the names of the victims from the journalists who had already picked up on the murders, though he doubted that luck would last until the evening news.
‘Jane Jones drives the same car as you,’ Marilyn said to Workman, indicating the navy-blue 2016-registration Ford Fiesta parked on the tarmac drive. ‘Same make, same colour, same age!’
‘And if Dr Flynn was here she would doubtless draw some conclusions about our shared psychology from that coincidence,’ Workman said with a smile.
Marilyn raised an eyebrow. ‘And she’d be right to. You know that we policemen—’
‘Persons,’ Workman interrupted.
Both eyebrows raised, accompanied by a roll of his eyes. ‘Policepersons don’t believe in coincidences.’
A white, oval ceramic plaque painted with a sprig of bluebells proclaimed that this was number fourteen. Raising his hand, Marilyn knocked on the lilac-painted front door. It was answered with brisk efficiency, within seconds, by a woman of a similar age to Workman, mid-forties, dressed in a pair of slim-legged navy trousers and a white crew-neck jumper. Her medium-brown hair was short, cut into as an efficient style as the manner of her door opening – much like Workman’s own hair and door opening. There was, indeed, something very ‘kindred spirit’ about Hugo Fuller’s secretary; the man had had commendable taste, in secretaries at least, Workman surmised, avoiding the amused glance Marilyn shot her as he held up his warrant card.
‘Detective Inspector Simmons, Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes. And this is my colleague, Detective Sergeant Sarah Workman.’
Jane Jones eyeballed them both dispassionately from the doorway. ‘How can I help you, Detective Inspector Simmons?’
‘Could we come in for a moment, please?’
‘If you must.’ She stood back and ushered them into a small, neat sitting room at the front of the house, containing a simple beige leather three-piece suite and a smoked-glass coffee table, the window overlooking the Ford Fiesta and shared patch of grass beyond. Marilyn spoke when they were all seated.
‘I’m sorry to tell you that your boss, Hugo Fuller, was murdered last night.’
If either of them had expected her to expire with shock, they were disappointed. Jane Jones took the news as if Marilyn had informed her that her supermarket delivery was missing a couple of essential items.
‘You don’t look surprised,’ Marilyn said. ‘Or particularly upset.’
Jones lifted her shoulders. ‘Mr Fuller was my boss, not my husband, my brother or son. And I’m sure that it won’t have escaped your notice, even this early in any investigation you might be conducting, that he wasn’t the nicest man.’
‘So, you think he had it coming?’
‘No, I wouldn’t say that. I didn’t say that. I mean, really, does anyone have it coming?’
Marilyn didn’t answer, though if he had his response would have been in the affirmative. Though he put equal effort into every murder he dealt with, give or take, he couldn’t say that he was equally surprised when some people became victims. Certain individuals lived in a world where their getting their comeuppance was only a matter of time.
‘Was he murdered at home?’
‘Yes.’
She suppressed a shudder. ‘I never liked that house.’
‘You’ve been there?’
‘A couple of times to collect things for work. We didn’t socialize, if that’s what you mean.’
‘What didn’t you like about it?’
‘The isolation mainly. And though it was grand, they didn’t have great taste; or I suppose I should say, he didn’t have great taste. It was all his taste of course.’
‘Of course?’
Jones arched an eyebrow. ‘Hugo quite unequivocally wore the trousers.’
‘In what way?’
‘In every way, Detective Inspector Simmons. Work, home, marriage, taste, you name it. I don’t think that Claudine got a look in, poor love. How is she, by the way? Is she holding up OK?’
‘I’m afraid that Claudine Fuller was also murdered.’
Jones’ hand flew to her mouth. For the first time since they had entered her home, she looked shocked and genuinely sorry. ‘Oh, God, no. You didn’t say.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Marilyn said. ‘I should have mentioned that at the beginning. It was a double murder. They were found dead in the early hours of this morning, in the swimming pool complex attached to their house.’
‘I’m so sorry. Poor poor Claudine. I hope it wasn’t too dreadful for—’ She broke off. ‘What a stupid thing to say. Of course it must have been dreadful.’ She met Marilyn’s gaze. ‘Do you have any idea who killed them?’
He shook his head. ‘We’re at a very early stage in the investigation, Mrs—’