Death Row - Mark Pearson [71]
‘Don’t call her my girlfriend – it’s not funny, boss.’
‘Is any of this funny? We’ve got an attempted murder of a serial child killer and rapist, a boy abducted from the same street he took those children from all those years ago, and now we have the head of a bodiless nun placed on a church altar a scant hundred yards from where the boy was taken. What the hell’s it all about, Jack?’
‘She’s not a nun, she’s a church cleaner.’
‘She was as bald as a billiard ball, so she’s either a nun or the nutter cut off her hair before cutting off her head. Any way you slice this cake, Jack, it’s not looking too tasty.’
‘Some killers do take trophies, you know that, Diane.’
‘Yes, of course I know that.’
‘Especially if there is a sexual element.’
‘A sexually abused nun. Who in hell are we dealing with here?’
‘Lots of women shave their heads for all sorts of reasons.’
‘Yeah, maybe. But their heads don’t turn up on the altars of Catholic churches, do they?’
‘No, they don’t.’
Delaney looked across as Sally Cartwright came into the room, her expression serious. ‘Sally, what’s going on?’ he asked.
‘You are not going to believe this, sir,’ she said, her face as white as a snowdrift.
*
The Waterhill estate was a mile away from the Whitefriars Hall of West London University, but it might as well have been on a different planet. An ugly conglomeration of high-rise buildings centred amidst a sprawl of roads and tarmac car parks. A place where the elderly didn’t go out after dark and the sight of a burnt-out car was as commonplace as the sight of a Chelsea tractor in Fulham. It was an equal-opportunity estate, though: you were just as likely to be sold drugs, raped, mugged or murdered by a black gang as by a white. There were clear areas of demarcation and, on the drive in, Bennett had flagged several young kids strategically placed to send the signal that the filth had come to visit. Eight years old and they could already tell Old Bill just by the look of them. It was a ghetto, no other word for it, thought Bennett. Like many, many others in a city polluted by its own decay. Being born in a place like the Waterhill was like having your fate marked out for you by a vengeful god, punished for the sins of your forebears. Only it wasn’t God who brought misery and degradation to them and Bennett knew only too well who was responsible.
He looked at the face before him and knew all he had to know about hate, fear, frustrated rage, and the wickedness that lives in some people like breath … like bacteria.
Adam Henson was in his fifties, five foot six tall and as round as he was high, his body mass effectively blocking the doorway to his flat on the ground floor of Carnegie House, one of the six high-rise buildings that formed the nucleus of the estate. He was wearing shiny black slacks, a white shirt, a severe crew-cut and an expression on his face that would curdle milk. Bennett judged by the smell of him that he probably hadn’t washed for several days.
The man crossed his arms and deepened the frown that was creasing his forehead in fat folds of skin. ‘I’ve told you, he’s not in.’
‘You won’t mind us coming in and checking, then,’ said DI Bennett, keeping his voice smooth and affable.
‘Yeah, I do mind,’ said the overweight man, the florid flush rising from his thick neck to his white face like a heart-attack warning, like the spread of red jam on rice pudding. ‘You ain’t got a warrant, you ain’t coming in. Especially him.’ He flicked his head dismissively towards PC Danny Vine.
‘Why? Because I’m black?’ asked the constable, an edge in his voice.
‘An Englishman’s home is his castle – ain’t that a fact, detective?’
Bennett stuck a hard finger against the shorter man’s chest and pushed him back into his flat, following him in. ‘Not on the Waterhill estate it isn’t,’ he said.
‘You got no right.’
‘I got every right. Your son is at liberty on parole, he breaks the conditions of that parole and that makes him a wanted felon. So shut it and get out of our way.’
‘He hasn’t broken any conditions.