Murder Club - Mark Pearson [69]
‘Coughing blood can mean an internal injury,’ said Laura Chilvers, looking worried. ‘Something he got as a consequence of the beating he received?’
The registrar shrugged – not disinterested, just tired. ‘It could also mean he has been vomiting heavily recently. Given his condition, it is not an unlikely situation. That can lead to tears in the oesophagus – the throat,’ she added unnecessarily for Delaney’s benefit.
‘But it could be from the beating?’ Laura pressed on, chewing nervously on the corner of her thumbnail. She realised what she was doing and thrust her hands into her pockets.
‘It could be from many things.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Delaney. ‘But we do need to talk to him urgently.’
‘Might I ask why you people are taking so much interest in this particular homeless man? I don’t mean to be rude, but from my experience such people are not usually high on the priority list of the Metropolitan Police,’ said Dr Crabbe.
‘That’s not true,’ said Delaney. ‘But as it happens, this particular homeless man may be the victim of an attempted homicide.’
‘Homeless people get beaten up all the time.’
‘And this one may have seen a murder. Or may have committed one himself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He confessed earlier.’
‘He was rambling, confused. I think he has been suffering from some kind of psychotic fugue, perhaps brought on by the attack. Or exacerbated by it,’ said Laura.
‘I guess we’ll have to find out, then,’ said Jack Delaney.
50.
KATE WALKER SAT at her desk, her laptop computer open in front of her. She should have been responding to about fifty emails that had built up in the day she had been away from the police surgeon’s office. She should have been … but wasn’t.
She was looking to find something to buy Jack Delaney for Christmas. Their first Christmas together. They had gone shopping for presents for Siobhan and he had been as happy as she had ever seen him. Not that she had known him that long. Not even nine months, for goodness’ sake, and here she was living with the man, bringing up his daughter as though her own. And a child they were having together being carried inside her. She didn’t know yet whether it was a boy or a girl, and neither she nor Jack wanted to find out. She figured he would probably like a son. Replace the son that he thought was his when his first wife died. Died when Jack intervened in an armed robbery at a petrol station in Pinner Green. One of the masked men had blasted a shotgun towards him, only it had hit his car instead, critically injuring his wife who was in the passenger seat. She had died later in hospital and they were unable to save the unborn son she was carrying inside her.
Delaney had been devastated, had gone on a four-year binge of self-destruction. Wallowing in alcohol and violence. Functioning as a cop, but only just. When a friend of his, an Irish prostitute called Jackie Malone, had been killed in an attempt to stop the exposure of an organised paedophile ring, it had thrown Jack and Kate together. In more ways than one. Her own uncle, a high-ranking police officer, had been involved in the ring. Luring runaway children off the streets of London under cover of offering protection, whereas in fact the children were being taken to a large house near Henley-on-Thames, where they were subjected to horrific abuse, filmed and in some cases murdered. Jackie Malone’s nephew had been used by Kate’s uncle as bait on the streets and, as far as she was concerned, ex Chief Superintendent Walker could rot in hell. He was never going to see the outside world again, that much was for sure. She had given him a knife scar on his right cheek after he tried coming to her room late at night one last time. If she had been able, she would have taken his head off with it from the neck.
So she and Jack had both been in dark places when they met; she could never have thought they would get together in a million years – but they had, and now they weren’t in those dark places any more. She guessed that’s how it happens sometimes. She