Dead Girl Found
Giles Ekins
Contents
Prologue
I. A Message, The Killings And An Investigation
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
II. Two Rapes, A Confession And A Secret Revealed
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Dear Reader
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About the Author
Copyright (C) 2020 Giles Ekins
Layout design and Copyright (C) 2020 by Next Chapter
Published 2020 by Terminal Velocity – A Next Chapter Imprint
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.
For Patricia as always.
Prologue
It was the smell.
The smell of death, the sickly-sweet stench of decomposition oozing through the partially opened door of an attic flat in North London.
PC Eric Samuels, a tall barrel-chested black man with a shaved head, had smelled this deathly odour before, the memory of it never left you. However, probationer PC Wayne Ellsecar had not and turned a sickly pale-white hue, trying not to throw up.
’Listen Wayne, you going to be sick, get outside and do it, OK man?’
Samuels turned to a middle-aged man standing nearby with a key in one hand, a mobile phone in the other. He seemed at ease with the vile smell.
‘Are you the landlord, sir?’
‘Yes, my name is Hussein, I phoned for you as soon as I opened the door.’
‘Did you go inside?’
‘Just briefly. To check. I know what such a smell means.’
‘And how do you know what the smell means, sir, you don’t mind me asking?’
‘I come from Iraq. The smell of dead bodies is not unknown there.’
‘Is everything all right, I mean, I keep on knocking on her door, but she never answers?’ came a voice from below. All three men turned around to look. An elderly lady, leaning heavily on the handrail, was making her way up the stairs.
‘Who are you, love?’ Samuels asked, moving to block her from going up any further.
‘Hansen, Mrs Ivy Hansen, I live down below. I saw you coppers come up and wondered if she’s all right, the girl? I’ve knocked on the door a few times ‘cos I haven’t seen her lately. And then there’s the smell. Must be the drains, I’m going to complain to the landlord, Mr Sodding Hussein, if he ever bothers to come around.’
’Mrs Hansen, hello! And how are you this morning? the landlord called to her.
‘Oh, it is you, ‘bout time you showed yourself, what with that smell an’ all but I’m worried about the girl, is she all right?’ she said as she tried to peer around the bulk of PC Samuels.
‘You get yourself back downstairs, my lovely’ said Samuels firmly. ‘There’s nothing for you up here’
‘Only being neighbourly, I’m concerned. S’only human nature to be concerned for your neighbour, in’t it?’ she persisted, determined not to miss out on whatever it was that was going on.
‘OK, darlin,’ Samuels said, going down to the old lady and taking her gently by the arm. She smelled of musty clothes and body odour overlaid with douses of lavender water. ‘Let me help you back down to your rooms, OK? You get inside, make yourself a nice cup of tea and we’ll be down later for a chat.’
PC Samuels firmly shut the door on her and quickly ran back upstairs.
‘You’d best wait downstairs, sir,’ he said to Hussein, ’this may be a crime scene.’
‘Yes. Understood. I’ll wait downstairs, no doubt you will need details of the tenant. Julia. Julia Jarrett. If it is her, that is.’
Hussein turned away and went down the stairs.
‘You stay here Wayne, ‘Samuels said, ‘no need for us both to go in just yet. You make sure Hussein, or the old biddy don’t come creeping back up again, OK?
‘OK’
Samuels cautiously nudged the door open with his foot. The silence was tangible, the absolute silence of death that seemed to blanket and muffle all other sounds. He slowly walked inside, holding a hand over his. face and nose.
Throughout his 30-year career in the police, he had attended scenes with decomposing bodies; the lonely old pensioner dying alone and unwanted, the homeless guy living under the viaduct and the starved baby of an alcoholic drug addict mother, who in her drunken habituated state forgot that she even had a child.
All these memories flooded into Eric Samuel’s mind unbidden, the stench as always triggering the lyrics of Billie Holliday’s classic recording of ‘Strange Fruit.’ He did not remember all the
words, but two lines always came to him:
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
It was a powerful song about the lynching of negroes in the American South, which as a black man he could readily relate to. but it was not the smell of burning flesh but of decomposing flesh.
To his surprise, the room was larger than expected. To the furthest corner he could see a toilet, wash basin and shower cubicle, screened off by a plastic curtain. There was a kitchen worktop with a sink piled high with food encrusted dishes, an under-counter cupboard and a wall cupboard, cooker and fridge.
The bed was unmade, with grey stained sheets and a pale blue duvet hanging down to the floor. A two-seat settee covered in red fabric, a wardrobe, glass-topped coffee table and a TV cabinet with a Sony TV made up the rest of the furnishings.
The room was laid with a pale grey carpet showing a dark red stain by the settee and clothes and dirty towels were heaped up in one corner.
On the coffee table was an empty bottle of supermarket vodka, coffee mug, an overflowing ash tray, a packet of roll up tobacco, Rizla papers and a box of matches. Also, there was a blackened teaspoon, cotton wool balls, three opened foil wraps with a residue of brown crystals together with a length of rubber tubing and a small plastic bag with some cannabis resin.
All this Samuels took in without consciously doing so but could have given a comprehensive description of the entire room and its squalid contents and drawn a detailed plan of the layout from memory.
The dead girl was lying on the floor in front of the settee, half on her knees, her upper body and head pressing down on the carpet in a grim parody of a yoga position. It was if she had leaned over too far whilst seated on the settee and fallen forwards, falling onto her knees and then head first onto the floor, her arms splayed out to either side of her. Her head was turned to the left, towards the door, as though looking for aid which never came.
She was, Samuels thought, aged about 19 or 20 years. The left half of her head was shaved, and her skull tattooed with a ragged swirling spiral, like some primitive aquatic worm whilst a crown of thorns encircled her neck Her left arm was also heavily tattooed, but the needle marks and veins which stood out stark and blackened from the ascorbic acid used to dissolve heroin could be disguised.
She was partially clad in stained white knickers, a grey T-shirt rucked up over her skeletal thin back revealing a white bra fastened by only one hook and she had a pink sock on her right foot only. There was a butterfly tattoo over her left ankle.
The body was swollen and bloated, the top layer of skin was loose, with a greenish sheen and visible red patches, bloody foam had leaked from the mouth and nose and the skin of her fingertips had turned green, swelling across her nails.
It was winter, and the squalid room was cold, for which Samuels was glad. Had it been spring or summer, the body would have been swarming with blow-flies and maggots. Even so, a few maggots still crawled about the soft flesh of the girl’s lips and he resisted an impulse to brush them off; the development stage of the infestation would assist in determining how long the girl had been dead.
PC Eric Samuels was no pathologist but knew enough to guess that the girl had been dead for over a week, possibly 8 to 10 days.
A syringe, dried blood at the tip and in the tube lay next to her out flung right arm.
‘Overdose’ he said in a quiet sad voice. He was the father of two daughters in their twenties and tried to imagine how it would feel if it was one of his own girls lying there. ‘You poor, poor girl, however did it come to this, eh sweetheart?’
She might once have been very pretty, but decomposition does not beautify the dead. Death did not become her.
He mouthed a silent prayer, took a last look around the room and then went back to the door to call in his partner. ‘Take a quick look, don’t touch nothing, mind, and I’ll call it in.’ he said.
The Coroner would, of course, order an autopsy but Samuels had no doubt in his mind that the girl had died from a heroin overdose.
Part One
A Message, The Killings And An Investigation
One
The town of West Garside lies some 16 miles to the northwest of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, huddled up against and climbing up the lower reaches of the Pennines. nestled into the slopes and valleys and spread along the flatlands of the river Gar. Always growing, the town reached out in timid fingers of development towards big city sister of Sheffield, whose own ribbons of expansion crept ever closer, soon these fingers would touch and forever entwine.
With a population of 137,000 at the last census, the town of West Garside boasts a Collage of Arts, a civic theatre and the newly opened Riverside Mall which had a Marks and Spencer store anchoring one end and an Aldi at the other; the usual high street shops as well as a multi-plex cinema and bowling alley.
The town had a non-league football team, there are seven 24 storey council tower blocks, some clad in the same flammable material as the Grenfell tower in London , scene of the worst fire disaster seen in Britain for many, many, years.
New light industrial factories and wholesale warehouses spread out along the riverside whilst the older parts of the town’s largely defunct industrial area centred around Redemption Island have now been gentrified. Factories and warehouses have been converted into trendy apartments. Restaurants proliferate along with restaurants, specialist coffee shops, gourmet pizza parlours, hand-made burger bars, small craft breweries and bakeries specialising in artisan breads.
The old Duckworth and Dawes Brewery has been demolished and the site re-developed into apartments, the only feature remaining from the brewery is the stone and cast-iron entrance arch with the words ‘Duckworth and Dawes Brewery’ curving in green letters around the top of the arch.
Two local coal mines, Garside Main and Reculver Two closed within a year of the miners’ strike of 1993, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and miners’ union leader Arthur Scargill butted heads and egos,
The steelworks of Alexander and Matthew Ltd are much diminished in size and now concentrate on the production of specialist high grade steel, mainly for the aerospace industry. It had once been the largest employer in town, butit is the West Garside Council that now has the most employees.
In the opinion of Donald Jarrett, the council is full of Trotskyite jobsworths, with leftie-leaning Guardian-reading social workers, cottaging and dogging outreach workers, health and safety zealots, Stalinist traffic wardens and busybodies spying to see if you put the wrong rubbish in one of the different coloured bins.
But at this moment, Donald Jarrett had far more tragic affairs on his mind. All the colour has drained from his face and tears roll down his cheeks, pain-filled tears that he somehow thought would seem disrespectful to wipe away, they were a visual confirmation of his anguish.
He was seated on the settee in the front room of his house, his arms about his sobbing wife Janet. She held her head in her hands, weeping uncontrollably. Inspector David Boothroyd looked on sympathetically. ‘Of all the jobs a copper has to do, he thought, this is the worst; informing relatives that a loved one has died unexpectedly’.
There is no easy way to tell a relative that their loved one has been killed in car crash, suffered a sudden heart attack, had been stabbed to death in a fight at the pub, that their child has been killed playing chicken on the railway lines or that a loving husband has died in an accident at work, the inevitability of sudden death ever present; the Grim Reaper never very far away.
Sergeant Mary Tanner stood at the side of Donald Jarrett, a comforting hand on his shoulder whilst Family Liaison Officer, Kimberly Johnson, sat on the other side of Janet, her arm wrapped around the sobbing, distraught mother of Julia Jarrett, found dead from an overdose in a squalid bed-sit in north London.
‘I really am most sorry,’ Boothroyd said again. What can you say, he thought, however heartfelt your words might be, they’re only platitudes and nothing you say c
an sooth the distress or heal the raw wounds of grief and pain.
Janet looked up at him, her face swollen and red-eyed, clutching at a sodden tissue as though it were a life saver. ‘Is…is there any doubt? I mean, is there any doubt that it’s Julia? Could it be a mistake, mistaken identity?’
‘I’m sorry Mrs Jarrett, no, there is no doubt but that it is Julia. Bank cards, driving licence and benefits correspondence were all found with her. A formal identification of the…her body will be necessary but please do not hold out any hope that it may not be Julia. I am so sorry.’