‘Does she have a locker, somewhere she changes into her uniform?’

  When Mariner felt they had learned all they could, he asked to be shown to the locker. There was little in it. Taped to the inside of the door were a couple of snapshots of Dominique and stuffed in the bottom of the locker was a plastic carrier bag. In this they found a pair of dark trousers and black heeled shoes, the ones she would change into for her shift in the bar. There was no blouse. ‘What are the chances our washerwoman has got it?’ said Glover.

  Before leaving, Mariner asked the manager if there was a photograph of Rosa on file. It would be the first one they had. She went to the filing cabinet and took out a shot that would have been used for the hotel publicity materials. Glover and Mariner looked at one another. Like Grace Clifton, Rosa Batista was a young woman walking the city centre late at night, and like Grace Clifton she had dark, curly hair. They could have been sisters.

  On their way out they saw Gilda standing on the pavement nervously smoking a cigarette. After a moment’s hesitation she came over to them. ‘I heard you found that other girl who went missing,’ she said. ‘Do you think Rosa is the same?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ said Mariner tactfully, but walking back to the car, he checked his phone and found a message from Sgt Paul Sholter, who was leading the search at Pepper Wood, to call him back urgently.

  ‘I’ve been trying to reach you, sir. We’ve found another mummy,’ he said. ‘Dr Gray is out here, and we’re about to move her.’

  EIGHTEEN

  There was a symmetry to it, Mariner thought, as he and Glover sped out again between the Worcestershire hedgerows. When he’d last been here to view a body, it was daybreak. Now, in the late afternoon, the light was fading and a shelf of thick cloud was rolling in, bringing with it a mist that obscured the fields and hedges. This time as they progressed through the trees at the deposition site, they veered off in a southerly direction and a way off through the gloom saw the white protective tent that had been erected over the find, all theatrically lit by arc lamps. The uniformed officer on guard stood back to let them through and they found Gray and his assistant squatting beside the mummified body. The face had already been exposed, gleaming supernaturally white in the argentine light. Mariner took the newly acquired photo of Rosa Batista from his pocket; there was no doubt that this was her.

  ‘That poor kid,’ said Charlie, quietly.

  Reaching up with a gloved hand, Gray directed one of the lamps to just below Rosa’s face and lifted something from her neck. It was a fine gold chain. He confirmed what they couldn’t quite see for themselves. ‘Another letter P,’ he said.

  Before he and Glover left the scene, Mariner sought out Paul Sholter. ‘How much ground have you covered so far?’ he asked.

  Sholter shone a powerful torch on to the large-scale map in its protective cover. ‘We’ve searched all the woodland to the west and north of where Grace was found,’ he said, indicating the area on the map, ‘including this coppice where Rosa is. All we have left now is this section to the south east. It’s about another square mile, mile and a half.’

  ‘OK,’ said Mariner. ‘Call everyone off now and start again tomorrow morning when it’s light. There might be one more out there.’

  ‘Do you think they’re going to find Dee Henderson?’ asked Glover as they made their way back to Granville Lane.

  ‘If she met the same fate as the other two, then we should receive a parcel of clothes very soon,’ said Mariner.

  It was late when he got home, but after a restless night’s sleep Mariner went into work on Monday morning fully expecting to find that parcel waiting for him. He was in for a disappointment. He even went down, in person, to harass the staff in the post room, but was told that there was nothing for him or for Superintendent Sharp. Returning to the incident room, Charlie caught his eye. ‘No luck, boss?’

  Mariner had never noticed Glover call him boss before. That was Tony Knox’s habit. Sharp came down from her office. She didn’t look as if she’d had a very good night either.

  ‘Nothing?’

  Mariner shook his head. ‘She’s been gone since Wednesday night,’ he said. ‘We might have reasonably expected to have it by now.’

  ‘Do you think the press coverage might have put him off?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Mariner conceded. ‘Or it just might mean, as we’ve suspected, that Dee Henderson is nothing to do with our washerwoman. We’ve already recognized that she’s not exactly his type. It could just be someone else taking advantage of the opportunity in the hope that we will make that assumption.’

  ‘Someone like Paddy Henderson you mean?’ Sharp said.

  ‘He’s got a history of mental health problems,’ Mariner reminded her. ‘He had PSTD after coming back from Afghanistan. Ellen Kingsley told us that he’s “very protective” of Dee. In some circumstances that can be code for jealous and controlling.’

  ‘Would Henderson report his wife missing though, if he’s somehow involved?’ said Sharp.

  ‘He might, if he’s watertight,’ said Mariner. ‘Or if he thinks he is. Let’s face it, he wouldn’t be the first perpetrator to put himself in the spotlight, would he?’

  ‘Go on.’ Sharp leaned back on a nearby desk and folded her arms, waiting to be persuaded.

  Mariner walked over to the incident board. ‘So far Dee Henderson hasn’t exactly matched any of the criteria of the other two. She doesn’t quite fit the physical profile. Different hair colour, slightly older.’

  ‘We’ve only got two other victims, though,’ said Sharp. ‘Is that enough for a profile? Any similarities between them could just be pure coincidence.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Mariner. ‘The clothes are the real sticking point. If we’d had those, at least we would know for sure.’

  ‘Grace’s clothing didn’t come directly to us,’ Charlie reminded him. ‘It could have just got lost in the post.’

  ‘But Rosa’s did,’ said Mariner. ‘By that time he’d got it right. And there are other differences between Dee and the other two,’ he went on. ‘Dee isn’t routinely in the city centre; she’s only passing through. And her timing varies. Depending on the train she catches, she doesn’t always get the same bus, and sometimes – when Paddy picks her up – she isn’t there at all. She’d be harder for someone to pin down.’

  ‘Unless hers was a more opportunistic encounter.’

  Vicky Jesson came in while they were talking. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  ‘Were testing out Paddy Henderson for Dee,’ Sharp told her. ‘Henderson’s alibi is comfortable, though,’ she reminded Mariner. ‘He wouldn’t be able to rely on the kids to lie for him.’

  Jesson scoffed. ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘He’s only secure up to about nine thirty,’ countered Mariner. ‘After that, by Henderson’s own admission, the kids are asleep. He could easily have slipped out to go and pick Dee up. We haven’t found her phone. What’s to say he didn’t ring or text her to say that he would meet her?’

  ‘Then what?’ said Jesson, dropping her bag and scarf on her desk.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mariner. ‘Perhaps they had a row about something.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Glover.

  ‘That’s easy,’ said Jesson, pragmatically. ‘Dee Henderson left her first husband because she had an affair with Paddy. Nothing to stop her doing the same thing to him. Once an adulterer, always an adulterer.’

  ‘You think that might be it?’ said Sharp.

  ‘I think it’s possible,’ said Mariner. ‘And even if Dee’s not having an affair, does Paddy fully trust her? After all, he’s very familiar with her track record, so he knows how that can work. He’s even been there himself. It brings us back to that fine line between being protective and being jealous. He might imagine something that’s not there.’

  ‘But to kill her?’ Sharp still wasn’t convinced. ‘Isn’t that taking it a bit far?’

  ‘He’s an ex-squaddie,’ said Mariner. ‘It’s clear that he’s physically fit and if he’s handy with his fists it could just be an accident. Fortunately for him there are other women who have been victim to an unknown killer, and he must be experienced at operating covertly, so all he has to do is dispose of the body, report Dee missing, and leave us to do the rest. This is pure conjecture, of course,’ he conceded.

  ‘Henderson drives a van,’ said Charlie Glover, suddenly. They all turned to look at him and he glanced up from the notes he’d been reading. He held up a pocket book. ‘A dark blue one. It says so in here from whoever did the background checks. And several people reported seeing a dark-coloured van around after the Grace Clifton reconstruction. I’m just saying, that’s all,’ he added defensively.

  ‘Let’s get hold of the CCTV from the hospital site on the night Dee went missing,’ Mariner said to Charlie. ‘Paddy might have picked her up in the city centre, but it would make more sense for him to fetch her straight from work.’ He thought for a moment. ‘And it wouldn’t do any harm to check out his alibis for the nights that Grace and Rosa went missing.’ Sharp, on her way out, turned and shot him a questioning look. ‘P for Paddy?’ he said. ‘Just covering the angles.’ When Sharp had gone he turned to Jesson. ‘How did you get on with Pippa Talbot?’

  ‘Understandably she’s in a bit of a state,’ said Jesson. ‘But she has no memory of seeing Grace wearing that necklace. If anything, I think she was surprised. It wouldn’t be Grace’s style to wear something like that. “Cheesy” was the word she used. I asked her if she thought Grace could have had a crush on her, but I think she was quite disturbed by the idea. If that was the case, I don’t think Pippa knew anything about it.’

  ‘It’s looking less likely,’ said Mariner. ‘The search team found Rosa Batista in another shallow grave in Pepper Wood last night.’

  ‘Dear God.’

  ‘She’s also wearing a gold chain around her neck with the letter P, but we don’t have anything to suggest that Pippa knew Rosa.’

  Jesson took a moment to absorb that. ‘So the necklace is something to do with whoever took them?’

  ‘It would make sense. It’s the only thing so far that we can be sure they have in common, apart from what’s happened to them since they disappeared. The big question is whether they knew P before their final fatal encounter with him.’

  Charlie Glover was on to something, or thought he was. As soon as the Belevedere Hotel was mentioned, he felt sure he’d heard of it before, so now he was searching past cases to try and find out why that was. It had taken him a while, but he’d found it, eighteen months ago: an attack on a young woman there. The victim, Chelsey Skoyles, aged twenty, had been dragged into the yard behind the hotel and assaulted late at night. There was only one witness to the actual attack, the guest, a Mr Hausknecht, and as the assailant had run off when he and the hotel’s night porter went out to help, there were no clear suspects. The notes also stated explicitly that the girl was highly intoxicated, making it difficult to get an accurate picture of exactly what had happened. One cryptic note at the bottom of the page said simply ‘Sceptre’. Charlie wondered if at some time there had been an Operation Sceptre that it was linked to. It sounded like the sort of meaningless title they might use. But even if it was, it appeared that the lines of enquiry had run dry and any case had consequently been shelved. Noting who had attended the incident Glover realized it was unlikely to be re-opened.

  It might explain why Ricardo and Karpinski were so cagey, thought Charlie. Two separate incidents at the hotel, then a member of staff goes missing. It would make sense that their washerwoman wouldn’t be new to this. Chelsey Skoyles might have been a practice run, so she might be worth talking to again. The key witness would be more tricky. Charlie noted from the case file that the home address was Philadelphia, USA. But first things first.

  Early on Monday afternoon Mariner had a call from the city pathologist, Stuart Croghan. He was ready to commence the preliminary post-mortems for Grace Clifton and Rosa Batista. For a couple of years now forensic post-mortems for the city had been conducted in Sandwell, but the facility there was temporarily closed, so Mariner and Jesson met Croghan at the brand new mortuary of the QE. The high-tech suite also included a separate viewing room, which meant that they could have chosen to watch the pathologist working via a bank of high resolution colour monitors, communicating through a two-way intercom. Mariner, though, preferred to be right there beside Croghan, seeing what he saw at first hand. So, gowned and masked, to minimize the risk of cross-contamination, they joined Croghan in the examination room. The one disadvantage Mariner could see was the exposure to the customary unpleasant smells, which somehow could never quite be subsumed by chemicals.

  The two women, unwrapped from their coverings, were laid out on gurneys side by side, a few feet apart, and Mariner was immediately struck again by how physically alike they were. He said as much to Croghan.

  ‘There are lots of similarities in their current condition too, if you take the time difference out of the equation,’ said Croghan. ‘Grace is in a greater state of deterioration, which would indicate that she was killed and buried several days before Rosa. But they are both very clean,’ he went on to observe. ‘I’m not sure that we’re going to get much from either of them forensically. I think they’ve been bathed, or at the very least submerged in water at some point. Death in both cases was from asphyxiation. We have a number of burst blood vessels behind the eyes that bear this out.’

  ‘They were strangled?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘That I’m not so sure about,’ said Croghan. ‘If you look at their throats, there’s no evidence, even at this stage, of any bruising, and the hyoid bones are intact, which would be unusual. Drowning is a possibility, of course, but we won’t know that until we take a closer look at the lungs for water content. What is interesting, though,’ Croghan was standing nearest to Grace Clifton’s body and drew Mariner and Jesson’s attention to her face, ‘are these faint bruises on either side of the nostrils.’ He pointed to the round, purple marks. ‘You can see that Rosa has them too.’

  ‘Caused by what?’ Jesson asked.

  Croghan looked up at her. ‘Are you expecting me to do your job for you? I’m not sure. It’s as if their noses might have been pinched or even clamped in some way. Rosa also has some old bruising above and around her left eye. From a few weeks ago, I would think.’

  ‘She was involved in some kind of incident with a customer,’ Mariner said. ‘Is there any sign of sexual activity?’

  ‘Nothing obvious. No bruising around the pelvic area. We’ve taken the usual swabs, but my guess is that the purpose of the washing was to flush out any bodily fluids. My guess would be that you’re looking for someone who’s to some extent forensically aware.’

  ‘That could be anyone who watches TV crime dramas,’ said Mariner, cynically. ‘They’ve been restrained too,’ he added, noting the vivid bands around the wrists and ankles of each woman.

  ‘Ten out of ten,’ said Croghan. ‘And the depth and lividity of the chafe marks would suggest that they were tied with something rigid.’ He lifted Grace’s wrist. ‘You can see how deep the marks are, and that the skin is raw and broken in places.’

  ‘So, cuffs or something?’ said Jesson.

  ‘Or plastic cable ties,’ said Mariner.

  ‘We haven’t recovered any fibres here, so that would make sense,’ Croghan agreed. ‘We did find this on Rosa’s upper lip, though.’ Taking them over to one of the side benches, Croghan picked up a laboratory slide and placed it underneath a laboratory microscope, so that an image appeared on the monitor above. It was a tiny fleck of something dark.

  ‘What is it?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘It looks like some kind of adhesive material, like duct tape, though we’ll know for sure when it’s been analysed.’ Croghan picked up another slide and slid it under the viewer. ‘And when we did the swabs, we retrieved this from Grace’s ear.’ Magnified many hundreds of times the image resembled a wiggly piece of string.

  ‘From the cloth she was wrapped in?’ Mariner speculated.

  ‘No, it’s too coarse for that,’ said Croghan. ‘It looks to me more like a fibre from sack-cloth. Hessian, or something of that nature.’

  ‘Something she was gagged with?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Croghan. ‘But we salvaged an almost identical fibre from the top of Rosa’s head, caught in her hair, so alternatively something they had their heads covered with. Toxicology should tell us whether or not they have been drugged, but given the amount of time they’ve been missing, it’s possible that any sedative may have worked itself out of their systems before they were killed.’ Croghan had returned to Grace’s body. ‘Also, as you can see, the pubic hair has been removed, by shaving. It may of course have been self-inflicted, but it’s the same for both women again, which would be a coincidence. Do we know if either of them was a fan of the Brazilian?’

  ‘Strangely enough, that’s not a question we’ve asked, but I would be surprised, given what we know so far about them,’ said Mariner. ‘We haven’t made this generally known yet, but along with the clothing for each woman we were sent some pubic hairs.’

  ‘How charming,’ said Croghan. ‘Then I’m sure you’re right. Whoever shaved them has taken great care with it. The skin is smooth. You sent the hair to the lab?’

  ‘Yes, should get the results any day.’

  ‘Good, they should be able to tell you what kind of razor or shaver has been used. If it’s any help, overall I get an impression of someone who has taken good care of these women, treating them respectfully, reverentially even.’

  ‘Any thoughts now on how long they have been dead?’ asked Mariner. Croghan sighed. ‘It’s never enough, is it?’ he said. ‘You always have to finish with the hard stuff. Wrapping them in the sheets will have effectively offered some protection from the usual pests and will of course have skewed the effects of air temperature and moisture. At a rough guess – and this really is going out on a limb – I would say for Grace it’s somewhere between seven to ten days, and Rosa three days up to a week.’