Dance With the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller

‘DS Hobbs, Oldroyd incident room. How can we help you?’ stated an impatient male voice.

I explained our initiative and the similarities between the cases, wrapping up with an offer to finance a fresh forensic sweep of Helen’s car.

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible,’ barked Hobbs.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The forensic side of things has been fully explored, constable. I can confidently say there is nothing more to be gained from examining the car.’

‘With respect, sir, I can confidently say there’s been a lot of progress in genetic fingerprinting over the past 18 months. They can work with much smaller samples now … microscopic samples.’

He sighed. ‘I am aware of forensic developments, constable.’

‘Excellent, so you know where we’re coming from then, sir.’

I could sense his brain grappling.

‘Look,’ he said finally, ‘you may as well know. The officers at the scene let the undertakers remove the body from the car before forensics arrived.’

I couldn’t speak.

‘It was the summer holidays, don’t forget. The place was packed with families, kids. By all accounts, it was a horrific sight.’

The full impact of his revelation took time to sink in. Removing Helen from the car not only contaminated the crime scene, it tainted anything connected to her body – skin, hair, fibres, even blood splashes. Just one body part could possibly be deemed exempt from this human contamination …

‘Did you send her fingernails away for examination?’

‘Yes,’ he said, his voice dry and tight, ‘but it didn’t throw anything up.’

‘I’d like to request them, sir, put them through the ringer again.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ came his irritated response.

‘Sir?’

‘They’ve been mislaid,’ he squeaked.

‘Mislaid, sir?’

‘Lost constable. The fingernails have been lost,’ he spat bitterly.

‘Christ. So what now?’

‘What now? We need a bloody miracle.’

Chapter 5 (#u8c4e256d-a360-58f7-b0a3-8ef9eed9a2c4)

Vauxhall, South London

Saturday, April 3, 1993; 17.00

My only hope now of connecting the murders of Liz Little and Helen Oldroyd would be to identify a common enemy with murderous potential.

But that would have to wait.

Having exhausted the ‘live’ unsolved female murder files, I needed to dredge those ‘dead files’ for potential connections, suspects and leads.

Time to revisit ‘The Others’.

The folder for 1992 – last year – contained four surreptitiously jilted prostitute murder investigations. Considering the Met Police boasted an overall murder detection rate of 90 per cent of about 170 homicides, this failure spoke volumes. Then I remembered how ’92 had been dominated by two of the most high-profile Met Police manhunts of all time; Stephanie Slater’s kidnap and Rachel Nickell’s murder. With finances already stretched to breaking, something had to give. And nobody in the national media had written a single word about the deaths of these ‘desperate skanks’.

The first three didn’t appear to have any links to Liz’s murder: Karen, 26, spine crushed, nose broken, asphyxiated, dumped in the Lea River; Carol, 32, sexually assaulted with a blunt instrument, bled to death, buried at a concrete works; Mandy, 23, choked with a ligature, found ‘posed’ in a disused warehouse, wearing just a demonic facemask and a pair of Mr Men socks.

And so I discarded those poor women, just as society had in life and the Met Police did a matter of weeks after they’d died.

But the fourth unsolved case needed to be flagged.

In December last year, three boys fishing the Wood Green reservoir near Alexandra Palace hauled a heavy-duty black plastic bag out of the water. But the bag wasn’t nearly as heavy-duty as the contents … a woman’s severed body parts.

A specialist forensic team hooked three more bags from the depths. The victim was an unidentified Caucasian woman in her 20s – a mystery not helped by her missing hands. When dental records failed to unmask her, the pathologist had a moment of inspiration. Good old Dedwina discovered that the dead woman had ‘double D’ breast implants, and that each pair came with its own unique pin code. Via manufacturer and surgeon, police learned that they’d been paid for by one Philip Armstrong, with an address in West London.

What a way for the 63-year-old property magnate to discover that his former lover, 22-year-old Valerie Gillespie, had been murdered.

A few months earlier, sugar daddy Armstrong had pulled the money plug on his ex-call-girl lover, for reasons that didn’t seem adequately explored. Valerie’s ‘good life’ dining at the Ritz and shopping in Bond Street came to a sudden end. She hit self-destruct, then rock bottom, working the strip behind King’s Cross railway station to fund a £150 per day crack habit. Sugar Daddy, drug dealers, clients and co-workers were all interviewed and eliminated. The investigation fizzled out. I was about to re-ignite it.

Valerie’s murder had already been linked to Liz Little’s earlier today, when Edwina revealed how both women had been anally assaulted with an A3 battery. Similar killer MO, similar victim injuries … I had something to present to DS Spence.

I trawled back through ’91 and more unspeakable acts against the only women desperate enough to get into cars with strange men. As ever with prostitute murders, most of the girls had been murdered swiftly, before any sex act had taken place. Usually, all that stuff came later – proving that, for this particular category of killer, it was all about wielding power and control over a woman.

Another case leapt out. Melinda Marshall, 19, from Bristol had come to London in May 1991 to find work as a model. Within months, she’d signed up to the Diplomat agency as a ‘high-class escort’, meeting men in West End hotels for between £300 and £500 per night.

Within weeks, she’d earned enough to rent a luxury two-bedroom flat in one of Chelsea’s smartest streets, for cash. She shared with a friend and fellow escort, Kim Morley, 21, also from Bristol.

On the morning of January 1st, 1992, Kim found her flatmate naked, stabbed and beaten almost beyond recognition on the floor of her bedroom. She’d been raped and sexually assaulted.

Because there had been no forced entry or robbery – £100 in cash was found close to her body – detectives assumed she’d been murdered by ‘a client’ or someone she knew. The report went on: ‘The last person to see Melinda alive had been a minicab driver we failed to trace, who dropped her off outside her flat just after 2am.’ I couldn’t help thinking how such lazy thinking typified the general apathy towards these victims. The last person to see Melinda alive was the man who murdered her.

The manager of the Diplomat Escort Agency revealed that her last booking had been a 10pm supper date at the Langham Hotel, near BBC Broadcasting House on Regents Street. At 10.30pm, Melinda called the agency from the hotel foyer to report that the client – a Syrian businessman and frequent customer – hadn’t shown. They never heard from her again.

Forty minutes later, at about 11.10pm, staff at the swanky Walpole hotel on the Strand turned her away. The concierges of London’s five-star hotels wielded vast influence; working girls of any class only gained entry on their say-so.

Diplomat’s manager couldn’t offer any explanation for her Waldorf cameo, but guessed she’d been ‘moonlighting’ either alone or for another agency.

Reluctantly – and only after the threat of a court order – Diplomat handed over the details of Melinda’s clients during her 14-week stint on their books, including the final John who’d failed to show. Each of them had been quizzed by detectives; each had a rock-solid alibi for what was, after all, a night when we tend to have rock-solid plans: New Year’s Eve.

Unusually, Melinda’s murder did get widespread media coverage, making me realise that newsworthy loosely translates as fuckworthy.

The fact she’d been a ‘high-class’ call girl helped. As did her recent work as a model – especially those racy but tasteful portfolio shots of her in lingerie and thigh-high boots. The newspapers’ trickiest editorial challenge had been finding a way to justify publishing this copyright-free soft porn. They all managed it admirably, even the broadsheets.