Lastnight Read Free Page A

looking for heads to roll.’
    ‘The powers that be care that much about Twitter?’
    ‘About public perception, sure. We’ve now got celebs tweeting about the investigation, everyone from Stephen Fry to One Direction. I had my own daughter asking me yesterday why we hadn’t solved the case. That’s all down to her favourite One Direction singer tweeting about it.’
    ‘Seems to me that it’s the tail wagging the dog these days.’
    ‘Doesn’t matter what’s wagging what, what matters is that the commissioner wants this case breaking and he’s dumped it on my desk like a huge steaming turd.’
    ‘And you think you can dump it on me?’ Nightingale laughed. ‘I know in the job shit rolls downhill, but I’m not even on the hill any more.’
    ‘Rawlings hasn’t put a foot wrong,’ said Chalmers. ‘It’s not his first murder enquiry and he hasn’t done anything differently to the way I’d’ve handled it. There’s no link between the victims other than they’re Goths. We’re looking at it as a hate crime but there are no obvious suspects. They’ve been trawling through social media and anti-Goth and anti-gay websites but there’s no one who stands out.’
    Nightingale looked back at the crime scene photographs. ‘And you’re sure it’s not a lone psychopath?’
    Chalmers shrugged. ‘These aren’t simple killings,’ he said. ‘What’s being done to them takes time. It seems a lot of work for one person.’
    ‘And what’s the cause of death? Please don’t tell me she was alive when they cut her up?’
    ‘The coroner says that she was alive but almost certainly unconscious; she’d been hit on the back of her head. But the cause of death was blood loss.’
    Nightingale shuddered. ‘Were they all killed the same way?’
    ‘Rendered unconscious and then mutilated,’ said Chalmers.
    ‘When was the last killing?’
    ‘Four days ago, at least that was when the body was found.’ Chalmers walked over to the whiteboard furthest to the right. He pointed at a head-and-shoulders photograph of a man with a double chin and thinning hair that had been dyed black and gelled. He had mascara and eyeliner and what looked like black lipstick. ‘Daryl Heaton, thirty-nine and unemployed. He was found in his flat in Kilburn after the neighbours had complained about the smell. His was the last body found but the coroner puts the TOD at about a week earlier.’
    Chalmers moved to the next whiteboard along. ‘Assuming she’s right about the time of death, that would make Abbie Greene the last victim. She was found six days ago.’
    Nightingale looked at the head-and-shoulders photograph at the top of the whiteboard. Abbie Greene was barely out of her teens. She was blonde and blue-eyed and had a cute smile that suggested either good genes or expensive orthodontics.
    ‘That was taken from her university application,’ said Chalmers. ‘She went Goth about six months ago. Dyed her hair black.’
    Below the photograph were half a dozen gory crime scene pictures. Abbie was lying across a blood-soaked bed with barely an intact scrap of flesh on her, except for her face. ‘He doesn’t slash the face,’ said Nightingale. ‘Just the bodies.’
    ‘Maybe it’s sexual,’ said Chalmers. ‘The face turns him on, he can look at them as he butchers them.’
    ‘It’s not butchering though, is it?’ said Nightingale. ‘He doesn’t sever the hands or the feet, or rip out organs or cut off their ears. It’s not Jack The Ripper stuff, is it? More like he’s skinning them. Skinning them bit by bit.’
    Below the crime scene photographs was a handwritten timeline that showed everything Abbie had done and everyone she’d met in the twenty-four hours before she died. According to the timeline, the last person who had seen Abbie alive, apart from her killers, was her girlfriend, Zoe. According to Zoe, Abbie had gone to see a film with a friend and had never returned. Her body was found the next day in a bedsit in North