The Waxwork Corpse: A legal thriller with a chilling twist (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers Book 5) Read online

  ‘Best piss off, mate, or you’ll get the same. This ain’t nothing to do with you.’ Charlie doesn’t answer. ‘Look,’ says Bledsoe, indicating with a jerk of his head Izzy’s motionless body, ‘he’s a fucking Jewboy looter on my patch. And he won’t tell me where it’s stashed. So let me get on, will ya?’

  For the first time Bledsoe notices the absence of his companion. His eyes flick round the bar, scanning the shadows and finally land on the crumpled darker heap by Charlie’s feet. He does an almost comical double-take and then, with a roar, charges at Charlie like a bull, at the very instant as the all-clear begins to sound.

  Charlie’s an accomplished boxer, a London schoolboy champion and, after several months working on the River, at the peak of his physical fitness, but Bledsoe is twice his weight and age. However, judging by Bledsoe’s puffing and blowing even when attacking a defenceless man, Charlie guesses he’s out of condition and is probably a lot slower than he. He sways out of Bledsoe’s advance and slams a punch into the other’s forehead as he goes past. Bledsoe skids and turns, but before he can position himself Charlie follows up with a combination to the body and dances back on his toes as he would in the ring.

  Suddenly all the lights in the bar are illuminated as the electricity supply is restored, and Charlie sighs inwardly with relief, assuming that Bledsoe will now make a run for it. Instead, the older man wipes his face with the back of his hand and launches himself again. Charlie bends under the other’s swing and comes up again fast, hitting Bledsoe with another two-punch combination, a jab to the nose which produces a spurt of blood and a fierce punch to the abdomen. The breath whooshes out of the older man’s lungs and he bends at the waist, his guard dropping, as if looking for something on the floor.

  As Bledsoe tries to force some air back into his lungs Charlie seizes his opportunity, steps back and launches a right-handed uppercut that starts almost at Bledsoe’s knees, connects with the underside of his jaw, and ends its arc of travel above Charlie’s left ear. It is perhaps the most beautiful punch Charlie has ever thrown.

  Bledsoe’s body describes a retreating arc, his head slamming on the floor. He’s only semi-conscious, his body floppy and his eyes unfocused but, before he can recover, Charlie is astride his chest, raining blows to each side of his face, left to the head, right to the head, left to the head.

  A hand grabs Charlie’s raised arm from behind but he shrugs it off and continues to punch. More people combine to haul Charlie, still trying to land blows, off Bledsoe’s prone body. Charlie turns, struggling, ready to fight whoever has intervened, to find half the people from the cellar, including May and Louise, staring at him.

  ‘That’s enough, Charlie,’ croaks a weak voice from the direction of the bar.

  The familiar voice penetrates the red mist and Charlie subsides. He turns towards the bar. Izzy’s face is a mass of bruises and lacerations. There’s so much blood, there’s barely a patch of pink skin. Blood has stained the front of his clothing from just under his chin to his mid-thighs. But one eye is open, and he is speaking, albeit indistinctly.

  ‘Enough,’ he repeats, spitting blood and a tooth from mashed lips. ‘Would someone please untie me?’

  For a split-second nothing happens, but then the bar comes alive with movement. People rush to each side of Izzy and support him while others untie the ropes binding his wrists. He’s half-carried to a chair and someone gets a bar towel to staunch the blood flowing from his cuts. Someone else fills a glass with brandy and holds it to Izzy’s lips. People crowd around Bledsoe and his associate. The latter groans from the floor and is helped to sit up. Someone tries to get a call through the overwhelmed telephone exchange for an ambulance. Charlie finds himself crowded to the back of the group. He’s aware of May’s eyes on him, re-evaluating the stranger with whom she was recently so intimate.

  The barman kneels next to Bledsoe’s still form. ‘It’s that bastard, Bledsoe,’ he announces, his fingers feeling for a pulse.

  More eyes fix on Charlie. Bledsoe’s reputation as a tough guy, one with influential and dangerous friends, runs through East London. No one has ever stood up to him before; certainly no one has ever knocked him out. It dawns on Charlie that there are going to be repercussions.

  ‘Can someone give me a hand?’ says the barman. ‘I ain’t too sure…’

  A woman with a nurse’s uniform visible under her coat pushes her way through the watchers and joins the barman kneeling at Bledsoe’s side. She opens his collar further and places a hand under his chin, feeling for a jugular pulse. She leans over, placing her ear close to the unconscious man’s gaping mouth. Everyone in the bar is silent. It’s a few seconds before she eventually speaks.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she says simply, straightening up.

  All remaining heads in the bar turn towards Charlie.

  ‘I had no choice,’ he explains. His voice is tremulous and, despite his size, Charlie suddenly looks like a lost boy. ‘Honest! They were killing Izzy.’

  CHAPTER 1

  1965

  The shock of entering the black water is enough to take Julie’s breath away. Even in the middle of a warm spring, Wastwater chills to the marrow. She kicks a few times quickly to stir her circulation. A double splash and two champagne bursts of bright bubbles show where her guardians, her boyfriend Neil and an instructor she only met twenty minutes ago, have entered the water, ahead and to her left; only the turbulence and the loom of their lamps reveal their presence.

  They have deliberately picked a moonless night. The two beams of light separate and come towards Julie, one on each side, and stand off, waiting for her. The two disembodied light sources are eerie, but she’s glad of them. She’s been preparing for this first night navigation exercise for months. In the clubhouse she’d joked confidently with the rest of the group about getting lost, coming face-to-face with or, worse still, feeling the black caress of the twelve-foot pikes reputed to live in the lake. But now she’s afraid.

  Wastwater is the deepest lake in England, carved by glacial action half a million years ago. From gravel beaches, its sides fall steeply for eighty metres until they reach the bottom of a “V” now flattened by millennia of accumulated mud and silt. The sides are steep and regular, except for Tiffen’s Rock. Like a decayed molar, the Rock erupts from the smooth side of the lake, its roots lost in the murk and silt, its top levelled by years of deposits. A sinister, freakish excrescence known only to the underwater fraternity, it has been used for years by divers on navigation exercises.

  Julie breaks the even rhythm of her strokes to illuminate her console and check her compass bearing and depth, then kicks out again, following the short stab of light from her lamp. Beyond that, blackness. Monstrous pike with razor teeth glide in and out of her imagination, but she pushes them away and concentrates on her stroke and her breathing.

  The Rock, when it appears, takes her by surprise. Her navigation has been perfect and, for a second, exhilaration overcomes fear. The three divers descend steeply, parallel to the side of the lake, the leader sweeping his lamp in an arc from side to side. She watches the depth gauge on her console as they descend: ten metres … fifteen … twenty … and with each metre her sense of unease grows. They find the base of Tiffin’s Rock at thirty metres, deeper than she has ever dived before. She points her torch away to the east, but the light is soon overcome by the inky blackness that hems them in on all sides.

  She swings the lamp back to the front and as she does, something stands out for a second in its beam. She slows her kicks. There, caught in the loom of her torch, is a package. Resting where Tiffen’s Rock grows from the walls of the lake, where the root of the tooth disappears into its gum, the package is half-buried in a thick shroud of silt, one corner protruding at an angle. A metre or two in any direction, and it would have rolled all the way down to the lake floor to be lost in millennia of deposits, way beyond human eyes.

  Her heart thumping in her chest, she swims over for a closer look, but she’s too close, to
o curious, and suddenly the water is blurred by millions of dancing particles caught in the light. She spins round, realising too late that she’s made a mistake, and is suddenly and completely disorientated. The lights of her co-divers, only seconds before just ahead of her, seem to have disappeared altogether. She starts panting, her breath loud in her ears, and she kicks out wildly, anxious to get out of the cloud of disturbed silt and back to clear water.

  After a few seconds she slows and turns. She points her torch into the complete blackness, illuminating each quadrant for a second and then turning on the spot to the next, but the silt has spread further than she could have imagined, and it’s like driving on high beam through fog. She extinguishes the torch and hangs there in the utter darkness, blood pounding in her ears.

  Then: a flash of light, followed by another. She illuminates her torch once, twice, three times quickly in succession, and she’s answered: eighty yards away, off to her right, she sees both of her guardians’ torches moving simultaneously in slow arcs. Relief overwhelms her, and a giggle bubbles in her chest. She recognises with alarm the light-headedness that signals incipient nitrogen narcosis. She feels her breathing quicken involuntarily, and she fights to maintain control but it slips further away with each breath.

  One of the men, the instructor she thinks, is before her now, gesticulating in her face. ‘Up!’ he points, once, twice, urgently. She nods. He sets off again, close to her right side, Neil on her left. The exertion and regular rhythmic strokes calm her. By the time they reach the top of the Rock, she has control again. They break surface to find a gale howling across the lake. Rain pounds the water so hard it’s as if the gods are hurling missiles from the skies.

  The instructor is swimming purposefully towards the gravel beach. Neil spits out his regulator mouthpiece and spins in the water. ‘Come on!’

  ‘No, stop! Didn’t you see her?’ Julie says.

  ‘See who?’

  A bolt of lightning lights up the sides of the Vale, and the almost instantaneous crack of thunder immediately above their heads almost drowns her reply.

  ‘There’s a woman down there!’

  ‘What? Another diver?’

  ‘No! A woman! On the rock! I saw her face!’

  ‘No,’ he shouts, ‘it was just a boulder. Covered in silt.’

  ‘I saw her, I tell you.’

  ‘It’s an hallucination. Nitrogen narcosis.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Neil, it was no hallucination! That was no boulder. It was a woman, wrapped in plastic. And I’m telling you: I saw her face.’

  The detective inspector from London named Abercrombie hugs himself against the wind blowing over Wastwater, stubs out his third cigarette in the car park gravel, and lights another. He bitterly regrets his decision to allow the local sergeant to take the car and go for his dental appointment. But his boss said “Be nice”, and so he is being nice. Relations between the Met and the Cumberland, Westmorland and Carlisle Constabulary have become somewhat strained and thus, in the spirit of co-operation, he is freezing his balls off.

  He glances at his watch. The divers have been out there for so long, they’ve had to change air tanks once, and will soon be up for more. The fellow from the Diving Club who bent Abercrombie’s ear for fifteen minutes before strolling off to enjoy his hot breakfast somewhere out of the biting wind had opined that that the police divers, who were unfamiliar with the lake, were probably stirring up the silt, making the search more difficult. Abercrombie thinks otherwise; he suspects the entire story of a body-shaped package was either cooked up altogether or exaggerated out of all proportion. If they find anything at all he expects it to be some fly-tipping, maybe an old mattress or a carpet. A student goes missing in a small community and sightings occur everywhere. One imaginative local had even reported seeing a body dropping into the lake from an aeroplane — by parachute! If it weren’t for the fact that the missing student happened to be the daughter of some diplomat based in London, he wouldn’t even be here.

  He shades his eyes and squints over the grey water to the boat two hundred yards out. He can see the man who’d been prevailed upon to row it there, huddled in his coat and trying to shelter below the gunwales. The poor bastard, thinks Abercrombie; he must be even colder than me.

  As the inspector watches, the water parts and a black shiny head appears. It is followed shortly by another. They resemble otters, or seals, he thinks, although his knowledge of matters aquatic is limited by his urban upbringing and a detestation of water, boats and everything connected with them. The two divers spin in the water, looking for the shore, and one of them waves energetically.

  My God, they’ve found something! thinks Abercrombie, grinding out his cigarette under foot. Sure enough, the other two divers surface, towing a large muddy object between them. The first two haul themselves into the boat, wriggle out of their apparatus, and lean out over the water. The small craft dips precipitously and for a moment the inspector’s sure it’s going to capsize, but with two divers pushing and two pulling they eventually get the object into the boat. The oarsman stares at it, and even from the shore the inspector can see his dropped jaw and wide-open eyes. One of the divers prods him into action and he sets to, turning the boat expertly towards the shore, and begins rowing.

  DI Abercrombie walks towards the water as the boat grounds on the gravel. He helps pull it up the shore and peers inside. The two divers and the oarsman watch him intently as he bends over the find. Christ, it is a body! It’s wrapped round and round with some thick plastic material and is bound with yards of wire and rope of differing thicknesses and colours, but the outline of a person can be seen clearly inside. The two divers who were forced to swim back in splash up the gravel and stand by the side of the boat, dripping.

  ‘Well, sir. Looks like we’ve found her,’ says one.

  ‘Call the coroner’s office and get a photographer up here immediately,’ replies Abercrombie. ‘You’d better call your DCI and a police surgeon too. Leave it in the boat and don’t touch it till I tell you.’

  It takes an hour for the cast to assemble. The body has been carried out of the boat and placed on a large sheet of clean plastic. The area has been taped off and two officers now stand at the top of the road leading down to the car park to prevent unauthorised entry. The local Detective Chief Inspector is the last to arrive, by which time everyone on the beach is hunched in their coats, stamping their feet and blowing on cupped hands. Abercrombie has given up; he lost sensation in his fingers and toes some time ago.

  The DCI, a heavy man with the corrugated face of a bloodhound and an accent which, to Abercrombie, is almost entirely impenetrable, wastes few words.

  ‘Let’s see what we’ve got then.’

  One of the divers crouches at the head end of the package, a diving knife poised in his hand. At the other end, near its feet, is a detective sergeant with a decade’s experience in forensic crime scene investigation. He carries secateurs. This will be his last job in this role because, in an idiotic change he’s sure is designed only to save the force money, he and his specialist colleagues are shortly to be replaced by civilians with the grand title of “Scenes of Crime Officers”. As the two men begin to cut the cords binding the package, working from its ends towards its middle, the DCI holds out his hand. Abercrombie knows what he wants and hands him a copy of a large fuzzy black and white photograph.

  ‘How was she held down?’ asks the DCI.

  ‘Some sort of concrete block with a hole in the middle,’ answers the diver between grunts. He is struggling to cut the cords binding the package; they’re so tightly embedded in whatever is inside that he’s unable to get the blade of his knife under them without risking damage to the corpse.

  ‘The rope’s no problem, but this stuff’s wire,’ comments the detective sergeant. ‘It looks like coaxial.’

  ‘Coaxial?’ asks the inspector.

  ‘The stuff you use for TV aerials,’ replies the DS, slightly out of breath with the effort of sawi
ng through the bindings. He’d just acquired a colour television — the first on his street — and he and a friend from the Post Office had spent the previous weekend doing the cabling themselves.

  One by one the bonds are severed. The diver stands, leaving the DS to cut the last cable. The DS takes a deep draught of clean air, anticipating having to hold his breath as soon as the body is revealed. Everyone leans in closer to watch as he peels away several layers of stiff, muddy, plastic. With one to go, the inspector steels himself. He’s seen bodies that have been immersed in water for some weeks, and no amount of familiarity can make the sight prettier. The head of a woman is revealed but, to the onlookers’ surprise, there is a further plastic bag, perhaps a shopping bag, over it. There is a smell, but far less than anyone expected.

  The DS leans and gently wipes a thin layer of silt off the shopping bag. The clarity with which the woman’s face appears startles everyone. Her eyes are open and it’s as if she’s looking at them through a window. She has shoulder-length curly hair and an oval face and so far as they can see, astonishingly, her skin is almost completely intact.

  The DS leans a little closer trying to decide what’s wrong with the woman’s face. It may be the effect of the plastic bag, but despite the almost flawless skin, her features seem somehow blurred; the eyes melt gradually into the nose and it’s not quite clear where the mouth begins and ends. She looks like a waxwork dummy that’s been left too close to a radiator. Nonetheless the features suggest a Caucasian, despite the coffee-coloured skin. Could the skin colour have been produced by prolonged immersion? wonders Abercrombie.