Secrets and Shadows

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

Scent of magnolias, sweet and freshThen the sudden smell of burning flesh

Then the sudden smell of burning fleshIt was a powerful song about the lynching of n*****s 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 c******s 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 h****n 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?’

. ‘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 h****n overdose.