Where the Devil Can't Go by Anya Lipska Read Free Book Online Page B

amateurish raunchiness of the girl’s pose jarred with the innocence of those rounded lips, and her eyes looked glazed, as though she were drunk – or on drugs. In that moment he decided he couldn’t keep his promise simply to pass on the couple’s address to Pani Tosik. No. When he found them he’d do his best to persuade the girl to dump her lowlife boyfriend and come home, and then he’d give Pawel Adamski a short sharp lesson in gentlemanly conduct.
    Janusz tapped the contact sheet. “You can send him a copy in the post?” he asked the guy.
    The guy checked the cover of the folder, said: “Sure, but I’ll need an address – he didn’t leave one, or even a phone number.”
    That was a blow. After promising to telephone with his friend’s address, Janusz left.
    Still, at least he had a name.

SIX
     
    Wapping Mortuary was housed in a low, grey brick building encircled by a high wall, which made it look more like an industrial unit than anything remotely medical, thought Kershaw, as she buzzed the battered entry phone beside the big steel double gates.
    A few minutes later, a mortuary technician with spiky dyed black hair and a bolt through her eyebrow was helping her into a blue cotton gown, the type surgeons wore for operations.
    “First time?” she asked, her tone neutral.
    Kershaw nodded. “I’m not squeamish, though,” she added, before realising she’d spoken with unnecessary forcefulness.
    Goth girl ignored the comment. “If you do start feeling a bit funny, just let us know before you keel over, OK?” She waited while Kershaw pulled on blue plastic overshoes, then led the way through a tiled corridor and into the post mortem room.
    Kershaw had seen the scene reconstructed a dozen times in TV cop dramas – the low-ceilinged tiled room, the naked bodies laid out on steel gurneys, some still whole, others already dissected. But it was a bit different when you knew it wasn’t all just an artful arrangement of wax models and fake blood. Anyway, television couldn’t prepare you for the smell – a terrible cocktail of chopped liver, body fluids, and bleach.
    The Goth girl paused at the first gurney. “DB16,” she said. Spread-eagled on the shallow stainless steel tray, under the unsparing fluorescent lights, lay the girl with the Titian hair – or what was left of her.
    “I’ll tell Doctor Waterhouse you’re here,” she said, leaving Kershaw alone with the body.
    The girl was opened like a book from collarbone to pubis, revealing a dark red cavern where her insides had been. A purplish pile of guts lay between her thighs, as though she’d just given birth to them. The skin, and its accompanying layer of yellow fat, had been flayed from her limbs and torso, and now lay beneath her like a discarded jacket, and her ribcage was cracked open, each rib separated and bent back. Water tinkled musically, incongruously, through a drain hole under the gurney.
    The good news, reflected Kershaw, was that she looked more like the remains of some predator’s meal on the Serengeti than a human being.
    “DC Kershaw, I presume?”
    Tearing her gaze away from the carcass, she saw a tall, silver-haired man in his sixties rinsing his gloved hands at a nearby sink. Shaking off the drops, he approached her, beaming.
    “Welcome, welcome,” he said.
    “Thanks for having me, Doctor,” she said.
    “Not at all,” said Doctor Waterhouse. “I’m always delighted to see a new detective braving the rigours of a PM.”
    He handed Kershaw some latex gloves with a little flourish, like he was giving her a bunch of violets, then spread his arms to encompass the cadaver lying between them.
    “Our lady,” he began, in a plummy voice, “is an IC1 female who apparently enjoyed good health throughout her life, with no evidence of any chronic condition.” He spoke as though addressing a roomful of medical students.
    “How old would you say she was?” asked Kershaw, wriggling her fingers into the second glove.
    “Your