Tooth & Nail

`The dark heart.' She nodded to herself. She had seen things, felt things, which few were ever privileged to witness. This was her life. This was her existence. And the painting began to mock her, the stream turning into a cruel turquoise grin.

Calmly, humming to herself again she picked up a pair of scissors from a nearby chair and began to slash at the painting with regular vertical strokes, then horizontal strokes, then vertical again, tearing and tearing its heart out until the scene disappeared forever.

Underground

`And this,' said George Flight, `is where the Wolfman was born.'

Rebus looked. It was a depressing location for a birth. A cobblestoned alley, a cul-de-sac, the buildings three storeys high, every window either boarded up or barred and grilled. The black bags of rubbish looked to have been languishing by the side of the road for weeks. A few had been impaled on the steel spiked fencing in front of the shut-up windows, and these bags leaked their rank contents the way a cracked sewage pipe would.

`Nice,' he said.

`The buildings are mainly disused. Local bands use the basement of one of them as a practice room, and make quite a racket while they're about it.' Flight pointed to a barred and grilled window. `And I think that's a clothing manufacturer or distributor. Anyway, he hasn't been back since we started taking an interest in the street.'

`Oh?' Rebus sounded interested, but Flight shook his head.

`Nothing suspicious in that, believe me. These guys use slave labour, Bangladeshis, mostly illegal immigrants. The last thing they want is policemen sniffing around. They'll move the machines and set up again somewhere else.'

Rebus nodded. He was looking around the cul-de-sac, trying to remember, from the photographs he had been sent, just where the body had been found.

`It was there.' Flight was pointing to a gate in the iron railings. Ah yes, Rebus remembered now. Not at street level, but down some stone steps leading to a basement. The victim had been found at the bottom of the steps, same modus operandi as last night, down to the bite marks on the stomach. Rebus opened his briefcase and brought out the manila folder, opening it at the sheet he needed.

`Maria Watkiss, age thirty-eight. Occupation: prostitute. Body found on Tuesday 16th January by council workmen. Estimated that victim had been murdered two to three days prior to being discovered. Rudimentary attempt had been made to conceal body.'

Flight nodded towards one of the impaled bin-liners. `He emptied a bag of rubbish out over her. It pretty well covered the body. The rats alerted the workmen.'

`Rats?'

`Dozens of them, from all accounts. They'd had a bloody good feed, had those rats.'

Rebus was standing at the top of the steps. `We reckon,' said Flight, `the Wolfman must have paid her for a knee trembler and, brought her down here. Or maybe she brought him. She worked out of a pub on Old Street. It's a five minute walk. We interviewed the regulars, but nobody saw her leave with anyone.'

`Maybe he was in a car?'

`It's more than possible. Judging by the physical distance between the murder sites, he must' be pretty mobile.'

'It says in the report that she was married.'

`That's right. Her old man, Tommy, he knew she was on the game. It didn't bother him, so long as she handed over the cash.'

`And he didn't report her missing?'

Flight wrinkled his nose. 'Not Tommy. He was on a bender at the time, practically comatose with drink when we went to see him. He said later that Maria often disappeared for a few days, told us she used to go off to the seaside with one or two of her regular johns'

`I don't suppose you've been able to find these . . . clients?)

'Leave it out.' Flight laughed as though this were the best joke he'd heard all week. `For the record, Tommy thought one of them might be called Bill or Will. Does that help?'

`It narrows things down,' Rebus said with a smile.

`In any event,' said Flight, `I doubt Tommy would have come to us for help if she hadn't come back. He's got form as long as your inside leg. To tell you the truth, he was our first suspect.'

`It follows.' Every policeman knew it as a universal truth: most murders happen in the family.

`A couple of years back,' Flight was saying, `Maria was beaten up pretty badly. A hospital case, in fact. Tommy's doing. She'd been seeing another man and he hadn't been paying for it, if you understand my meaning. And a 'couple of years before that, Tommy served time for aggravated assault. It would have been rape if we could have got the woman into the witness box, but she was scared seven colours shitless. There were witnesses, but we were never going to pin rape on him. So aggravated assault it was. He got eight months.'

`A violent man then.'

`You could say that.'

`With a record of particular violence against women.'