White Death. Daniel Blake

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      The more Patrese looked, though, the more he saw that there were at least as many differences between the two corpses as there were similarities.

      For a start, Jane was lying on the grass under a tree, a couple of hundred yards from the church where John had been left.

      More pertinently, perhaps, she’d been killed where she lay.

      Patrese saw the splatter marks of blood high and thick on the tree trunk: the carotid artery, he thought, spraying hard and fast as her neck was cut. The ground around and beneath her body squelched with all the blood which had run from the cut sites.

      And whereas John had been killed with what looked like clinical precision – clean lines of severance at neck and thigh, neat removal of the chest and back skin – Jane had been attacked with a far greater, unfocused fury. The wound at her neck gaped open and jagged, as though the killer had sawn or twisted or yanked her head: possibly all three. Flaps of skin and muscle hung messily from the stump of her arm. The perimeters where the patches of skin had been taken were uneven and torn. No restraint marks on her remaining wrist or her ankles: the attacker must have set about her instantly.

      Heads, arms, skin, all gone. Had the killer taken them with him, as proof of his skill and tools to help him relive the fantasy he’d just acted out?

      ‘Any thoughts?’ Kieseritsky asked.

      ‘Lots. Some of them might even be right.’ Patrese pushed himself to his feet. ‘John was killed elsewhere and brought here. Jane was killed here. Pretty risky, to decapitate someone in a public place. Lot of people round here at night?’

      ‘Up to midnight, sure. Most of ’em the kind of people who keep you and me in business, of course. Same for urban parks the country over. But we ain’t talkin’ murderers usually, let alone something like this. We’re talking pickpockets, drug dealers, muggers, those kind of guys. The guys who know the process system as well as I do, they come in and out of the station house so often.’

      ‘New Haven’s got a high murder rate, right?’

      ‘Where d’you hear that?’

      ‘Bureau report. I remember it ’cos after Katrina, when all the criminals had been shipped out of state during reconstruction, New Orleans dropped out of the top three for the first time in years. Big rejoicing in the Big Easy.’

      ‘Yeah, well. I seen that report too. We’re fourth highest in the US proportionate to population, it says. Only ones in front of us are Detroit, St Louis and some other hellhole, can’t remember where. But it’s bullshit, Agent Patrese.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘First off, our crime figures are down year-on-year, and that’s what matters to me, not how we rank against someplace else. Second, it all depends on where you draw the municipal boundaries. May I speak freely? New Haven ain’t no different to any other damn place in the States. The vast majority of crime is committed by poor black people, on poor black people, in areas full of poor black people. Don’t make it right, of course, but that’s the way it is. You must know that.’

      Patrese nodded. He’d worked in Pittsburgh and New Orleans, and it was the same in both those places. Kieseritsky continued:

      ‘But round here, downtown, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen.’ She gestured toward the Gothic gatehouse on the edge of the Green. ‘That’s the main entrance to Yale, you know. That’s the kind of place this is. Ivy League, old school, full of the kids who in twenty years’ time will be running the country.’

      ‘And screwing it up, same as generations before them have done.’

      She raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘President Bush went to Yale.’

      ‘I rest my case.’

      She laughed. ‘Anyway. Like I said, most law-abiding folks wouldn’t hang around on the Green late night, but those that do are only going to lose their wallets and cellphones. Not their lives.’

      ‘And the lowlife? They here all night?’

      She shook her head. ‘Most of them have cleared out by two or three in the morning, even on weekends.’

      ‘And no one saw Jane Doe being killed, or John Doe being dumped?’

      ‘Not that we’ve found so far.’

      A uniform hurried across the grass toward them, eyes bright with the importance of the news bearer.

      ‘We’ve got a match on Jane’s fingerprints, ma’am,’ he said.

      ‘Previous offense?’

      ‘Arrested in New York on the Iraq war demonstration, February 2003.’

      Patrese remembered that day well: there’d been protests all over the world. He’d intended going, but he’d spent what had started as the night before and ended up as the whole weekend with a waitress he’d met on the Strip in Pittsburgh.

      ‘Regina King,’ the uniform continued.

      He must have seen both Patrese’s and Kieseritsky’s eyes widen in surprise, because he nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am. Sir. That Regina King. Kwasi King’s mom.’

       5

      Kwasi King was twenty-four years old, and he had been famous for exactly half his life. A month after his twelfth birthday, he became the youngest chess grandmaster in history. Before he reached fourteen, he won the US championship. Chess was pretty much a minority sport as far as the mainstream media were concerned, but one story was always guaranteed to get their attention – a child prodigy who might, just might, be the next Bobby Fischer.

      Especially when that prodigy was a black kid raised by a single mom in America’s largest public housing project.

      Regina King had been seventeen when she’d given birth to Kwasi. The name meant ‘born on a Sunday’, because he had been. If she knew who Kwasi’s father was, she never said so. She had no qualifications to speak of, but what she did have was a work ethic that was positively Stakhanovite and a tidal desire to give her son a better start than she’d had.

      She took two jobs at once, sometimes three, just to keep them afloat; but the jobs were minimum wage and childcare cost money, so the only place she could afford was a small apartment high up in a Queensbridge tower block. Six thousand people lived in the Queensbridge complex, peering with hopeless longing across the water to Manhattan’s glass-and- steel canyons.

      Drug dealers worked shifts along the development’s main commercial stretch, punching clocks as diligently as stevedores. You wanted to go get something from the store, even a loaf of bread or a bar of candy, you had to walk past them. This is the life, their very presence seemed to hiss, this is the life, this is the only life you’ll ever know. In the daytime, they shouted and snarled at each other: when night fell, they started shooting.

      Some of them tried their luck with Regina: she was a good-looking girl, and still only twenty. She turned them down, politely but firmly. A couple of her wannabe СКАЧАТЬ