Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

stamp on her suggests his actions are deliberate. He’s thought this through. He doesn’t want to leave forensic traces. He doesn’t want to get caught.’
    ‘So why the overkill on the face?’
    ‘I’m not sure yet. The textbook answer is, to depersonalise her. To objectify her. To make her less than human so what he’s doing isn’t really murder, because she’s a thing not a person. But that doesn’t feel right here somehow. Because the other business, the sealing up of the labia, that’s very personal. That’s making a statement of possession. “I’m done with you but nobody else can have you.” That’s what that says to me. It’s not a generalised statement of misogyny, it’s specific, it’s aimed directly at her. And that runs directly counter to the notion of smashing her face to depersonalise her.’ He frowned at the photograph, turning it this way and that. ‘I don’t know, I’m going to have to think about this.’
    ‘Good. I like what happens when you think about things. Now, are you done with the pics? Because I’m getting claustrophobia here. Any chance we could move into a room-sized space?’ She handed him a pair of nitrile gloves.
    Three doors led off the lobby. Tony opened the nearest one and revealed a poky, windowless bathroom with a shower cubicle, a toilet and a tiny sink. The lingering smell of toiletries couldn’t quite hide the fetor of damp. ‘Later,’ he muttered and hastily pulled the door to.
    The next door led to a room that comprised living room, dining corner and kitchen. The separate components could have made for a comfortable, welcoming space if they hadn’t been crammed into half the area they actually required. Instead, it felt crowded and confined. ‘Deceptively poky. Isn’t that what the estate agents never say?’ Tony looked around, taking in the pockets of clutter that had infiltrated the few available spaces. Piles of magazines, stacks of DVDs, cardboard boxes half-full of drug samples and promotional giveaways – pens, mouse mats, coasters. He squatted beside the DVDs and scanned the titles. ‘No sign of anybody else’s taste here. Bridesmaids , How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days , The Wedding Singer, Eight Women , Juno , Notting Hill , There’s Something about Mary , Amelie , My Best Friend’s Wedding. The fairytale reimagined for the twenty-first century.’
    ‘Fairytales for straight girls. Nothing in Polish?’
    Tony stood up and grunted as his knees cracked. ‘No. She was probably trying to improve her English. Given her job.’ He crossed to the dining table, where there was a laptop-shaped space between a stack of papers, an all-in-one printer, scanner and copier, and an A4 pad with a few lines of scribbled notes. ‘Did forensics take the laptop?’
    Paula nodded. ‘They did. I’ll ask them for a copy of the hard drive in the morning. If I’m going to talk Stacey into looking at Bev’s hard drive, I might as well get her to see what she can find on Nadia’s computer as well.’
    But Tony wasn’t listening. Now he had advanced into the kitchen area, he’d spotted a corkboard on a short section of wall that jutted into the room. The board had been obscured from sight when he’d been in the main part of the room. He made straight for it and stared at it, frowning as if he was cataloguing the contents for the crime-scene equivalent of Kim’s Game. ‘This is more like it,’ he said.
    Three takeaway menus – Indian, Chinese and catch-all pizza, kebab and burger. He turned and glanced round the kitchen area. ‘She cooked. You can smell it, you can see it from the pans and the knives and stuff. And there’s vegetables in the rack. Onions, potatoes, carrots, garlic. OK, the onions and potatoes are sprouting and the carrots are as wrinkled as a Shar Pei’s scrotum…’
    ‘That’s probably because, one way or another, she left here three weeks ago,’ Paula interrupted.
    He nodded. ‘She worked hard, she worked late. She didn’t always have time to cook.’
    ‘Maybe she couldn’t be bothered.’
    ‘Take a look in the cupboards,’ he said, anticipating open packets of ingredients, jars of herbs and spices, tins he’d have no idea what to do with.
    Paula revealed exactly what he’d expected. ‘You win. She cooked.’ She picked an open cardboard box off the shelf and peered inside. ‘Now I know the Polish word for lentils.’ While she was on this theme, she opened the fridge. It smelled of over-ripe cheese and bad fruit