Free Mother of Demons by Maynard Sims Page B

to go?”
    “He’ll agree, and I should think he’ll love every minute of it.”
    “Can you ski?” Harry said when Jason entered the office.
    “Yes, why?”
    “Because you’re going on a trip. How does an all expenses paid holiday to Austria sound?”
    “What’s the catch?” Jason asked suspiciously.
    “You’re going to have to form a relationship with a beautiful young blonde and pump her for information about Anton Markos.”
    “Sometimes this job sucks,” Jason said with a smile.
    Susan walked into the incident room and across to the board affixed to the wall. The board was empty apart from a photo in the center, taken on the riverbank. The room was half-full. Witherspoon and Bartlett were there along with two detective constables, one male, one female. The male DC, Tom Fox, was three years out of Hendon and was climbing rapidly up the promotion ladder. He was expected to reach the rank of sergeant before he hit twenty-five. Gillian Ryder had already reached twenty-five but was still a DC and showed no great ambition to climb higher.
    “What have you got for me?” Susan said.
    “We have a name for the victim,” Gillian said. “Kerry Green, sixteen, from Hackney. She was already in the system, a couple of juvies and a shoplifting charge last year that resulted in her being printed.”
    “We’ve also identified the caller,” Fox said. “His name is Arthur Lane.”
    “Do we like him for this?” Susan said.
    “I went to interview him first thing. He’s seventy-two, a retired postal worker from Penge. He saw Kerry’s body and called it in.”
    “Why didn’t he leave a name?”
    “The usual,” Fox said. “Didn’t want to get involved.”
    “So if he lives in Penge, how did he get to see the body?”
    “He’s been staying with his sister in Belvedere Road. He was walking her dog along the Embankment.”
    “So we have no lines of inquiry so far.”
    There was a general shaking of heads around the room.
    “Well, I’ve just got back from a meeting with McBride at UCH. There were a few marks on the body he wanted me to see.” She opened her briefcase and took out three color prints. She pinned them to the wallboard and stood back. “Okay. Image one: the stab wound, and probably this is what killed her. Notice the shape of the puncture wound.”
    “It’s a star,” from the room.
    “Professor McBride believes it was made by a five-bladed knife.”
    “Odd.”
    “Yes, that’s what he thought. He thinks it’s five blades welded together along the blunt edges, contained in a single handle. He thinks it might be ceremonial in some way. As you see, it leaves a star-shaped wound. I don’t know how significant this is, but if you join the points of the star together, they form a pentagram, an occult symbol. So we need to look at any groups in the area with some kind of black magic connection. Check with local cemeteries—see if they’ve had any incidents of graves being interfered with, headstones defaced, statuary vandalized, that kind of thing. Also check with the library and local bookshops to see if they’ve been asked for any books on the subject.”
    “What about the Spiritualist church in Cooper Street?”
    “No, we won’t go after the Christians just yet. Let’s concentrate our efforts on the fruit loops and oddballs.” She turned her attention back to the board. “The second photo. Someone carved this into Kerry’s flesh, postmortem according to McBride. Again the symbol suggests some kind of occult connection. It’s a crescent and could signify a new moon. And finally this, the remains of an ink stamp on the back of her hand.”
    “That’s a nightclub reentry stamp,” Gillian said.
    “Reentry?” Susan queried.
    “Antismoking laws. If you’re at a club and you want to go outside for a cigarette, they stamp the back of your hand so you can go back inside without having to pay again.”
    “Yeah, I’ve heard of that. Right, Gill, make copies of the photo and get