by Ali Gunn
‘Fat chance,’ Elsie said. ‘This one’s mine.’
‘But boss—’
She shot him a withering gaze. ‘As far as we know this is not a serial murder, understood?’
He acquiesced, not that he had any choice. He might have been a big fish in the small pond that was West Yorkshire Police but down here he was a rookie with no influence. Elsie might suspect a serial killer, she might even believe it to be true, but until evidence backed that up, the case was hers. She needed this case. She needed the chance to prove, once and for all, that she’d earned her command. Solving a case like this was the only way to quash the rumours, to quieten the snide remarks.
Such high-profile crimes were a double-edged sword. While success would redeem her reputation, failure would forever condemn her to working the graveyard shift. A tiny voice at the back of her mind screamed out that she should hand it off to DCI Fairbanks. It was the easy way out. If she let him have the case, she’d have no risk of failure, no media spotlight to deal with, and nobody comparing her to her father. Her team was too green, too new. The safe choice beckoned.
Chapter 3: Spilsbury
The echo of a hacking cough announced the pathologist’s belated arrival. Elsie hastily stuffed the victim’s mobile into her pocket so she wouldn’t see the orange light. The coughing grew louder and louder until Dr Valerie Spilsbury appeared out of the darkness. She was a curmudgeonly old woman, grey and hunched with a face that was all wrinkles surrounding large eyes made even bigger by her designer Tom Davies glasses. The doctor looked comically small next to Stryker. It would have been easy to assume that her height and age reflected her ability. It was a mistake that nobody made twice. Spilsbury spared little time for the detectives and forensic scientists with whom she had to work. She had her favourites – they all did – but Elsie was not among them.
‘Doc,’ Elsie said by way of greeting. Spilsbury didn’t even glance at her. She barrelled past at elbow-height as if the corpse could wait no longer.
‘Move aside,’ she said with a wave of her hand. ‘I can’t have you contaminating the crime scene any more than you inevitably have.’
Elsie’s nostrils flared angrily. Every bloody time it was assumed that she was incompetent because she was young and she was a woman. Never mind that the doctor had had to deal with the same prejudice once upon a time. Perhaps that was it; Valerie Spilsbury had risen above the bile and so she had contempt for anyone who couldn’t follow in her footsteps. What hurt the most was that Spilsbury was right. Elsie had broken protocol by going fishing in the victim’s handbag. Elsie bit her tongue, though she arched an eyebrow at Stryker from behind the pathologist’s back. He managed a wan smile in return.
By now the pathologist was poring over the body with rapt attention. She leant in so close that she was almost but not quite touching the body. Elsie could hear the pathologist’s laboured breathing as she watched her breath rise in the winter air. It was the sort of bitingly cold night that made Elsie long for thick woollen mittens, and a warm log fire to retire to. If she closed her eyes, she was transported back to the Chesterfield, in the window overlooking the garden of her childhood home. It was her reading nook, her sanctuary where Mam would bring her hot chocolate, and she missed those days sorely. She shivered as she looked at Spilsbury dressed in an overcoat that looked paper-thin, and wearing nothing more than sterile gloves on her tiny weather-worn hands.
The doc worked methodically, and even Elsie had to grudgingly admire her efficiency. She progressed from sense to sense, first taking in how the body looked, both up close and within the context of her surroundings, then pausing as if to listen to the corpse which struck Elsie as a fruitless exercise. She’d asked about it once, and Spilsbury had claimed to be able to hear the decomposition, even smell the slow process of putrefaction. Such things turned Elsie’s stomach.
Spilsbury muttered to herself as she worked, still oblivious to the detectives waiting for her to provide a time of death. The heavy breathing stopped suddenly, and then Spilsbury sniffed the air as if she were a dog.
A giggle escaped Elsie’s lips at the thought of the vaunted Doctor Valerie Spilsbury with matted fur and a wagging tail.
Spilsbury’s head snapped around towards her so fast that she wouldn’t have been surprised if she suffered whiplash. ‘What’s so funny?’ Spilsbury demanded.
She shrugged, stifling the urge to laugh. ‘Nothing.’
The pathologist turned away and dug an oversized camera out of her bag with which to take photos of the body in situ. It was a task that ought to have been delegated. Elsie watched as the body was thoroughly photographed from every angle. The doctor worked quickly, the single-lens reflex mechanism of her full-frame camera snapping with a clack over and over again. Every passing moment was another opportunity for evidence to degrade.
Once the photography was out of the way, the doctor pulled out a long thin thermometer that ended in a wicked point. She eyed the victim as if deciding where to stick it.
‘Can’t decide if you want to put it under the tongue or up the bum?’ Stryker joked under his breath.
Unfortunately for him, Spilsbury heard him.
‘Name?’ she demanded.
He glanced at Elsie as if he expected her to leap to his defence. Instead, Elsie shrugged. When Spilsbury asked a second time, Stryker told her.
‘Mr Stryker, I will assume you’re new to the Met, and I will give you the benefit of the doubt once. Is that clear?
His head dropped, and he stared at his feet.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Right, then come closer.’ She beckoned him with a gnarled index finger. ‘This,’ she held aloft her thermometer, ‘is the most important tool I own. Do you know why?’
He eyed her warily. Was it a trick question?
‘To take a corpse’s temperature,’ he said.
‘Indeed,’ the doc said. ‘And why do we want that?’
‘Time of death,’ he said much more confidently this time.
Spilsbury nodded appreciatively. ‘You’re not a complete idiot then. Back when I started, we used a rough rule of thumb, bodies cool at roughly one point eight degrees Fahrenheit per hour.’
‘Not now though,’ Elsie chimed in.
‘Quite,’ Spilsbury said. She turned to her bag, withdrew a small laptop and set it upon the ground. ‘These days I use a Bluetooth thermometer that feeds into my laptop so I can consider more variables. Any idea what those variables could be, Mr Stryker?’
He looked around the courtyard. The rain was still pounding down as it had been on and off since they’d arrived, and it brought a chill with it that would no doubt affect the forensic timeline. ‘How cold it is out?’
‘That would be one such variable. There are many. Everything from ambient temperature to the size of the body, air pressure, salinity, and whether a body has been dumped will cause differences. If this isn’t the primary crime scene, then we don’t know what the conditions were like where she was murdered. These may be minor variations with no meaningful impact on the forensics or they may throw off the timeline. Now, did I hear one of you say you think that this might be a serial?’
The pathologist had to have impressively sharp hearing to have heard them talking about that.
‘Maybe,’ Elsie conceded cautiously. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Those are the options.’ Spilsbury crossed her arms as she spoke. To Elsie she looked like Sister Mariana, a nun who had taught her as a child and had assumed a very similar position whenever she was unamused.
If sexual assault were a possibility, then proper procedure dictated that the pathologist couldn’t use a rectal thermometer lest she contaminate the evidence.
Spilsbury glanced from one detective to the other and then gave a little shrug. ‘Can’t chance things,’ she said cheerfully as she stabbed the victim’s abdomen with her thermometer. The spiked end of Spilsbury’s thermometer slid almost effortlessly into the body. It was obviously a procedure that the doctor ha
d done a thousand times before, and the disinterested look on her face reflected that. Where Elsie naturally recoiled from even looking at the corpse, Spilsbury handled it dispassionately.
‘How long’s she been dead, doc?’ Elsie asked.
The doc seemed to be working it out in her head.
‘I’m not putting a number on it.’
‘Why not?’ Stryker demanded. ‘Can’t you just subtract her current temperature from normal body temperature, and then divide it by two degrees Fahrenheit or whatever you said it was?’
Spilsbury didn’t budge. ‘First, it’s one point eight degrees, not two. Secondly, it’s nearly freezing so doubtless she’d have cooled quicker than usual. Humidity, body mass, etc., they all matter too.’
‘Then give us a ballpark, doc,’ Stryker retorted.
‘No,’ Spilsbury said firmly. ‘And watch your tone if you don’t want your first murder case to be your last. One more outburst and I’ll be putting in a formal complaint.’
Elsie threw her hands up in surrender. Her new protégé was proving more trouble than he was worth. ‘Doc, Stryker’s sorry, aren’t you, Seb?’
One glance at Elsie’s face and he knew he was outnumbered. Contrition dawned upon him. He thrust his hands into his pockets, the spitting image of a spoiled schoolboy caught with his hands in the biscuit tin.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
Spilsbury ignored him and turned her attention to Elsie. ‘You’ve got a body dump here. There’s visible livor mortis.’
Sure enough, her lower limbs were covered in red-and purple bruises. ‘How’s that impact our post-mortem interval?’ Elsie asked.
‘That alone says she’s been dead for two hours minimum.’
A quick glance at Elsie’s watch proved the same. They found the body hours ago. ‘Any more than that?’
‘Fools guess. Experts know their limits,’ Spilsbury said. ‘I need to check the nearest weather station. Until I know the temperature, wind speed, and humidity, I can’t give you more than an educated guess, and I never guess.’
Elsie couldn’t help but parrot Stryker’s question. ‘I know it’s not possible to say definitively, but it would be valuable to have some idea of the timeframe. I’ll take your educated guess over a complete absence of information any day.’
Spilsbury sighed. This was a battle she knew she’d never win. She held up her hands in defeat.
‘The only thing I can tell you are the odds. It’s probable that she’s been dead for a day or more,’ Spilsbury said, though she sounded less certain than her words indicated. Perhaps it was Spilsbury’s famous poker face, or perhaps she was simply unwilling to stake a thirty-year career on a hunch. ‘There’s no sign of rigor,’ she continued. ‘Someone has taken the time to pose her on this bench, and it would have taken them a while to get this dress positioned so elegantly.’
The thought set Elsie’s mind racing. Someone had posed the body? If it were a serial, and the first victim had been posed too, that detail hadn’t made it into the newspapers. Elsie made a mental note to check the Met’s own HOLMES 2 database. ‘Are you sure, doc?’
‘Almost certain,’ Spilsbury confirmed. ‘Don’t quote me on it until after the autopsy though. I’ve no visible cause of death. Let’s get the body bagged and transported to the mortuary. Do you want to be present? I should be able to start at around nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’
It was a tempting offer. Elsie cast a glance at the reticent Stryker.
‘As you two are getting on so well, Stryker will come watch,’ Elsie said. ‘Like you said, it’s his first murder investigation, and he needs to learn, don’t you Stryker?’
The doc grimaced, and Elsie knew she had set the cat among the pigeons.
Faced with an entire morning with a man she clearly disliked, Spilsbury’s prim and proper façade broke. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Fine. He can come, but he’d better not puke in my autopsy room.’
With that she spun on her heel, and then stalked back the way she’d come, leaving Elsie and Stryker standing in the rain. Echoes of her footsteps – and the accompanying hacking cough – faded into the night.
Once she was sure no one was watching, Elsie pulled the victim’s phone out of her pocket, and then placed it gingerly under the victim’s thumb.
It didn’t unlock. The screen read Enter Passcode. Your passcode is required to enable Touch ID.
She swore, and then shoved the phone into an evidence bag. Elsie mulled over her options – canvass the area, babysit the crime scene manager whenever he or she arrived, or look up the victim’s address. The victim had a driving licence in her purse so Elsie decided to start with the last, easiest, task. After she’d done that, there was scant more she could do on-site. If St Dunstan in the East wasn’t the primary crime scene, she had to find out where the victim had actually been killed, and the victim’s home seemed as good a place to start as any. She made her decision.
‘Stryker, the crime scene’s all yours. When our crime scene manager gets here, make sure the body is bagged, then crack on with the general canvass. If Knox and Matthews bother to show up, I want them going door to door, and I want copies of any CCTV recordings within a quarter of a mile. Got it?’
‘But where are you—’
‘Do you understand or not?’ She wasn’t about to explain herself to the cocky detective.
‘Got it,’ he said reluctantly.
‘Call me if you find anything inceptive.’
Confusion furrowed his brow as if they didn’t think about inceptive evidence up north. They probably just called it meaningful or something else equally vapid. No doubt he would Google the term the moment he was out of her sight.
‘And, Stryker?’
‘Yes, boss?’
‘Welcome to the Met.’
Chapter 4: Life Interrupted
Annie Burke knew it was going to happen. She’d spent the whole day tidying up around the house compulsively putting everything away just how she liked it. A place for everything and everything in its place. That’s what her parents had drilled into her. This was her long-awaited weekend off with her hubby, Sam. The champagne was chilling in the fridge, a fresh lasagne was in the oven, and the table was set for two.
Her mood had varied throughout the day. Something about the anticipation felt like a first date complete with butterflies in her stomach. She loved the romance. Sometimes though, she felt like she was in love with being in love and not in love with Sam.
She’d nearly finished preparing dinner before the call came in from the area forensic manager. ‘Not tonight, please,’ she’d pleaded. ‘It’s my wedding anniversary.’ It was no use. The boss didn’t care if she’d been married eight years today. It didn’t matter that she had an elaborate dinner planned, and rose petals scattered across the bed. It didn’t matter that her husband was on the way home from the airport having been away in Asia for almost a month. It didn’t matter that tonight was their last chance saloon, the night she’d pinned her hopes on to rekindle it all, to find that spark they’d once enjoyed.
It was much the same as when she’d first got married. Her schedule ruined everything, and he demanded more. She could be called at a moment’s notice and was duty-bound to respond. Such was the life of a crime scene manager working murder cases. When a body was found, and she was the only crime scene manager on the duty roster dumb enough to answer the phone on a Friday night, she had to go. If she didn’t then evidence could be lost. The first few hours were critical. She had no choice.
Dinner had been abandoned – not for the first time – and an apology note left on the table for Sam. Their reconciliation had waited months if not years already. Another day or two couldn’t hurt, could it?
It was nearly eight o’clock when her taxi pulled over on St Dunstan’s Hill. The road ahead was blocked by squad cars, and her police colleagues loitered on the pavement awaiting her arrival.
‘Sixty quid please, love,’ the cabbie called over his shoulder. Sixty pou
nds? It was daylight – or rather evening – robbery.
Not more than a second after the cabbie spoke, Annie grimaced and shut her eyes as she groped for the purse that she knew wasn’t there. She’d been in such a rush to grab her kitbag that she’d left it on the kitchen counter. When she didn’t move, the cabbie repeated himself, this time more loudly with an edge to his voice causing the hair on her neck to stand on end. The taxi door was still locked; Annie wondered how unsafe she would have felt had they not been parked next to two police cars. She rolled down the window, and a man she presumed was the new guy on Murder Investigation Team 18 approached with an expression of curiosity on his face.
‘You’re Mr Stryker, right?’ Annie had been texted by the Senior Investigating Officer that one Sebastian Stryker would be waiting for her at the crime scene.
‘Guilty,’ he said with a lopsided grin. ‘Call me Seb.’
‘Seb, I’m in a bind. I was in a rush and forgot my purse—’
Before she could finish her sentence, he thrust his hand into his trouser pocket and fished out his wallet.
‘Say no more,’ Stryker said. ‘It happens to the best of us. What’s the damage?’
‘Sixty quid,’ the driver grunted.
‘Sixty quid? Where’d you drive her from? Nottingham?’
‘Look, mate, that’s what it says on the meter. Don’t like it, take it up with the Mayor of London. I’m sure he’ll give a shit. Now, you going to pay up or shall I turn the meter back on?’
Stryker scowled but still handed over three crisp twenty-pound notes that looked like they were fresh off the printer. The cabbie unclicked the passenger door locks.
‘Mind giving me a hand with my kit?’ Annie asked as she stepped out onto the pavement. As well as a large police-issue holdall, she had a bundle of boards ready to lay on the floor so that footfall wouldn’t contaminate the scene.