Initial

by S Thomas Thompson

  On one occasion, Augustine had been to watch a post mortem as the ongoing investigation of a murder case. The enlarged liver and the condition it was in was easy to spot for anyone that had been present at more than one post mortem in their life. The look on the face of the pathologist told of a surprise in the way that it had been treated and still wasn’t the cause of death. But the fact that the owner of said liver hadn’t drunk for many days before the death meant that there was little alcohol in the blood. The report barely mentioned that fact that this was a heavy drinker, a factor that was eventually a large part of the violence associated with their murder and helped Augustine blaze a trail to her killer, from the pub that they both used to frequent. Until that point, there was little to associate the deceased with much anyone else on the planet. After, he had been able to make the right enquiries and link her to the series of events that lead to her untimely death. From that point onwards, Augustine despatched a member of his team to observe all the post mortems for his cases. Electra came back with the best results, time after time.

  With Electra on her way to the hospital with the body, and the on-beat police officers tidying up the scene Augustine had to find another way to get back to the station. The commuters were starting to appear in dribs and drabs and soon it would be one of the busiest streets in the city of Newcastle. It was testament to the people he worked with in the police force that nobody would know that they were walking close to the scene of a brutal murder. And hopefully he could keep it off the front pages for a few days too. The national newspapers were leading on a corrupt politician that had been working for several companies with a vested interest in his government department. Rather stupidly, he had failed to declare this to the commission. The deals looked to have been done behind closed doors but as anyone in the public eye can tell you, there is always a pair of eyes on your back. The politician was seen in and out the doors of not one, but two tobacco companies and a pharmaceutical firm based in the United States. He had, to that point at least, claimed that the fact he had opposed an increase on tobacco duty and had asked questions in parliament about opening up the pharmaceutical market to companies from overseas was a coincidence. Augustine didn’t believe in coincidences anymore, after twenty plus years in the force. The heat on the politician would die down in a few days and the newspapers, especially the tabloids, would love for a new long-running story to take its place. He was determined that his case would not be that story.

  As he stopped and looked around at the mostly empty streets that would soon be filled with people on the rush to work, he heard a voice in the background. It was like something that was getting closer and closer to him. “Augustine...Augustine...AUGUSTINE!”

  It was Ash. He was offering Augustine a lift back to the station so they could all look at the reports from the forensic team together. Ash was from the United States, but moved over the England when he was only around seven. Augustine often thought that being born in the country that probably invented crimes of this manner would help Ash to look at things in a unique way to the rest of the team. His father had worked for a major American investment bank that decided it might be a good thing to branch out into Europe. Ash’s father was given the honour of heading up the company in this respect and Ash and his mother went along so the father had the happy family life that the bank’s psychoanalysts insisted was the foundation of great decision making. At seven years old, who was Ash to argue? His mother was a little more able to fight her corner and after enduring three years of her husband coming home from work late and smelling of the cheap perfume she knew his secretary was fond of, she went back home to Alabama and to her parents. The divorce was messy and Ash became a pawn in their battles. But he had established himself in England by that point and his education at a boarding school was proving particularly successful. Ash stayed and his father employed someone to look after the boy when he was home from school. The someone was now his step-mother but Ash has had little to do with his father since he returned to the States and Ash joined the force. He didn’t really have the time to go visit, and consoled himself with the occasional phone call to top up the birthday cards that were sent annually in May. It was the least he could do, literally, and Ash just wanted to keep up his side of the bargain until the day his father passed away. After that he was free to be his own man, Ash believed.

  Augustine and Ash had always got along. From his early days, Augustine had been interested in American sports. When his school friends were talking about the football in the Monday morning playground, Augustine was talking to anyone that listened about how well the San Francisco 49ers had played the night before or what form Scottie Pippen was in. He soon ran out of people to speak to, as one by one he worked his way around the whole male population of the school without finding a fellow enthusiast. Many of the interests that are considered obscure and worthy of ridicule at school are seen as much more interesting to others when you leave and join the grown-up world. Here you are not restricted to the people you share a classroom or a playground with. You now have the whole world to choose from. When Augustine met Ash, he knew he had a kindred spirit on this front; even the fact that Ash supported the New York Yankees didn’t put off the mad Cleveland Indians fan Augustine from talking incessantly about the three US sports that interested him - baseball, basketball and football (or American Football to all those that called the European game by the name football.) They had stuck at it ever since.

  “Thanks Ash. That’s a great idea. What do you think of all of this? Any ideas yet?” Augustine steered the conversation to the facts immediately.

  “I can’t get my head around this yet. We are supposed to believe that this happened and we have nothing but the letter ‘A’? Is this going to continue right through to ‘Z’?” he enquired of his boss. Ash loved to ask questions. It helped him to process what he had seen in his mind.

  “We will see the full forensic report when we get back to the station, but for now that is what we are working on. Pretty strange, isn’t it?” Augustine fell into the pattern of other people’s conversation quite easily. If the other person questioned a lot then he found himself doing it too. It wasn’t conscious, but once he had started he would often notice that it was happening. Then he was painfully aware of it, and wondered if the other person had noticed it too. He didn’t know whether to continue or desist and ended up becoming embarrassed at the situation he found himself in, unable to devise a quick strategy to get out of it and feel comfortable again.

  “Yep. But the letter really intrigues me. I want to find out more. Do you have any theories?” he fired back. Augustine decided that more questions was the order of the day. He ignored the question Ash had asked and said, “It was a clean blow, wasn’t it?” It was the best he could do in the circumstances.

  “I’m not 100% sure about that. The neck of any human is filled with muscles and thick bone. For something to have cut the head clean off right here in this alley, it would have to be incredibly sharp and thrown with immense force. I don’t know that someone can do this in the confined space we have here. Could you?” Ash spoke lazily and sometimes Augustine didn’t know whether he was being deliberately obtuse or whether he just didn’t grasp English in the same way as he would if he had come home to two British-English speaking parents when he was young, especially the formative years when he first learned to speak. Did he mean could Augustine kill someone? Did he mean could Augustine know about confined spaces and weapons? Did he mean could Augustine throw something with sufficient force? He decided that any answer was a poor one so ignored the question and started towards Ash’s car for a lift.

  But something told Augustine a walk to the bus station would help. It would certainly give him some time to think about what he had seen before. It was also a slight nod towards the fact that he knew he didn’t get enough exercise. A short walk was the only chance he usually got, or usually gave himself, to stay on the right side of obesity and keep up the muscle tension in his legs. A walk it wa
s. Augustine scanned the area again to see if there was anything he had missed before he set off.

  “It’s alright Ash, I’ll walk and see you back at the station in a short while. It’s not far to the bus station and I want to think about the information we have pulled together already this morning,” he explained to his colleague and he wandered around the area again.

  He hadn’t got far when he thought about the railings at the side of the alleyway. They were around seven-foot-high and barbed at the top, so he wasn’t seeing them as a means of escape, but he wondered if they had been checked for blood splatters or anything else that would give them a way in to the killer. He started to walk back to the alley and phoned the head of forensics who had been working that morning. Augustine shouldn’t have worried. The team were thorough at what they did and the head assured him that the whole alley, including the railings had been swabbed and analysed. There was nothing there to give any clues. Augustine turned back in the direction of the station again and walked purposefully. He felt that all parts of the police were working in tandem here to get the result that he probably needed for his statistics. He knew it would be a long day.

  4

  Electra watched carefully. She watched as the pathologist got all different tools and instruments out to do his job. She watched as the pathologist took a deep breath and as he prepared to carry out the post mortem on the body. He was painfully thin, not an attractive trait in a man, but one that women other than her seemed to aspire to, thought Electra. She watched as he moved over to the body. It was clear that he didn't relish the job in any way shape or form. Electra watched people as if it was a study of politics. What she studied was their actions. Most people tried to give off one message to the world about any given situation. But their body language often told a completely different story altogether. Electra did her best to find a place in the room that gave her a view of the victim as well as a good view of the pathologist. She knew from experience that there were going to be signs from both. She recalled that place in the room when she called Augustine from the car as she made her way back to the station. He was walking and the signal between the two of them went from strong to weak. It made parts of the whole conversation difficult to decipher but the overall message was there.

  “Gus, I could see that he didn’t want me there at that point. He was comfortable with me seeing the whole body that was laid out in front of us but he looked nervous about me looking at his face. It was as though he knew I….” started Electra before a patch that Gus couldn’t hear. It didn’t sound important so he didn’t ask her to repeat.

  Electra told the whole story of the post mortem. She told of the way the pathologist studied the brain that was removed from the severed head. His tiny wrists struggled away at the organ like its weight would break them. There were no other signs of injury in the head so he moved on to the rest of the body. She told of the way that he extracted and weighed each of the organs to determine if they were of the right size and condition. In many cases that would be to help determine the cause of death, but Electra felt that he was just going through the motions. He looked for all the world like the role was too much for him. It was like a son who had been passed down the family business while still in his teenage years. His mind and body would be focused on getting drunk and pulling women, but the next morning he would have to get up and make decisions that he didn’t really understand. He would grow into it. The cause of death was strikingly obvious. There weren’t many people who would survive a wound like that and die of liver damage. She looked at the head and considered if it was the same one that she looked at in the alleyway. The pathologist had already confirmed that it was a single blow and Electra could see that there was little sign of a struggle but something made the head look different to the one she had seen earlier on the ground. Perhaps it was the missing hat. It must have been the missing hat. Where else would they get a head from?

  She watched as he carefully took out the heart and weighed it. This was standard practice and Electra picked up nothing from the looks on the pathologist face or voice. He carefully took out the organs one by one. He checked them over once and then out them to one side on a metal tray to be catalogued. They made a thud as he dropped them, only from a height of a few inches. Electra found it a satisfying noise in a strange way, but not one that she would want to hear on a regular basis.

  Electra recalled this to Augustine on the phone. “Gus, it’s been pretty standard up to a point. The organs didn’t look or feel any different to the other post mortems I’ve been to. But something felt different. There was something in the air. I can tell you…” Again, the reception stymied the conversation. Electra found a few seconds to add, “I’ll Facebook message you the rest,” with a chuckle in her voice. Augustine hated social media. He had always tried to avoid it. The trend of telling the world every aspect of your life was confusing to Augustine. He had joined Facebook under pressure from Electra and kept in touch with distant family members and colleagues over it. But he couldn’t get to grips with people that would confirm what they had for breakfast or what they were watching on TV. For Augustine, it was like the least interesting soap opera you could imagine. Electra knew of his dislike and teased him about it as much as he could.

  As the pathologist worked is way down the body Electra watched with some interest while he inspected the victim for any signs of sexual assault. She later recalled look in his eyes in the telephone conversation with Augustine.

  “He looked shocked. The pathologist seemed genuinely frightened by what he saw. He was young, so it may have been his first time.”

  It was the type of look that she has actually been sent there for. It gave away a lot of information about her lifestyle, or at least the pathologist’s view of her lifestyle. Electra didn’t know it at that point, but the victim was unidentified.

  And as she watched carefully, she could see there was something to pique his interest. His eyes gave it away to her. It was the coil that he removed from the body before placing on the metal tray. The click of metal against metal was a noise she wasn’t used to in a post mortem. The clink of metal was matched by a look from the pathologist. Electra had got what she had come for.

  5

  Meanwhile, back at the station, the conversation was in full swing. Ash was leading proceedings, as he often did when Augustine was not around. The others in the team were listening intently to the way he saw it all happening.

  “Listen, she died there and then in that alley. Even on a quiet midweek night, it was far too risky for the killer to move her to that spot after killing her somewhere else. So, we are looking at someone who took a chance with this girl, and carries a weapon around with him. He just happened to come across her at that time and carried out his whim,” Ash lectured the rest of the team. The lights in the office were on and with the summer brightness outside it was a shock to the senses. Intense light seemed to produce intense conversation.

  Lou wasn’t quite so convinced. He had been on the force far longer than anyone else in the team and during that time he had worked on cases of sexual assault, drugs and low-level crime before transferring to the murder investigation team. He had seen far more in his years than Ash and was willing to contend with the view his colleague was currently putting forward as the gospel. “I don’t think you can be totally sure that this is random and the guy just happened upon a victim. Not many people carry around a weapon of the size needed to inflict that wound and leave it to chance. If the letter left on her chest is significant, and I would hazard a guess that we all think it is, then he is looking to carry out more of these attacks. On that basis, why carry around a sword looking for a victim, when you run the chance of being caught and being locked up before you get the opportunity to carry out even one murder? It doesn’t make sense,” explained Lou. He wanted the rest of the team to use their experience and crunch the numbers rather than speculate at this time. They each had a forensics report sat in front of them and they were reading while
talking. Various parts of the report sparked different conversations. By this time, Electra and Augustine were still absent from the office, so it consisted of Ash, Lou and the other member of the team. They all spoke at once from certain parts of the report. It was as though they were reading precisely the same sentence at the same time, so the conversation went with the part of the report that they were reading. Each had slightly different experiences and often different views on the parts they were reading. If Ash saw the clinical nature of the weapon as reason to feel the attack was random, then Lou saw it as reason to believe that it was planned. The other one sat somewhere in between. But one aspect that they were all agreed upon was the fact that the murderer was good at what he did. The report pretty much gave then nothing in terms of cold hard evidence to track a killer and stop him before he committed any more. There were no fibres from clothing, no traces of bodily fluids apart from the victim’s own and no fingerprints. He was good in this aspect. But obviously, he wanted them to know a little something. It was strange for the three of them to admire a crime like this, but if there was ever a perfect crime, this was approaching it.

  “I think we should all go away and do our own reading, come up with our own ideas before the boss and Electra get back. That way we can influence this investigation for the better with our own thoughts,” Lou urged the others. They all walked to their desks and sat with heads down. Lou strolled over to a desk that looked as old as he was. It had dinks and dents across the sides, but the surface was in good condition. If he could still work on it then Lou couldn’t see any reason to request a change. The police had better things to spend their money on, he decided. The idea was to look through the report with a fine toothcomb to see if it threw up anything different, anything that could be a potential lead. The way that police work happened was by narrowing down the field of suspects until you had something to work with. It may be that the suspect was seen wearing certain items of clothing, or with a hairstyle or tattoo that rendered them different. This meant that the police could work with a pool of suspects that could be sifted through for alibis or motives.