by Nick Oldham
‘What – as in boxer?’
‘One of the characteristic features of bodies exposed to intense heat.’ Baines continued to loop the slab, his thin arms and legs bringing to mind a praying mantis. ‘It’s called heat stiffening. Arms extended from the shoulders and the forearms partially flexed. And yes, like a boxer. Legs, as you can see, also flexed. Doesn’t happen every time – there are no fixed rules – but it is common. It’s the coagulation of the muscles on the flex or surface of the limbs.’ He finished his explanation with a smile.
‘Oh, right, thanks,’ Henry said as if he was expected to understand such terms.
Baines said, ‘A bit like pulling a longbow.’
‘Indeed,’ Henry said, now slightly understanding.
‘But, obviously in this case, I would suggest the vital question that needs to be answered is whether this poor soul was alive or dead when the fire started. Blood samples will help: do they contain traces of carbon monoxide or not?’
‘Meaning?’
Baines turned to Henry. ‘Meaning that if carbon monoxide is present, the victim was breathing after the fire started.’
‘Ah.’
‘Also, the presence of particles of soot in the lungs and air passages is a similar, supporting indicator. There are other ways to tell if burn injuries were suffered before or after death,’ Baines babbled on, engrossed in his puzzle, ‘but I won’t even try to explain that to you, officer, uh, DC …?’
‘Christie.’
‘DC Christie … except to say that burns received after death will show no signs of vital reactions. Anyway, let’s take a closer look.’ The pathologist stopped suddenly, walked over to Henry and said, ‘My name is Baines, by the way. Very pleased to meet you. This is my first solo post-mortem, incidentally. I’m quite new to this game.’
After a very detailed examination – including directing a scenes of crime officer to take photographs and record the progress of the PM on video – Baines meticulously plotted everything on pro-forma diagrams of the human body and then, speaking out loud into a microphone hanging above the body, he began the dissection.
Henry had once overcooked a chicken in the early days of his marriage to Kate – trying to impress her with his culinary prowess – and it had come out of the oven black and smoking, almost in flames, and try as he might not to think it, the body of this unfortunate man on the slab reminded him of that particular Sunday roast.
In that instance, Henry had chucked the bird away and he and Kate gone out for lunch instead.
Today’s roast would be minutely examined.
This was the first time he had attended the PM of someone who had died in such a manner. He’d been to countless others, and if he was honest, this one, so far, was up there with the worst.
However, he expected the cause of death would be smoke inhalation in this case and that it would become just a job for the uniform branch to sort out and report – hence the presence of WPC Clarke who had been deployed to it for such an eventuality.
He guessed this could well be a homeless guy who’d hunkered down in a dilapidated building, maybe tried to light a fire for warmth, fallen asleep, maybe drunk, and the fire had got out of hand before he’d even woken up.
Sad, but these things happened.
He glanced at Clarke. She seemed fixated, staring at the scene being enacted in front of her eyes, mesmerized with horror.
‘You don’t have to stay,’ Henry said quietly.
She spun ferociously to him. ‘Because I’m a girly?’
He was taken aback and his face must have registered horror. ‘No,’ he backed off, ‘because you don’t have to.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said dryly and turned back to watch the proceedings which began as Baines, assisted by the mortuary attendant, began the slow task of peeling away the clothing worn by the victim. Some sections were easier to remove than others; in particular, the dead man’s shirt was problematic.
‘Nylon,’ Baines said to Henry. ‘It’s just melted on him.’
Finally, he was ready to do some cutting.
It began with Baines selecting a dissecting knife from his range of shiny instruments, which reminded Henry of a very neat cutlery drawer. His bony fingers had fluttered over the array of cutting instruments which included a brain knife, scissors, saws – including an electric saw with oscillating safety blades – a skull key, scalpels, forceps and chisels. Baines’s fingers quivered like a classical pianist about to slam his fingers down on to the ivories, although in this case he picked up the knife and moved across to the body, making an incision down the centre of the torso from neck to pubes, veering around the navel. The pathologist’s concerto.
While he did this, the mortuary assistant, under Baines’s direction, used a scalpel to trace a cut around the dead man’s probable hairline, then carefully peeled the scalp forwards with his fingertips, rolling it over the facial features to expose the skull underneath which was cream-coloured and unaffected by the fire.
Meanwhile, Baines had gently eased the body cavity open to reveal the ribcage and internal organs.
At that point, Clarke fainted.
Two hours later, Henry was standing outside the mortuary at the rear of Blackpool Victoria Hospital. He was with Baines, who was leaning nonchalantly against his dinky little sports car, a British racing green Triumph Spitfire, smoking a large cigar.
‘A rain of blows to the skull,’ Baines reiterated, just so Henry could take it in again; and just to make sure Henry was also scribbling it all down in his pocket notebook. ‘Bludgeoning, and from the indentation of the impact, the shape of the wounds on the skull itself, a sustained attack – initially from behind, I would say, with a weapon similar to a baseball bat, perhaps.’
Henry nodded, wrote feverishly, hoping he’d be able to read his own scrawl later, even though he knew Baines would fax in a copy of his typed report in detail.
‘Skull very badly fractured with many splinters of bone embedded in the brain itself, as I showed you.’ He puffed on his cigar.
Indeed, Henry had seen this.
But that had been after Baines had done his work on the bodily organs. After removing the lattice that was the sternum and ribs, he had removed the heart and lungs, transferring them to the dissecting table. He had lifted the lungs up like an old cardigan and then laid them out neatly before slicing into them. At that point, Henry had given up any hope of keeping the smell out of the fabric of his suit and had gone to watch the procedure closely, with Baines happy to explain what he was doing and seeing and how he drew his conclusions.
Clarke, in the meantime, sat out in the corridor with her head in her hands.
The lungs had shown cancerous growths in the bottom sections of both, but, more importantly, there was no evidence of the man having inhaled smoke from the fire.
Then there was the brain to examine after the skull cap had been removed, but before Baines did this, he pointed out the damage done to the bone by a weapon.
Once the skull cap had been removed, Baines inspected the brain closely in situ. Henry joined him and it was clear to see how much damage had been done to the grey matter. Baines then removed the brain and carried it over to the dissecting table as if carrying a pet rabbit, then dissected it methodically.
‘So the fundamental questions to be asked,’ Baines said, pausing as he mulled things over. ‘No, actually, I’ll jump to the answers. Number one: the injuries to the brain were not caused by the fire; number two: the injuries we saw were caused before the fire; three: these injuries to the brain were the cause of death. Five: they are homicidal injuries.’ He took a few more puffs of his cigar and exhaled the smoke. ‘Clearly, the blood will have to be tested for carbon monoxide, but even now I know the result – negative.’
Henry, with his pen poised eagerly over his notebook like a keen journalist about to get a scoop, said, ‘Which means?’
Baines threw down the stub of his cigar and crushed it underfoot. ‘It means, DC Christie, tha
t you have a murder on your hands and somewhere out there’ – he waved a hand towards Blackpool – ‘is a very brutal killer.’ And with that, he gave Henry a smile, clambered into his soft-topped car like a stick insect negotiating a branch, fired it up and skidded away while Henry checked his notes and wondered what had happened to answer number four.
SEVEN
2020
‘Fuck me! The direct entrants are getting older and older!’
Henry Christie’s mouth sagged open with a popping sound as he came to a hesitant stop on the threshold of the office in which he would be working for the foreseeable future. He had been about to knock on the open door and announce his arrival – his first day at work – but before he could speak, the woman in the chair closest to the door, who must have either heard him coming or sensed his presence, had spun around and delivered the disparaging one-liner, taking Henry aback.
‘I take it you are the new guy, yeah?’ she asked.
Henry paused in order to regather his senses and checked the laminated sign Blu-Tacked to the door which, in varying sizes and colours of fonts read, Lancashire Constabulary Cold Case Unit. Above that sign was a National Health Service rainbow poster, with the words Save Our NHS written below. It looked like a kid had done it.
Henry said, ‘I assume so …’
She spun back to her desk, tilted forward and sprang to her feet, gathering up a file as she did. ‘Been waiting for you to land. Got a job on. Where’ve you been?’
‘Er … with the detective chief super.’
‘Oh, Ricky boy.’
‘Mr Dean, yes.’
‘That’s what I said, Ricky boy … fancies himself sooo much,’ she said and took two strides across the room, grabbed a faded denim jacket from a hook on the wall, then two more strides across to Henry, pushed the file into his chest, making him take hold, while she inserted her arms into the jacket which, to Henry’s conservative mind, looked slightly incongruous over the extremely short skirt, flowery blouse and silk scarf she was wearing around her neck, though it did align nicely with her tanned bare legs, Doc Marten ankle boots and close-cropped hair with a purple flash across her right temple that reminded him of a David Bowie album cover.
She shouldered her way past him – which is when he noticed she was just as tall as he was – and said, ‘C’mon, then, been bloody waiting for you just in case I need a bit of macho back-up.’
On those last words, she stopped abruptly and gave Henry a quick, derisive yet amused once-over with very, very blue eyes and a crooked half-smile playing on her lips as she surveyed him. She uttered a snort of a laugh and said, ‘Yeah, right.’
Then she was past him, heading down the corridor, leaving him abandoned.
The office he was looking into had four desks in it and a man sitting at one of them. He was wearing a face mask. He looked at Henry, who couldn’t discern his expression, but the guy shrugged, then returned to the typing he was engaged in at a desktop computer which, Henry noticed, was about the size and depth of an old TV. This observation gave Henry the clue that this was a slightly forgotten corner of the constabulary.
He wheeled around and followed in the slipstream of the woman who had not slowed down and was already exiting through the door at the end of the corridor.
Henry upped his pace and managed to contort through the pneumatically closing door before it shut – but she was already outside the building and striding headlong through the landscaped grounds towards the large car park used by the Constabulary Training Centre at Hutton Hall, situated several miles south of Preston.
The building he’d just entered and exited was a former student accommodation block that had been converted into offices many years before to house the Force Major Investigation Team (FMIT) initially and now the more recently formed Cold Case Unit (CCU) which had a ground-floor office in one corner.
Henry gave chase and tried to catch up with the woman without losing too much of his dignity and trying not to wheeze.
‘I park across here so I can walk through the trees,’ she explained for no reason. ‘Then I can see squirrels, rabbits and birds. Did you know that the rabbits here once had myxomatosis?’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yeah – gunked-up eyes … yuk! Horrible sight.’ She shuddered as she walked along.
Henry did know – it was a disease that came and went. He’d seen a lot of dead or suffering rabbits in his time on FMIT.
‘I’m not a direct entrant, by the way.’
‘I know that – it was a joke. Well, the direct entrant bit was because, to be fair, you do look a bit long in the tooth.’
‘That would be because of my age.’
She grinned at that one, but then asked, ‘How much are you on?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Daily rate … y’know? Dosh.’
‘That’s between me and my maker,’ Henry responded. He was startled at her rudeness, but not really bothered because he had already decided in the two or three minutes he’d known this woman that he would be giving as good as he got, even if technically she was his boss.
She gave him a sly look as they reached the tarmac of the car park and took a diagonal route which ended up with her pointing a remote lock at an old Mini Cooper with a Union Jack painted on the roof but also a Ban the Bomb logo on the bonnet.
Henry saw his chance for a dig and said, ‘And I thought we’d be going out in a 2CV.’
She stopped abruptly. Henry carried on a couple more steps and almost collided with her.
‘Stereotyping or being cheeky?’ she pondered.
‘Holding my own.’
She surveyed him critically once more. ‘Riiight,’ she said, drawing out the word, then nodding her head. ‘I admire that, but don’t get me wrong. In that office, I’m the boss and I’m the only one allowed to overstep the mark because I’m female and I will always use the sexist card.’
‘Fair enough. Mine’s the ageist card.’ Henry smirked. ‘You get that when you’re over sixty.’
‘Sixty? Jeez – I put you more round the seventy-two mark.’
She sidestepped past him, went to her car and got in behind the wheel, saying, ‘Get in,’ as she did.
Henry shook his head in disbelief, bit his bottom lip, found his face mask in his pocket, put it on and, wondering why he was bothering at all, got into the opposite side, dropping into a sporty bucket seat which felt just a bit too body-hugging for his girth, by which time the engine was revving.
After a few ferocious revs, the woman turned to Henry – she was now wearing a pink face mask and her voice was slightly muffled.
‘I’d offer to shake your hand, but as I don’t know where you’ve been and you’re not in my bubble, I’d just like to say I’m pleased to meet you. My friends call me Debs, my enemies call me “deadly” and there is no in-between. And I’m your DS, so get used to it.’
‘Gotcha.’
‘I know exactly who you are, what you were, what you are now,’ she said. ‘One thing I’ve learned in life, and it was a harsh lesson, is to prepare, get to know your adversaries and, well, you’ll probably find out other shit in due course.’
‘And what are we up to now?’ Henry tapped the folder which was on his lap. It had the name Clanfield scrawled across it in thick felt tip.
‘Well, with any luck, we’re going to arrest a rapist. How does that sound?’
‘I’m up for that.’
Henry Christie’s day had actually started much earlier, at five a.m., when he’d had to put a few things in place before he even set out.
He lived in a village called Kendleton and jointly owned the rural inn in the village, The Tawny Owl, known locally as Th’Owl. And days there always began early, or at least they had done until the pandemic closed everything down. The shutdown had actually come at quite a bad time for Th’Owl because in the previous year horrific moorland fires had ravaged the countryside around the village and decimated trade, and things were only really getting back to
normal after a good Christmas when the virus came to town.
The plus side was that the business was debt-free and Henry could afford not to have to furlough his staff and was able to continue to pay full wages, though he knew it was something he couldn’t sustain indefinitely.
He was also – personally – in the fortunate position of being in receipt of a police pension, which kept the family side of things ticking over – family meaning Ginny, the stepdaughter of his late fiancée, Alison, with whom he ran the business fifty-fifty.
Even so, he knew that any extra cash coming in would go a long way towards keeping things afloat, so it was a good thing when he took a phone call from Rik Dean, the detective chief superintendent in charge of FMIT – actually one of a series of calls – asking him to consider coming back to work as a civilian investigator.
Henry had steadfastly refused the offers even if they were quite lucrative because he had recently found himself involved in two complex multiple-murder investigations and decided he’d had enough of policing.
But purely from a mercenary point of view, Henry changed his mind after much finger wrangling because every little would help to keep the business afloat.
In his past life, a life that seemed so long ago, when Henry had been a cop, he’d risen to the less-than-dizzy heights of detective superintendent on FMIT, and now the force was reluctant to lose his skills and expertise. Rik Dean often badgered him to consider a civilian investigator role, especially after his success on the investigations he had become embroiled in during the previous year which had involved organized crime, money laundering and brutal killings – and especially as Henry had also managed to save Rik Dean’s life into the bargain.
But Henry hadn’t been sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring.
If the call had never come, he would not have bothered, and no doubt the business would have survived, unlike many other pubs and hotels which were closing down, unable to weather the storm of the virus and the attendant lockdowns.
When the actual phone call had come, he had been in the bar of Th’Owl. He was dressed in overalls, splattered with a cream-coloured emulsion and balancing precariously at the top of step ladders as he daubed an intricate ceiling cornice with a brush that sent spatters of paint across his cheeks and forehead.