[Eddie Collins 01.0] The Third Rule

by Andrew Barrett

  “I’ll bet you let Stuart in there.”

  Jeffery backed off. “Stuart hasn’t shown up yet.”

  “Christ,” Eddie said, “that’s a first. Has he rung in sick? Maybe he’s dead.”

  “Enough.” Jeffery pulled a bundle of paper from the clipboard and handed it to Ros. “We had a murder came in early this morning. You’re both on that. You’ll need fresh laptops, so I’ve included requisition slips in there for new ones–”

  “What about configurations?”

  “Taken care of, Eddie. Go draw them from Bishopgarth. Here are your van keys, they’re the spares from the main building.”

  “And our cameras and kit?”

  “You pick up one camera from studio while you’re getting your laptops and all the kit you need is at Unit 41, put aside, and ready for you to collect.”

  Ros rolled up the paper and began walking to the main building.

  Jeffery took hold of Eddie by the arm. “How are you feeling? You okay with this?”

  “Aw, you do care about my ego.”

  Jeffery just stared.

  “Can’t see a problem,” Eddie shrugged.

  “Good, because your meeting with HoD is due out of the blocks first thing Monday morning.” Jeffery offered a faint smile, turned and left.

  They collected their kit, and travelled through to Wakefield to pick up the laptops and camera.

  Eddie bit his nails as they drove back from Wakefield into Leeds and towards the scene. He was thinking about what Mick said last night, and how he planned to visit Henry Deacon today, hoping to scrape some information out of him concerning Lincoln Farrier’s death and Sir George’s possible involvement.

  What he hoped for more than anything else, was some information about Henry’s Jaguar. He wanted to see if anything slipped out, or even if the man admitted killing Sam and that guy on Leeds Road.

  And if he did admit it?

  Well, if he admitted it, then Henry Deacon wouldn’t be troubling anyone for too much longer. It was a promise he made to Sam. And to himself.

  And then his phone rang. He looked across at Ros, who glanced at him, a questioning look on her face. “Jilly,” he said.

  “Go on and answer it, promise I won’t listen.”

  He selected audio and then okay. Jilly spoke: “You okay to talk, Eddie?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “About the other day,” she began. “I said some things that I shouldn’t have said. Look, I want you to move back in. There. I said it. No strings attached.”

  “You’d be happy living with an alky then?”

  Ros shook her head.

  “Not really. But I want you back.”

  “Right.”

  “Put your phone on video; I like to see what you look like.”

  Eddie closed his eyes. This was getting silly. It wasn’t Jilly speaking; it was a woman whose mind had gone to slush.

  “Eddie?”

  “Okay, okay.” He pressed the button, and she smiled at him.

  “How are you?”

  Everyone is suddenly concerned for me today. And how am I feeling? I’m feeling pissed off, that’s how I’m feeling. I know who killed my boy but I’m going to have to kill him before he can destroy the evidence I have against him. My boss is pushing me through the doors of the nearest Job Centre; I have a colleague who’s out to sabotage me, and my wife is batshit crazy.

  “Everything’s fine.” He stared down at the screen. “You?”

  “When are you moving your stuff back in?”

  “Work is taking up a lot of time, but I’ll make it as soon as I can.”

  “Pop round sometime, I can give you the new keys so you can bring your stuff over even if I’m not in.”

  “You’re always in, Jilly.”

  “Not these days.”

  He was about to ask where she went, but Ros was pulling the van up to the scene cordon. “Okay, Jilly, gotta go now, I’ve just arrived at a scene.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I thought you were in the van by yourself, pulled up on a hard shoulder or something. Who’s out with you?”

  “It’s Ros, you know Ros.”

  Jilly said nothing for a second or two, then, “Oh, Ros. Yeah. Okay, speak soon.” She hung up.

  Eddie flipped the screen closed. “Great. Can’t wait.” He saw Ros smile just the tiniest amount. He smiled too.

  56

  Thursday 25th June

  The cobbled street of Back Eshald Place was rammed with police vehicles. It was a bright day, but clouds in the western sky looked bruised and angry. Nearby, youths sat on swings in a ruined playground cum alfresco drugs shop; they watched, laughing at the police every now and then.

  Nearer to him were a smaller, quieter group of onlookers, some, noted Eddie, with digital cameras. And at the furthest cordon, television media had gathered, their vans with satellite antennae parked neatly in a row, newscasters and crewmembers frantically rigging up in case they missed something juicy. “Why are they here?” Eddie climbed from the van. Today there were more killings in Leeds than in the entire county twenty years ago. They were nothing spectacular anymore, barely news fodder at all.

  A suited figure walked briskly towards them. As he neared, he thrust out a hand at Eddie and said, “Morning, DCI Benson, Holbeck CID.” His eyes never ventured near Ros, who stood with her arms folded.

  “Eddie Collins, CSI.” Eddie shook hands.

  “Right, Eddie, this is what we’ve got–”

  “This is Ros,” Eddie said, “Ros Banford.”

  “Ros.” Benson nodded, returned his attention to Eddie. “We’ve got a dead girl at the foot of some cellar stairs, looks like she’s lost a lot of blood, can’t say where from just yet.”

  “House been searched?” Ros asked.

  “Yeah, all clear.”

  “Have they searched the cellar?”

  “I told them to keep away from it till you got here. If you want–”

  “No,” Eddie said, “we’ll go in and have a look first. If we find someone, don’t worry, we’ll shout.”

  “Any idea who she is?”

  Benson shrugged. “Not yet. This lot here,” he motioned to those closest to the fence, “think it was being used as a squat.”

  “What’s the report from your search crew; what’s it like in there?”

  “It’s being lived in, alright. They found drugs paraphernalia in what used to be the lounge, some kind of slow water filter, other bits and bobs. No signs of life upstairs, though.”

  “Right.” Eddie turned to Ros. “Shall we make a start?”

  “Let’s,” she said, “don’t much like being filmed for posterity.”

  Ten minutes later, suited up, Eddie and Ros approached the house.

  “So who’s Benson? You heard of him before?”

  Eddie said, “He’s from Wakefield CID. Been over here a month or so. He has a bad reputation so I try to stay out of his way when I can.”

  They entered the house through a warped tin door, torches in hand, new camera slung around Eddie’s neck. Even through the masks, they could smell dampness and the familiar undercurrent of blood and drugs, shot through with a tinge of death. They stood in the kitchen, the tiled floor here at the very entrance to the house too coarse, too damaged to be of any value for footwear marks.

  Forward a few paces and to their right was the rough cellar door. On the floor nearby were droplets of blood; in and around them were several footwear marks. And in the doorway between the kitchen and the lounge lay a hammer. Even without artificial light, they could see blood and hair sticking into it.

  “Give the floor some oblique, Ros,” said Eddie, “see if we can’t detect a few.”

  Ros crouched, focused the torch beam into a long thin tube of light, and cast it slowly back and forth in an arc. It showed up all manner of goodies on the floor, curly hairs, crumbs, pieces of food, a layer of recently disturbed dust: footwear impressions. “Yep,” she said, “plenty to go at.”


  “Let’s clear the kitchen floor first so we have somewhere to stash our gear.”

  They did, using a combination of oblique light and white fingerprint powder. Outside the common path of foot traffic, where the dust had had a chance to accumulate, torchlight picked out good quality footwear impressions, and Ros lifted them using sheets of black gelatine rollered out onto the floor. And for those marks that were within the common path, and that responded well to white globular powder, she lifted using transparent adhesive sheets.

  They scanned and powdered the floor; and the further into the kitchen they got, away from the deep scars made by the metal door, the better the quality. They were rewarded with seven footwear marks, all of reasonable value, detail in abundance. Most were Arrows, the favoured boot of police officers, but Nike and Reebok made an appearance, and one that neither had seen before. It was more of a shoe, like a deck shoe, certainly nothing that any self-respecting youth of today would be seen wearing. It raised their spirits and now they had cleared the kitchen floor, except for the marks in blood and the hammer, they had access further into the scene.

  Eddie scanned the lounge floor while Ros filled in the orange Criminal Justice Act labels to verify the footwear marks they had recovered, turning each one into a specific exhibit recorded in her paperwork - referred to as her CID6. She drew a plan of the kitchen floor, took rough measurements and then plotted the location of the footwear lifts on the plan.

  “No decent ones in here.” Eddie stood, gripped the small of his back and then massaged his right leg.

  Ros joined him at the lounge threshold. “Look,” she said, her voice muffled by the mask, “a smashed doll. I wonder if they had kids in here?”

  “And the drugs stuff too. But the floor is shit; we won’t get any footwear in here.”

  Ros made a test. She used the ESLA electro-static device to try and lift the dust surrounding a footwear mark she had planted, but the floor was too badly damaged to give any detail. Then, she tried a black gel lift; still nothing. “Right,” she said, “forget the lounge floor, waste of time.”

  Eddie walked in, suit crinkling as he moved.

  Ros joined him, stared around at the crumbling wreck that used to be someone’s home. “Do you fancy doing the body and I’ll concentrate on all the crap in here?”

  “How could I refuse such an offer?”

  “Thought you’d say that.”

  “But let’s clear the blood on the kitchen floor first.”

  “Okay, but photography’s yours,” she compromised. “I’ll do the reagent and swabbing. Fair enough?”

  The blood had no direction – other than straight down. It hadn’t been deflected by an object, hadn’t been flung or cast off by an implement, hadn’t arrived here from another place at high velocity. This was nothing more dramatic than drops of blood that had hit the floor and fanned into star shapes; some of them had pooled together within a five-inch radius.

  Eddie photographed it, and the partial footwear marks in it, with and without a scale alongside, all in relation to the cellar door. Then, after Ros swabbed the blood, to prove it belonged to the girl (they were never going to be lucky enough for it to belong to an injured offender), he retook his earlier shots and took them for a third time after she applied a dark blue reagent, gentian violet, which brought out and enhanced lots of additional detail the naked eye couldn’t pick up.

  This process highlighted two footwear marks in what they presumed to be the girl’s blood. A Nike Air, and a small part of the deck shoe.

  The trouble with the reagent was that it highlighted proteins, which was how it managed to develop the detail in the bloody footwear mark. But because this was a kitchen, old blood from meat, juice from burgers, even spilt milk glowed when Ros cast ultraviolet light over it. Discerning what was relevant and what was abstract would be the footwear bureau’s job. Thankfully.

  Eddie peered down the cellar steps. The twisted body lay three-quarters of the way down them, crumpled like the doll in the lounge. Eddie stood over her, looking at the waste of life. The first thing he noticed were the Reebok trainers she was wearing. So that left the deck shoe and the Nike Air as possible suspects’ footwear.

  The walls were a mixture of whitewash and bare brick; flakes of white damp clung to them like desiccated cobwebs, so there was nothing to be gained by getting the chemical boys from the Fingerprint Development Laboratory involved.

  He stood on the gritty stone steps and despite the nagging throb in his leg, crouched and inspected the girl. She was between twenty and twenty-five, slim, almost wasted, blonde with petite features; good-looking. Good-looking apart from the neat stab wound in her chest that had oozed sufficient blood to cover her chest and part of her neck. Doubtless beneath her there would be more, congealed, pooled. Slug food. Eddie shuddered.

  “What did you die for, eh?” The blood on her chest had trickled to where it was now: across her right shoulder, forming a little pool in the niche of her collarbone. This is where the murder happened, no doubt, but it started up there; Eddie looked back up the stairs. She was stabbed up there, hence the blood on the kitchen floor, and then hurled or fell down here where the final shallow beats of a dying heart cast its fluid.

  The needle marks on her exposed arms proffered some background, and the darkness beneath her half-open eyes, stark against the pallid quality of her skin, suggested that drugs played a big part in her life. But did they play a big part in her death? Another feature to catch Eddie’s eye, was the thread protruding from the nails of her right hand, like a symbol, a sign pointing to the killer? It was golden, like the one nestling in the slash mark on her T-shirt, wafting away in a breeze too light for Eddie to feel.

  Working in the confined space of a cellar stairwell proved difficult for him. Not only was the corpse upside down and the exposed areas of skin he needed to tape, furthest from him, but working constantly in his own shadow, cast by the lighting rigs at the top of the stairs, was just plain annoying. He’d photographed the body an hour ago, and now he planned to make his way past her with a tapings kit, and head-and-hands bags, ready to begin sealing her away until she reached the mortuary.

  Eddie used a pair of sterile tweezers to recover the golden threads, and found another couple under the nails of her clenched fist. They came away easily, indicating that they hadn’t been there for too long before her death. He placed the threads into small paper wraps, and then sealed them away into tamper-evident evidence bags, already signed and dated. He opened the tapings kit to pull from her exposed skin any stray fibres, any contact evidence, any trace evidence that was too fine for the eye to see, and too delicate to risk losing it in transit to the mortuary.

  A six-inch strip of sterile tape lifted invisible evidence from her bare forearms. He used more for her face, noting how strange it seemed when the tape lifted her part-open eyelids from the eyeball. And again, how strange when her forehead distorted, as he pulled the tape off, and how she never flinched when a clutch of eyebrow hair came away too. He taped her hands, her feet, and that part of her upper chest not contaminated by blood.

  “How are we going to get her out?”

  The light from the kitchen dimmed, and Eddie looked up to see Ros’s silhouette against the lighting rig. “Christ knows. Tell you what, if you’ve done with the floor up there, we could lay the body bag there and bring her to it instead of the other way around. No way can we package her here.”

  “I’ll go and get one. Back in a mo.”

  When the full force of the light returned to the stairwell, he returned his attention to the corpse. He slid the acetates, with individual tapes adhering to them, into a pre-recorded evidence bag, laid them a couple of steps above her bent knees and ripped away the seal of a head-and-hands kit.

  “What’s your name, kid?” He slid the largest bag over her head, pulled it down so it squashed her nose, made her eyebrows appear heavy like a bank robber wearing tights. He tied the bag off, reached up and bagged her hands. And then each fo
ot. The knuckles of her right hand were scuffed, probably as they skidded down the wall there. But they were small, petite even. They were a kid’s hands.

  Eddie licked his lips, felt the coarse fibres of his mask against his dry tongue. He sweated, and sure enough, he could hear Brandypuke Farm calling to him as his gloved hands trembled. He brought his mind back to the dead girl looking up at him with her creamy eyes.

  He remembered Sir George Deacon’s mesmerising words in his House of Commons speech. “If you want to kill serious crime, you have to kill serious criminals.”

  Eddie found himself staring at her; noting tiny details like the fine spray of blood on her cheeks, and the fine hairs growing around her temples giving her that wispy, romantic gypsy look. She was a sweet-looking kid.

  He was getting in too deep, could feel it. The shakes were booze-influenced, but the dampness in his eyes was compassion. And he wondered why. He’d always remained detached. After all, it was a stranger’s body, and so it was a job, a piece of meat. Overtime. But the hair, the wispy, gypsy look, it was… She was a kid, for fuck’s sake!

  Eddie turned away from her, scraped a plastic sleeve across his eyes and breathed through his mouth into the cool darkness of a stranger’s cellar.

  The Maglite beat away the blackness, but the smell of damp was strong. Mixed with it, overpowering it was wood oil, linseed, maybe. The remains of a candle sat just beyond the stairs and then he shone his light higher, towards the back of the room.

  “Well, I’ll be fucked.” Eddie walked towards the easel. There was a plastic sheet suspended above. Across its white surface were curtains of dust, and of course, more webs. He shone the torch light across it and saw recent disturbance, the smears from three fingers where someone had lifted this sheet. There was nothing to see beneath it though, just the naked wood of the easel.

  Above him and slightly to the left, was a bare bulb, small enough to be a vehicle bulb, and from it ran a skinny flex that bypassed a haphazard collection of old drawers and cupboards and connected with a huge black battery on the floor. This was a studio, a palace among the ruins, and Eddie felt a prickle of pride for the dead girl’s ambition.