Charley frowned. ‘That’s no excuse.’
Mike paused for a moment as he flicked through the pages of information. ‘That occurred back in 2016,’ he said. ‘Then, in 2017, she was arrested and charged with shoplifting. It says here that she stole a bottle of wine and other bits of foodstuff from a supermarket. Total value of the items taken amounted to sixty-three pounds. She denied the offence. The case ended up in the Magistrates’ Court. She was found guilty, and was given one month’s imprisonment suspended for one year. All her previous antecedent history is being downloaded to the HOLMES database as we speak.’
‘Was she married? Single? Living with someone?’ Charley asked.
‘According to her record she was single. There’s no mention of a partner, but of course that may have changed.’
Charley replied slowly, as if thinking about what she was going to say. ‘Okay, so let’s get a priority action raised to research her background, including her last known address. Let’s find out as much as we can about her lifestyle. Find out how a person lived…’
Mike finished her sentence. ‘…and you’ll find out how they died.’
Charley smiled. ‘Exactly! I’ll brief the team once all the officers from other divisions have arrived to join us.’ She looked over his shoulder to the clock above her office door. ‘That’s probably not going to be happening until about two o’clock. Hopefully, the post-mortem will be over by then. It’s scheduled for midday. If any officers arrive early from further afield, instead of having them hanging about, perhaps Wilkie could brief them with knowledge of the area. It’ll save time later. I’m taking Ricky-Lee with me to the mortuary as exhibits officer, and I also want Annie to be there for experience. As my deputy, I want you to keep an eye on things here, and update me as and when. I think that’s it for now.’
Mike ran his hands through his hair, and his forehead furrowed with worry. ‘As you are probably aware, the media are chasing updates.’
Charley’s jaw tightened. The pressure was on, and Cordelia’s body was barely cold.
‘Leave the media to Connie and I. Right, is there anything else I need to know?’
Mike shook his head. ‘No boss, I think you’ve got it covered.’
* * *
Annie Glover talked about everything and anything, other than where they were heading, as though she was desperately trying to put off the inevitable, which was attending the post-mortem of Cora Jones. Charley humoured her, aware that everyone dealt with trauma in their own way.
‘Standing on the shoulders of giants,’ Annie whispered as they passed through the mortuary gates.
Charley glanced at her. ‘What made you say that?’
Annie looked vacant. ‘Oh, I was given a two-pound coin in my change this morning at the petrol station, and the quote is written around the edge. Funny I’ve never noticed it before.’
‘It was Newton, wasn’t it? What do you think he meant by that?’ Charley asked, as she pulled straight into a parking space next to the main door.
‘My guess is that if Newton had been able to discover more about the universe, it was because he was working in the light of discoveries made by fellow scientists.’
Charley turned off the car’s engine. Annie turned to her boss. ‘I suppose it’s a bit like me and you.’
‘What is?’ asked Charley.
‘The saying. Isaac Newton and his bosses. I learn to build on what you teach me from your experience, without my having to go through what you’ve been through.’
Charley grinned. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment shall I?’ She took the keys out of the ignition. ‘One thing you’re always sure of here is parking space,’ she said, reaching in the boot for her briefcase that lay on top of her horse-riding gear. Charley breathed in the smell of horses that reminded her of her first love.
‘Who would want to hang about here?’ said Annie, breaking Charley’s reverie, as the younger detective inspected the building before her like a child queuing for the ghost train.
Inside, Cora Jones was laid out on a stainless-steel post-mortem table, covered by a white sheet. The viewing window protected them from the pungent odours Charley knew to be in the air in the room. The implementation of standard infection control precautions meant that no more would she stand in her green plastic apron and gloves, shoulder to shoulder with the pathologist, inches away from the corpse, and in some respect it saddened her. It was important to her as an SIO, to know how a person had died, and try to see that for herself.
Annie groaned, brought her hands quickly to her mouth, then turned away for a minute.
A glance across at Annie showed Charley that her younger colleague was wringing her hands and it occurred to her that at post-mortems, Annie might think of her late brother Ashton, his suicide, and the much later trial and sentencing of the pedophile priests, his abusers.
Charley knew very little about Annie’s background and her home life. With the help of Botox, she also hid her emotions well. Maybe she was more like Charley than Charley realised, the SIO considered. Annie kept her private life to herself. She didn’t blame her. No one knew better than Charley that rumours and bad news spread around a police station faster than any intelligence.
‘You okay?’ Charley asked Annie.
Forcing herself to look again, briefly, then directly back to Charley, Annie nodded unconvincingly. ‘Why does the sight of a dead body get to me more at the mortuary?’
‘I don’t know,’ Charley said softly. ‘Perhaps it’s because your mind is occupied at the scene where as here others are doing the work and you’re the voyeur. Being up close to a dead body is stressful and not everyone can cope. I’ve known seasoned detectives faint at a post-mortem. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but that’s why I want you here, to get you to accept a post-mortem for what it is. The necessary examination for the investigator to understand how, and why, a person has died.’
Cordelia’s leggings, pants and trainers could be seen in-situ, around her ankles, just as she had been discovered.
When the sheet was taken from the body, Charley’s eyes once again, automatically scanned her, from head to toe and back again.
Charley could feel Annie turn towards the examination rather than let anyone see her face. Annie groaned at the sight of her head injuries.
Ricky-Lee entered the viewing room, and immediately started setting out the exhibit labels, and marker pens on the table, ready to receive the exhibits through the flap-type drawer from the adjacent examination room.
Annie leaned towards the glass. Curiosity and her training took over as Charley had hoped it would, and she saw her focus move from the woman’s head to her hands, looking for possible defence wounds. ‘She has no rings on her fingers, nor indentations where a ring might have been,’ Annie noted.
The notion sounded romantic to Charley, but she had a point.
‘The most recent intel tells us she’s single. That might explain things.’ Charley glanced in Annie’s direction for a brief moment. The young detective constable remained nose to the glass, silently staring through the window at the body, apparently now more at ease with the view which was so close and personal.
The turning on of the microphone indicated that Butterworth was about to start his examination. Dressed in protective clothing he stretched his arms above his head, before twanging his plastic gloves into place, one finger at a time.
In cases like this, Professor Butterworth’s job was to ascertain the cause of death. He would attempt to find out if Cora Jones had died from, amongst other things, asphyxia, exposure, or an injury to a vital organ. Concerning the manner of death, she may have been killed by strangulation, a gunshot, knife wound, a blunt instrument, or indeed the boulder that had been dropped on her head.
Swabs from the mouth, anus and vagina were taken, and subsequently from relevant parts of the skin where the professor thought there was the best chance of obtaining DNA. In this case from her breasts. Hair was pulled, and cut from her pubic hair, and
the hair on her head. Blood and urine samples were next. Professor Butterworth was thorough.
Noting all Cordelia’s visible external injuries, whether they were serious or slight, for the recording device, he scoured her body from head to toe before having her turned over to check her back. CSI Neal Rylatt took photographs at Butterworth’s request. The corpse may have a hundred injuries, but only one killed her.
With the victim positioned on her back, the professor picked up a scalpel to make the first incision, and Annie retched involuntarily. There were no obvious, visual signs of sexual penetration such as tears, bruising or scratches to indicate any form of penetration. They were reliant on swabs taken to ascertain if sexual intercourse had taken place.
Chapter 6
Inside the viewing room the air was filled with anticipation; the mood a mixture of desperate hope that Professor Butterworth’s findings would confirm things that the detectives already knew, but more importantly, find things that they didn’t, which would ultimately aid the investigators on their journey to trace the offenders.
Old man Butterworth was slow, methodical, and thorough in his approach to dealing with the lifeless body, which Charley likened to a mannequin. It was her belief that although life had once existed within, the vessel for Cordelia’s soul was no longer required. Charley was impatient, aware that the corpse before her was decomposing.
The incision the pathologist had made down the front of the body revealed a cavity, from which he took great care in removing the woman’s internal organs one by one; examining them in detail he recorded their weight. ‘I want tissue samples and bodily fluids for further examination,’ Butterworth said to his assistant.
‘What do they do with the tissue samples and bodily fluid after they’ve done with them?’ whispered Annie.
‘Providing they are small samples, they’ll be disposed of in the same way as samples from living patients. However, if they take the skull, or one of the larger organs for further examination they are duty bound to return the remains to be buried with the body,’ said Charley.
There was no time limit for the examination, it was too important to rush. Charley steeled herself for the well-versed gruesome procedures to come, and the thought of the anticipated incision to be made in the hair at the base of the head, which would permit the little skin left to be rolled from the face, and would allow Butterworth to flip the top of her skull so that her brain could be scooped out for its examination, brought about the SIO turning her mind to counting, her preferred occupation at times like this. She started counting how many hours she had spent at mortuaries in the past year, too many to remember she decided after a while, but she was certain that it was longer than any time she had spent on holiday. Grimacing, she knew she was right to look away as the thick soup-like substance that was her brain spilled onto the table. There was nothing Butterworth could do to stop it. The men at the table, stepped back, and from memory Charley involuntarily gipped at the foul-smelling substance. Like the train rumbling along the tracks earlier, it was locked in her memory.
‘What’s he doing?’ asked Annie in a hushed tone.
‘I guess he’s looking for a bullet,’ answered Charley.
Annie’s voice went up an octave. ‘Has she been shot?’
‘I don’t know. He doesn’t know. He’s just ruling things out that could have possibly killed her.’
Butterworth looked up, and for the first time he spoke. ‘A blood clot. There’s evidence of a haemorrhage. She was alive when the head wound was inflicted,’ he said.
Charley was surprised by the revelation. ‘So, she was moved as she was unconscious, before the boulder was dropped on her head,’ she said.
Annie looked puzzled. ‘That sounds a bit odd, don’t you think?’ She paused for a moment. ‘What would you do if you doubted Butterworth’s findings?’
Charley was the Senior Investigator but she relied on the expertise of other professionals to help her solve a case.
‘I’d seek a second opinion. After all it is the responsibility of the Senior Officer in charge of the investigation to check and question facts and actions of those involved in an enquiry, whoever they are, or whatever their role.’ Charley frowned. ‘Why do you ask?’
Annie was sitting with her chin resting on her hands. ‘I just wondered.’
Ricky-Lee was also sitting with his exhibits book open, pen at the ready, awaiting the handing over of samples, or packages from the pathologist.
Charley’s mind turned back to Cordelia’s lifestyle. Charley had previous experience of working with outreach workers in London. She never judged people. After all, a spell of bad luck, rendering someone jobless and homeless, could happen to anyone, at any time in their lives, whatever their profession. Charley caught Ricky-Lee’s eye, and he held her stare for a moment, raising an eyebrow at the professor’s findings. He looked tired. Charley made a mental note to check in with him later. The fact he was in recovery from a gambling addiction was never far from her mind.
She turned back to the post-mortem. Some homeless people she had known were desperate for a roof over their heads, and readily accepted help, whilst others declined the offer of shelter, but would accept food and drink. Charley wondered which category, if any, did Cordelia Le Beau fall into? She definitely wasn’t like any rough sleepers Charley had come across.
Almost three hours later, Cordelia’s clothing, bloods, swabs, tapings and scrapings were collectively bagged up in their tamper-proof bags and containers to ensure they remained sterile, tagged with the necessary exhibit labels, which were attached to each individual item, in the possession of exhibits officer Ricky-Lee Lewis, ready to be transported to the pathologist for signing.
Charley stood by, watching Butterworth’s assistant putting the internal organs into a black plastic bin bag, and depositing it in the corpse’s cavity before sewing the incision wound up with neat, large mailbag stitches.
Some pathologists gave a running commentary from the start to the finish of the examination, some told jokes for the duration, but it was only now that Butterworth spoke at length to her about his findings.
As he stretched his back, he looked up over his mask, at the detectives in the viewing room, and he leaned his belly against the stainless-steel table where the body of Cordelia Le Beau still lay.
‘The post-mortem is, as you know, to ascertain the cause of death. I’m all done here, and this is what I have deduced from examining the cadaver.’ Butterworth spoke not only for the detectives, but also the recording device from which he would take his notes later, to produce his written report. ‘Cora Jones aka Cordelia Le Beau has bruises at the back of both her upper arms, consistent with her being forcibly grabbed, and dragged backwards. This suggestion is corroborated by dirt, and grass stains, along with superficial scrape marks to her back, buttocks and the heels of her footwear.’ Butterworth paused, and looked down at the corpse. He looked tired. He was obviously thinking and choosing his words carefully. ‘There are two footwear impressions on her torso which are readily visible. The patterns from the soles are from two different-sized pairs of shoes, and are quite distinctive. One shoe print is much smaller than the other, possibly a female or a child’s footwear. Finding out who they belong to is your domain.’ Butterworth took a deep breath before continuing. ‘She may not have been conscious at the time that these superficial injuries were sustained, but she was still breathing.’ Butterworth’s tone changed. ‘I am quite satisfied Cordelia Le Beau was killed by a blow to the head, which as we have seen, cracked open like an eggshell when bludgeoned.’
‘What about the bruising to her neck?’ asked Charley.
‘There is no doubt the poor lass suffered a physical assault. If you look closely you will see fingerprints on her neck, indicative with her being grabbed around the throat. Someone tried to strangle her, but that didn’t kill her, although they might have believed at the time it had.’
Charley questioned the point. ‘So, the attacker could have thoug
ht that she was dead before they threw a boulder at her head?’
‘Her breathing would have been extremely shallow whilst she was in an unconscious state, so yes, that’s quite possible.’
Annie looked puzzled. ‘Then why would you drop a boulder on her head…?’
‘Maybe they were trying to cover up what they’d done, they didn’t want to see her face. Or like our theory earlier, they wanted to make identification of the body as difficult as possible. Or they realised she was still alive and wanted to finish the job.’
Annie was aghast. ‘They didn’t have to stove her head in though did they?’
Chapter 7
Junction Cafe was not on a road junction, but in a lay-by, off the main road. The aroma of frying bacon that assailed Charley’s nostrils caused her stomach to growl. There was no canteen at the station and so Charley and Annie had stopped en route.
‘I’m bloody starving,’ said Annie, when she returned to the car with two bacon sandwiches, yanked open the door, and flung herself into the passenger seat next to Charley. A shiver ran down her spine. There was a cold wind blowing outside, and there was no doubt that a storm was coming. Charley wiggled her fingers. ‘Gimme mine,’ she said.
Annie took a satisfying bite of the soft, white teacake. The juice from the tomato inside dribbled down her chin. Wiping the liquid with her finger, she chewed the food slowly, moaning contentedly.
‘I read somewhere that stress can shut down your appetite,’ she garbled, her mouth full of food.
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