The Body Dealer (A DI Erica Swift Thriller Book 5)

by M K Farrar

  She nodded. “Okay, well, after I’d had breakfast and given Max his as well—”

  “Max?” Erica interrupted.

  “Oh, my dog. Sorry, I should have said that.”

  “No problem. Please, continue.”

  “Well, I took him out for his morning walk. I’m gone most of the day and I feel bad about leaving him, but as long as he gets a decent walk before I go, he seems okay.”

  “And what time would you say you left your flat?”

  She shrugged. “Just before six thirty, I think.”

  “Do you take the same route every day?”

  “Yes, I do.” Her eyes widened. “You don’t think someone intended for me to find the body, do you?”

  “Not at this stage. What time would you say you first noticed the body?”

  “Maybe ten minutes later. It was the smell that hit me first.” She put the backs of her fingers to her nose as though trying to block out the memory. Her skin had paled, the colour draining from her cheeks. “I-I thought someone had left a barbeque burning or something.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. I just kept walking. I was more concerned about Max doing his business so I could go back home and finish getting ready for work. God, bloody Max. If only he had, then I never would have seen that. I’d just be at work right now, like normal. I wouldn’t have that horrible image burned onto my brain.”

  There wasn’t much she could do about that.

  “So, after you smelled smoke on the air, you just kept walking?”

  She blew out a breath. “Yes. I noticed it got stronger, and I was starting to worry that one of the canal boats might have caught fire, but then I rounded the corner and that was when I saw that poor woman.”

  “What did you do when you saw her?”

  “Nothing, at first. I wasn’t really sure what I was seeing. Then I called nine-nine-nine. I thought it might have been a dog or something—or maybe I hoped it was a dog. But then I saw her fingers and realised it was a woman, or a girl. It was hard to tell. She was pretty badly burned up by that point. The woman on the end of the line stayed with me until the fire service and the police arrived. I didn’t look, though. I couldn’t. I turned away while I waited, and I threw up.” Tears filled her eyes. “Maybe that was the wrong thing to do, but I couldn’t help it.”

  “It’s okay. There wasn’t anything you could have done. She was most likely dead before you got there.”

  “Most likely? So, there was a chance she wasn’t?” She covered her face with her hands. “Oh God.”

  “We’ll know more after the postmortem examination.” Erica took a breath. “I know this is difficult for you, but can you think back to before you came across the body. Was there anyone else around? Anyone who might have caught your attention?”

  “No, there was no one. It was just me.”

  “Any vehicles?” The canal towpath was too narrow for a car, but it was big enough for a motorbike. “Or anyone on the water?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I mean, I walked past some of the canal boats, but they’re always there.”

  Erica nodded. “We’re going to be interviewing everyone who lives on the canal boats as well.”

  “I hope one of them can be of more help than I’ve been.”

  “You’ve been very helpful.”

  She looked up, her lashes matted with mascara and tears. “Have I? I don’t feel like I’ve been helpful at all. I should have done something more. I should have tried to put out the fire myself instead of throwing up.”

  “She was already dead,” Erica reassured her, though she didn’t know that for sure. “If you’d tried to interfere, all you’d have done was make a mess of the crime scene.” Though throwing up didn’t help.

  She sniffed. “Oh, good. I’m glad I did the right thing then.”

  Erica took a breath and leaned forwards slightly. “Miss Fairbank, have you ever been a victim of a crime before or witnessed any crimes?” Erica had made sure they’d checked her record to see if she had any warrants or a criminal history, but she was clean.

  Her eyes widened. “No, never. I mean, I had an old man flash at me in a park when I was a student, but I didn’t report it or anything. I assume that isn’t relevant to what happened today.”

  Erica offered her a smile. “No, it isn’t. I just wanted to ask to see if you were aware of what happens now. Obviously, you’ve been through a trauma today and you may find that has some lasting effects on you. We have skilled victim and witness care coordinators who will contact you and assess how they can support you with any on-going issues you may experience.”

  Leah put up a hand to stop her. “I’m fine, honestly, just a bit shaken up.”

  “Even so, someone will be in touch. You’re probably running on adrenaline right now, but when that fades, you might find yourself in shock.”

  The witness nodded and looked down at where she twisted her hands together on her lap.

  “I will need a DNA sample from you,” Erica continued, “just to rule out any contamination of DNA.”

  “Oh, your colleague, DC Rudd, came and did that earlier.”

  “That’s great. Means we can let you go home even sooner. DI Swift ending the interview with Leah Fairbank at ten fifty-five.” There was a buzz to signal the end of the recording and Erica rose to her feet.

  Leah slowly got up as well. “You mean I can go?”

  “Of course. I’ll walk you through the building. I believe DC Howard is looking after Max for you.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “If you think of anything else, make sure you give me a call.”

  “I will.”

  Erica walked Leah Fairbank from the interview room and through the building, to where DC Jon Howard was making a fuss of the little terrier under his desk. The dog went mad when he saw his owner, jumping up, tongue hanging out. Leah dropped to her knees and pulled the dog into her arms, and he covered her face in wet licks.

  It was sweet to watch. Maybe Erica had been too hasty about not getting a dog. But then she remembered she barely had time to look after her daughter, never mind a dog, and it would hardly be fair to put the responsibility of that on her sister’s shoulders, too.

  Erica made her way back to what was now her office.

  “Hello, boss,” Shawn said with a grin as he caught up with her.

  “Don’t call me that,” she said, though she knew he was only teasing her. “This isn’t permanent, remember. I’m just filling in. Did you manage to get a card sent around for Gibbs?”

  “Yeah, everyone’s signed it and thrown in a bit of cash to get himself something, too.”

  “Like what? Flowers?” Gibbs wasn’t the kind of man you bought flowers for, but it didn’t seem right turning up empty-handed. “What about chocolates? Do you think he’ll even be eating normally?”

  Shawn shrugged. “Beats me. Sorry. You brought me grapes, remember?”

  He was referring to when he was stabbed at the terrorist attack a few months back. He’d been lucky to have made a full recovery. It could have been a lot worse.

  “You were stabbed. There wasn’t anything wrong with your mouth.”

  “True. Anyway, I had a call from Lucy Kim down at the coroner’s office. She said she’ll be done within the next hour, if we want to head down there.”

  “Absolutely. Let’s hope the body can reveal something about itself, because right now, we don’t have a whole lot to go on.”

  Chapter Five

  The forensic pathologist, Lucy Kim, was there to greet them.

  She’d had a haircut recently, her silky black hair shaved down one side, and the part that was left longer flipped over. She’d also added another tattoo to her collection, and the black outline of several stars on her collarbone peeped out beneath her shirt.

  “DI Swift, good to see you again. And you, too, DS Turner.”

  “You, too, Kim,” Erica said with a smile.

  S
he liked the pathologist and her enthusiasm for her job. Rumour had it that when she didn’t have the audio running to record her findings, Kim preferred to work with rock music playing loudly in the room. Picturing the image of the young woman bopping around while a body lay open on the table tickled Erica for some reason. As far as she was aware, Kim wasn’t in any kind of relationship, and she wondered how men reacted when they met her, and she told them what she did for a living. It would take a confident guy to be a match to Lucy Kim—or perhaps a woman was more to Kim’s liking, not that it was any of Erica’s business.

  As Kim led them down to the morgue, she addressed them over her shoulder.

  “This is going to be a quick report,” Kim said. “There wasn’t much left to work with, unfortunately.”

  “I’m aware of that. Anything you can tell me about the victim will help.”

  She gave a curt nod. “Of course.”

  They put on protective outerwear then pushed through the doors into the morgue.

  The stench of burnt flesh hit her, and Erica did her best to hide her reaction.

  Kim approached the surgical table and pulled back the sheet to reveal the blackened mass beneath.

  “When bodies are burnt,” she said, as though by way of explanation about the terrible condition of the body, “the skin shrivels, and they curl into a near foetal position called the pugilists stance.”

  “That’s probably why Leah Fairbank initially thought it was a large dog on fire,” Erica said to Shawn.

  He glanced at the misshapen lump on the table and pulled a face. “I’m surprised she managed to guess at what it was at all.”

  “The body wasn’t so badly burned when she came across it,” Erica pointed out. “It took seventeen minutes for the fire service to reach her and get water onto the body, and some serious damage would have been done in that time.” She turned her attention back to Kim. “Can you confirm the sex of the body? The main witness believed it was a woman.”

  Kim nodded. “From the width of the pelvic girdle, which is wider in women, and the presence of the sciatic notch, which is almost one hundred percent reliable, I can confirm this is a woman. The brow ridge, orbital formation, and the ridge at the back—the occipital protuberance—also point to this being a woman, but those aren’t a preferred method for sex determination as these features do run on a range. We can use the teeth to determine age up to about twenty-four, but beyond that, it gets much harder to pin down the exact age of a body and we have to use decades, such as between thirty-to-forty, or forty-to-fifty. Luckily, I’d say our victim is younger, and I’d put her age at early twenties so twenty-one or twenty-two. Unfortunately, because of how badly burnt the body is, there isn’t much wet tissue pathology to go on. I hope to have got a DNA sample from the pulp in the molars, but I’m not sure what the quality of the sample will be just yet. The heat exposure may have corrupted it. I need to send it off to be analysed.”

  “DNA analysis will help give us a better idea about who she is,” Erica said, looking for confirmation.

  Kim circled the table. “Yes, we should be able to get her ethnicity, her hair and eye colour. They can even create a generated computer ‘mug shot’ from DNA these days, but we can’t rely on how accurate that would be.”

  “Might give us an idea, though.” Erica pursed her lips. “Right now, we don’t have much, except for what you’ve given us.”

  Kim continued. “I can also give you an approximate height, but this is far more of an estimate, I’m afraid. Simply comparing her humerus to my arm, I’d say she was between five feet one and five feet three, so on the shorter side.”

  “That helps,” Erica said. “We can check any recent missing records for people matching that description,”

  Shawn blew out his cheeks. “That’s not going to narrow it down much. Tens of thousands of people go missing in London every year, and we even know if someone has reported her missing.”

  “If we can get DNA and dental reports,” Erica said, “we might be able to pin her to someone.”

  Who were you? she silently asked the body, hoping it would give up its secrets. What happened in those final moments of your life? Who is missing you?

  Kim walked around the table. “There is something else. An accelerant was used. The body wouldn’t have burned so fast without it. I can’t know for certain, but from the pattern of burning on the body, I’d make an educated guess that SOCO will have found splashes of accelerant on the ground around the body.”

  Erica glanced over with interest. “You think the body was dumped where it was found, and the accelerant poured onto her there.”

  “I’d say so, yes.”

  Erica shook her head slowly as she thought. “I can’t help but wonder again about where the body was dumped. Was that place chosen knowing that it would be hard for the emergency services to reach? If so, they wanted the body so badly burned that we’d be unable to identify it.”

  “I think that’s a reasonable assumption.”

  “What, exactly, were they trying to hide?”

  “Everything,” Shawn said, bluntly. “By destroying the body like this, they’ve destroyed everything. Any evidence, the cause of death—assuming it wasn’t via burning—the identity of the victim.”

  “The lungs were too badly damaged to tell if there was smoke inhalation,” Kim said. “I could barely tell they were lungs at all, and most of the internal organs had either burned down to nothing or what remained had been blasted to pieces by the force of the fire brigade’s hoses. One thing I can tell you, is that the victim wasn’t suffering from any broken bones, new or otherwise. I also didn’t find any marks on any of the bones that might point towards a stabbing. Often there might be scrapes on the ribs if a victim has been stabbed.”

  Erica nodded. “Thanks, though that doesn’t rule out the other dozen different ways a person can be killed.”

  Kim smiled sympathetically. “Unfortunately not, but if anything else occurs to me, I’ll let you know.”

  THEY STEPPED OUT OF the mortuary office, and Erica sucked in a deep breath of fresh air, trying to clear the tang of burnt flesh clinging to the insides of her nostrils.

  “I’d like to get another look at where the body was found, try to get a better idea of the movements of the perpetrator when they dumped the body and set fire to it.”

  “I’ll drive,” Shawn said as they climbed into the pool car.

  Twenty minutes later, Shawn pulled into the road adjacent to the canal towpath. It was the same access point the fire service had used to put out the fire. Warehouses ran along the tow path, but there was also an access lane running between the buildings, beyond which was a six-foot drop to the tow path on the other side of a brick wall.

  There were plenty of buildings along the canal that had been renovated into flats, commanding high prices, not only because they were near the water, but simply because this was London with its ridiculous housing market. So far, this side had remained industrial, though it probably wouldn’t be for much longer.

  Erica climbed out of the car. Security cameras were positioned on the outside of the buildings. “I assume we’ve requested footage?” she said.

  “Yes, that was done right away. I believe Rudd is working on it.”

  “Good.” She walked alongside the building and slipped down the side to take her to the wall. She gazed down onto the path below. There was still no access to the general public, and a large patch of the gravel path and the surrounding area was scorched. What a terrible way to come to an end. It was near impossible to tell the cause of death of the victim from the body, but Erica hoped whoever she was, she hadn’t suffered.

  “If you were going to move a body onto a canal path, would you carry it down the path and risk being spotted, or just roll it over the wall?”

  “I’d roll it over the wall,” Shawn confirmed.

  She glanced up at the adjacent buildings. “Or the body might have been thrown from a window or fire escape?”

&nbs
p; “Kim said there weren’t any broken bones. If it had been thrown from a height, wouldn’t there have been more damage? When a body falls a considerable distance, they tend to go headfirst. Even if the head didn’t hit the pavement first, there would probably still be some type of break to the skull with that kind of force.”

  “You’re right, though if the victim was already dead when she was thrown, she wouldn’t have tensed in the same way a live victim would have. That might have prevented bones breaking.

  “I still think it’s more likely that the body was brought here and rolled over the wall, though.”

  Erica nodded. “Then they leaned over and threw lighter fluid all over her and lit a match?” She looked around at the buildings again. “No CCTV footage on this side.”

  “It’s probably the reason they chose this spot to dump her.”

  “But they still must have brought the body here, assuming they didn’t kill her inside one of the buildings. We need to check any surrounding CCTV for vehicles arriving or leaving this area around that time.” She frowned, her mind working overtime. “Were the warehouses occupied when the incident happened?”

  He shook her head. “No, it was still too early. The workers don’t get into until eight. They were searched by uniformed officers shortly after the body was found but didn’t find anything of interest.”

  She jerked her chin towards the water. “What about the other side of the canal? Someone might have seen something.”

  “The officers who did the initial door-to-door didn’t report back anything of interest. Seems everyone was either still in bed or too busy getting ready to notice what was happening on the other side of the canal.”

  “Damn. I guess the CCTV is probably going to be our best chance of getting a lead. We’ll have caught whoever did this on camera at some point, even if they think they’ve done everything they can to not get caught. Let’s head back and see if the others have found anything of interest yet.”

  They went back to the car.

  “Hungry?” Shawn asked her.

  Her stomach growled and Erica realised how hungry she was. “Starving.”