No. I mustn’t. Stick to the plan. No point in ruining everything now.
She curled Tony’s flaccid hand around the hatchet shaft, got plenty of his blood on there, and got his fingerprint in there too. And then she carefully put the weapon on the table. She took a step back and peeled off her second pair of gloves, shoving them inside a resealable plastic bag that she kept in her left back pocket. From another plastic bag in her right back pocket, she took a clean pair of gloves and pulled them with difficulty onto her sweating hands.
She took out the key from the front door, cleaned it, and replaced it, making sure the door was locked. She picked up Tony’s CAT hat that had fallen on the hall floor inside the front door, and she retrieved the one that she’d worn at Sidmouth’s murder and put it on the table facing Tony – it seemed only right. She smiled, and then carried on with the plan.
Jess watched him sink a little further towards the table, but essentially nothing changed; he was just settling into his new position. And now it was time to leave. She stepped onto his heavy, filthy overcoat and shuffled towards the back door on it. Once there, she put the bottle of methadone into the inside pocket, having torn off the label long ago. And then she snagged the heavy coat with the hook end of a wire coat hanger, opened the back door, and slid the wire beneath it.
As she pulled the door closed, she yanked on the wire hard enough for the hanger to release the coat and to pull out from under the door before it closed fully. The effect was a closed and locked door with an overcoat bunched up behind it, and the ultimate effect would be suicide – no way out for a would-be murderer.
Chapter Eighty-One
If you die when there’s no one looking, do you still die? Of course you do. Lots of people die alone. Scary thought, having no one there at the end.
Eddie contemplated this as he parked the van on the public side of the blue and white tape. No matter how often he parked a van next to a strip of scene tape, he’d never get bored, but he would always get nervous.
Of course, he’d never be stupid enough to tell anyone that.
It was the nerves that kept him on his toes; it was the nerves that kept him awake, and kept him looking when all the others had gone home for the night. And he suffered from nerves because he knew he wasn’t perfect; he had to work hard not to miss things, and he took it hard when he did.
When he missed things, he punished himself, and looked harder the next time, edged closer to other people’s expectations of him. But he was still afraid of missing things – not because of those expectations but because of the people he’d be letting down: the victims. If he never missed anything at a scene, he wouldn’t be nervous.
But how do you know if you’ve missed something at a scene?
He wondered what it would be like to die alone.
Even when Eddie had been in relationships, and even now that his dad was living with him – however temporary that situation might turn out to be – Eddie had always been fundamentally alone. Perhaps it was a sad thing to admit to, but like the nerves, he’d never tell anyone out loud.
Dying would be one of two things: the most enjoyable experience of his life, finally getting the peace he’d longed for; or the most terrifying thing ever. It would have him screaming that he’d got it all wrong and he needed a second go at life.
Either way, best or worst, it would be the last experience of his life.
He wondered if all his longing for peace and quiet and solitude had taken him down the wrong fork along the lanes of life. He wondered if everyone had been put on this earth to mingle and make friends, to enjoy the company of other humans and to sink into the shallows of polite laughter and polite nods while passing someone on the corridor, leaving behind all sense of deep thought, giving it up for mediocrity, for insincerity.
Giving it up just to fucking fit in. Surrendering contemplation for the acceptance of others.
You arrive with your mother surrounding you, but you always leave through the darkest door with no one holding your hand. Cold. Silent. Alone.
And no matter how brave you were when dying, you never qualified for a medal. It was so easy that everyone could do it. Everyone would do it sooner or later.
He shivered, pulled out a cigarette, set it on fire and inhaled deeply, still contemplating death in general while those outside his van contemplated death in the particular, in between wondering what to have for dinner or where to sneak off for a piss.
Eddie cracked the window, sighed smoke towards it and focused on the turmoil inside his head. These were the moments he longed for; these rare moments when he and his mind could sever the contact with his surroundings and fall into deep thought, the abstract and the playful: turmoil within smooth, infinite blackness. Death.
He threw the cigarette out of the window, slid out from the driver’s seat into the rain, pushed the door closed, and looked at his new place of work.
It was shit.
Or, at least, it was very mediocre. It was a small, detached, brick house with white-framed UPVC windows and hanging baskets with dead flowers draped over the sides. It had its own narrow driveway and a concrete path with moss encroaching from the dampness of a low brick wall on one side and a claggy lawn full of weeds at the other.
He and Benson stood out of the rain, protected by the hatch door of the van as they pulled scene suits and black overshoes on.
“Khan put the door in. Found him in the kitchen.”
“Fuck’s sake. What’s wrong with you? You know he doesn’t have a clue when it comes to forensic work. Did he dick about with my scene?”
“I sent him to see if we were on the right track; I didn’t know he’d find him dead, did I? Anyway, the alarm went off, so he wouldn’t have been in there too long.” Benson shrugged. “Come on, he knows how to play it, Eddie. He won’t have messed with things he shouldn’t.”
“So he didn’t use the fucking floor while he was in there doing his search?”
“What search?”
“Come off it. You mean to tell me he found a body and immediately tiptoed back out the front door with his hands in his pockets? He’ll have had a good poke around before he called it in.”
Benson’s head bowed and he resumed his slow amble towards the scene guard who stood before the rusting grey gate at the foot of the concrete path. “Okay, no, I can’t guarantee it. Anyway, he’s a copper, his first duty is to protect life.”
“Pretty hard to do that with someone who’s already dead.”
They both signed in with the scene guard, uttering nothing other than their names and numbers. Eddie looked at her as she tapped their details into a mobile device. Her collar number was 249, and when she looked up he saw she had the most wonderful deep hazel eyes, a kind face, a Marilyn Monroe smile. He found himself staring at her, captivated.
Benson nudged him, and they walked up to the house until they stood outside the front door, admiring those dead hanging baskets as water dripped from them.
What the hell was going on? Was he entering his second puberty or something?
“I fucking hate this weather.”
“Be boring if it was sunny all the time,” said Benson.
“What? That’s what I like about you: always got a differing opinion, even if it is bollocks. You can never just agree, can you? Always picking a fight.”
“Shut up, Eddie. Let’s go and have a look, eh?”
Chapter Eighty-Two
Eddie swung the door open and stepped onto the ‘welcome’ mat.
How appropriate.
Benson rustled in behind him and they peered through into the kitchen at the body.
“Did Khan find any ID?”
“Utility bills in the name of Anthony Hardwick.”
Eddie stared at Benson from the corner of his eye.
“Okay, yes, so he might have had a quick look around.”
They stood on stepping plates in the kitchen.
Benson took a pace back from Eddie and watched him.
Eddi
e folded his arms and melted into the scene.
He saw Tony – Anthony – his heavy overcoat on the floor inside the back door as though he’d been in a rush, or he’d been too intent on carrying out the deed bouncing around inside his head to worry about anything else.
Though Eddie wasn’t religious in the slightest, each time he saw a suicide he always did the spectacles-testicles-wallet-and-watch thing, and whispered, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. And today was no different.
He pictured Tony, eyes almost glazed over in some drug-induced or booze-induced stupor, tripping into the closest of the chairs that sat around a small, glass-topped dining table crushed up against the kitchen wall. He saw him take off the CAT hat and throw it on the table. He saw him take the razor-sharp hatchet and use it like a scalpel, coursing a red line down his exposed left forearm. Just enough to part the skin.
The fingers tingled. Hot blood trickled down his wrist and dripped onto the glass. It hurt, but not too much. Perhaps Tony’s vacant, apathetic mind had found it fascinating, and perhaps any pain that might have lingered soon fled, leaving behind nothing more than another task under way, like making lunch. Not the beginning of the end, nothing so monumental, nothing so catastrophic. Nothing so fatal. Routine. Back in a minute.
This time, perhaps, he gripped the hatchet a little tighter in his right hand, made a fist with his left, and held his breath. He didn’t swing the hatchet, he just cut. The sharp blade entered his forearm and parted meat on its way down to the cluster of wrist bones; he could feel his arm being tugged at, and it felt like a stranger was doing it.
There was pain this time, and an electric shock that caused his fingers to twitch, and he winced. The blood came faster, and the nerves in his fingers stopped working. There was no pain there, and he smiled, amazed. His arm was on fire, but it was bearable, and the hot blood flowing over it seemed to cool it. There was a little steam, and the blood ran fast enough now that he could hear it dripping onto the table even as everything else turned to white noise. It ran across the glass and it poured off the edge, spattered on his leg and onto the floor.
Lots of it.
He could see a little fountain of it pumping in his wrist.
Tony put the hatchet down. It had done its job. He dipped the index finger of his right hand into the blood on the table, and on a clean part of the glass, wrote: SORRY.
He laid his right hand on the table, but it slid sideways, landed in his lap, and then slipped off that too, to finish its life dangling by his right side.
Tony blinked for the last time, and then his chest became still. His eyes closed and his head fell forward onto his chest. And the house seemed to grow cold and die too.
Eddie saw the last drop of blood drip from the tip of Tony’s finger, and was reminded of Sidmouth’s mother.
He shuddered just as Benson’s voice brought him back. “Okay, Eddie?”
He nodded.
* * *
“Nasty way to go,” Eddie whispered.
“You need a drink?”
He shook his head. “We should get to work.” He turned to Benson and saw his face was white. “Front door. Locked from the inside?”
Benson nodded, shuffled on his stepping plate, suit crinkling. “Key’s still in the lock. Door’s smashed to fuckery thanks to Khan, but the key’s in the lock, yes.”
“Key on the inside rear door mortice lock?”
Benson nodded. “But it’s not locked with that lock.”
“Locked on the Yale?”
Another nod.
“We need to check the windows.”
“I did that. All secure.”
Eddie nodded. “I’m happy it’s a suicide, then.”
“Of course, the killer could have just gone out of the back door, latched the Yale.”
Eddie thought about it. “Yep, could have, but his overcoat is right up against it, not pushed up against the wall like it would be if the door had been opened against it.”
Benson took a look; sure enough, it was bunched up against the door like a draft excluder. And then he took another look at Eddie, worried that he was affected by this much more than usual.
He often wondered what happened inside Eddie’s head when he disappeared at scenes like this. He’d worked with dozens of CSIs and never seen anything like it; it was like Collins was watching it happening, like he was a bystander.
Whatever it was, it was creepy, and he didn’t much like it. But, on the plus side, it always seemed to be eerily accurate.
* * *
Eddie was thinking about the PCSO outside, and what a wonderful pair of… eyes she had. He could hear Benson breathing hard behind him. It almost made him laugh as he stood there with his arms folded. Benson treated Eddie like his own personal psychic, reading a scene and coming up with something prophetic, giving him the answer like some kind of deus forensis.
Well it didn’t work like that. Sure, he liked to look hard at a scene, to actually see it, and to read it if he could. There was nothing magical about it; it was a case of seeing something, like that bloodless shadow on the floor by the chair, and asking questions. When the answer that best fit the situation came to mind, then that was almost always what had happened. It wasn’t science, it wasn’t magic. It was just common sense. It was logic.
There were several factors that had to be borne in mind when looking and seeing things like this. First, staging – had someone set this thing up to look like something it was not? And then, lack of preservation – had someone inadvertently, or otherwise, messed up the scene and destroyed or altered clues?
For now, it was the shadow that had Eddie’s attention. Blood isn’t the thick, glutinous fluid most people imagine; it’s marginally more viscous than water, and it flows and splashes and travels just as easily and just as far as water does. The thing Eddie liked best about it right now, though, was that it was bright fucking red, and stood out on a white kitchen floor like a murder in a suicide scene.
Potentially.
“I think that was a nice touch.” He pointed to the word SORRY written in blood on the table. “I wonder what he’s sorry for? Causing a mess? Leaking blood everywhere? Killing people? Blaming people? Giving me four hours’ sleep?”
“Killing himself?” Benson asked. “He must have family.”
Eddie wasn’t listening. That shadow was a doubt that hissed at him like a slow leak in a tyre; it was the only thing that turned him from ‘it was suicide’ to ‘was it suicide?’ Nagging.
The CAT Diesel Power cap was on the table right in front of him. It was as soiled as you’d expect a well-worn cap to be. Much of the bright yellow was now mucky and subdued, blackened over the years where grubby fingers had handled it. The peak at the front was almost entirely black; the seam where the peak joined the main cap was sweat-stained, and that in turn had attracted even more dirt.
In short, it was filthy; well-loved and well-worn.
And yet… Eddie stared at it as he’d stared at the rest of the scene; was drawn to it. He didn’t know why.
Chapter Eighty-Three
“Okay,” Eddie said. “I can’t do all this by myself. I’m going to get Kenny over here.” It was a little after 2pm; enough time for him to be rested. Eddie took out his phone and dialled.
Kenny was there within the hour, and by the time he’d walked across the stepping plates to the back door, Eddie had pulled everything out of the overcoat, and laid out the contents of a rucksack he’d found, and photographed it in situ in the cluttered cupboard under the stairs.
“What we got?”
Eddie stood, arched his back, and the camera that hung on a strap around his neck bounced off his stomach. “Hope you brought me a coffee.”
“It’s outside.”
Eddie closed his eyes in gratitude.
“This,” Eddie swept his arm towards Tony’s body, still slumped in the chair, “is our little serial killer.”
“Is that right?”
“The guilt got too much
for him.” Eddie looked Kenny in the eye. “The weight of death too heavy a burden to bear.”
Kenny sighed. “You’re not in one of your Shakespeare moods again, are you? I thought you’d grown out of that shit, I really did. And, I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t disappointed.”
“Okay, no need to get so personal. I thought it was pretty good, actually.”
“It wasn’t. Sorry.”
“Be like that. Anyway, he was sorry, look, he even wrote it on the table in his own blood. Therefore, we can all gather round and forgive him in a wonderful ceremony of life over death.”
“Any more of that and I’m leaving. Okay?”
Eddie sniffled and pulled out a small notebook he’d found inside the overcoat. “It’s a list of names.”
“Names?”
“Christ, do I have to explain everything to you, Kenny? A name is—”
“Whose names, Eddie? And snap out of it, I’m still tired, and it wouldn’t take me much to walk straight back out of here and get my head down again.”
“Okay, keep your wig on.” Eddie looked at the book. “Thomas Marchant.”
“The pickaxe guy?”
“One and the same, Kenny.” He read the next name. “Stanford Bolton.”
“Doctor Faeces himself.”
“A certain Frank Cooper.”
“You’re fucking kidding!”
Eddie showed him. “See? Even when he’s dead, people want to kill the bastard.” He read the last name on the list, and his eyebrows met in the middle, and he looked up at Kenny.
“Who?”
“Jeffery Walker.”
“Our Jeffery Walker?”
“No, Kenny. Just a Jeffery Walker. Of course our Jeffery Walker, you—"
“Kidding.”
Eddie shook his head.
The Death of Jessica Ripley Page 32