by Paul Gitsham
So Mr Michaelson had probably fallen on the way to bed the previous night, rather than getting up early that morning. The time of death should clear that question up.
“How did you find your father?”
“As I said, I let myself in about eight after I dropped the kids off. The living room door was closed, so I didn’t look in there. After I made his breakfast, I went in to collect any dirty mugs and have a bit of a tidy-up. He spends all day in there and it gets a bit messy sometimes. And that’s when I found him.”
Her voice broke and Warren told her to take her time. The tissue in her hand was sodden and starting to shred, so Warren fished out a small packet from his inside jacket pocket. After a few deep breaths, she continued. “He was lying face down in the fireplace. I knew as soon as I saw him he was dead.” Her voice cracked, but she continued, “You just know, don’t you? He was too still. His eyes were open, staring at me.”
“Did you touch him at all, or move anything?”
She shook her head. “I felt for his pulse—” she touched her throat “—but there was nothing. I walked out and called an ambulance.”
She was looking tearful again and so Warren decided to move away slightly from the discovery of the body. The follow-up interview could answer any other questions. He cast about for the right choice of words. “Did your father require help with his more…intimate…personal care?”
“No fortunately. Dad was quite insistent about that. It took him a while, but he could pretty much dress himself and we had one of those sit-down showers fitted. He needs a bit of help with fiddly things, like his tie and button-up shirts if he’s going out to the British Legion for the day, and about once a week we’d give him a proper wet shave instead of using his electric razor.”
“You said ‘we’. Do you have any other help?”
“No, just my brother, Tommy, and my husband. We split the rest of the duties between us: cleaning, shopping, odd jobs. We took it in turns to make him dinner.” Her mouth twisted. “Dad had a good job and was always very careful with his money, so he doesn’t qualify for any state care. He was—reluctant—to pay for help whilst my brother and I live so close.” The speech was delivered in careful, neutral tones, but her eyes gave her away. Warren filed away her reaction for future analysis, if need be.
“Has Tommy been told about what’s happened?”
“I phoned him about half an hour ago. He’s on his way. He works in Stevenage.”
“What about your husband?”
“His phone’s off, but he’ll pick up his messages when he finishes work in an hour or so.”
“You said your father needed assistance walking?”
She nodded. “He could move around the house on his own and we got him one of those wheeled Zimmer frames with a tray fitted, but that’s about it. His left leg was affected by the stroke and he wasn’t very steady.”
“So he was mostly housebound?”
She nodded again. “He didn’t like going out. For some reason he was ashamed of his disability. He hated using a wheelchair.”
“But he used to go to the British Legion?”
“About once a week. Funnily enough, he didn’t mind that. I think it’s because several of the others need assistance as well. They have a minibus that picks them up. I guess they’re all in the same boat.”
Nothing she had said changed Warren’s mind about what had happened. Charles Michaelson had been unsteady on his feet; he’d either collapsed or tripped, possibly on the rug in front of the fireplace, and cracked his head against the stonework.
“When did you last see your father?”
“Last night. It was my turn to make him some dinner.”
“What time was that?”
She thought for a moment. “I put the kids to bed about eight, then came straight around. I live about five minutes away.”
“And how was your father?”
“A bit quiet. He’s been a bit tired and under the weather for the past few days. He didn’t say very much; he was watching some documentary on TV. He doesn’t eat much in the evening so I just made him some sandwiches and a cup of tea and gave him his pills. I did a spot of ironing, then left.”
“What time was that?”
“A little after nine, I guess.” She paused for a second. “Yes that’s about right. Whatever he was watching had ended and he’d changed channels to watch something else. Programmes usually start on the hour don’t they?”
“And you went straight home?”
“Yes, Ian, my husband, leaves for work about ten. He works nights. I have to get back to look after the kids.”
She suddenly looked exhausted. Warren wasn’t surprised. Young children—an eight o’clock bedtime suggested they were probably still at primary school—an infirm father and a husband working shifts. Kathy Mackay had a hard life. There was nothing overtly suspicious here he decided. He’d get DC Gary Hastings to conduct a follow-up interview after the post-mortem.
Expressing his condolences again, he headed for the car. If the traffic was kind he’d make the tail end of the meeting. If he timed it right he’d miss the death-by-PowerPoint that finance loved and still manage to nab a custard cream.
* * *
Charles Michaelson’s death remained a tragic accident until late that evening.
“Harrison here, sir. I’m out at the Michaelson death.” Crime Scene Manager Andy Harrison’s Yorkshire tones were clipped, his voice slightly tense. “I’m not happy with the scene.”
* * *
The smell from the late Charles Michaelson hadn’t improved any since the morning, even though the body had been removed to the morgue, pending autopsy. CSM Harrison and his team had been working in the small room for nearly three hours. Warren assumed that their noses had become used to the smell. Hopefully his would soon become accustomed to it also.
Harrison had turned up at the scene with his current trainee, expecting a routine unexpected death. He’d been anticipating an opportunity for Shaniya to try out some basic techniques in a low-risk environment, where there’d be no danger of jeopardising a prosecution.
“It’s a combination of a few small things, sir.” Harrison had photographed the body in situ before covering the hands in plastic bags to preserve evidence, then sending it away.
“First, I’m not happy with the positioning of the body.” He pointed at the upturned rug. “If he’d tripped and gone straight down, I’d have expected the body to have landed a bit further back. He’d have still hit his head on the stone hearth, but probably missed the mantelpiece.”
“He could have stumbled, caught himself, then gone down,” suggested Warren, playing devil’s advocate.
Harrison shrugged. “It’s circumstantial, I agree. But I’m not happy about him tripping in the first place.” He pointed to the far end of the room. “He’s supposedly unsteady on his feet and needs assistance walking. So why didn’t he use his Zimmer frame?”
Warren gauged the distance between the chair and the wheeled frame. “It looks as if it was beyond arm’s reach. Did he knock it out of the way in his sleep?”
Harrison shook his head. “No chance. Look at the design: two wheels at the front, rubber stoppers at the back. That’s not going anywhere unless it’s moved deliberately.”
“OK, so somehow the frame is out of his reach. He was a stubborn bugger from all accounts. Maybe he chose to walk unaided, to prove to himself that he could do it?”
“But why not use his walking stick?”
Warren thought for a moment, before seeing what Harrison had already spotted. “It was hanging off the left-hand side of the chair.”
“Exactly. Michaelson supposedly had no use of his left arm. He’d have had to twist around to hang it on that side. Why would he do that, when he can more easily hang it off the right side, which is where he usually placed it?”
Stepping over to the wing-backed armchair, he showed Warren a faint indentation in the overstuffed velvet.
“He hung his walking stick her
e for years, I’ll bet. Within easy reach of his right arm. There’s even photographic evidence.” He pointed to a picture sitting on the TV stand and another one on the windowsill. Both were family shots, taken a couple of years apart. Both in the same room. In one he was holding a newborn baby in his lap, his face split by a huge smile. In another, he was flanked by a younger version of Kathy Mackay and a clearly related man of a similar age. An oversized badge proclaiming “70” and a coffee-tableful of greetings cards identified the occasion. In both pictures he was seated in the same wing-backed chair, the wooden cane clearly visible hanging off its right wing.
Harrison was right, the scene wasn’t quite as one expected, but then they rarely were. He said as much to the veteran crime scene investigator.
“Again it’s very circumstantial, Andy. I agree it’s weird that he hung his walking stick off the back of the chair, pushed his frame out of the way then decided to walk unaided. But it’s pretty clear his bowels were full. Maybe he got caught short and decided he didn’t have time to shuffle to the bathroom? People do silly things all of the time.”
Harrison still looked unhappy. The man was a highly experienced CSI and Warren could see the man’s gut was troubling him, and that troubled Warren.
“You said on the phone that you had some concerns about the body as well?”
Harrison led Warren over to the broken fireplace. “Look at the pool of blood. What do you see?”
The puddle was larger than Warren had initially thought, the body having hid some of it. The blood gleamed, wet and shiny against the stonework.
“This probably happened in the very early hours; his temperature was already down slightly when the surgeon measured it mid-morning.”
“It’s still wet.”
“Exactly. It should be sticky by now.”
Warren thought for a few moments. Now his own gut was uneasy.
He was the senior investigating officer; it was his call.
“Let’s call it an unexplained death for now and treat this as a potential crime scene.”
* * *
By eight a.m. the following morning, Middlesbury CID was buzzing. The death was still classified as unexplained, but Warren was under pressure to try and decide if it was suspicious or not by the end of the day. His decision would determine how much manpower and resources would be thrown at the investigation. If Warren declared it a suspicious death, then the cost could run into hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds, perhaps for nothing. If he decided to be conservative and treat it as non-suspicious and it turned out to be the result of foul play, valuable clues could be lost and prosecutions placed in jeopardy. In either case, Warren would find himself in front of the chief constable explaining himself. Warren had been promoted to DCI less than a year ago—he didn’t want the chief to even know his name this early into his career.
Gary Hastings had conducted a follow-up interview of Kathy Mackay early the previous evening, before Harrison’s call to Warren, and he was reading the highlights to the rest of the team.
“It’s pretty much as the boss has already stated. She found him when she went to make his breakfast at eight a.m. She doesn’t work, but she and her husband have two children, both at primary school. Her husband works nights as a parcel sorter at the Anyjob Package Delivery firm up on the estate.”
Whilst Gary had been interviewing the grieving daughter, her brother had turned up. He confirmed that the two had shared caring duties for their father since his stroke a decade earlier. Their mother had died two years before his illness and he had been alone ever since.
“I got the impression that the old man had been a bit difficult at times. There also seemed to be some resentment that they didn’t get any help looking after him. He owned the house and had a good pension from his days as an engineer, so they didn’t qualify for state funding, but he didn’t want to spend his own money on carers. It had been difficult to persuade him to contribute towards the stairlift.” Gary glanced around the room. “My gut feeling is he was a tight sod and his kids were stuck with looking after him.”
Warren thanked him and made a note to follow up the interviews again if they found anything suspicious.
“Anything from the neighbours?” DI Tony Sutton asked.
Detective Sergeant Mags Richardson had organised a doorknocking the previous night. “Most of the neighbours are fairly new to the area and didn’t really know him. They confirmed that he rarely came outside and that his son, daughter or her husband visited at least twice a day. The most interesting reports came from the house directly opposite and his immediate neighbour, who has been there almost as long as he has.
“The old woman next door reckons she used to know him and his wife before the wife died. She was clearly reluctant to bad-mouth him, but she implied that he was difficult and overbearing. He was very controlling of his wife when she was alive and the neighbour suggested that he should be rather more grateful for the assistance his kids gave him than she had ever observed. I think she has more to say, sir, and we should consider a full interview. Encourage her to open up a bit more.”
Warren frowned slightly; intimidating little old ladies wasn’t really his style, but there was no denying that many people were torn between speaking ill of the dead and doing their public duty. He’d have to tip the balance.
“What about the second witness?”
Mags consulted her notes again. “The man across the road reckons it wasn’t unusual for the light in the front room to stay on until very late, sometimes all night, which agrees with what the daughter said about him sometimes falling asleep in front of the TV. However, Monday night, he went out for a smoke about midnight and said that the light was off. Didn’t you report that the light was on when you entered the room?”
Warren nodded slowly. “Yes. Definitely.” He thought carefully. “The light switch was next to the door in the usual place, as I recall. What did the daughter say, Gary?”
“Never touched it, sir.”
A murmur went around the table. “The position of the body suggests that he was on his way out of the room when he tripped. But surely if he was in the room watching TV with the light on he wouldn’t have got up and turned the light off for a snooze, then got up to turn it back on again? And then got up a third time to leave the room and fallen?”
“If it was off when he fell, then that might explain how he could fail to see where his Zimmer frame was then trip over the rug,” suggested Karen Hardwick.
“So if he fell in the dark, who put the light back on again?” finished Sutton.
* * *
The post-mortem of Charles Michaelson was completed within an hour of the meeting finishing. Warren had organised follow-up interviews for the two neighbours and Michaelson’s children for that afternoon. In the meantime, Tony Sutton was in charge of finding out all that he could about Michaelson’s past and that of his immediate circle.
If the autopsy came back at all irregular he was upgrading the investigation to a suspicious death and he wanted to be in a position to pick apart any lies that may be told in interview.
“The man was a walking time bomb,” started Professor Ryan Jordan, the Home Office certified pathologist who’d picked up the case that morning. He’d stopped by Middlesbury on his way to attend a meeting in Cambridge, saving Warren the trouble of a trip down to the Lister Hospital where he was based.
“The fall was a nasty one, but wouldn’t necessarily have killed him. He didn’t suffer a fractured skull. He died of a massive brain haemorrhage, sometime between about midnight and two a.m., Tuesday morning.”
“Is that why he fell? Did he collapse?” asked Warren, taking a sip of his coffee.
Jordan shook his head. “No, the brain haemorrhage was purely from the impact with the fireplace. He suffered from heart disease and he had physical frailties consistent with somebody suffering a stroke years previously; the musculature on his left side, especially the arm, is significantly atrophied compared to his right si
de. It is entirely possible that he stumbled and fell.”
“So what do you mean by ‘a time bomb’?”
“The deceased was on anticoagulants, warfarin according to his medical records.”
“You mean blood thinners. Because he had a stroke, right?”
Warren’s grandmother had suffered a stroke and he remembered the brightly coloured pills that she had taken every day with her tea.
“Yes, although they don’t actually thin the blood per se, they just reduce its ability to clot. Blood clots in major vessels can lead to heart attacks or strokes. Michaelson had suffered a stroke previously, and had a family history of cardiovascular disease so he would have been prescribed them as a matter of course.
“I saw your note about how his blood was still wet, hours after he was found, and did a quick and dirty INR—I’ve sent a sample to Addenbrooke’s anticoagulation service for confirmation, but I measured it at fifteen.”
Many of the words in Jordan’s sentence were familiar to Warren; nevertheless, the meaning of what he had just heard was beyond him. His face must have said as much.
“Basically, an INR is a measure of how fast blood clots. It’s normalised—that means that a typical, healthy person off the street will have an INR of one point zero. People who have had strokes or have heart conditions are given drugs, such as warfarin, that slow the clotting of their blood. They usually aim to have an INR of two to three. That means it takes their blood two to three times as long to clot as a healthy person. It’s an extremely effective method for reducing the likelihood of another stroke or cardiac event, but it does have side effects.”
“Increased bleeding?”
“Exactly. Most of the time it’s not a problem; it just takes a little longer to stop bleeding if they cut themselves, but more serious wounds carry a risk of serious blood loss.”
“But Michaelson had an INR of fifteen?”
“At least. At that level he would have been at risk of internal bleeding from the slightest bump. It’s probably a good job he had a largely sedentary lifestyle. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to have cut himself in the garden, say, and bled out. I looked at his stools and there were traces of blood in them, probably from tiny bleeds in the gut.”