‘What are they?’ I asked.
‘Take a good look,’ said Harry. ‘Tell me what you think they look like.’
Under a hand-glass, I could see that there were two faint rows of marks, a top and bottom layer. ‘I’d say they were bite marks, except—’
‘Except what?’
‘They just don’t look right somehow.’
‘That’s exactly what I was thinking. They’re not quite like any bite marks I’ve seen before,’ said Harry, tracing the marks with the thin probe. ‘Superficially, it looks like the impression of teeth. But, generally speaking, the underbite should leave a stronger impression than the top row of teeth. In this case,’ I followed the tapping probe, ‘both upper and lower “jaws”—I’ll call them that for the moment—are identical. And the upper and lower jaws don’t overlap properly. They seem out of whack.’
Harry turned away and came back with a plastic packet containing black and white photos. He passed it to me. ‘Take a look at those. That’s what a human bite looks like.’
I studied the series of photographs, seeing the familiar oval shape in all of them—upper and lower jaw impressions joining up, the underbite showing more darkly.
‘And it isn’t an animal,’ I said, peering as Harry revealed the similar marks on the skin of the jaw near the ear, ‘because animal jaws are far more acutely shaped than human jaws.’
‘Whoever or whatever did them, they were made ante-mortem,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll have to wait for the histology report to be a hundred per cent sure, but I’m prepared to bet on it.’
‘Someone with badly made false teeth?’ I asked.
Harry shrugged. ‘You’re the investigator. I was hoping you might be able to cast a little light on the matter. I’m just telling you what I’ve found.’
‘Stop being so modest, Harry,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you think made these marks.’
‘I can’t think of anything that would make those double rows,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s the bite marks of someone with some facial deformity.’
‘Why don’t you send these over to the forensic dentist,’ I said. ‘See what he makes of them.’
‘That’s exactly what my next step was going to be.’
I noticed that the earrings had gone from the woman’s ears and remembered Sofia’s remarks. Hasn’t anyone noticed what’s truly weird about the way this woman’s dressed?
‘Did you find out about those earrings?’ I asked, remembering my request concerning Cec Peabody, the jeweller.
‘Nineteenth-century Victorian rose gold in a distinctive design of interlinked hearts set with seed pearl and peridots, is what the man said. I have the report in my office.’
‘Peridots?’ I queried. ‘What are they?’
‘Semi-precious stones,’ he replied. ‘A yellowy-green form of olivine, according to Cec.’
We left the post-mortem room, dumped our gowns and booties and walked back to Harry’s office.
‘Have you looked at the gunshot case yet?’ I asked. ‘The scientist from the Ag Station?’
‘She’s next. It’s been a busy day.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said. ‘Getting a quarter of our annual murder allocation in one twenty-four-hour period.’ Generally speaking, homicide rates in the Australian Capital Territory hovered around eight victims per year.
‘Find out what made those marks on Tianna’s body and you’ll be moving in the right direction,’ said Harry as I made to leave.
‘So, what was the cause of death?’ I asked. ‘Those head injuries?’
Harry sat behind his desk. ‘My report hasn’t been typed up yet but I can tell you the main points. Cause of death was due to injuries on the back of the head. I found eggshell fracturing of the skull and severe injuries at the frontal lobes too. The result was a lot of venous damage and bleeding in the subdural space resulting in a very large clot. This would have raised the pressure in the cranial cavity until it eventually exceeded the arterial blood pressure.’
I thought of Tianna Richardson lying unconscious while her own blood filled the narrow space between the lining of her brain and the curved bone of her skull. ‘And that stopped the blood flow to the brain?’ I asked.
‘Correct,’ said Harry. ‘Deadly, unless you get to an ICU pretty smart and have the pressure relieved.’
‘You said impact injuries. Any idea what made them?’
‘That’s the odd part,’ said Harry. ‘It doesn’t look like a bashing to me. I’m thinking contre coup.’
I frowned. ‘I’ve heard that term before. But I’ve forgotten it.’
‘There’s still a lot of argy-bargy about contre-coup injuries,’ Harry explained. ‘And how and why they occur. Some scientists reckon they’re caused by rotational force or shearing effects.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said.
‘I don’t either, to be honest. But one thing is pretty clear. The presence of this sort of injury almost always implies that the person’s head was moving fast when it suddenly hit something hard and unyielding.’
I imagined Tianna Richardson being hurled violently to the ground of the car park. But hard enough to cause those deep wounds? It would be difficult for even a very strong offender to muster the speed necessary from a standing position.
‘At first I thought she might have been thrown from a moving vehicle, because of these abrasions and scratches,’ said Harry.
‘And hit the ground on the back of her head at speed?’ I asked. ‘But why do it there, in the car park? There could be witnesses. There’d be cars coming and going as well as parked around. How could he get up enough speed under those conditions?’
Harry nodded. ‘That’s right. Then I thought maybe, as she was pushed out of the vehicle, one of the doors swung back at speed and hit the back of her head. Or she was hit by another vehicle.’
‘But, Harry, there’s no suggestion of any car being involved. Not at the crime scene.’
‘Yes, and I haven’t found anything on her that would indicate the involvement of a vehicle,’ Harry said. ‘No flakes of paint. No other abrasions consistent with that interpretation. You know how it is, a bit of car on the person and a bit of person on the car.’
Locard’s theory of the transference of particle evidence formed the basis of my trace evidence work. Except in this case, there was no evidence of such an exchange.
‘You said at first you thought all this,’ I said, remembering Harry’s words. ‘What do you think now?’
There was a silence as Harry stared off into the middle distance. I could almost hear the machinery of his formidable mind. But whatever he was thinking, I had the sense he wasn’t quite ready to share it with me just now.
‘I took swabs of the injury at the back of her head—they’re waiting for you. Maybe you’ll find things at the trace level,’ he said as he passed a bagged sample in a specimen container to me. ‘I found these sandy particles on the wound site.’
‘Yes.’ I recalled the large grains I’d brushed into a container from the matted hair. ‘I collected identical particles.’
There was another silence, broken only by the entrance of a morgue attendant wheeling in a body at the other end of the post-mortem room, a young woman wearing expensive European riding jodhpurs smeared with mud and filth.
‘I’m mystified, Jack,’ Harry said after a while. ‘The injuries she’s sustained are consistent with the head striking a hard surface at speed. But I can’t make any sense of how that might have happened.’ He gave a little grimace. ‘Maybe you can do better. I’m going to have a closer look at that bruise on her face.’
I’d worked with Harry for many years and I’d never seen him as puzzled as this. ‘Your wife’s right, Harry. You do need a break,’ I said. ‘All those early mornings and late nights. Not enough conversation down here w
ith the dead.’
He looked up at me and for a second I thought there were tears in his eyes, but it could have been the light or the way his spectacles reflected. ‘It’s not the dead who worry me,’ he said.
I knew what he meant. For a split second I wondered if I could talk to him about what Charlie had said last night, but I just couldn’t do it so I silently signed for the bagged specimen Harry had given me and put it in my briefcase.
‘You might as well take these back with you too,’ he said. ‘Save me sending for the courier. The swabs from body cavities—there were signs of recent sexual activity.’
Considering the facts of the case, that didn’t surprise me.
‘You should get a DNA profile from the semen.’
Eight
My next stop was outside the neat, double-fronted brick veneer cottage of the late Tianna Richardson on Kincaid Street. I pulled up behind Brian Kruger’s crime scene wagon and walked up the cement pathway past several weatherbeaten garden gnomes huddled around a small declivity that might once have been a little fishpond before the big dry. Now, only grass grew in it. Apart from a vermilion geranium in a pot near the front door and a wide-branched pepper tree, the garden was bare. Just as I was about to knock on the front door, Brian called out.
‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s me. Jack.’
‘Give it a shove. It’s not locked.’
Brian appeared as I pushed open the door, hesitating because I wasn’t wearing protective gear. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘We’ve finished with the physical evidence sweep. Take a look.’
‘We?’ I asked, looking round.
‘Debbie was here but she’s gone out to get some eats.’
I walked into a large living room furnished with fawns and timbers, an old-fashioned floral carpet on the floor, framed family photographs standing on the mantelpiece and sideboard and lots of ornaments and knick-knacks. Genevieve had loved this sort of thing too, and our house had been infested with collections of coy shepherdesses, little donkeys and carts, draught horses and Toby jugs.
‘Have you had a chance to talk to Harry Marshall?’ Brian asked.
‘I have,’ I answered. ‘He says he knows what killed her but he can’t work out how. Except to say that her head was moving fast when it hit something stationary.’
‘That sounds like a fall,’ said Brian. ‘But where we found her, there was nowhere she could have fallen from.’
I told Brian about the odd marks on the dead woman’s body before looking around. ‘Find anything?’ I asked.
‘Nothing obvious. No sign of anything amiss here. It’s all neat and tidy. We’ve talked to her nearest and dearest and they all say the same thing. She was a popular girl. No enemies. Sure, she had boyfriends, but doesn’t everyone. She liked dancing and partying.’
From outside came the sound of a vehicle pulling up. I looked out the window to see a Holden ute, its hotted-up engine burbling before it was cut.
‘That’ll be the boyfriend,’ said Brian. ‘Damien Henshaw, local resident. Painter by trade. He’s agreed to an informal chat. You can help me do a search of the place.’
‘Hey!’ I remonstrated. ‘You said you were finished.’
‘I lied.’ Brian smiled. ‘I meant we’d finished the fancy stuff.’
A young fellow, long blond hair in a ponytail, swung out of the car, shoved his hands deep into his padded chequered shirt and approached the house. As far as I could see, there was absolutely nothing wrong with his teeth or jaw line. In fact, he was a strikingly handsome young man. Tianna Richardson, I recalled, must have been in her early forties; this youth couldn’t have been much older than my own son. Or hers.
Brian met him at the door and held it open while Henshaw came inside, scared eyes darting from Brian to me. ‘This is Jack McCain, Damien,’ said Brian. ‘He’s part of the investigation into Mrs Richardson’s death. He’s a scientist.’
Damien nodded at me, hands still firmly in his pockets, slightly stooped, standing awkwardly until Brian ushered him into the living room. He relaxed a little in the familiar surroundings and sat down on one of the lounge chairs.
Brian had his notebook out, ready to take a statement and I wandered around, leafing through the photo album that lay open on the coffee table, listening, while Brian took down the details. Damien was twenty-four and had known Mrs Richardson for about four months.
‘I did some painting for her,’ he explained.
‘That’s not all you did for her,’ said Brian. ‘Tell me about that.’
‘Yes,’ I interrupted. ‘How did that come about?’ I looked up from the photograph I’d been studying of Tianna out for dinner with a group of people. ‘Who made the first move?’
Damien Henshaw looked around the room, his gaze fixing on a shopping bag and scarf thrown over the back of the other lounge chair. He shrugged. ‘She came out of the shower when I was doing the hallway. She put it right on me. Asked me how about it.’
‘And?’ I prompted.
‘It started from there.’
‘What sort of relationship was it?’ I asked. ‘How often did you see each other?’
‘I can’t believe it,’ Damien said, ignoring my question, ‘I can’t believe she’s dead like that.’ His words sounded strained and unnatural and his head suddenly slumped down.
‘Please answer my question,’ I said. ‘Can you describe what sort of a relationship you had with Mrs Richardson?’
Damien shifted in his seat and looked accusingly at Brian. ‘You told me this was just going to be a chat.’
‘It is,’ said Brian, reassuring him. ‘We will need you to drop down to the station sometime, though. And do a proper statement. No need to be worried. It’s standard procedure with a case like this. Okay?’
Damien was still uneasy but he straightened himself on the chair.
‘So tell us,’ I prompted.
‘I’d drop by a couple of times a week, usually in the evenings, and we’d have sex.’
Couple of times a week, I thought. If I was his age, with a woman so obliging and attractive, I’d have been dropping in a couple of times a day.
‘I just want to get an idea of what happened the night before last,’ said Brian. ‘Monday—when Mrs Richardson went to the nightclub. Did you see her that day?’
Damien nodded. ‘I dropped round after work finished and she wanted me to stay in and watch a video. That’s the other thing she was always wanting me to do.’
‘And the first thing?’ I asked.
I thought he’d blush, but his answer wasn’t what I was expecting. ‘Bloody dancing,’ he said. ‘She loved going to nightclubs with bands and dancing.’
Shocking behaviour, I thought.
‘But you wanted to go to the pub with your mates?’ I suggested.
‘Right. Then she started saying she wanted to come with me. To the pub.’ There was a long pause. ‘But I didn’t want her to come. I didn’t want her hanging round me when I was with my mates.’
‘What did she think of that?’ I queried.
‘Not much.’
A long silence.
‘So you argued?’ I asked.
Damien nodded. ‘We had a fight. It ended up with her calling it off. I told her I didn’t care and I walked out. She came after me, screaming at me.’ His expression changed as he suddenly realised the implications of what he was saying. ‘Look, I didn’t touch her! I mean, she was upset at me. Yelling. But I didn’t do anything!’
I could see he was scared now and I decided to lean on him a bit.
‘You and Tianna had had this fight before?’ I asked. ‘You never wanted her to come to the pub with you because you’ve got a girlfriend, haven’t you? Someone your own age.’
I saw his face change and soften. ‘Yes. We’re get
ting married at Christmas time.’
‘Name?’ Brian asked.
‘Kylie McGovern.’
‘And you didn’t want them to know about each other,’ I said.
Damien Henshaw’s eyes flickered between Brian and me.
‘Is that what the fight with Tianna was about? Is that why she called it off? Because she’d found out about your girlfriend?’
‘She’s not just a girlfriend!’ There was energy and enthusiasm in his voice. ‘She’s my fiancée.’
‘Did Mrs Richardson find out about your fiancée?’ Brian asked.
‘No! I’ve just told you. She was pissed off about not coming to the pub.’
‘So why didn’t you tell us this in the first place?’
I saw the red flush rising from his neck. ‘Because it’s none of your bloody business, that’s why!’
I stood up and walked to the chair where the shopping bag and scarf hung. ‘Let’s get something straight, Damien,’ I said, gripping the back of the chair, facing him. ‘Tianna Richardson was murdered the night before last and it’s my business to talk to everyone who knew her. That includes you. And the people you know. People like your fiancée, Kylie.’ I came closer, standing over him but remaining as polite as possible. ‘We want to know about them too. In fact, everyone who knew Mrs Richardson is our business in a murder investigation.’
The red flush in his face subsided, although his lips were set in a thin white line. This was a very different character from the casual knockabout image he’d first presented. Now I had the sense of someone maintaining tight control.
‘So what happened that night?’
‘You’re getting this all wrong. I don’t have to talk to you.’
Although we’d rattled his cage, I didn’t like the way things were going. We didn’t want to get him offside at this stage. Much easier for everyone if he cooperated.
‘You’re quite right,’ I said, glancing over at Brian who got the message.
‘But it makes our job easier,’ said Brian, ‘if we’ve got an idea of what happened that night.’
‘We understand that couples argue all the time,’ I continued in the same tone as Brian. ‘You should have heard me and my ex.’
Dirty Weekend Page 9