‘You’d better hope that no one else dies,’ Easton said. ‘Or I’ll do my best to see both of you charged.’
Fighting talk from Easton, and Dani loved to see just a sliver of confidence taken from Daley’s icy exterior by Easton’s coolly delivered threat.
‘Next time I only want to speak to Dani,’ Ben said, giving Easton a sly look that Dani would have loved to wipe off his face for good.
The room fell silent for a few moments.
‘Sorry,’ Dani said, ‘but you’re not in a position to dictate—’
‘I’ll speak to you, and only you,’ Ben said, cutting her off. ‘I don’t want to see him again.’
‘I’m afraid that’s really not for you to decide,’ Easton said, though his protest sounded weak.
Dani said nothing more, but how the hell was she going to explain that to McNair?
‘Ben, what are you doing?’ Dani said. ‘Why are you doing this?’
She hadn’t intended to, but she sounded desperate, and she saw the power in Ben’s demeanour grow as a result. He didn’t bother to answer the question.
‘Detectives,’ Daley said, ‘unless you have anything else to add, I think this meeting is over.’
Dani slumped. She had nothing.
* * *
‘Talk to me,’ Easton said.
‘It’s nothing,’ Dani said as she pulled the phone from her ear and deleted the voicemail. The message had been from Larissa’s foster carer. They’d spoken earlier, at Dani’s prompting, only for Dani to discover that Larissa hadn’t returned home the previous night. Both of them had been in a fret about that, after Larissa’s late-night trip to Harborne, but Poppy had called back half an hour ago to confirm that Larissa was back home now, and seemed fine, even if she wouldn’t explain where she’d been.
‘I meant talk to me about that meeting, not your voice message,’ Easton said.
‘Oh.’
Dani sighed and started the engine and pulled the car out of its spot and towards the security gate.
They drove on for several minutes as Dani tried to gather her thoughts. By that point she wasn’t even sure if she was angry any more. She was simply dumbfounded. She really didn’t know what to say or do next, either about Ben, or Larissa.
‘So?’ Easton said.
‘Well what do you think?’ Dani responded.
‘That Ben pretty much admitted that he knew what was going on.’
‘Not really.’
‘What? All that no comment crap? You can probably exchange every one of those answers for a yes.’
‘You know it doesn’t work like that, however obvious it might be to us. For the CPS to even consider a charge against him we’d have to prove Ben knew about Curtis’s plans. Whatever the hell his plans are. And we can only do that if either Ben or Curtis admits it. And it’s not even the most important thing. The most important thing is finding Curtis. Stopping anyone else from dying, not sticking another charge on Ben.’
‘The fact we’re having the conversation with him at all shows he knows something.’
‘I agree,’ Dani said. ‘But it could be he knows something small and insignificant.’
‘No. No way.’
‘I know. I don’t believe that either. But like I said, right now we can’t prove otherwise.’
‘But you agree it sounds as though more people are going to die?’
Dani clenched the steering wheel tightly as she tried to channel her confusion and frustration. Her knuckles turned white.
‘We don’t even know for sure that Curtis killed both Oscar and Mary,’ she said. ‘It’s just our theory.’
‘But it’s the only explanation we have so far. And your brother’s games are likely going to lead to more people getting killed unless we find Curtis first.’
Dani was about to bite back at Easton’s reference to her sibling relationship with Ben. The way he’d said it was almost accusatory against her. She held her tongue.
‘I’ll brief McNair on the interview,’ Dani said. ‘And after that I suggest we leave the lawyers to it. We need to get on with the investigation. McNair is holding a press con later. Curtis’s face will be out there soon enough. We’re closing the net.’
Easton sighed, suggesting he wasn’t particularly satisfied with her response. Neither was she, really. She was both desperate and determined to find out what Ben knew. If she could, she’d have him strung up and every effort made to force the information out of him however they could. But she couldn’t. The only solution now was for the police to play to their strengths and for her and the investigation team to keep on top of what they could control.
A thought struck her.
‘Do you remember what question his first no comment answer was in response to?’ she asked.
She glanced to Easton who was looking quizzically out of the window as though trying to wrack his brain. He didn’t get there and was soon poring over his notepad. He tapped the paper with his finger when he found the right spot.
‘It was something along the lines of what did Ben know about why Curtis was in Long Lartin.’
Dani chewed on that for a few seconds. Why was that so controversial a question? Ben had been answering questions about Curtis on the inside by that point, albeit in an obtuse manner, so why the sudden change with that question?
‘We need to dig more deeply into Curtis’s trial,’ Dani said.
‘In what sense?’
‘We’ve already posed the hypothesis that Curtis was out for revenge. How else do we explain the death of his trial judge?’
‘And Oscar Redfearne?’
‘I don’t know.’ Which was a glaring hole in their already paper-thin theory.
‘There has to be more at play than simple revenge,’ Easton said.
‘Maybe. Or maybe not. But we should start there still. We need to find out everything we can about that trial. Who the barristers were. Which witnesses were called. How the verdict was reached. There’ll be a clue somewhere.’
There has to be, Dani thought, as hopeful as she was desperate.
Chapter Twenty-One
Never had Dani been so glad for modern airflow technology as when she entered the morgue on a hot summer’s day. Already somewhat flustered from the earlier visit to the prison, she was sweating just from walking from her car to the front entrance of the building, and unhelpfully, her churning mind was pre-infused with thoughts of the smell of stinking, rotting, maggot-infested flesh of cadavers in the sun.
Nice.
Luckily, as she opened the doors, and felt the waft of supercooled air-conditioned air, those smells and thoughts all but disappeared.
In fact, as she continued along the corridor to the theatre room, she shivered from the chilly air, which was strangely a welcome relief.
Though the smell of death remained. It was something that never left a morgue, no matter how much bleach was used.
She knocked on the doors to the theatre and a moment later Jack Ledford, in his white robes, opened up and beckoned her inside. He had a deep frown on his already normally furrowed brow.
‘Everything OK, Jack?’ Dani asked as he led her through the clinical room to the silvery gurney in the centre, upon which sat an unidentifiable bundle under a white sheet.
‘Not really,’ he said, before grabbing a pile of papers from a side table. ‘It’s one thing trying to draw conclusions from two dead bodies within my own theatre, but asking me to do so with one body of my own and just a pile of notes from another pathologist fifty miles away is quite something else.’
She’d had word from Ledford earlier that not only had he completed the post-mortem of Oscar Redfearne, but that he’d also received the results of the post-mortem of Mary Deville, which had been carried out by a pathologist in Shropshire.
‘Is it someone you know?’ Dani asked, not ignoring his grumble exactly, but hoping she could gloss over it.
‘What?’ he said, glancing up from the papers in his hand. ‘Yes. Yes, I do know her.
She’s perfectly good, as you can probably imagine from her speed in getting this back, but still, we all have different techniques and methods of reporting and you appreciate I’ve only had this to review since this morning.’
Though it was he who’d called Dani, not the other way around, so any lack of understanding of the Deville report was surely down to him having not taken long enough to familiarise himself with it. Not that Dani would point that out to him.
‘I understand,’ Dani said. ‘And I’ll make sure I spend plenty of time comparing the two sets of notes myself, to see what conclusions I can draw, but you know how much I value your opinion on these matters.’
Her flattery seemed to do the trick. Ledford sighed and caught her eye and then fished some glasses from the top pocket of his white coat which he dropped onto the end of his nose.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Let’s start with Deville.’ He paused a few moments as he rifled through the papers. ‘You’re going to have to wait for full forensics results for the scene analysis, but there are some intriguing finds here.’
‘Such as?’
‘Nothing to indicate any kind of sexual penetration prior to death. No foreign fluids recovered from her orifices.’ Dani clenched her teeth at the images conveyed by the clinical words. At least it was positive news, of sorts. ‘But they did identify metallic slivers in more than one of the wounds.’
Dani frowned. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Often two reasons in relation to stab victims. One could be a rusted blade, though I don’t think that’s what we’re seeing here as the wounds are so neat, and the slivers, from what I can see in the notes, were not obviously rusted.’
‘So the other?’
‘The other reason is a newly sharpened blade. In the process of sharpening you’re essentially cutting the outer edge off the blade, and you naturally get residue because of that. Unless you clean the thing to perfection you can get tiny fragments stuck to the metal which get transferred on subsequent use.’
‘Did you see similar traces in Redfearne’s wounds?’
‘We did.’
‘So you can potentially match the same weapon to both cases?’
‘We’ll have to request the metallic sample from West Mercia, but of course we can try to match them.’
‘Please.’
And such a conclusion would be of huge importance in a court of law in order to prove the same weapon had been used in both murders, and if they found a potential murder weapon, in proving that said weapon was the one used. Although to Dani, even without that forensic conclusion, the fact the slivers were there on both bodies in the first place didn’t sound like a feasible coincidence. Not when put together with other factors. The evidence was pointing more and more to supporting the theory that both Oscar and Mary were killed by the same person, and to that person being Damian Curtis.
‘And the wounds themselves, would you say they’re of a similar nature?’ Dani asked.
‘You’re asking if it looks as though the same weapons were used by the same person?’
‘Weapons?’
‘There’s definitely more than one for each victim. I think I suggested that to you at Drifford House.’
‘You did. You said perhaps an axe, together with something that had a longer blade. A katana or machete.’
‘And it’s the same for Mary Deville.’
Yet another fact that was unlikely to be a coincidence.
‘Two weapons,’ Dani said as a strange thought struck her.
‘Yes. That’s what I said.’
‘I assumed until now it was one person with two weapons. But an axe and a machete? How on earth do you wield both at the same time?’
‘I’m not sure I suggested—’
‘No, I know you didn’t say that. But just thinking through logically… why two weapons? Could it be that there were two attackers?’
Ledford stared at Dani for a few seconds.
‘I really can’t answer that,’ he said. ‘Based on what I can see, two attackers is no more or less likely than one attacker with two weapons.’
Did it make sense to Dani? No one had really put the idea of two attackers forward as a theory yet, but could it be the case?
‘Clearly both victims died in frenzied attacks,’ Ledford said. ‘They suffered multiple horrendous and hugely destructive injuries. Yes, it’s possible two people inflicted those injuries, but it’s not at all impossible that one person wielding two weapons could have done this, or even that it was one person who switched weapons during the attack, for whatever reason.’
Dani really didn’t know which of those scenarios was the most likely, or even what any of the scenarios told her about the attacks.
‘No bite marks on Mary Deville?’
‘None.’
‘Any indication she fought back?’
‘Not really. Nothing under her nails or anything like that which you could use to identify the attacker. Really no obvious signs of defensive wounds as such, though it’s hard to define exactly what would be a defensive wound when you have so many injuries like this, all inflicted with such brutality. I’d suggest from what I’ve read in the report that the injury to the left side of her head – likely caused by an axe or similar object – rendered her incapacitated and the other wounds followed subsequently, though you’d have a hard time proving that conclusively, even if it does follow in terms of the pattern of injuries being largely to the front and one side of her body. By which I mean she was very possibly on the ground when many of those wounds were inflicted.’
‘And cause of death was the head trauma?’ Dani said.
‘That’s the pathologist’s conclusion. The head wound caused massive damage to the brain tissue. Intracranial bleeding is the likely fatal result.’
‘And Redfearne?’
‘There wasn’t an equivalent penetrative wound to the head, but there was blunt force trauma. Perhaps he was hit with something or he fell and hit his head.’
Ledford put the pile of papers down and moved to the gurney. He peeled back the white sheet and Dani held her breath for a second as she stared at the stitched-up remains of Oscar Redfearne. Strangely, he almost seemed to be in better shape now than the mangled mess she’d first seen at Drifford House.
‘But the head wound didn’t kill him?’
‘No. It did cause a lot of internal damage. You’ve heard of a coup and contrecoup injury?’
‘Yes,’ Dani said. She knew more than she wished about those. A coup injury was exactly what she’d suffered when Ben had tried to kill her. She was a traumatic brain injury survivor, though the damage to her brain, her frontal lobes, was permanent, as was her resultant new and more anxious, more angry personality.
Ledford decided to explain it to her regardless, such was his manner. ‘A coup injury occurs where the brain is damaged at the site of impact on the head. So when a moving object hits a stationary head, most usually. The opposite would be a contrecoup, where a moving head hits something stationary, causing the brain to bounce to the other side of the head and thus causing injury at the side opposite to initial impact. You can of course have an impact where you get both injuries, if the force is sufficient, and in fact that is what we have with Oscar Redfearne.’
‘Why the difference, I wonder?’ Dani asked.
‘The difference?’
‘Mary was hit in the head with an axe, you suggested. But not Oscar. In fact, you’re suggesting the blow to his head was very possibly from a fall, if I’m not mistaken?’
‘Him falling and banging his head would be consistent with the brain injury, yes. And I do have a possible explanation for the differences in head wounds between the victims, although it’s a theory, not a provable fact.’
‘Go on?’ It was most unlike Ledford to offer theories, so Dani wouldn’t pass up on the opportunity.
‘Height,’ he said, then paused as if waiting for Dani to get it. She did get it; she was just a bit disappointed that this was his theory.
/>
‘Oscar was six foot three,’ Dani said.
‘And Mary Deville was five foot five. Quite a difference in height. The attacker, assuming they’re the same person for each victim, had no issue swinging an axe at Mary’s head height, but he perhaps struggled to wield it high enough to connect with Oscar’s head with force.’
‘So we’re looking for an attacker who’s smaller than Oscar but taller than Mary?’
Ledford shrugged. ‘Possibly. But if the wounds are explained in that context, it does give more weight to the theory that both victims were attacked by the same person, in a roundabout way at least.’
Dani thought for a moment as she continued to stare at Oscar’s youthful, though ghostly, face.
‘From what I can see, and remember of the scene, Oscar had far more injuries around his body than Mary Deville?’ Dani said, pulling her eyes from the corpse.
‘I’d say so. My own conclusion is that there was something of a struggle here. Perhaps in Oscar’s case he was attacked with the blade first. He was able to defend himself to some extent, which resulted in the slashes to his limbs. I’d say the head injury likely did incapacitate him, and that theory would accord with the similarities in the attack on Mary Deville, but Oscar died of blood loss from his wounds. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly which was the fatal blow given they all happened within such a short space of time, and there are several which on their own could have killed him.’
‘Are you able to conclude when the bite marks were inflicted?’
‘There was no evidence of healing, and no significant levels of blood coagulation as compared to any of the other wounds, which would suggest to me he was bitten during this attack. But it could have been the first wound, it could even have been the last. I really can’t say which is most likely with any conviction.’
Which unfortunately didn’t really help Dani at all. Why had the killer – Curtis? – made such a seemingly obvious mistake as biting the victim, and hence leaving behind his DNA?
Dani noticed Ledford glance at his watch. The second time he’d done so now.
‘I appreciate your time,’ Dani said, deciding she was perfectly happy to leave the place anyway. There was only so long she could stand being in a room so filled with death. ‘You’ll keep me updated with further results? Toxicology?’
The Rules of Murder Page 15