A Long Time Dead (The Dead Trilogy)

by Andrew Barrett

  He was a quiet worker who would timidly ask for a photograph here or a swab there, rather than yelling orders like a Sergeant Major, as would some pathologists.

  Wainwright began his autopsy by carefully removing the plastic bags covering the hands, feet and head. These he handed to one of the Exhibits Officers, who began her routine of packaging and labelling. He then made more notes of the deceased to supplement those he made at the scene, and sketched any unusual markings to the skin, scratches or abrasions on the wrists or hands that may have indicated signs of a struggle. Defence wounds, they were called.

  He checked her eyes for obvious signs of drug abuse, illness or the like, and her arms and legs for tracks. There were none. She did indeed appear to be a clean young lady.

  By the end of this preliminary stage, half an hour had passed and people began chattering again. Chris was not optimistic of an early finish. The Exhibits Officer, DC Clements, flicked a pen against her bottom lip, her top lip shining with Vicks; Haynes rapped his fingers on the bench, and Paul, Chris noted, looked away from the body; not just slightly away, coyly like he was pretending to be busy, but 180 degrees away, arms folded, stomach rumbling.

  Before Wainwright put his clipboard down, he again picked up the girl’s left hand and studied the back of it quite closely. When, after a moment, he failed to put the hand down, the chatter gradually ceased. Pens, fingers and feet stopped moving and attention grew. Wainwright looked up. Shelby glided to where the pathologist stood and looked at her hand. “Chris,” he said, “can we have a picture of this, please?”

  “Sure,” Chris snapped a shot of the blue-ish smudge on the white skin. “Looks like it says something to me,” he said, more to Shelby than anyone else. There were two faint lines of blue smudge running roughly from her wrist to her knuckles.

  Ann rigged up an illuminated magnifying glass over the dead girl, and Wainwright peered through it at her hand. Distinct letters and shapes appeared. “Strange,” he said.

  “What, what?” Shelby said, hoping for a lead.

  “Well, the writing, if we at this stage may call it writing, is angled peculiarly.”

  “How do you mean?” Shelby asked.

  “If for example, you were to write upon your own hand, chances are it would go in a straight line roughly from the inboard part of your wrist towards the top knuckle of your index finger, following the line of the tendon. But as you can see, this goes in a straight line from the base of her thumb toward the knuckle of her middle finger, possibly indicating that someone else wrote whatever it is, and not the girl.”

  Shelby nodded, and DS Lenny Firth made notes in a green-backed pad. “S’cuse me, boss?” Firth chipped in. “I don’t think she wrote on her hand. She’s left handed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I took her watch from her right wrist; and back at the house there were left-handed scissors and stuff in the bathroom.”

  “Okay, then. So, we have some illegible writing on her left hand probably written by someone else. Photo, Chris, if you please.”

  Chris photographed her hand with and without grey measuring scales, and then re-photographed it using a slow speed black and white film, hoping to provide better contrast.

  “What can we do with that, Chris, to bring it out more?” Shelby asked.

  Just as he was pulling the camera out of the way, tripod legs hopping across the tiles, Chris paused. “We could try Quasar,” he said. “It’s a high intensity light which, if the right wavelength is selected, should get the ink in her skin to fluoresce, but I don’t think that will be available until tomorrow; it needs specially trained staff from the Fingerprint Development Lab.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “Oh, we could also use a plain old-fashioned UV lamp and photo the results.”

  “Good, good, any ideas, Chris, keep ‘em coming.” He finally smiled and the crow’s feet surfaced. “Well,” Shelby said, “let’s bag her hand up again so the writing doesn’t get washed off or rubbed out altogether, and we’ll get FDL here tomorrow.” He was about to ask a question of Firth and then said, “Never mind, I’ll arrange it.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can’t get some under-nail crud; paring stick please and a Beechams,” Wainwright said.

  “A what?” asked DC Clements.

  “A folded piece of paper,” Chris whispered, “to catch the nail scrapings in.”

  “Right.” And then quietly, “Why didn’t he say than in the first place?”

  “It isn’t going to be easy,” Wainwright examined her fingers, “she was a nervous little thing; bitten most of her nails away.”

  Shelby moved closer, peered at her ragged nails. Some were so well chewed that they had dark deposits – dried blood – up by the quick.

  “But we’ll try.” He did, but unsuccessfully.

  The hand re-bagged, Wainwright moved on to take other body hair samples. These were primarily in order to link her with another scene, to place her in a car or perhaps another address, if the full story of her last night alive ever became known.

  He plucked and cut head hair, and placed it into a plastic universal container held in the Exhibits Officer’s shaky grasp. Then he passed her some eyebrow hair, then eyelash hair, and then nasal hair. When he moved down to the pubic region, Wainwright stopped in his tracks, tweezers poised. “Inspector Shelby.”

  Shelby moved over, accompanied by Firth, and saw that her pubic mound was sheathed in fine light ginger, almost straight, pubic hair; downy to the touch.

  “What am I looking at, Bellington?”

  “Can’t you see it?”

  Shelby looked harder, moved even closer. “I haven’t a clue what you want me to look at.”

  “There,” Wainwright pointed with a gloved hand. “The black hair amongst her own?”

  “Photograph, please, Chris.”

  Chris photographed the hair, and then again with an adhesive arrow pointing it out in case the jury couldn’t make it out either.

  Wainwright’s tweezers shook as he handed the hair to the Exhibits Officer.

  “I want that treated as a priority,” Shelby said sternly to her. “We should be able to get DNA from that, right?”

  “Hopefully,” said Wainwright. “If the root is still in good condition, yes. If not, then we should be able to extract mitochondrial DNA from the hair shaft which will enable a maternal strain to be identified.”

  “A what?”

  In his wonderfully rich, public school voice, both aspects of which annoyed Chris, Wainwright explained that, “Mitochondrial DNA is unlike the nuclear DNA fingerprinting one hears of on the news occasionally. It has less of a distinguishing property in that all the mitochondrial DNA from siblings is identical, and furthermore is only carried down from the mother – hence, maternally-passed down.”

  “Thank you,” was all Shelby said.

  “Problem being though,” Wainwright continued, “is that mitochondrial DNA is not compatible with the National DNA Database. That means, I’m afraid, you will need a suspect to match it against. Or access to his mother.”

  “Fucking marvellous,” Shelby said.

  Wainwright took a sample of her own pubic hair as a control. Next, two sets of oral swabs: one from around the inner region of the lips, and the other from around the tongue; and then he performed upper and lower vaginal and anal swabs before concluding, “I would say that no sexual penetration has occurred recently before death.”

  “But plenty afterwards,” whispered Haynes, who thought Shelby couldn’t hear him. He was wrong, and reddened when Shelby strongly intimated demotion.

  “What?” asked Shelby, returning his attention to the pathologist, more confused than ever. “You mean to tell me that a pretty girl was found dead in the bedroom of an otherwise unoccupied house,” he pointed, “and she was naked, let me add, and you say she hadn’t been…she hadn’t had sex?”

  “That’s right, Inspector.”

  Shelby muttered, “What is the world com
ing to.”

  “Possibly the offender, er…” clearly embarrassed, Wainwright looked at DC Clements, “I mean, perhaps he was unable to er, to fully er—”

  “He couldn’t get it up?” Clements suggested.

  “Well, I just think it’s something you ought to bear in mind, Inspector.”

  Next, Chris took more photographs of the neck wound before and after cleaning. They discovered that a single-edged blade had penetrated her neck by nearly two inches, severing the carotid artery and nicking the jugular vein. It was the sort of blade found on a million penknives, and that similarity with Delaney’s death wasn’t lost on anyone.

  After Wainwright weighed and dissected each organ, everyone stood back and watched Ann place them in a black plastic bag and shuffle them into Nicky’s gaping abdominal cavity, humming Bring Me Sunshine. She didn’t sew Nicky up at this stage, as there was a chance of a further PM carried out by another pathologist under the instructions of the Defence counsel – if one were ever needed.

  “Briefing at oh-eight-hundred sharp, Chris.”

  A light snow began to fall.

  Thursday 21st January 1999

  Chapter Sixteen

  — One —

  Roger could barely keep his eyes open. It was only the turbulence from buses and large lorries passing his parked van and rocking it, that kept him awake.

  He had been here for two hours. Here was sixty yards away from Weston’s front door and about two hundred yards from the silhouetted ruins of Sandal Castle. The dashboard clock said it was 08:32. It was four degrees outside.

  The meagre snowfall that littered crevices yesterday evening, that hung around in the corners between pavements and walls like a work in progress, had vanished overnight. Cloud was thick today, and even now the sky appeared in tumult, shoved around by the strengthening wind. It still wasn’t fully light, the earth had a bubbling ceiling and it appeared there had been a celestial power cut.

  Roger had been on duty since six o’clock. He had rushed to work, dumped his sandwiches and his Adidas bag, and printed off the jobs for Jon and Helen who would arrive at eight. He made sure there was nothing urgent that required immediate attendance, left a brief note for Chris in case he showed up at the office, and then brought his van here, his mind rattling with Hobnail’s words and soothed by Yvonne’s compassion.

  It began to rain as Weston’s BMW nosed out of the drive.

  Roger’s eyes sprang wide and for a moment he didn’t know what to do, had forgotten everything he had rehearsed last night while he should have been sleeping. He buckled his seat belt and fell in behind Weston half a dozen cars behind. The rain grew heavier the further out of town they travelled. The windscreen misted up.

  For twenty minutes, they travelled, with the cars between them leaving, others joining. The gap remained constant. The traffic lights at Durkar, where you could turn left towards Newmillerdam, caught Roger out. Weston scraped through on amber and Roger could only watch from behind a red light, as the BMW slipped out of sight around a corner. He panicked then, knowing this was the big chance, maybe his only chance to prove what a dirty bastard Weston really was. He felt the bulge of his compact camera in his coat pocket: no, not good enough evidence for a conviction in court, perhaps, but good enough to get the ACC or Mayers to sit up and really take notice this time.

  When the lights changed, Roger craned his neck, brought the van over to the right and saw Weston’s car in the distance, stuck in a queue of traffic by a roundabout. He pulled up four cars back. And he swallowed, felt the sweat on his palms, and peered through the dirt streaked, misty windscreen at the man who dared call him the enemy. The BMW took off, Roger willed the cars in front onward, grimaced at their inability to pull out into the main flow of traffic, and that’s when his mobile phone rang.

  Steering with one hand, he struggled to get the damned thing out of his other coat pocket and answered curtly. It was Jon, and through his continual splutter of bad jokes and awkward questions, Roger kept his attention on Weston. “I really have to go; speak to you later.” They were well out of town now, heading along the dual carriageway towards the M1.

  Where the hell are we going? he thought.

  “You heading somewhere?” asked Jon.

  “I’m on a job.”

  “What job? I don’t see your call-sign in—”

  “It’s more of a personal job.” He passed beneath the motorway, which from down here looked like a sea wall with a barrier of spray running its full length. The wipers scraped across the windscreen, the road noise blotted out Roger’s loud breathing.

  “Ah. I see.”

  “I don’t think you—”

  “The Bulldog?”

  Roger paused. “Keep it to yourself, Jon.”

  “Just be careful, you stupid man, and don’t turn your phone off. Where are you now?”

  “Heading towards Bretton Country Park, looks like.”

  “Okay, I have to go now, Helen’s coming back. Take care of yourself; I don’t want to trail out there to rescue your sorry arse.”

  “Has Chris come in?”

  The line went dead, and Roger turned on the phone’s silent function.

  On a narrow road, hemmed in by naked black trees, and by hedges covered in grey road dirt, Roger peered through the spray, trying to sight Weston’s car. There it was, two cars separating them.

  Suddenly, Weston turned right into the Bretton estate and Roger carried on, skidding the van into a narrow dirt lay-by thirty yards past the entrance. The van slid to within two feet of an overflowing concrete litterbin. He climbed from the warmth, out into a tearing wind that pulled at his coat, rippled his trousers against his long skinny legs, and nearly snatched his glasses from his face. The rain came heavier, almost horizontally. He squinted over the rough hedge to watch Weston’s car splashing through puddles towards a small gravel car park by the wooded hillside. Water ran down his neck and dripped from his glasses. Cars sped past him, throwing up clouds of dirty water and drowning thought with noise.

  Roger locked the van, tucked the keys safely away, and pulled his collar up, making a dash for the far side of the road and the entrance to Bretton. The gullies at either side of the tarmac road bubbled with storm water, and overhead, power lines hummed and phone lines whistled.

  The tarmac road became a potholed gravel track after thirty or forty yards. Another hundred yards after that, it divided left towards the house and gardens, or right towards the woodland, the lake and stone built boathouse further down the valley, and the picnic areas and sightseeing trails. A generous car park, also gravelled, accommodated only three cars; one of which was a black BMW. Empty.

  Hurrying, Roger left the harsh noise of traffic on the wet road, and swapped it for harsh winds tearing through trees, barging into them until they sang like perpetual thunder. Cold wind-blown rain stung his face until the skin was numb and blotchy red; eyes screwed up, coat fastened to the neck, hands rammed into pockets and wrapped around the disfigured Mars bars.

  He turned into the woods, hurrying silently among the turmoil, through towering trees, shiny with rain, through mounds of slippery leaves, navigating minefields of snagging bracken and fallen trees, and over tributaries whose banks were a mire of clinging mud. He looked down at his shoes, and merely tutted at the muddy water soaking into his socks.

  Whipping branches plucked at his coat and trousers, attempted to steal his glasses, and made grabs for his hair. Still the rain pierced the naked canopy, and still Roger headed deeper into the woods, well away from the marked nature trail, lower into the valley and closer to Weston.

  And the truth of it was, the closer he came to Weston, the more his footing slipped, the more his hands came out of his pockets to regain balance, the harsher his breathing was and the more unsure of his quest he became.

  Not for a moment did he consider that this time Weston was going fishing in the lake, or was taking a walk in the woods for no more sinister a reason than to work off some of his weight a
nd enjoy a minor struggle with nature. He wasn’t in this for the pleasure, wasn’t Weston: he didn’t look up at the trees, didn’t admire them or the knee-high foliage or the bracken, or the fungi growing on dead wood, or the squirrels that darted into places of greater safety every time their tree shook.

  He was here for a specific purpose. Such as digging up some guns, or a gun, and he was going to take it back to his car, and he was going to meet someone at twelve o’clock, and he was going to sell them that gun at a place called Harvey’s Table. And then in the months to follow, that gun would kill people, maim people; and the money would buy Weston more cigars and beer, and would fund the deposit for a two-week holiday in Spain in April. How nice.

  That’s what he was doing.

  The noise was incredible. It was like standing next to a Boeing as it prepared for take-off, and even in here, covered by the woods, he was violently whipped about, found walking difficult, found it a real effort one moment and then a real effort to keep from falling flat on his nose the next. Mud seemed to grow up his trouser legs. His fingertips were numb, his nose was leaking, eyes streaming.

  Roger thought of Hobnail, how he’d finally met him outside the station, and he thought of what Hobnail had told him, how he said he’d seen Weston enter The Joker – “couldn’t bleedin’ miss him,” he said. “I’d recognise the fella who nearly mowed me down a few days ago, no problem. And he walks the same as he drives: aggressive.”

  And Roger had been enthralled by Hobnail’s tale, eyes had never moved from the tramp’s, nose completely ignorant of the smell, ears hearing nothing except the old man’s coarse accent and his regurgitation of the words he had heard, about how Weston “Was meeting a beaver at noon, Thursday. So he was gonna dig up the metal before then.”

  “He said that? He used those exact words?”

  Hobnail had looked worried, as though maybe they weren’t those precise exact definite words, and he’d made a right balls up. His eyes had moved away from Roger as he dug around in his memory. At last, he’d stared back and nodded. “Oh aye, mentioned metal, he did.”