by Rob Sinclair
‘A Vauxhall Insignia. Two rough-looking guys inside. Except the car is registered to Brigitta Popescu.’
‘She doesn’t strike me as much of a driver.’
‘Certainly doesn’t. She’s also the main driver listed on the car’s insurance.’
Easton huffed. ‘So who was the chap driving, then?’
‘Which is the question we’re going to need to get to the bottom of.’
‘Am I sensing another trip to Tipton?’
Dani sighed and looked at her watch. ‘I’d rather avoid it, if we can.’
‘But at the very least we’ve got some guy driving Brigitta’s car, uninsured.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘If you’re looking for someone to sweat out…’
‘Agreed. Make a call to the local station. Let them know the deal. If they can get a PC in a car to sit on that street and wait then great, but at least make them aware we need to find that vehicle, pronto. When they find it, tell them to arrest the driver if it’s anyone other than Brigitta Popescu.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘You said it yourself. Driving while uninsured.’
‘But you think there’s more going on than that?’
‘I’m absolutely certain of it.’
She just didn’t have a clue what.
* * *
Dani was tired and seriously frustrated by the time she made it home. Having first stopped at the hospital to see Jason, it was nearly ten p.m., and the house was unexpectedly frigid. It turned out the heating hadn’t come on at all during the evening, the pilot light of the ageing boiler having blown out because of the draught coming through the back door. A problem they’d never had at their house in Harborne, where they’d spent thousands on modernising even in the few short months they’d lived there together. This house needed its own dose of TLC, though Dani struggled to bring herself to even think about that while Jason was still in hospital.
After an hour with both the heating on full blast as well as the inadequate gas fire in the lounge, Dani was still ice cold as she sat on the sofa with the laptop, scrolling away.
She’d intended to just quickly catch up on life – social media, the news, emails – before going to bed, but had inadvertently got spectacularly sidetracked. That had started from a simple google of the word ‘Strigoi’. Which had turned into a deep dive research of Romanian folklore, evil spirits, vampires and werewolves. Not to mention the history of Vlad the Impaler, the brutal fifteenth century Wallachian ruler, best known for his horrific methods of torture, but also the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s infamous character who revolutionised vampire folklore: Count Dracula.
All of which only added to Dani’s chill, and the feeling of creepy isolation as she sat alone.
Dani cupped her hand to her mouth as the gory accounts of Vlad’s brutality transformed into grotesque images in her mind.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when there was an unexpected bang from somewhere outside the room.
Heart thudding, Dani stared across to the partially open doorway. No other sounds came, but she was soon silently slipping the computer from her lap, onto the seat next to her. Just as quietly she pushed herself onto her feet, just as another thudding sound came, this time causing Dani to flinch anxiously.
Earlier she’d joked with Easton about being easily spooked. And Dani really didn’t think that she was normally like that, but there was no doubt she was feeling rattled now. In fact, she’d been on edge all day, ever since that meeting with Brigitta Popescu.
Dani tiptoed to the doorway. The house beyond was all quiet now. Painful memories burned in her mind of the previous occasions she’d been attacked in her own home. Surely it couldn’t all be happening again?
As Dani reached the door, she could see the light was on in the hallway. Just as she’d left it. With a rush of adrenaline she jumped out. Spun this way and that.
No one there.
Another thud, and she spun back to face the wall. Rolled her eyes at her own silliness. This time she could place the noise exactly. Though it did help that the bang was followed by muffled arguing. The next-door neighbours. Oh, the joy of a semi-detached house. Dani hadn’t lived here long but she’d already figured that the neighbours had an unruly teenage daughter who created havoc for her worn-down parents. The slanging match now taking place next door was a more or less daily occurrence.
There was an even bigger bang and the letterbox on Dani’s front door rattled from the force of the vibration. The clip-clop she heard outside confirmed that the daughter was now storming away down the drive. Probably to her boyfriend’s car, as was the norm.
At least now the shouting and clattering from the house had stopped.
Though Dani soon realised she took little comfort from the new-found quiet. Out in the hallway the temperature remained uncomfortably low. A gust of wind blasted the house causing a creak and strain somewhere at the back.
No, Dani had had enough of this. She couldn’t stay here alone tonight. Not with the horror stories that were now on constant replay in her mind.
Five minutes later, with a hastily packed overnight bag, she was on her way back to the hospital.
Chapter 12
Dani was shocked when the ringing phone woke her and she realised it was gone nine a.m. As expected she’d slept horrendously at the hospital, cramped into the too-hard armchair by Jason’s side, and even though he was no longer constantly monitored through the night, the nature of the place meant there was nevertheless a constant stream of noise coming from beyond Jason’s closed door. From four till just after seven a.m., Dani had been frustratingly wide awake, and had very nearly bitten the bullet and headed off to HQ early, but apparently tiredness had eventually caught up with her.
Jason wasn’t even in the room now. He’d somehow got up and out without her even knowing. What the hell?
She answered the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘DI Stephens, it’s Saad Tariq.’
‘Hey. You have something for me?’
‘I think so.’ He briefly explained the results of tox on Clara Dunne, also the prelims on the various fibres and other samples taken from her home. ‘Perhaps it’s best if you come down to the lab so I can properly explain it all.’
Dani thought about that one for a moment. ‘Have you got the post-mortem results too?’
‘I was told they’d be ready this morning. Weren’t you planning on going to see Ledford for those?’
‘Not if I can avoid it,’ Dani said. She never welcomed a trip to the morgue.
‘I’ve got all morning free,’ Tariq said, ‘if you’ve time to stop by.’
‘No, I’ve got a better idea,’ Dani said.
* * *
Easton beat Dani to it. He’d already been at HQ when she’d called him, and had headed straight over to Oldbury. She’d needed to take a shower at the hospital and get herself into shape first. She found him standing outside Clara Dunne’s home, playing with his phone. Behind him blue and white police tape remained stretched across the front door of the house.
‘Let me guess,’ Dani said. ‘More vampire research.’
He looked at her quizzically, as though it had never crossed his mind. And anyway, wasn’t she the one who’d spent all that time yesterday either searching or thinking about Strigoi?
‘You look rough,’ he said.
Dani snorted. ‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘Seriously. You have a bad night or something?’
‘I was at the hospital.’
Easton looked concerned now. ‘Is Jason OK?’
‘Oh, he’s fine. Just one of those things.’
Easton didn’t look convinced but he didn’t push further. Likewise, Dani didn’t bother to probe into the latest about him and his sister. There was only so much sharing of private grievances she could take.
Tariq soon arrived and Easton did the honours of pulling away the tape and unlocking the front door. With no heating on for the last forty-eight hours, t
he inside of the house was nearly as cold as outside, and there was a strangely dank and murky smell. Even though Clara Dunne’s body had been removed way before any rot had set in, Dani could not just smell, but also sense death in this place now.
A house was just four walls and a roof, but how could any home ever move on from such a thing? The very reason she would have found it impossible to stay in hers and Jason’s Harborne home.
‘Give us the short version first,’ Dani said to Tariq, as the FSI shut the front door behind him. In the hall they each put plastic shoe covers on.
‘Certainly,’ Tariq said. ‘Before I start, I have these for you, hot off the press.’
Tariq took two thin wads of paper from his satchel and handed one each to Dani and Easton.
Dani took the post-mortem report and spent a few seconds quickly flicking through for the vital finds.
‘Drowning?’ she said, a little surprised.
Tariq held up his hands. ‘You know you’ll have to go through the details with Ledford, I’m no pathologist.’
‘So it wasn’t the drugs or alcohol that killed her,’ Easton said, a frown on his face as he rifled through the papers.
‘Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as conclusive as that,’ Dani said. ‘Looking at these tox levels, she had easily enough drugs in her system to kill her, plus the alcohol. Was that a deliberate attempt to kill herself? Or was she simply unconscious and slipped under the water?’
Both Tariq and Easton took pause now as they looked over at Dani, as though they were unsure where she’d taken that information from. The sad fact was, as someone who’d relied on alcohol and anti-depressants to get by for years, she knew all too well the potential problems of overdosing on either, or both. She knew the limits, had always stayed within them herself, but what Clara Dunne had in her system was way beyond.
‘In fact, you wouldn’t even need to be unconscious,’ Dani added. ‘Just drunk enough to not wake up. You’d be surprised how common it is.’
Neither Easton nor Tariq said anything to that.
‘And these bruises,’ Dani said, working through the report in her head as she read it. ‘On her lower arms, upper arms, around her shoulders.’
‘There were no bruises on her body when we were here,’ Tariq said. ‘It would have been obvious to the eye, never mind in the pictures.’
‘Meaning what?’ Easton said.
‘Meaning they were either inflicted very close to death, or when the body was moved,’ Dani said.
Easton now looked seriously baffled.
‘You know your stuff, DI Stephens,’ Tariq said.
Unfortunately so.
‘Bruising can still occur on a dead body,’ Dani explained to Easton. ‘Bruising is little more than blood pooling beneath the skin, so even when blood isn’t flowing, as long as there’s sufficient force applied to the flesh of a fresh corpse, then you can get bruises appearing.’
‘Most frequently when we move bodies from a scene,’ Tariq said.
‘But if you’re saying these bruises weren’t there when you were first called in, but are now, it’s also possible the trauma was caused just before death, isn’t it?’ Easton asked.
‘That’s one for Ledford, I’m afraid,’ Tariq said.
‘The logic follows,’ Easton said. ‘And what about this swelling to the back of the head?’
Tariq was looking more and more uncomfortable now, as though he was being put on the spot.
‘Again, it could have been caused when we moved the body. It’s not easy taking a sixty-kilo corpse out of a slippery bath.’
‘Ledford’s saying if the impact that caused that swelling occurred while she was still alive, it likely wasn’t sufficient to incapacitate her,’ Dani said.
More of a statement than a question, as she was reading the finding direct from Ledford’s own words.
‘OK,’ Dani said, folding the report away. ‘Walk us through your scene analysis.’
‘Of course,’ Tariq said, looking a little relieved.
He produced another report each for Dani and Easton, then got to work explaining.
‘First up, I should say we did standard tests with UV light all around the house for bodily fluids, blood, etc. Nothing stood out, but then that was expected as there was nothing about the scene to suggest Clara had been attacked or bled elsewhere within the house.’
Dani made a mental note of that. She’d possibly come back to it later as she wasn’t sure it was the most straightforward of conclusions.
‘We tested all obvious surfaces for prints,’ Tariq continued. ‘Around the bathroom, doors and frames, kitchen surfaces, banisters, the like. We found what you’d expect. Plenty of areas with Clara’s prints, and one or two areas where we have other unidentified prints, but mostly only partials.’
‘Anything that looked unusually print-free?’ Dani asked.
‘Not really. Kitchen was particularly clean, but that’s not unusual as such. A good cloth and a bit of Fairy will take prints off a lot of surfaces.’
‘And the partials?’
‘There were seven different fragments in total. We’ve matched five of those, to various degrees of accuracy, to Bianca Neita’s prints.’
‘And where were they?’ Easton said, eyes down, flipping a page as he spoke.
‘Front door, on the outside handle. Inside edge of the front door too. Bathroom doorframe. Side of the bath.’
‘Which is all consistent with her statement about coming in and finding the body,’ Easton said, looking to Dani for confirmation.
‘Consistent enough. For now,’ Dani said. ‘What about the final two partials?’
‘This is where it gets a bit more… unclear,’ Tariq said. ‘One was in the bathroom, on the edge of the cabinet door, and the other was on the top of the baluster at the bottom of the stairs.’
They were standing right by it, and Dani stared over to the dark wood now, as though trying to seek a glimpse back in time.
A thought was building in the back of her mind, but she held on to it for now.
‘Let’s take a look as we talk,’ Dani said.
They moved through to the lounge first, then the kitchen, Tariq regurgitating the procedures his team had undertaken in each room, and the generally bland results that had been returned.
Soon they were in the frighteningly cold bathroom, and Dani felt a wave of sorrow pass over her as she stared at the bleak-looking bath, and the brown tide mark a couple of inches from the top.
‘Did you test the water?’ Dani asked.
‘We took a sample. Not yet tested, though, I don’t think.’
‘Could you?’
‘Certainly.’
Dani looked around the room, from the bath, to the tiled floor where the glass of neat vodka had been found, to the cabinet.
‘Nothing on the floors? No footprints, no shoe-prints?’
‘The only surfaces you’d get anything useful from were the laminate in the hall and kitchen, and the tiles in here,’ Tariq said. ‘We found some faint outlines which match to the shoes worn by Bianca Neita, and a few partial foot imprints. We can match some of those to Clara, but some are too smudged to reach a conclusion on.’
‘Smudged?’ Easton asked. ‘As in someone tried to remove them?’
‘Unlikely, as it’s normally quite obvious when an area has been deliberately cleaned in that manner. I’d say most likely the smudged prints are from Clara walking around in socks. You can still get residue transfer – oils and skin cells – through the material.’
Easton sighed. ‘So basically, this all adds up to pretty much nothing. There’s nothing I’m seeing here to suggest someone else was in the house. Except for Bianca Neita, that is.’
Was the answer that simple? No, Dani didn’t believe so.
‘I don’t think Neita killed her friend,’ Dani said.
‘I wasn’t suggesting she did,’ Easton said.
‘I know. I’m just thinking out loud. Bianca Neita’s prints are easi
ly explainable. But thinking back to what she said, if we’re looking for an explanation of the mysterious figure she claimed to see…’
Dani’s brain hit a wall as the thoughts continued to take shape. The bathroom was horribly silent for a few seconds. Dani turned and strode out, heading back for the hall.
‘Bianca opens the door. Sees a figure exiting out the back.’ Dani turned when she reached the front door, looking back along the way. ‘Say an intruder came in, took their shoes off so as to not leave shoe-prints. Gloves on their hands to stop transfer.’
‘OK?’ Easton said. ‘But that doesn’t explain the partials then?’
‘Actually, it might,’ Dani said. ‘Shiny leather, as an example, is pretty good at collecting residue. When you put two gloves on you still have to pick the things up bare-handed.’
‘Secondary transfer,’ Tariq said.
‘Exactly.’
‘I guess that’s possible,’ Easton said.
‘So going back to shoes,’ Dani said, ‘when Bianca storms in, the intruder runs. If they’d taken their shoes off to prevent prints, they wouldn’t have had time to put their shoes back on before they fled. Nor did we find any obvious footwear left behind, so they didn’t scarper in their socks.’
‘But they could have had shoe covers on,’ Easton said.
‘Exactly. But they wouldn’t have put those on outside. The ground was damp that day, from frost melt. Wet shoe covers would have left stains on the laminate, which we don’t have. So the intruder would have put covers on their feet only when they came inside.’
Dani stared down to the welcome mat by the front door.
‘One of my team looked over the mat,’ Tariq said. ‘We found hair fibres and plenty of dust but nothing much else. We haven’t got a clear picture yet on any of the DNA results from the various hair samples, I’m afraid.’
Dani took in the words as she crouched down and took hold of the edge of the mat. She lifted it up slightly to peer underneath. Just as she’d expected.
‘It’s double-sided,’ she said as she flipped the whole thing over. Debris and grit and whatever else was stuck in the thick and coarse pile sifted onto the floor.