by Nick Oldham
Flynn locked the shop and made his way along the canal in his wet clothes.
The canal boat was still cold inside, but he managed to fettle the vagaries of the heating system, stripped off and hung his clothes over a rail and re-showered.
Afterwards, changed into his new togs, comfortable and practical rather than stylish, he sat next to the gas fire in the living area, surprised at how efficiently it had warmed up.
He sat back, flicked on the small flat-screen TV and found a news channel.
The warmth permeated him until he was glowing. Then the combination of a late-night flight, early morning arrival and the excitement of dragging a body out of the river seeped over him like an anaesthetic. He could not have stopped himself if he’d wanted and before he knew it his head had lolled forwards and he was asleep.
By the time Henry returned to the scene from dropping off Flynn, Professor Baines had arrived in his pristine E-type Jaguar.
He was at the body, squatting down, carefully examining the head. He was speaking in low tones through the side of his mouth into the barely visible microphone that looped down from his ear and was linked to a voice-activated recorder inside his jacket.
He rose as Henry arrived and stood on the opposite side of the body. They nodded at each other. Henry tilted his head, inviting Baines to speak.
‘I pronounce life extinct,’ Baines declared, checking his watch and reading out the time.
‘I was pretty sure of that one,’ Henry said.
‘Needs to be said and done,’ Baines said loftily.
‘And beyond that?’
‘Looks to be a drowning. External signs are what you would expect. She does have head injuries, but they could have come after immersion. Not unusual for a drowning person to have injuries like that, especially one drowned in these circumstances. River debris, tides . . . she could easily have struck something hard.’
‘But you’ll be able to tell?’
Baines gave him a withering look. ‘I am a pathologist.’
‘So they say.’ Henry turned as a crime-scene van pulled up nearby. ‘A few photos, then back to the mortuary. How soon can you do the PM?’
‘As soon as you get this woman identified, I’ll put knife to flesh.’
THREE
After the crime-scene photographer had recorded the minimum necessary, plus a few shots of the landscape, the woman’s body was bagged and heaved into the back of the ambulance. The paramedics would take her to the mortuary, even though they were not obliged to do so. They could have been awkward and insisted she be removed by an undertaker, but as usual they were helpful.
Henry and DI Barlow had a short conversation with the result that Henry said he would follow the ambulance and body, to maintain the chain of evidence just in case it became something more than a drowning. Barlow – much to his facial disgust – was told to go to the police station in Lancaster, get the ‘missing from home’ file and bring it to the mortuary. The details in the file, which included a photograph, would be helpful to confirm the identity of the deceased.
Behind the ambulance was a little convoy: Henry, Barlow, Baines and two marked police cars. One of the police cars stayed with the ambulance as it turned into the hospital grounds just south of the city, whilst the other, and Barlow, carried on.
The ambulance reversed up to the mortuary doors, which were opened from the inside by the pre-warned creepy mortuary technician, waiting with a trolley that he manoeuvred expertly up to the ambulance doors. The bagged lady was slid onto it and then reversed into the mortuary, the double doors then closed to keep the outside world at bay from this strange, unsettling, but vital world.
Once inside, the body bag was reclaimed by the paramedics, who washed it with a hose, then took their leave. Henry, the uniformed PC who’d come along to help and the technician looked at the drowned body.
‘You want me to strip her?’ the technician asked, slightly gleefully, Henry thought, snapping on a pair of medical gloves.
He nodded and Henry watched as the soaked clothing was removed. He supervised the recording and bagging of each item by the constable. The outer jacket, jeans, blouse, underwear and the single polka-dotted cut-off Wellington boot. Henry visualized the missing one to be somewhere out in the Lune estuary, maybe getting washed up further down the coast at some stage. He doubted it would ever be recovered and if it was it would probably be left where it was found. Just another item of flotsam and jetsam, of no significance whatsoever.
Once naked, all that remained was the woman’s jewellery. The rings on her fingers were carefully screwed off by Henry and handed to the constable, who bagged each one separately. There were four, each distinctive and expensive-looking, including the wedding ring. She also wore a gold necklace with a pendant, and bracelets on each wrist. They were described, as is usual police procedure, as ‘yellow metal’ – just in case they weren’t actually gold.
Henry inspected each item in the clear plastic bags, held up the wedding ring and peered closely to see if it was inscribed. He saw ‘To J’ next to a tiny love heart etched inside the ring.
‘Jennifer,’ he thought.
Another ring also had an inscription. This looked like an eternity ring with ‘J’ and ‘H’ inscribed and intertwined by another heart.
‘Jennifer and Harry,’ he thought, a great detective’s mind at work, piecing all the clues together.
There were no markings on any of the other pieces of jewellery, so he turned his attention to the body, looking but not touching. He peered closely at the crown of her skull and saw a deep cut which formed a parting in her hair, the injury Professor Baines had already noted. Henry raised his eyes and saw her body was not showing any signs of other wounds, but the skin was what he described as ‘curdled’ after being in the water for so long, and smelled like a blocked drain. There was nothing more he could tell, but he gave her a last glance and thought what a shame it was to have died so early. The thought made him shudder for a moment. The fairly recent death of his wife, Kate, zipped through his mind.
He swallowed back his emotion and packed it away in a separate brain compartment, then turned to the bags into which the dead woman’s clothing had been placed.
As the constable had recorded it, he had also gone through the pockets and found nothing.
Henry gave each piece a quick squeeze and was satisfied: nothing.
‘Should I wash her down?’ the technician asked brightly.
‘No, let’s wait until the pathologist has had a look first . . . he’s somewhere, not far away.’ At which point Baines entered the mortuary, having parked his beloved E-type at the far end of the car park and purposely across two bays to discourage others from pulling up too close. He was already removing his jacket and replacing it with a green overall, walking across to the body and circling it for the close visual inspection. He was recording his observations via the mike fitted to his ear.
Henry watched and listened, although the man’s voice was fairly quiet, and eventually Baines turned to him.
‘Nothing of real note, certainly nothing I wouldn’t expect to see on someone who has drowned in such circumstances.’
Henry nodded. He was glad this was getting a little further away from him, still hoping it would turn out to be a tragic but ultimately run-of-the-mill death that the uniformed branch could deal with. Nothing to bother him.
Baines moved to the woman’s head, placed a hand carefully under her neck and tilted it backwards, using his hand as a fulcrum. Her mouth sagged slackly open. With his other hand he pulled her jaw wider and looked inside, pulling her cheeks wide and inspecting her teeth.
‘Nice set,’ he commented. Then frowned. Something caught his eye, so he tilted her head slightly to the right to get the light working better for him and said, ‘Fancy.’
‘Fancy what?’ Henry said.
Baines shrugged. ‘Gold filling in a pre-molar.’
‘And?’ Henry shook his head.
‘And . . . don’t kn
ow yet, maybe nothing,’ Baines said, but Henry could see the man’s mind flicking through its internal Rolodex.
‘Anything for me?’ Henry said.
‘Hard to say yet . . . need a closer look.’
Henry pouted with disappointment. He was going to say something, but his words were cut short when the muzzle of a gun was screwed painfully into the back of his neck at the point where his skull balanced on his spinal column.
The gun was removed. The man holding the weapon backed off, keeping it aimed at Henry, who turned slightly and saw there were two of them, both armed, having entered the mortuary through the public entrance which should have been locked.
They arced their guns threateningly across the four people in this section of the mortuary – Henry, Baines, the PC and the technician.
The gun that had been jammed into Henry’s skin was a large-calibre pistol of some sort; the other gun was a black, ugly looking machine-pistol, very deadly in this enclosed space, capable, with one short burst, of cutting them all down.
The men were dressed in black jeans, black zip-tops, trainers and balaclava masks, with latex gloves on their hands. Henry thought there was something familiar about them.
‘What the . . .? Henry started to utter angrily. He’d not yet had the chance to get frightened.
But then he wished he hadn’t opened his mouth.
The man with the handgun, a big, heavy-framed guy, stepped quickly forwards and slammed the pistol across his face like he was doing a backhand smash in tennis.
Henry’s head jerked sideways, his whole face distorted with the strength of the impact. His jaw crunched, his teeth catching the inside of the mouth. He staggered with a ‘Ungh’ noise and pain seared diagonally across his cranium like a knitting needle had been hammered into him. His knees buckled as all communication between brain and spine was disconnected. He crumpled over, even though he tried not to.
The next moments were just hazy and confusing for him, as though he was drowning in dish water. Then a dreamy sensation of being dragged across the tiled floor, his cheek stretching, a trail of blood dribbling from his mouth. He heard shouting, a scream of agony, the voices unrecognizable and distorted, then nothing but blackness as he passed out.
Then his eyes flickered open. He knew instinctively he had not been out for long. His brain clicked into gear as he found himself lying on his side in the recovery position, this time on a carpeted floor. He could feel the weave of the carpet against his cheek. And taste blood in his mouth.
He didn’t move. Tried to work out what was happening, but for the moment that conundrum was beyond him, even though his mind was functioning. He moved his face slightly and looked up with one eye into the concerned face of Professor Baines kneeling down over him.
‘Henry, old man, are you OK?’
Henry squinted and moved his mouth, the salt-taste of his own blood on his tongue. He tried to speak, but could not manage the words. Instead he manoeuvred himself onto his hands and knees. His head drooped between his arms and he spluttered blood out from his lips, the whole left hand side of his face creased with pain.
‘What happened?’ he asked fuzzily.
‘They locked us in here at gunpoint,’ Baines said.
Henry raised his head painfully and looked around. ‘Where’s here?’ He was having a bit of trouble focusing.
‘The viewing room. They locked it from the outside so we couldn’t get out.’
Henry twisted carefully around, but his elbows gave way and he thumped arse-down on the floor with a groan. Exhaling carefully, he moved his head and tried to make sense of where he was and who was with him. Baines knelt by him, there was the uniformed PC, the mortuary technician and two more mortuary employees, a man and a woman. Henry’s eyes descended on the constable for an answer.
‘They ripped my PR off,’ he blurted, but held up his mobile phone. ‘I called it in . . . backup’s on the way.’
‘Good lad. Anybody else hurt?’ Henry’s eyes were beginning to work a little better now and he checked the terrified faces of the mortuary staff. He saw a woman tending to the mortuary technician sitting on one of the chairs, dabbing something on his eyes.
‘They sprayed something into the tech’s eyes,’ Baines said ‘CS spray, I’d guess. His eyes are streaming, but he looks like he’ll be OK.’
They had been herded (or in Henry’s case, dragged) into and locked in the viewing room. This was the room to which relatives of deceased persons were brought to either view a body in a casket in the room itself, or to look through a large curtained window on the other side of which was an anteroom where trolleys could be pushed, the curtains drawn back and they could see through the glass. It all depended on the circumstances and the state of the body.
Henry rattled the door handle.
Correct, it was locked from the other side by twisting an inset bolt which could be released from this side if they’d had a big, flat-bladed screwdriver. Like being locked in a toilet cubicle.
Baines had risen to his feet with Henry, now reaching his full, spindly height of over six feet. He was still watching Henry with concern, who was working his jaw, assessing the damage done.
The cuts inside his mouth and cheeks where his teeth had connected with the flesh were still bleeding. He touched them gingerly with his tongue.
‘What the hell do they want?’ Henry uttered.
Baines shrugged. ‘Stealing from dead bodies?’ he suggested.
‘Or stealing from a particular one,’ Henry said and crossly rattled the door handle again.
The constable’s mobile phone rang and he answered it. ‘Yeah . . . in the viewing room . . . they locked us in here . . . right . . .’ He ended the call and looked at Henry. ‘Backup’s here – but the bad guys have gone.’
‘You need to go to A&E,’ Baines said firmly. He was following Henry around with his arms open, ready to catch him if he suddenly fell.
‘I know,’ Henry agreed, the tip of his tongue still touching the inner mouth cuts and also finding a loose tooth. He felt the side of his face with his fingers, carefully pressing the new swelling under his eye. He’d broken his cheekbone once before and it had taken a long time to heal, and still gave him gyp. He hoped it wasn’t bust again, but his face was very tender and sore, reminiscent of the pain from the previous fracture.
He and Baines were standing next to the gurney on which the drowned woman lay . . . or at least the woman who’d been pulled out of the river lay. Only a post-mortem could establish for certain how she had died. And because of the events of the last fifteen minutes, Henry now wanted to be one hundred per cent positive she had drowned.
Suddenly his head went muzzy.
He fought it and leaned both hands on the edge of the trolley, hoping to disguise what was happening to him. He might well have needed to go to A&E, as Baines suggested, but he didn’t want to go.
His mind started working again.
The armed men had assaulted Henry probably as a show of their capabilities so no one was in any doubt that they meant business. He hoped it wasn’t anything personal, just something to encourage everyone else to follow their orders.
Briefly unconscious as he hit the floor, he hadn’t been privy to what happened next. According to Baines and the constable, the men had yelled and screamed and herded everyone at gunpoint into the viewing room. They had made the constable and the mortuary technician drag Henry – one leg each – in with them, then ripped the PC’s personal radio off. They’d sprayed the technician when he’d stood up to them.
Henry’s blood was smeared across the tiled floor, then along the short carpeted corridor to the door of the viewing room, like a leopard had dragged a gazelle across the jungle.
Then they were all locked in, including the staff who’d been working in the examination room.
Ripping the constable’s PR off him had only really been a gesture, Henry thought. The intruders must have realized that at least one person amongst their captives would have a m
obile phone. The only thing achieved by grabbing the police radio was that it cut off a direct line of communication to the police control room. Using a mobile phone, even on a treble-nine, would be far slower than a PC screaming for assistance down a PR.
So the men had bought themselves some time. Not much, but presumably enough to achieve their goal.
Which was what? Henry asked himself.
His eyes – one gradually closing to a hazy squint as his cheek swelled – moved to the bags containing Jennifer Sunderland’s property that he and the PC had been recording.
They’d been ripped open and the contents tipped onto the floor, and scattered as the men searched through them.
So this was the answer: they wanted something that she possessed, or thought she possessed. And whatever this something was, they were prepared to be utterly ruthless in finding it. Ruthless enough to smash a gun into someone’s face. And maybe kill if necessary.
The captives had been released from the viewing room by the first officer on the scene. Now more cops had arrived and were being a bit aimless, like they were playing bumpsy-daisy. They needed some direction, as there wasn’t much for them to do here, so Henry took charge and told them all to get back on the streets. The offenders had gone before the first officer had arrived, therefore Henry wanted cops out on the streets pulling any vehicles with two or three men on board. It was more miss than hit, he knew, but he wanted to get things moving and keep the scene of the crime as pristine as possible for the CSIs.
When all the uniforms had dispersed, that left him, Baines and the PC who’d been helping out with the property, as well as the mortuary staff, who had all retreated to a refreshment room, drinking tea, traumatized by the events, unable to do any work in the foreseeable future. They all had to be interviewed and statements taken. Henry also guessed they’d all need counselling, too. Par for the course. He didn’t even consider that luxury for himself.
If it hadn’t hurt his head to do so, he would have shaken it in despair.