by Mike Craven
Chemotherapy to kill him. Antibiotics and antifungals to keep him alive. Fluke took it all without complaint. He had a Hickman line fitted into one of the large veins in the chest as the drugs were destroying his smaller veins and for months he walked round with a plastic tube sticking out of his chest.
Each day was a learning experience on a course he hadn’t signed up for.
The only way to destroy the cancer was to destroy him. The team took him as close to death as they dared then stopped and let him build up his bloods and health only to do it all over again. Three courses of treatment. Three times he was taken to the brink.
Finally, the scans showed that it had worked. His bloods were allowed to build up. Physios got to work on teaching him to walk with his nerve-damaged legs. Visitors were allowed in his room without wearing face masks. He was allowed to see his newborn nephew for the first time.
He’d been a fit man when he’d been admitted, an ex-Royal Marine, and while he was never in the same league as Towler – who was a freak of nature – the job meant he had to stay in decent shape. He left hospital a shell of a man, down to eleven stones and unable to walk without crutches and splints. He was too weak to cook but that was okay as he had no appetite.
Doctor Cooper told him it was normal. His appetite would come back. The Burkitt’s wouldn’t.
After nearly six months in hospital and three months of recuperation at home, putting up with well-wishers, genuine and nosey, he was ready to go back to work. Some of his strength had returned. His appetite was back. His legs were still troubling him but he kept that to himself.
One good thing had happened during his illness: Hayley decided that she didn’t need the hassle of looking after anyone at her stage of life and had broke it off in his first month of treatment. Fluke didn’t blame her, although others did.
He still had to see Doctor Cooper – would have to for the next ten years – every week to begin with, to get his bloods checked and his lymph nodes poked. He discussed with Occupational Health a return to work date.
In the past, someone who was off sick either ran out of sick notes and had to come back, or just decided they were fit to return and turned up.
For Fluke there was meetings with Occupational Health, with Chambers, and even the chief constable, all glad he was feeling better, all doubting he was ready. He rejected an offer of a temporary desk job out of hand.
In the end, it had taken a letter from Leah stating that he was fit to return to operational duties. Straight into the job he had nine months before: Detective Inspector, Force Major Incident Team.
Chapter 9
Fluke sat in the dayroom on the haematology ward, lost in his thoughts, while he waited for his blood test results. It obviously wasn’t the right time of day for outpatients; he was the only one in there. He picked up a discarded travel magazine and flicked through it, staring at the beaches, at the five-star hotels and stunning views. It all looked so nice, but Fluke couldn’t help looking past the smiles and the sunshine. Most of those tropical islands were plagued with poverty and crime. It’s the lot of the policeman, he thought, to see the worst of everything. He threw it back down on the seat beside him.
You sure sucked the fun out of that, Avison.
A nurse stuck her head in the room and told him Doctor Cooper wanted to speak to him. She passed him a cordless phone.
‘Doctor Cooper,’ he said.
‘Good morning, Avison. You made it, then? Sorry I missed you, but I’m on nights.’
‘No problem. I was here anyway, as you know. PM on a girl found in West Cumbria this morning. I’ll need to get back actually, he can’t be far from finished.’
‘That’s what I rang for. Your results are in and they’re fine. Your platelets are still low and you refusing plasma hasn’t helped. Your haemoglobin’s nearer where it should be, though. Your bloods are never going to be brilliant, not after what your bone marrow went through, but for now I’m happy to let you go.’
‘And yesterday?’
‘Already forgotten about, under the circumstances, but don’t do it again, Avison. If you absolutely have to go, call someone, for God’s sake. This isn’t a prison, we can’t stop you leaving. Now, go and catch him.’
Fluke was already on his feet, trying to get someone’s attention, pointing at his cannula. There was no way he was going to try and take it out himself again. He didn’t think he’d get away with it twice.
‘Cheers, Doc. Do I need another appointment?’
‘I’ll get something out in the post but I want to keep an eye on you for a while. It’ll probably be next week.’
Fluke thanked her and put down the phone.
As he made his way back down to the mortuary, he wondered why she’d phoned him. Anyone could have told him his results.
Sowerby had finished sewing up the ‘Y’ cut when Fluke returned and was just calling out some last-minute remarks to the overhead microphones.
‘Ah, Avison,’ he called when he saw him. ‘Just finishing up here.’
‘What we got, Henry?’ Fluke asked.
‘I’ll have an interim report with you by lunchtime tomorrow and the full report by the end of the week, but I can do you a verbal?’
‘Please.’
‘We were right, of course, the bullet to the head killed her. I traced the path. Kept quite a neat line really; entered the back of the skull at the point of the bullet hole, obviously. Went straight through the brain tissue and hit the front of the skull just about here,’ he said, pointing to his own head where the nose met the forehead. ‘You’ll notice this part here is quite thick. The bullet bounced down, through more brain tissue, through the roof of the mouth, as we thought. Of course, it probably started to lose shape by then so the wound on the mouth is larger than the entrance wound on the skull.’
‘So she swallowed it?’ Fluke said.
‘Oh no, she was dead instantly. It was gravity. It probably worked its way into the stomach fairly quickly. I estimate she’d have to be upright after she was shot for three seconds at least for this to happen. When it worked its way into the duodenum is anyone’s guess. Could have been immediately, could have been when she was moved.’
‘Can I see the bullet?’
The bullet was in an unsealed bag as Towler had assumed Fluke would want to see it before it went off to ballistics for a possible match and a point towards the weapon used to fire it. The SOCO man carefully lifted it out with evidence tongs. It was horribly misshapen but still looked small. It had blood and other body matters on it. It wouldn’t be cleaned until it got to the lab.
Fluke turned to Towler. ‘.22?’
‘That’s my guess. And I’m not really guessing either unless it’s something really exotic. No, this is a .22. Low power, judging by the shape of it.’
‘How so, Sergeant?’ asked Lucy.
‘The British Army, along with most of NATO use .22 ammunition in their assault rifles only they call it 5.56mm. They’re high powered and have a tapered point for accuracy. A bullet like that it wouldn’t have bounced. At that range, it would’ve gone straight through her head with no deviation in trajectory. Would have carried on for another five hundred yards unless something hard stopped it,’ Towler said. ‘This is low-powered and the naughty end is rounded, designed for short-range work where accuracy isn’t important. The bullet’s supposed to go in and stay in.’
‘Any idea what fired it?’ Fluke asked.
‘Nah. No way of telling yet. It’ll be a small weapon, even for a handgun,’ he said. ‘Easy to hide, deadly at close range. Not designed for deterrence, more for self-defence. This is about having the shot no one is expecting. Has to be used up close. It would probably bounce off someone at twenty yards. Easy to keep in a handbag or pocket. Ideal for a killer.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Lucy asked, with a look of incredulity.
Towler was intelligent but hid it well. Even if he hadn’t been, this was his area of expertise. ‘Misspent youth, Lucy.
Illegal in this country, of course,’ he said. ‘You can’t get guns over here that easily, despite what the press say, and this type even less. No demand for it. The gangbangers in Manchester and London want the bling weapons, the status symbols. Why have a gun if you can’t show it off? The hard-core organised crime lot want military-grade weapons. The SIGs and the H&Ks. No one wants a tiny .22, they’d be laughed at.’
‘We’ll get it off to the National Ballistics Intelligence Service’s Manchester hub tonight,’ Fluke said. ‘Matt, get someone to escort it there. Get traffic to take them in one of their pursuit vehicles. I want this with them in two hours. We’ll see if they’ve seen this gun before.’ NBIS held details on all firearms and bullets recovered from crimes in the UK. If the gun had been used before, NBIS would know.
‘What else we got, Henry?’ he asked as Towler went off to arrange a night on the M6 for one of FMIT’s DCs.
‘Couple of things but nothing significant, really. There was an absence of fall injuries which is unusual. The momentum of the bullet should have sent her falling forwards rather than crumpling to the ground. I would have expected an injury, probably on the head, but there wasn’t. No bruising on the arms, wrists or feet. She wasn’t restrained or tied up.’
‘Held as she was shot?’ Fluke said.
‘Possibly, can’t say definitely, of course, but it fits the facts. It would explain how the bullet had time to travel down to the stomach as well.’
Fluke filed it away for the future. ‘TOD?’
‘I’m putting the time of death down at around thirty to forty hours ago. Rigor mortis was reducing. Temperature of the liver gave me a good indication. Monday was a cold night.’
Fluke knew that the body lost 1.5º F an hour after death and kept losing it until it was the same temperature as its environment. That’s why Sowerby had taken the ambient temperature when he got in the hole. If it was 0ºC, it would take the average human twenty-five hours to get to the same temperature.
So, she’d been killed between ten o’clock Monday night and eight o’clock Tuesday morning. Sowerby had said she was standing when she was shot. Fluke thought it unlikely she was killed too close to the foreman starting work and most people are asleep by midnight. His instincts were telling him she’d been killed Monday night and disposed of a few hours later. More evidence of the well-planned work of a professional.
‘Anything else?’
‘She’d had cosmetic surgery, but I was wrong. It wasn’t a botched job at all. Quite the opposite.’
‘The nose?’ Fluke asked.
‘Not just the nose. She’d had four separate corrective procedures. All on her face. And I’m loathe to call them corrective procedures.’
‘Why.’
‘It was Lucy who pointed it out initially. Noticed that it didn’t seem to add up.’ Sowerby took off his glasses, brushed some errant hair away from his eyes and taking a sheet of mortuary blue paper towel, wiped his face. ‘You understand the basic premise of cosmetic surgery, of course?’
‘Sucking fat out of salad dodgers and making the rich look thirty instead of sixty,’ Towler said, walking back.
‘Yes, well, there’s a lot of that, obviously. It’s their core business despite what they say. They’re in the vanity trade whether they’ll admit it or not. They say they are there to improve self-esteem and to help reconstruct people after accidents, but only a few actually believe their own press,’ Sowerby said.
‘Seems to be a bit of a waste. Especially with a girl like this. She didn’t need plastic surgery,’ Fluke said.
‘No, she didn’t. And that’s the point. Lucy pointed out that the rhinoplasty, when we actually had a proper look, wasn’t correcting anything, either medical or cosmetic. Can’t say so in court, but I’m certain the rhinoplasty was done to make her nose look worse, not better. Certainly has more of a point than it had originally.’
Fluke knew that Sowerby couldn’t comment on the relative attractiveness of someone. The defence would discredit him without breaking sweat. Between those four walls, his opinion was valid though. If he said the nose was made to look worse, then Fluke believed him.
Sowerby continued. ‘This was quality work, expensive work. That’s why we missed the rest on the external. You aren’t supposed to see good quality work, defeats the illusion of natural youth.’
‘What else was there? I can’t see anything,’ Fluke said, leaning forward and studying her face.
Sowerby passed him a magnifying glass.
He first pointed to her ears. ‘See here, there’s some very faint scarring. She’s had them remodelled. I don’t think they’ve been reduced or pinned back either which is the normal reason someone would get them done. I think they’ve been made to look different.’
Fluke could see where he was going; a nose job that detracted rather than enhanced her looks, and an ear job that she didn’t need. As Sowerby walked him through a chin implant and brow lift that would have changed the shape of her face, the pattern was obvious.
Lying before him was a woman who had taken extreme lengths to disguise her appearance. ‘Are these reversible?’ he asked.
Sowerby gave it some thought. ‘I’m not an expert in this, you understand. Medically speaking, I see no reason why the chin implant couldn’t be removed and the brow lift reversed. They’ve removed cartilage and bone from the ears so no, that’s irreversible. As for the rhinoplasty, I don’t know. Possibly.’
That’s drastic, Fluke thought. There were many reasons why a woman might try and hide who she was. Not all of them were illegal. ‘Any idea when this was done, Henry?’
‘At least twelve months ago. All the wounds have fully healed. Impossible to say after that. If pushed, I’ll say not that long though. The scars would fade after time and they haven’t. But it’s not an exact science.’
‘Anyway to identify the surgeon?’ Fluke asked.
‘Not a chance. Could be anyone and anywhere. The implants don’t have serial numbers. It may not have been done in the UK,’ Sowerby said.
Cosmetic surgery was one thing. There were other ways to hide your appearance. Less permanent measures. ‘Was she naturally dark-haired?’ he asked.
‘Platinum blonde, I think Lucy called it. Light blonde to you and me. The roots were just coming through. Her pubic hair was dyed the same colour as her head.’
Towler was out of earshot thankfully. If he hadn’t been, there wasn’t a disciplinary policy in the world that would have stopped him making a cuffs-and-collar joke.
‘Any other way she was trying to disguise herself?’ Fluke said. ‘A false moustache perhaps, a—’
‘Contact lenses,’ Sowerby said, interrupting Fluke’s sarcastic flow.
‘What?’
‘Her eyes are blue, not green, coloured contacts. SOCO has them if you want a look, but they’re fairly common.’
Extensive cosmetic surgery. Dyed hair and coloured contact lenses. An appearance altered and not for the better. Sowerby was right, subjective view of her beauty couldn’t be recorded anywhere official. Fluke was paid to make deductions based on facts, however, and there were two blindingly obvious ones. She’d been murdered and she’d been hiding from someone.
But who from?
‘There’s nothing common about this case, Henry,’ Fluke said. He looked down at the pale body. ‘Who was after you, sweetheart?’
Chapter 10
With the post-mortem finishing with no new information, Fluke headed back and twenty minutes later pulled into his designated space at Carleton Hall. He decided to go for a quick walk round the grounds to clear his head, get the smell of the mortuary off his clothes.
The sky was grey and Carleton Hall looked eerie in the pale light. A huge red sandstone building accessible only by driving underneath the A66, it was Grade II listed and had extensive grounds. It was unfit for modern policing; poor communications, not enough room and nowhere hear enough parking, like a furnace in summer and a cryogenic tomb in winter.
Fluke loved it. Loved the grandeur of it, its lines, the high ceilings, the ornate carvings on the wood panels, loved the countryside it was set in. Of course, things had been added as the years had passed. The Public Protection Unit had their own extension. Armed Response and the Dogs Unit were in separate buildings a few hundred yards away. But FMIT were in the main building.
As he wandered the gravel paths, he ran through what he needed to do. He needed an ID on the witness and he expected it that day. It would be the first hard intelligence they got back. He’d never met an addict without a record.
He also needed an ID on the victim and wasn’t convinced it was going to be easy. Not after what he’d just seen at the PM. For now, she was a Jane Doe.
With luck, NBIS would come back with a positive line of enquiry on the bullet they’d sent but he wasn’t sure how much help it would be. Firearms were rare in Cumbria, so it would have been obtained elsewhere in the country.
He needed someone to start working the forensic evidence. There was a lot taken from the scene. There were clothes, the notepad and the phone, and he wanted someone he trusted doing it. Jo Skelton fitted the bill.
Fluke also needed the actual murder scene since he knew West Cumberland Hospital was only the deposition site. He knew it might not be in Cumbria and if it was found elsewhere, there could be a jurisdiction issue.
It would almost certainly be a dead end, but someone had to chase up the cosmetic surgery lead. On top of that, all the routine stuff that had already started – the house-to-house enquiries, the fingertip searches, the passive data requests – needed to continue.
He sighed and headed back up to the main building. With two major investigations running, FMIT was noisy; half the robbery team were still at their desks.
The three FMIT officers working the murder and a couple of SOCOs were waiting for him.
Both incident room doors were open, phones were ringing, and there was the steady babble of noise heard whenever lots of people are talking at the same time. Fluke shut their door and thankfully the sound subsided. Jo had obviously kicked out some of the robbery team to make way for them. The room smelt of takeaway food, curries and pizzas predominantly, as incident rooms always did. There wasn’t a salad to be seen. Fluke’s stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast and he picked up a spoon and an unguarded tray of curry. It was cold, greasy and delicious.