Critical Threat

by Nick Oldham

  ‘Excuse me, boss,’ the sergeant next to him said, interrupting his thoughts, ‘but are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, why?’

  ‘It’s just you had a bit of a strange look on your face, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Henry folded his arms, tilted his head back and tried to relax. There was no point in fretting about anything now. What would be would be. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath through flared nostrils, exhaling slowly and thought, with more than a trace of bitterness, that whilst he was excited to be involved in Operation Enid, the reality was he would have much preferred attending the scene of some grisly murder or other. That was what he really loved doing. He truly believed he had found his niche as a senior investigating officer after years of bouncing around in various detective roles, but other people had other ideas. Obviously.

  He was as sure as he could be that he had investigated his last murder.

  And that irked him personally, because the key word was ‘investigated’, not ‘solved’. He hadn’t come anywhere near solving it, hadn’t even started investigating it properly.

  He uttered a snort of contempt without meaning to, which he covered up with a cough when he opened his eyes and squinted at the sergeant, who was still giving him curious looks.

  ‘Sure you’re OK, boss?’

  ‘Yep, yep, fine.’

  She regarded Henry as if he were strange.

  The uncontrollable snort had been uttered as he had thought about that last murder six months earlier and how things had changed for him in the intervening time …

  When he had discourteously flounced from the Race and Diversity training course, he had been eager to get to the scene of the murder, even though he had only the sketchiest of details. Because he believed he had been sidelined and given only dross to do, he was desperate to grab this one by the throat and make it his. He knew he had to get in there quick, take charge and stomp his identity on to the front of the policy book. If he dallied he knew there was the probability of some more favoured detective being handed the job by Dave Anger. He needed to ensure a fait accompli.

  He had traded in his trusty Ford Mondeo after Dave Anger had trashed it and bought an almost new Rover 75, which was slotted into a tight space at the far end of the training centre car park. He rushed across the tarmac in a very ungentlemanly fashion, before manoeuvring it out of its spot and speeding out of the headquarters complex, slowing only for the road humps on the drive.

  He arrived at the scene within half an hour, having managed to elicit more information en route: a burned body had been found on the edge of a piece of woodland not far from the Kirkham exit of the M55, junction 4. That was really all he needed to prepare himself. The rest he would discover on arrival.

  Sitting, eyes shut, in the personnel carrier, Henry could still visualize the body.

  He’d had a bit of a run of bodies that had been set alight. There had been the low-life Manchester drug dealer whose charred remains had been found just inside the Lancashire border; then, unconnected, the sad remains of a young girl in the back of a car in Fleetwood which had been torched when her abductors panicked. That had been the work of Louis Vernon Trent, who Henry had hunted down and who now languished in prison serving life following the successful Crown Court trial.

  Now this one.

  Henry had got results on the first two, but as he looked at what was left of his hat-trick, he had one of those queasy sensations that experienced investigators are prone to, telling him this was not going to be an easy one. No quick glory here, he thought. A hat-trick, maybe, but third time unlucky, too.

  At least he could not fault the initial response of the uniformed officers. It had been done by the book. Nothing at all wrong in that. The first cops to arrive had actually done a great job.

  As ever, priority had been given to identifying the crime scene itself. In this case it was far wider than just the area immediately around the body. Following directions given, Henry found the entrance to a farm track off the A583, about halfway between junction 4 and the small town of Kirkham. And it was from this entrance that the scene was protected. A few police cars were parked on the main road, including a Scientific Support van. Several white-suited people were hanging about as well as officers in uniform and a guy with a broken shotgun over his arm and a spaniel. Henry pulled in a hundred metres away and walked the rest on foot.

  A man broke from the huddle and approached him. It was Rik Dean, a detective sergeant based in Blackpool, and well known to Henry. Rik was one of the good guys and Henry, seeing his potential several years ago, had assisted him to get on CID initially, but his promotion to DS was entirely Rik’s own doing. He was an excellent thief taker and was also proving to be an excellent supervisor, even if he did have an eye for the ladies which sometimes got him into warm water.

  ‘Henry – glad it’s you.’

  They shook hands. ‘What we got, pal?’

  Rik turned away from the road and looked across the fields. He pointed. ‘This track – it’s narrow, wide enough for one vehicle at most – leads up to those woods.’ His finger was aimed at what was basically nothing more than a copse in a hollow in the middle of a field, maybe two hundred metres from the road. ‘“Staining Woods”, they’re called. The track here leads to the edge of the trees and the body was discovered ten, fifteen feet inside the perimeter of the trees.’

  ‘Discovered by?’

  ‘Local guy hunting foxes on the land – with permission,’ Rik added quickly. ‘Literally stumbled over the body in his wellies. That’s him.’ He indicated the man with the shotgun and dog Henry had already noticed.

  ‘The body?’

  Rik shrugged. ‘Burned to a crisp, almost to the point of breaking up, particularly the legs and arms. Looks like the local wildlife have been having a barbecue.’

  ‘Male, female?’

  ‘Hard to say, other than the body’s about five-six, slim, so fair guess is female. No other distinguishing features at the moment.’

  ‘Been here how long?’ Henry asked, aware he had constructed the question rather like that strange little creature in the Star Wars films.

  ‘Not too long. Day or so, probably.’

  ‘OK, let’s have a nosey.’

  The lane, and the fields ten metres either side of it, had been cordoned off to preserve any evidence as this was the most likely route the person who had dumped the body would have taken. This meant that Henry – once attired in the obligatory white suit and wellingtons provided by the CSI guys – had to approach by a very circuitous route, through hedges, over dykes and across fields, before even getting to the immediate scene itself.

  All this Henry approved of, though one of the things he decided to do as he tramped across a boggy patch was to widen the scene even more.

  As Rik had said, the body was lying inside the woodland, in a small depression in the earth.

  A tape had been slung from tree to tree around this part of the scene, preventing unauthorized access. A miserable looking PC with a clipboard ensured all details of people coming and going were recorded. A crime scene investigator was down near the body, photographing and videoing busily.

  Henry didn’t want to get too close because the fewer who went up to it, the better. Once he was convinced that all the evidence that could be collected had been, then he’d have a closer look. He just wanted to become familiar with the scene, start drawing hypotheses, then pull back and allow the specialists and scientists to get on with their tasks.

  ‘From what we can gather from the guy who found her, the body had been lying face down in that hollow,’ Rik explained. ‘He’s apparently been chasing a fox on foot with the dog – who’s called Pepper, by the way. The fox has nipped into the woods and the guy’s run after it. The dog, by all accounts, just leapt across the body, while he tripped over it at a fair whack. He’s gone flying, dislodged the body, his shotgun’s gone spinning out of his hands, and he’s ended up on the ground face to face with a scre
aming skull. Scared the living crap out of him.’

  ‘Is he a suspect?’

  Rik shook his head. ‘Nah … but he’s going to be interviewed properly shortly.’

  ‘Good – and the fox?’

  ‘Not yet managed to trace it,’ Rik said with a straight face, ‘but I’ve already got a team on it.’

  Henry put his hands on his hips and surveyed the scene, turning away from the woodland and looking back towards the road, which was the main ‘A’ road connecting Blackpool to Preston.

  ‘Not a lot of cover,’ he mused. ‘Lots of passing traffic. But not many houses, either. You’d think a body on fire, anything on fire, would be noticed.’

  ‘Ahh – one thing I forgot to mention,’ Rik said sheepishly. ‘I was going to get round to it.’

  Henry turned on him. ‘Go on.’

  ‘From the initial CSI inspection, it looks as though the body wasn’t actually set on fire here. There’s no evidence of burned ground. Looks like the murder took place elsewhere and the body was dumped here after.’

  ‘OK …’ He raised his face to the sky. Clouds scudded in from the east. The wind had an Irish Sea chill to it. ‘We need to get as much as possible from the scene, so let’s convene a scene conference now, then get the show on the road.’

  Henry yawned and tapped his earpiece. Very little had been transmitted on it for the last few minutes and he wondered if something had gone wrong somewhere with the operation. Not that it was his problem. If it had to be chopped, as sometimes happened, he would just shrug and make his way home, slide in next to Kate and get up when he felt the urge, maybe not even bother turning in for work, have a day off, doss. It was something you could afford to do if you were supernumerary and nothing would fall apart even if you never even bothered showing up.

  He checked his watch. The time had rolled on to 4.11 a.m. Already eleven minutes behind schedule. Well, there was a surprise. He rested his skull on the headrest, wafted away a particularly vicious fart, and allowed his mind to drift again …

  The public mortuary at Blackpool Victoria Hospital reeked of smoke and burned flesh. Henry stood by a stainless steel dissecting slab, a surgical mask wrapped around his face, and looked down at the charred … thing … on the table that had once been, as he now knew, an adult female. He was wearing a surgical gown, too, hoping it would keep the tang of death off his clothes, though he knew it wouldn’t be a hundred per cent successful. He would need a shower and his suit would probably need dry-cleaning before it could be worn again. And the aroma would linger in his nasal passages. Next to him stood Rik Dean.

  ‘Done.’

  The Home Office pathologist stood on the other side of the table, removing gloves and mask, revealing the face underneath.

  Keira O’Connell was the locum pathologist standing in for the currently absent Professor Baines, a man Henry knew well. He had been initially disappointed that Baines wasn’t available. Apparently he was away on an international conference for pathologists in the Bahamas, concentrating on forensic dentistry, which was one of Baines’s big interests. Henry had to admit, though, that the temporary replacement was much better looking, even with her blonde hair scraped severely back off her face into a tight ponytail. Her face was round and sweet, yet her eyes, which Henry had studied over her facemask, were steel-cold grey and deeply intelligent.

  O’Connell leaned on the table and inspected her handiwork as her assistant busied himself doing a tidy-up. It had been a nasty and gruesome task, extremely smelly, terribly unpleasant. Henry – the ‘new man’ who even did the ironing at home – despite his recent diversity training found himself hard pressed not to comment that this wasn’t the sort of job a woman should be doing. He refrained, mainly because he suspected that she would have stabbed him with a scalpel, and also because she had done a terrific examination which Henry had watched with a mixture of distaste and awe.

  On the work bench behind her was an array of test tubes, plastic bags, swabs and trays containing specimens taken from the body which would require laboratory examination down at the forensic science lab.

  ‘Summary,’ the pathologist said in the staccato way in which she spoke. Her words were spoken clearly both for Henry and Rik’s sake and for the audio/video recording that had been made of the post-mortem. ‘Female, aged between twenty-five and forty. Difficult to ascertain the ethnic origin at this time due to the extensive damage caused by the fire which I would grade as fifth degree. She was set on fire whilst naked as there appear to be no traces of clothing on her. However, the fire was not the cause of death. She was set alight after death as the burns on the body show no signs of vital reaction.’

  O’Connell turned away from the cadaver, which lay split open from neck to lower stomach. She stepped to the steel draining board on which the organs from the corpse had been laid out and examined. The display reminded Henry of a butcher’s shop he’d once seen on holiday in Tunisia.

  She picked up the lungs and inspected them like a big, floppy book. Henry was always amazed at how large lungs were.

  ‘The lungs were filled with water, indicating the victim had inhaled water. They are wet and heavy, very pale and distended. No sign of any lung disease.’

  ‘So the victim was drowned?’ Rik asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Next she picked up the fist-sized chunk of muscle that was the heart. ‘Good, healthy heart, too.’ Then she moved to the brain which had been sliced open like a country loaf. ‘Severe bruising of the brain, causing much internal bleeding, indicating a frenzied attack with a heavy, blunt instrument.’ Next came the liver, slimy and difficult to hold. ‘Liver healthy.’

  O’Connell glanced at the two detectives. ‘All in all, this woman was very healthy before she died. I would say she looked after herself well.’

  She placed her hands on her hips and blew out, then turned. ‘The trachea had been constricted, indicating an attempt at strangulation, but neither the strangulation nor the beating killed her – it was drowning.’ She regarded Henry and pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows and tilted her head. ‘All in all, this woman has been subjected to prolonged and severe torture. She has been beaten and half-strangled and her head has been held under water until she died. She was then set on fire. Brutal, nasty.’

  ‘You can tell all this?’ Rik said.

  She blinked and frowned at his stupidity. ‘And more … I’m a pathologist, so, death, as it says in some book or other, is my beat.’

  ‘As it is mine,’ Henry said.

  ‘Touché.’ She smiled pleasantly. ‘You don’t know who she is yet?’

  ‘No,’ Henry admitted. ‘No leads as yet. Gonna be a toughie, I reckon, unless we get lucky in the next few hours.’

  ‘Lucky?’ O’Connell said cheekily. ‘Why not get professional instead?’

  ‘They go together hand in hand. One begets the other.’

  She did not look convinced and she was acting as though she did not have much time for Henry, or perhaps she was just being professional.

  ‘You want an opinion?’ she asked.

  ‘On me, or the deceased?’ He raised a flirty eyebrow.

  ‘The deceased,’ she said and Henry saw her hiding a smile.

  ‘Always welcome.’

  ‘It will be difficult to establish the ethnic origin, but there is a gold filling in one of her back teeth which could be helpful if you get the gold analysed. I say that because I actually think we are dealing with a woman of Asian origin here from what I can see of what is left of the bone structure in the face. A facial reconstruction could prove worthwhile.’

  ‘Asian?’ Henry said, surprised.

  ‘And if I’m right, you could be dealing with an honour killing.’

  Henry’s heart sank a few centimetres in his chest. ‘An honour killing? Bugger.’

  ‘Just a gut feeling … I could be wrong, though.’

  ‘But I’d guess that’s not usually the case?’

  This time O’Connell did not hide the smile. ‘No, not usua
lly … now, if you’ll excuse me, the job’s not over until the paperwork’s done, if you know what I mean? I think you’ve probably got enough to progress your investigation. I’ll let you have the report and a copy of the DVD of the PM by tomorrow afternoon.’

  Henry took the hint and started removing his mask as he and Rik walked towards the door. ‘Thanks, Doctor O’Connell …’

  ‘Professor, actually,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Thanks, Doctor Professor,’ he said. He stopped and looked at her. She shot him a look of amused contempt before returning to the organs. He and Rik went into the office next to the mortuary to hang up their masks and gowns.

  ‘You shameless flirt,’ Rik chided Henry.

  ‘Ah, but that’s all I do now,’ Henry said, his mind pondering what the next stage of the investigation would be. He was thinking about his ‘fast-track menu’: the list of things to do that included a combination of investigative actions which, according to the Murder Investigation Manual (which Henry could almost recite), ‘are likely to establish important facts, preserve evidence or lead to the early resolution of the investigation’. He needed to sit down somewhere quietly and jot stuff down in an exercise book which would hopefully get his grey matter on the road to solving the age-old problem of any murder investigation which the manual simplistically states as ‘who killed the victim?’ and the simple problem-solving formula of ‘why + when + where + how = who?’

  Dead simple, and all made a bit easier if the victim is identified, although that should not in itself stall the investigation.

  Henry had decided there would be a murder squad briefing at 8 a.m. the following morning at Kirkham police station, from where he would run the investigation, that being the nearest decent-sized cop shop to the scene. After that, at 10 a.m. there would be a press briefing – and then the work would really begin. He sent Rik off to start making some phone calls to get a squad together.

  The mortuary office was quiet, so he decided to use this facility for a quick brainstorm. Henry had a pen and exercise book in his jacket pocket, which he spread open on the desk, and began blatting down his battle plan.