The Third Rule (Eddie Collins Book 1)

by Andrew Barrett

  Benson shrugged. “Not yet. We’ve had a natter with them kids but they don’t know who lives here, though this lot here,” he motioned to those closest to the fence, “seem to think it was being used as a squat.”

  “What’s the report from your search crew; what’s it like in there?”

  “It’s being lived in, alright. They found drugs paraphernalia in what used to be the lounge, some kind of slow water filter, other bits and bobs. No signs of life upstairs, though.”

  “Right,” Eddie turned to Ros, “shall we make a start?”

  “Let’s,” she said, “don’t much like being filmed for posterity.”

  Twenty minutes later, suited up, Eddie and Ros approached the house.

  “So who’s Benson? You heard of him before?”

  Ros looked across at Eddie, “He’s from Wakefield CID. Been over here a month or so. He has a bad reputation so I try to stay out of his way when I can.”

  They entered the house, torches in hand, new camera slung around Eddie’s neck. Even through the masks, they could smell dampness and an undercurrent so familiar to their line of work: blood and drugs, shot through with a tinge of death. They stood in the kitchen, the tiled floor here at the very entrance to the house too coarse, too damaged to be of any value for footwear marks, and they surveyed what they could see.

  Forward a few paces and to their right was the rough cellar door that bore the scars and scuffs of many clumsy excursions through it. On the floor nearby were droplets of blood; in and around them were several footwear marks. And in the doorway between the kitchen and the lounge lay a hammer. Even without artificial light, they could see blood and hair sticking into it.

  “Give the floor some oblique Ros,” said Eddie, “see if we can’t detect a few.”

  Ros crouched, focused the torch beam into a long thin tube of light, and cast it slowly back and forth in an arc. It showed up all manner of goodies on the floor, curly hairs, crumbs, pieces of food, a swath of dust and of course, recent disturbance in that dust: footwear impressions. “Yep,” she said, “plenty to go at.”

  “Let’s clear the kitchen floor first so we have somewhere to stash our gear.”

  They did, using a combination of oblique light and white fingerprint powder. Outside the common path of foot traffic, where the dust had a chance to accumulate, torchlight picked out good quality footwear impressions and Ros lifted them using sheets of black gelatine rollered out onto the floor. And those marks that were within the common path, and that responded well to white globular powder, she lifted using a transparent sheet of adhesive.

  They scanned and powdered the floor; and the further into the kitchen they got, away from the deep scars made by the corrugated-skinned door, the better the quality. They were rewarded with seven footwear marks, all of reasonable value, detail in abundance. Most were Arrows, the favoured boot of police officers, but Nike and Reebok made an appearance, and one that neither had seen before. It was more of a shoe, like a deck shoe, certainly nothing that any self-respecting youth of today would be seen wearing. It raised their spirits and now they had cleared the kitchen floor, except for the marks in blood and the hammer, they had access further into the scene.

  Eddie scanned the lounge floor while Ros wrote the orange CJA labels for the footwear marks they had recovered, turning each one into a specific exhibit recorded in her notes – the CID6. She drew a plan of the kitchen floor, took rough measurements and then plotted the location of the footwear lifts on the plan.

  “No decent ones in here.” Eddie stood, gripped the small of his back and then massaged his right leg. “Muscle’s still giving me trouble.”

  “It’ll heal eventually.” Ros joined him at the lounge threshold. “Look,” she said, her voice muffled by the mask, “a smashed doll.”

  “And drugs stuff too.”

  “Do you think they had kids in here?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me; the dross we have these days.”

  “It’s not always their fault, Eddie.”

  “We won’t get anything from the floor in here; it’s in a shit state.”

  Ros made a test. She used the ESLA electro-static device to try and lift the dust surrounding a footwear mark she had planted, but the floor was too badly damaged to give any detail. Then, she tried a black gel lift; still nothing. “Right,” she said, “forget the lounge floor, waste of time.”

  “Okay, good.” Eddie walked in, suit crinkling as he moved. “What shall we do next?”

  “Depends how you want to split it.” She joined him, stared around at the crumbling wreck that used to be someone’s home. “Do you fancy doing the body and I’ll concentrate on all the crap in here?”

  “How could I refuse such an offer?”

  “Thought you’d say that.”

  “But let’s clear the blood on the kitchen floor first.”

  “Okay, but photography’s yours,” she compromised, “I’ll do the reagent and swabbing. Fair enough?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  The blood had no direction – other than straight down. It hadn’t been deflected by an object, hadn’t been flung or cast-off by an implement, hadn’t arrived here from another place at high velocity. This was nothing more dramatic than drops of blood that had hit the floor and fanned into star shapes; some of them had pooled together within a five inch radius.

  Eddie photographed the blood, and the partial footwear marks in it, with and without a scale alongside, all in relation to the cellar door. Then, after Ros swabbed the blood, to prove it belonged to the girl (they were never going to be lucky enough for it to belong to an injured offender), he retook his earlier shots and took them for a third time after she applied a dark blue reagent, gentian violet, which brought out and enhanced lots of additional detail the naked eye couldn’t pick up.

  This process highlighted two footwear marks in what they presumed to be the girl’s blood. A Nike Air, and a small part of the deck shoe.

  The trouble with the reagent was that it highlighted proteins, which was how it managed to develop the detail in the footwear mark. But because this was a kitchen, old blood from meat, juice from burgers, even spilt milk showed up like a beacon in the night. Discerning what was relevant and what was abstract would be the Footwear Bureau’s job. Thankfully.

  Eddie peered down the stone steps. The twisted body lay three quarters of the way down them, crumpled like the doll in the lounge. Eddie stood over her, looking at the waste of life. The first thing he noticed were the Reebok trainers she was wearing. So that left the deck shoe and the Nike Air as possible suspects’ footwear.

  The walls were a mixture of whitewash and bare brick, flakes of white damp clung to them like desiccated cobwebs, so there was nothing to be gained by getting the chemical boys from the Fingerprint Development Laboratory involved.

  He stood on the gritty stone steps and despite the nagging throb in his leg, he crouched and tried to inspect the girl. She was between twenty and twenty-five, slim, almost wasted, blonde with petite features; good-looking. Good-looking apart from the neat stab wound in her chest that had oozed sufficient blood to cover her chest and part of her neck. Doubtless, beneath her there would be more, congealed, pooled. Slug food. Eddie shuddered.

  “What did you die for, eh?” The blood on her chest had trickled to where it was now: across her right shoulder, formed a little pool in the niche of her collarbone. This is where the murder happened, no doubt, but it started up there; Eddie looked back up the stairs. She was stabbed up there, hence the blood on the kitchen floor, and then hurled or fell down here where the final shallow beats of a dying heart cast its fluid.

  The needle marks on her exposed arms proffered some background, and the darkness beneath her half-open eyes, stark against the pallid quality of her skin, suggested that drugs played a big part in her life. But did they play a big part in her death? Another feature to catch Eddie’s eye, was the thread protruding from the nails of her right hand, like a symbol, a sign pointing to the k
iller? It was golden, like the one nestling in the slash mark on her t-shirt, wafting away in a breeze too light for Eddie to feel.

  Working in the confined space of a cellar stairwell proved difficult for Eddie. Not only was the corpse upside down and the exposed areas of skin he needed to tape, furthest from him, but working constantly in his own shadow, cast by the lighting rigs at the top of the stairs, was just plain annoying. He’d photographed the body an hour ago, and now he planned to make his way past her with a tapings kit, and head-and-hands bags, ready to begin sealing her away until she reached the mortuary.

  Eddie used a pair of sterile tweezers to recover the golden threads, and found another couple under the nails of her clenched fist. They came away easily, indicating that they hadn’t been there for too long before her death. He placed the threads into small paper wraps, and then sealed them away into tamper-evident evidence bags, already signed and dated. He opened the tapings kit to pull from her exposed skin any stray fibres, any contact evidence, any trace evidence that was too fine for the eye to see, and too delicate to risk losing it in transit to the mortuary.

  A six-inch strip of sterile tape lifted invisible evidence from her bare forearms. He used more for her face, noting how strange it seemed when the tape lifted her part open eyelids from the eyeball. And again, how strange when her forehead distorted, as he pulled the tape off, and how she never flinched when a clutch of eyebrow hair came away too. He taped her hands, her feet, and that part of her upper chest not contaminated by blood.

  “How are we going to get her out?”

  The light from the kitchen dimmed, and Eddie looked up to see Ros’s silhouette against the lighting rig. “Christ knows. Tell you what, if you’ve done with the floor up there, we could lay the body bag there and bring her to it instead of the other way around. No way can we parcel her here.”

  “I’ll go and get one. Back in a mo.”

  When the full force of the light returned to the stairwell, he returned his attention to the corpse. He slid the acetates, with individual tapes adhering to them, into a pre-recorded evidence bag, laid them a couple of steps above her bent knees and ripped away the seal of a head-and-hands kit.

  “What’s your name, kid?” he slid the largest bag over her head, pulled it down so it squashed her nose, made her eyebrows appear heavy like a bank robber wearing tights. He tied the bag off, reached up and bagged her hands. And then each foot. The knuckles of her right hand were scuffed, probably as they skidded down the wall there. But they were small, her hands; petite even. Dainty. They were a kid’s hands.

  Eddie licked his lips, felt the coarse fibres of his mask against his dry tongue. He sweated, and sure enough, he could hear Brandypuke Farm calling to him as his gloved hands trembled. He brought his mind back to the dead girl looking up at him with her creamy eyes; the girl who would plead that he find the bastard who did this and… and what? Have him killed? Or lock him away?

  He remembered Sir George Deacon’s mesmerising words in his inaugural speech in the House of Commons. ‘If you want to kill serious crime, you have to kill serious criminals.’

  He was staring at her; he even noted tiny details like the fine spray of blood on her cheeks, and the fine hairs growing around her temples giving her that wispy, romantic gypsy look. She was a sweet-looking kid. He was getting in too deep, could feel it. The shakes were booze-influenced, but the dampness in his eyes was compassion. And he wondered why. He’d always remained detached; it came easily to him. After all, it was a stranger’s body – always had been, and so it was a job, a piece of meat. Overtime. But the hair, the wispy, gypsy look, it was… She was a kid, for fuck’s sake!

  Eddie turned away from her, scraped a plastic sleeve across his eyes and breathed through his mouth into the cool darkness of a stranger’s cellar.

  The Maglite beat away the blackness, but the smell of damp was strong. Mixed with it, overpowering it was wood oil, linseed, maybe. The remains of a candle sat just beyond the stairs and then he shone his light higher, towards the back of the room.

  “Well, I’ll be fucked.” Eddie walked towards the easel. There was a plastic sheet suspended above. Across its white surface were small curtains of dust, and of course, more webs. He shone the torch light across it and saw the recent disturbance, the smears from three fingers where someone had lifted this sheet. There was nothing to see beneath it though, just the naked wood of the easel.

  Above him and slightly to the left, was a bare bulb, small enough to be a vehicle bulb, and from it ran a skinny flex that bypassed a haphazard collection of old drawers and cupboards and connected with a huge black battery on the floor. This was a studio, a palace among the ruins, and Eddie felt a prickle of pride for the dead girl’s ambition.

  He felt sorry for her, the artist who died on some cold stone steps in a derelict house. “Who killed you?” Eddie put his gloved hands on hips and into his mind came the word: boyfriend. “Ah, right. The boyfriend did it, in the cellar with a letter opener. It’s all clear to me now.” But it wasn’t clear –and despite his attempts at throwing humour at the problem, it came back as two-dimensional, like a slap in the face. “Sorry,” he whispered.

  To his right was a small shineless wooden door with a web blocking the entrance and a spider the size of a child’s fist hanging there, almost daring him to enter. Well, Eddie dared. Grit crunched underfoot, and his scene suit crackled like a packet of crisps as he approached what used to be a coal chute. Now, it was some kind of store and as the spider disappeared into the upper reaches of its solitary world, Eddie ducked beneath its web and entered its lair.

  It wasn’t long before he found something.

  Black bin bags covered two rows of… of what? If you removed all the cupboard doors from a kitchen, and put each one into a black dustbin liner, and stacked them edge on it would look just like this. He pulled aside a torn corner from one of them and his gloved fingertips touched something with a texture. Eddie held the torch up, peered inside the tear and saw it was an oil painting.

  “Hats off to you, my dear.” He pulled the plastic away from several others and they too were paintings. Rather lavish paintings. And then he saw a scrawl, a name signed in black paint. He closed in, opened the plastic a little wider and read the name: “Ledger.” And on the next, “C. Ledger.” Same on the next three, and then, “Christian.” Christian? It was a man’s name, an old man’s name too, not much heard of these days.

  Eddie poured himself into the snippets of the paintings; wondered about the artist, what he was doing now, if he was alive, and then it hit him: if these were painted by a male, who the hell was she? “I take it all back,” he said, “Hats on to you.” He was busy constructing the dead girl and the artist when he heard the grate of a metal clad door above him, heard Ros call out.

  “You finished down there?”

  “You want me to come up?”

  “Yes please.”

  That wasn’t Ros. That was Benson. What the hell did he want? Eddie peeled himself away from the paintings and headed for the stairs.

  Refusing to give the body a second glance this time, Eddie stepped over it and climbed the rest of the stairs into the kitchen. “What’s up?” he looked at Ros. “Is the food here? I’m starving.” And if you could manage without me for half an hour I could sure as hell use a little rum or vodka.

  “No food.” This from DCI Benson.

  “It’s gone lunch time. We’re hungry, could do with a break.”

  Benson shrugged. “So sue me.”

  Eddie’s mood darkened, and off came the gloves. Literally.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “I’m going to get some bloody food.”

  “You can’t leave a scene!”

  Eddie peeled off his suit and stepped outside onto the path. “So sue me.”

  Ros followed, watching Benson’s cheeks flush as though he’d just been airbrushed a fetching shade of crimson, and hid her smile at Eddie’s bluntness.

  Benson stepped
next to Eddie. He was a bulldog; short and stocky, flat nose, face like someone played cricket with it. Eyes an untrustworthy translucent green. Eddie didn’t find his face or his manner at all appealing. “You get your fucking arse back to work.” Benson smiled; who knew how many cameras were watching them? “Or I will personally throw you down those stairs myself. And then I’ll submit a report to your Department Head. I’m sure you’d appreciate that, Eddie, wouldn’t you?”

  Eddie tried to step away from Benson, but he had a nauseating magnetism that kept him on the spot. And he couldn’t look away either.

  “Am I okay to go for sandwiches?” Ros asked.

  “Forget the sandwiches, Ros.” Eddie said.

  “I’m warning you, Eddie. I need a quick result from this job. We’re aiming for the first Rule Three direct from a scene.”

  “Forgive me for sounding like a dick, but what are you talking about?”

  “We know who she is.”

  “Yeah?” Eddie found a hint of bravery, closed the gap down.

  “Hey come on, you two—”

  “And we know who her boyfriend is, too.”

  “Ten quid if you can tell me what they called their doll.”

  Benson grabbed Eddie’s wrist. His eyes narrowed and he squeezed, digging his thumb into the carpal tunnel. Eddie breathed in, held it and tried to retreat. He couldn’t.

  “DCI Benson—”

  “Shut it, woman!”

  Ros did.

  “Don’t fuck around with me. We have a hunch that Christian Ledger is the man who killed her. She is Alice Sedgewick, a misper from four years ago. A girl with mental health problems. An absconder from Dartmouth Hill.”

  Eddie raised an eyebrow, not in admiration of the information, but making a subconscious connection between her mental health problems and Benson himself – a sleight of hand insult that Benson wasn’t slow on noticing. He squeezed hard enough to draw a whimper from Eddie, and more concern from Ros. She came closer, rested her hand on Benson’s. She was about to speak when he abruptly turned to her. “Go get sandwiches. He doesn’t mind which type.”