The Murder House

by Simon Beaufort

  ‘You’d better get young Butterworth to take that to FSS, Neel. I’d say there’s a good chance it’s the murder weapon.’

  Oakley stared at him for a moment before taking the stone. Had Grossman forgotten again about Mark’s death? If so, what did that say about his ability to perform his professional duties?

  I was furious with myself for nearly passing out when I saw the revolting sight in the mortuary, and even more furious for nearly informing Oakley that it didn’t look anything like the man I’d left on the floor on Orchard Street. The only thing that looked familiar was James’ dark hair, and even that was stained and matted. I could still smell the body, and taste the stench of it in the air around me. The knowledge that I’d taken a warm, living person and turned him into that vile thing was almost more than I could bear.

  As soon as the door closed behind Oakley, I started to cry. Perhaps I wouldn’t get away with it after all, not because of the forensic evidence, but because I just wasn’t strong enough to carry it off.

  The familiar turmoil returned. What should I do? Tell Oakley that it was me who’d turned James into that mess of corruption and fly-blown flesh? I didn’t think I could, not now. Surely the worst was over? I’d been back to where the terrible thing had happened, and I’d seen the body of the man I’d killed in all its awful glory. What could be more terrible than what I’d already been through?

  ‘Don’t worry about what happened,’ said Oakley as he drove me back to the station. ‘It was the same for me when I saw my first decomposed body.’

  I was unable to suppress a shudder. ‘I didn’t know it’d be so …’

  ‘It’s August,’ said Oakley, speeding up when a traffic light turned amber. That particular one had lags long enough that some drivers read their newspapers while they waited for it to change. ‘It wouldn’t have been so bad in winter. Grossman told me that the heat has accelerated the process, which is why it’s going to be difficult to pinpoint a precise time of death.’

  ‘Have you learned anything from door-to-door enquiries?’ I asked, eager to change the subject. ‘Or from FSS?’

  ‘We’ve got nothing from the neighbours. Walls, hedges and fences mean no one saw a thing. Also, it isn’t a particularly friendly street. The Smiths at number seven are the most social, but they were away. Mrs Greaves and her son from number eleven didn’t see much either, although she recalls a woman in a scarf walking down the street two weeks ago on a Tuesday night.’

  ‘A scarf?’ I gulped. She’d seen me! Christ!

  ‘A headscarf, like they used to wear during the war. The orange street lights distort colours, but she thinks it was dark and spotted. She remembers, because she says it’s unusual to see women in scarves these days. Is that true?’

  His question startled me. For one awful moment, I thought he was asking whether I’d worn the dark spotted scarf. ‘I don’t know,’ I managed to whisper.

  ‘Come on, Helen,’ he pressed impatiently. ‘I need the help of a woman here. Have you got such a scarf? How would you wear it? And would you do so in August?’

  ‘No,’ I replied tersely. ‘I haven’t got one. So I wouldn’t wear it in August or any other month. Ask DI Davis. Or your girlfriend. I heard you were seeing a nurse from the hospital.’

  Oakley gaped at me, almost neglecting to stop behind the car in front when it pulled up at a junction. I wouldn’t have minded if he had at that point – a quick car smash would be a merciful end to my nightmare.

  ‘How did you know?’ he demanded. ‘Is nothing sacred?’ His expression hardened. ‘Wright! I called Catherine from Orchard Street last night to let her know I couldn’t meet her. My God, that man’s a gossip!’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ I agreed, thinking of Wright spreading the story about Butterworth’s Blunder.

  Oakley was silent for a while, then said crossly, ‘I can’t ask Catherine to help me with a murder enquiry. It wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘But it’s fine to ask me?’ I shot back.

  ‘You’re a police officer,’ he explained, as if that deprived me of my sex. He grinned suddenly. ‘Besides, we’re still at the stage where she thinks I’m Bristol’s answer to Poirot, and I don’t want to disillusion her just yet. It’s nice, being admired. Do you have a boyfriend?’

  I was tempted to tell him to mind his own business, but he was only being friendly. As far as he was concerned, we were just two colleagues, chatting to while away the time it took to travel to the station.

  ‘Yes.’ I suppose Colin was my boyfriend. We’d slept together, after all, and there were plans to see each other again. I could see Oakley was expecting more than a single syllable, so I elaborated, trying to put some emotion into a voice that was dead with the shocks of the day. ‘He’s an old school friend, but it’s a fairly recent thing.’

  ‘Like me and Catherine, then,’ he said. ‘We’ve not been together long. This is the first major case I’ve had since we met, so now she’s learning what it’s really like to date a policeman. The last one didn’t like it at all.’

  ‘Shift work?’ I asked, trying to sound interested. I didn’t want to know about his personal life. I just wanted to get away before I blurted out my whole, miserable story.

  ‘Unpredictable hours,’ he replied. ‘Arranging to meet her, then not showing up. Letting her down on plans made months before. Leaving her alone every night. Expecting her not to mind me falling asleep when I did manage an evening at home.’

  ‘Perhaps you should transfer back into uniform,’ I said, aiming for jocular. ‘At least shifts are vaguely predictable.’

  ‘I like being a detective. What about you? Any designs on CID? Or the traffic department?’

  ‘Neither,’ I said, a little sullenly. ‘Midsomer Norton was all right, but I hate New Bridewell.’

  He seemed surprised by my vehemence. ‘You’re the one who needs the transfer,’ he said wryly. ‘You’ve let Wright get to you.’

  ‘It’s hard not to when he gives me all the crappy jobs and tells everyone that I’m the one he can do without.’

  ‘I know what it’s like,’ said Oakley. I suspected he did, given that being seen as an ethnic minority wasn’t any easier than being a female graduate where men like Barry Wright were concerned. ‘You should make a complaint or tell him where to get off. But don’t let him decide your future for you.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said. He was right. I shouldn’t let Wright dictate my life. I shouldn’t let Oakley decide it either, by confessing to murder as we sat slowly baking in his car. I’d decide for myself when – or if – I wanted to come clean.

  ‘This scarf,’ said Oakley, like a dog with a bone. People were right about him. He was tenacious. ‘If you did have one, how would you wear it?’

  ‘I suppose I’d put it round my head and tie it under my chin,’ I replied, recalling that I’d tied it at the back of my neck.

  He shot me an uncertain glance. ‘You’d look like Nora Batty,’ he said rudely. ‘Mrs Greaves said this woman had fastened it at the back, and that she walked briskly, keeping her head down.’

  ‘I’d never don a scarf in summer,’ I said, aiming to make him believe I was the last person on Earth that the wretched Mrs Greaves could have seen. ‘It would be too hot.’

  ‘Quite. So, we can assume this person was trying to disguise herself. The scarf, the fast walk, and the fact that her head was down all suggest that she may have been up to no good.’

  ‘No,’ I countered, a little desperately. ‘It means she might have just washed her hair and wore the scarf to keep it in place. Or that she needed to wash her hair, but had to go out for milk or cigarettes, so grabbed the scarf to hide it. Or that she was walking away from her lover, and didn’t want to be recognized by someone who might tell her husband. It could mean all sorts of things.’

  ‘But as we can’t be sure it was the right day, it probably doesn’t matter anyway,’ he said with a despondent sigh. ‘We’re chasing phantoms. We’re almost twenty-four hours into this case, and
we don’t even have the victim’s name.’

  ‘Marko Kovac,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps.’ He frowned. ‘But it’s a funny old case. If our victim was killed in the lounge – as the weapon you found suggests – why was he moved to the kitchen? And why wrap him up if he was just going to be left there?’

  I saw an opportunity to discuss all the things I’d been wondering myself, reckless though that might be. I tried to sound as though my first question had just occurred to me. ‘The only way out of the house is through the front door – the back one just leads to the garden. So why move the victim to the kitchen, when you’d have to drag him back past the sitting room if you were intending to spirit him away?’

  He looked surprised that I was capable of such probing thoughts. He probably believed that a woman who swooned over corpses would be no good at murder solving. But I had lots of questions, and I was certain mine would be a lot more incisive than his. I started to go through them.

  ‘Did the killer intend to bury him in the garden?’

  ‘Only if he had a pneumatic drill. It’s concreted over.’

  ‘Then did the killer aim to carry the body away, but something happened to stop him? Or did he come back after a few days, but the body had started to smell, and he realized he didn’t have the stomach for it? Or is he still intending to come back?’

  Oakley raised his eyebrows. ‘All very interesting points. Grossman thinks that studying the insect larvae will tell us when the body was wrapped in relation to its death, and I’m hoping that the plastic and the duct tape will yield fingerprints.’

  Duct tape was a forensic dream. It was hard to use wearing gloves, as it tended to stick to them, and criminals often tore them off in frustration, leaving not only their prints, but other trace evidence, too. I wouldn’t have used it to wrap a body; I would have opted for string or rope. Anyone using tape was either stupid or very skilled. I decided that Yorke’s men were probably the former.

  I realized at that point that I was the only one that knew there was a connection between the body and Yorke, although it probably wouldn’t be long before that was rectified – not once FSS had analysed the duct tape. And I wanted Yorke’s people caught, because then they wouldn’t be in a position to come after me. I wondered how I could let Oakley know to look in Yorke’s direction without incriminating myself. An anonymous note? Oakley should know that James had been aiming to fix Yorke’s trial, too – the case that Oakley had worked hard to build. Perhaps my note should include something about a fictitious statement insinuated into the court file, as well.

  ‘What kind of black plastic was used?’ I asked curiously. ‘I didn’t see any bin liners when we were looking through the kitchen.’

  ‘Stuff you buy by the meter from garden centres.’ He must have seen my surprise because he added, ‘I bought some to make a pond in Catherine’s yard last week.’

  ‘You’ll be the prime suspect, then,’ I joked, feeling a little better at last. The terrors were beginning to ease, although I’d be sure to take a sleeping pill when I went to bed that night, to get through the darkness and back into in the sunshine again.

  He grimaced. ‘If we get desperate, we’ll have to visit garden suppliers and see who bought some recently. If the killer paid by credit card, we may catch him. Of course, if I wanted it to wrap around a body, I’d pay cash.’

  ‘Perhaps the killer found it in the shed,’ I suggested. ‘Mine’s full of things I think might come in useful someday. You’ll need to see whether there’s a lot of dust on it, consistent with being stored.’

  Oakley groaned. ‘I have a feeling this case is going to run and run.’

  I hoped so, given that solving it would mean me in prison.

  Sunday, 12 August

  When the preliminary results from the forensics tests came though they were difficult to interpret. The problem wasn’t that there was nothing to analyse, but that there was so much, resulting in a mass of information that took Oakley most of the day to trawl through. While he worked, Davis looked through witness statements, and by eight o’clock that evening they were ready to present their first tentative conclusions to their team.

  The officers began to gather. All had had a busy day, and were hot, footsore, and mostly empty-handed. Morale was high, though, as it had been the first full day, and even inexperienced officers knew that there was a lot of ground still to cover.

  Taylor liked to keep all his officers, whether they were working on the case or not, informed of developments in major incidents as he felt it increased the general efficiency of the force as a whole, although there were details that would be kept between him and his inspectors as a precaution against false confessions.

  Normally, Oakley approved of Taylor’s open-book policy, but the Butterworth incident had made him aware of how dangerous gossip could be, and he wondered how long it would be before sensitive information was leaked to the press. His main suspect for that remained Wright, and he was not pleased to see the sergeant sitting in the front row at the briefing, as if he imagined himself to be a vital participant.

  Taylor called the meeting to order. ‘This won’t take long, then you can all get off home. Unfortunately, progress has been slower than we hoped, but tomorrow is Monday, so hopefully we’ll start getting answers as people return to work. Clare will summarize what we know so far about the victim and the circumstances of his death, then Neel will tell us what we’ve got from forensics. I’ll conclude by outlining the leads we need to follow over the next few days. Clare.’

  ‘We still don’t have a definite ID, but the most obvious possibility remains Marko Kovac, and we have made initial inquiries as if he were the victim. No one at the university knew him very well, as he tended to spend all his time working with some specialist equipment. No one has come up with a reason as to why anyone should kill him.’

  ‘What about his research?’ asked Oakley. ‘Nanotechnology.’

  Davis looked puzzled. ‘Yes – the science of doing things small. What of it?’

  ‘The science of engineering or manipulating matter at an atomic or molecular level,’ corrected Oakley.

  ‘Sounds small to me,’ muttered Evans.

  ‘There’s both an industrial and military demand for increasingly powerful technology using smaller component parts,’ Oakley went on. ‘Imagine how many circuits you could cram into a mobile phone if each was the size of an atom. It’s a highly competitive field because there’s huge commercial potential, and money is invariably a good motive for murder.’

  ‘So Kovac’s discoveries might have led another scientist to kill him?’ asked Davis. ‘Or perhaps he killed a rival. Of course, there’s also the fact that he was in Macedonia when it was exploding. He may be suffering from shell-shock, or whatever it’s called these days.’

  ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder,’ supplied the lugubrious Merrick.

  Davis shuffled her notes. ‘According to the university, Kovac arrived on the ninth of July, and rented a house from Academic Accommodations. We’ve not managed to contact anyone from the company yet. That’s first on my list for tomorrow. Kovac was due to leave Bristol on Tuesday, the thirty-first of July. Dave will tell you what he’s done about that.’

  Merrick stood, clearing his throat. ‘I checked all flights in and out of Albania for the past three months, but Kovac wasn’t on any of them. Trains are cheaper, so he probably travelled overland. The problem is that you just get on them – you don’t need to book.’

  ‘You can, though,’ Oakley pointed out. ‘It’s the only way to make sure you get a seat.’

  ‘Well, Kovac didn’t – not in June, July or August,’ said Merrick. ‘There’s also the possibility that he came by bus. Again, there’s no way to tell. I checked with immigration, but Kovac has an open visa for six months, which means he can come and go as he pleases during that time. However, they’ve got no record of him doing either.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ asked Oakley. ‘That he never came and so h
e never left?’

  ‘I’m saying we can’t confirm his movements,’ said Merrick. ‘Passport control may have just checked his visa and nodded him through. I’ve got an English-speaking officer from Tirana to look into him. I’m going to call him again tomorrow. Interpol have nothing, so Kovac’s not on the FBI’s most wanted list or anything.’

  ‘Thanks, Dave,’ said Davis as Merrick sat down. ‘Mrs Greaves from number eleven saw Kovac on Monday the thirtieth, when he told her he was going home the next day. No one saw him after that afternoon, and no one saw him leave the house. However, there was no suitcase or luggage, so we can’t dismiss the possibility that Kovac really has gone home and that we’ve got someone else’s body here.’

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘Yes, sir. No one heard or saw anything unusual, except Mrs Greaves, who claims a woman walked down the street in a headscarf on the Tuesday night. It was too hot for such attire, so it stuck in her mind. I suggest we put this on the back burner, as it won’t be easy to look into, and I’m not convinced it’s relevant. But if any of you see a dark spotted scarf, bear it in mind. And that’s it. We’ve got no reports of unusual activity, and no strange cars. Neel.’

  ‘Forensics are slow at the moment – just like they’ve been since the lab in Chepstow closed down. Everything has to go to Solihull lab, which is overworked and underfunded, thanks to the government’s austerity measures. I’ve been told not to expect anything from DNA for at least a couple of weeks—’

  He was interrupted by a chorus of indignant objections. The loudest came from Superintendent Taylor. ‘I trust you told them this is a murder enquiry?’

  ‘Of course, sir, but it’s not the only one, and the rather rude clerk who deigned to speak to me on the phone said it’s low priority as our victim has been dead a while and the case isn’t politically sensitive.’