‘Why on earth do you want to stop cars driving in?’ Rowena asked him. ‘You don’t seriously think you’re going to find tyre prints out there after all this rain? Especially when your police vehicle has already driven in.’
‘That’s what Barry said,’ Nick complained, ‘but it’s correct procedure.’
‘Seems to me he’s been up all night reading the procedures manual,’ Sarah teased. ‘Probably shot the guy to get a bit of practice at following an investigation.’
Nick’s protest was swallowed up by the noise of rain and wind as the door opened.
All three of them turned towards it, but no one came in. Rowena, having just removed her rain gear, was the closest and she hurried to shut it again.
‘I couldn’t have shut it properly,’ she said, and apologised to the others, although she was the one who’d been wet by the gust.
‘Slip the lock across as well,’ Sarah suggested. ‘With the force of the wind it could blow open again.’
The words made sense but it was the tightness in them that scared Rowena. If someone as sensible as Sarah was freaked out by the goings-on, things must be serious.
Of course they’re serious, she scolded herself as she draped a gown over her clothes then added a plastic apron and picked up a pair of gloves. You’ve been so hung up over your feelings for David, you’re ignoring the fact there’s a murderer on the island.
Somehow ‘perpetrator’ no longer seemed strong enough.
‘I’m going to cut off his trousers. Because he’s stiffened in such an awkward position, I’ll need help to get the bits off,’ Sarah explained. ‘Then I want them bagged and labelled.’
She picked up a large pair of shears and began by slicing through the man’s belt at the back.
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to undo it?’ Rowena asked.
‘Not when the most likely fingerprints would be around the buckle,’ Nick told her.
‘But they’d be his—that’s all,’ Rowena pointed out.
‘Probably,’ Nick said, ‘but what if someone else dressed him?’
‘Oh!’
‘I wonder why he wasn’t wearing a raincoat—or some kind of protection?’ Nick asked, and Sarah stared at him as if he’d grown another head.
‘You’re right! I didn’t even think of that. And he’s not wet, his clothes aren’t even damp, yet it’s been raining since we came out of this building last night. He came out with us—surely he didn’t get in the car then. I’m pretty sure we’d have noticed if he had.’
‘So another car must have driven up there,’ Nick said, with the smug smile of someone who’d just been proved correct.
‘Doesn’t mean there’d be any tyre tracks left,’ Rowena retorted.
Sarah held up her hand.
‘Peace, my children!’
However, Rowena wasn’t worried about arguing with Nick—she’d had a brilliant notion.
‘But the car was there all along. So David couldn’t have driven the man up there! And there was no second car in the drive this morning so someone else has to be involved, driving him through the rain and leaving him there.’
She offered it triumphantly as Sarah asked her to bag the cut belt and ruined segment of trousers exactly as they were.
‘But David could have arranged for the chap to meet him—say at the hospital—then suggested they sit in the car to have a talk,’ Nick suggested.
Rowena glared at him.
‘Trust you to think of an objection!’ she muttered, folding the cloth carefully then ruining the effect by jamming it angrily into the bag. ‘You sound as if you want it to be David, when you must know he’s as gentle as a lamb and goes out of his way to save life. Look at the animals he tended during the bush fires.’
‘Here,’ Sarah interrupted. ‘Give me a hand to lift him. In fact, Nick and I will do it, and you pull the material out from underneath him.’
‘The material’ was the other half of the man’s trousers, now removed in one long piece.
‘Pop it in a bag and label it,’ Sarah told Rowena. ‘And note the time again for me, Nick. I’m going to take his body temperature then see if we can work out when it happened.’
Rowena was relieved to have her attention recalled to work. She probably wasn’t doing David’s cause much good by defending him so vehemently.
Especially as he’d made it obvious he had no desire for her support.
None at all!
‘It’s 35.8 degrees Celsius. He’s a big man so he’d cool more slowly than a thin person—No, don’t write the comment down, Nick, just the temperature. I’m only thinking aloud. It’s always easier to work in Fahrenheit because a body in a room at sixty degrees cools at one and a half degrees an hour, but in Celsius the scale uses a three-hour graph.’
‘Do you have any idea what she’s talking about?’ Rowena asked Nick.
He grinned at her, the antagonism between them forgotten in their mutual interest in the science.
‘Some,’ he admitted, while Sarah, with a pen and paper, muttered to herself as she scribbled graph lines and figures. ‘Say he started off with a normal temperature of just over 37 degrees Celsius. Then, as his body cools, this temperature drops. Scientists have worked out how much it cools an hour and now that she knows it’s gone down just over one degree, Sarah’s working out how many hours ago he died.’
‘But she was talking about a room at sixty degrees Fahrenheit,’ Rowena reminded him. ‘And she’s read the thermometer in Celsius.’
‘Sixty degrees Fahrenheit is about fifteen and half degrees Celsius,’ Sarah said over her shoulder. ‘That any help? No, it wouldn’t be, because he wasn’t in a room, he was in a car, and the car was out in the open…’
She turned around now.
‘Would you know what the temperature was last night?’
‘Ten degrees Celsius,’ Nick said promptly.
‘He does the weather reports for the island,’ Rowena explained to the surprised doctor.
‘Damn!’ Sarah muttered. ‘I know lividity and rigor aren’t reliable, but it doesn’t make sense.’
“What doesn’t?’
Rowena and Nick spoke together.
‘Thirty-five point eight degrees in the cold with a man his size would give me about six hours since the time of death, possibly less, putting it at what? One to two-thirty in the morning?’
‘So wouldn’t that be a perfect time to kill someone?’ Rowena asked.
Sarah sighed.
‘It destroys the “meeting someone” scenario. I mean, what person in his right mind, particularly an ex-policeman, would agree to meet someone they didn’t know at such an hour? Especially someone you might possibly suspect of murder.’
‘But remember he was a cop—and a big fellow. He’d have been confident he could handle it.’
Sarah turned to Nick and pointed her pen at him.
‘You’re young and enthusiastic now, but don’t ever, ever think that just because you’re a policeman you can handle things!’ she told him. ‘No! If you consider it logically, Nick, his training should have made him more wary, not less.’
‘Forget his reaction for a moment,’ Rowena interrupted. ‘Apart from the unlikelihood of a meeting at that time, what else doesn’t fit? You mentioned other things.’
Sarah grinned at her.
‘Easily sidetracked, aren’t we? The lividity is stable, which happens in about six to ten hours and can continue for up to twenty-four. Which means if he’d been shifted after it sets, the discoloration would remain where it is now. But as a way of estimating time of death, it’s not much use except that we know it’s at least six hours since he died, but I’d say, for a man his size and the extent of discoloration, it would be longer than that. See how the skin remains red when I press against it. Earlier than that, it would blanch—go white—when I pressed it.’
‘What about the cold?’ Nick asked, but Sarah shook her head.
‘Lividity isn’t affected by temperature, but the rigor i
s. The cold should have slowed the process but the body has the stiffness of someone who’s been dead twelve hours or longer. I guess we might have more idea when it starts to wear off, although that could be thirty to thirty-six hours later so it’s not accurate either.’
‘So what am I writing down?’ Nick asked.
‘Just the body temperature and the outdoor temperature last night,’ Sarah told him. ‘Let the scientists on the mainland work it out. Actually, they have a new way of measuring the time of death, using factors involved in the release of potassium from the blood as it breaks down, so they should be able to come up with a more accurate estimate.’
‘If we ever get him over to the mainland,’ Nick said. ‘The way the weather looks, it could be days before a plane can land. In the meantime, he’ll have to go on ice.’
‘Which could alter things considerably,’ Sarah said, frowning at the dead man as if he were personally responsible for the problem.
Rowena understood her dilemma because her own frustration at a lack of a definite time was gnawing at her stomach. She and Sarah had been up and moving around the house until after ten, then Sarah had gone over to the hospital at ten-thirty and again at two-thirty.
The last time rang a bell. She turned to Sarah.
‘Two-thirty? You were out at that time. You didn’t see anyone?’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘LURKING out the back?’ Sarah thought for a moment. ‘I didn’t even look. It was raining and blowing hard enough to make visibility practically nil. I drove over, parked under cover, went in through the side entrance to the hospital and came back out the same way. Though a hospital is a strange choice of a site to kill someone, given that it’s the one place in any town where people are not only on duty all night but are actively moving around.’
‘But last night, any moving around would have been internal,’ Rowena said. ‘Not even the most die-hard of smokers would have ventured onto the veranda in the wind.’
‘It still seems risky,’ Sarah said, frowning at the man again. ‘And I don’t like two-thirty. I know body temperature is the most reliable of three unreliable factors, but the other signs should at least relate to it.’
‘Perhaps when we get witnesses, people who’ve seen him around, we’ll be able to narrow it down a bit,’ Nick suggested.
‘Seen him around where?’ Rowena snapped at him. ‘Drinking at the pub until closing time, which last night, given the weather, was probably eight-thirty. Or taking in the sights of the town of Winship—on a night when a gale’s blowing, the power and phones are off and the heavens have opened?’
‘Someone will have seen him,’ Nick said stubbornly. ‘The woman he’s with, for a start. And the folk wherever he’s staying. He’s at the motel, isn’t he?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ Rowena said, then she turned to Sarah. ‘Do you need me for anything else?’
The surprise in Sarah’s eyes told Rowena she probably sounded as demented as she felt, but she needed to get out—away from the body they were discussing so heartlessly—away from death.
Why the panic? she asked herself when Sarah had thanked her for her help and she was struggling into her raincoat, outside the room instead of inside.
‘Because it’s real, not just a game!’
She said the words aloud—said them slowly as if they had to be chewed over before they’d come out.
And no mater where the speculation went—with times of death and possible scenarios for how the man had come to be in David’s car—David would remain the focus of attention. And would remain in danger.
She pressed her hand against her chest and looked fearfully towards his car.
Why?
Wasn’t that the question?
Why was all this happening?
Forget about Paul Page for the moment. She was fairly certain his had been a follow-up kind of death. Consider Sue-Ellen. Why would someone kill David’s wife?
Rowena buttoned up her coat and felt in the pocket for a rain-hat, but remembered she’d lent hers to Sarah.
‘Bad luck!’ she muttered to herself. ‘So your hair will get wet—so what?’
After a final look at the car, she turned towards the surgery and flung herself into the rain, dashing down the drive, around the barriers and across the deserted street.
She left her dripping outer clothes in the porch, absently noting Peter’s old slicker hanging on a peg.
But nothing else—no customers today.
She hurried inside and, after a perfunctory knock, opened the consulting-room door.
‘Why would someone want to kill your wife?’ she demanded.
David looked up and her foolish heart imagined she’d caught a glow of pleasure in his eyes before he quenched it with a scowl and said, ‘I presume you have a reason for asking your question.’
‘Oh, stop being so stuffy!’ she told him, coming in and flopping into the chair across the desk from him. ‘OK, so you don’t want me as a lover, but we’re still friends so let’s figure this out. It has to go back to her. This man’s death can’t be totally unrelated, but we don’t know anything about him so we have to start with Sue-Ellen.’
There! She’d said it! Said the name of the woman.
David shook his head.
‘Do you think I haven’t tried to work that out?’
‘Money!’ Rowena suggested. ‘They were a wealthy family—the parents were dead. Did she inherit much—have a lot of money of her own?’
Then, as she realised where this question was headed, she said, ‘Oh!’ in a weak voice and slumped into a chair.
‘Exactly!’ David said. ‘Why do you think I was chief suspect? Only she didn’t have a lot of money. The family had an expensive lifestyle, so there wasn’t a huge fortune left. Sue-Ellen inherited enough which, if properly invested, would have given her a nice bit of extra income for the rest of her life but she was brought up to have the best and have it now. Instant gratification.’
‘Nothing left?’
The question brought a grim smile.
‘Nothing,’ David confirmed. ‘We know that for sure because the police had some notion I’d taken the money and secreted it away so, on legal advice, every purchase Sue had made, everything she’d spent over the years immediately preceding her death, was investigated. I insisted the lawyers go through every credit-card bill, every store account. She’d spent it all right!’
‘But that’s wonderful,’ Rowena told him. ‘It removes your motive for killing her.’
‘Only if I could prove I’d known it was all gone!’
This time the smile was slightly more relaxed and, though she knew she shouldn’t, Rowena found herself responding to it.
She smiled back.
David looked at her. The neat knot of hair was damp and dishevelled so little ribbons of hair now curled wetly around her face, framing the oval shape in the way ringlets framed the faces of women in sketches of Regency times.
The grey eyes, so steadfast, were still wary, but they’d lost their look of hurt—which he’d inflicted.
Would pointing out the obvious inflict more?
‘It only removed one motive,’ he reminded her. ‘Spouses murder each other every day of the week, and only rarely is money involved.’
He watched Rowena nod and realised she was listing other motives to herself—passion and jealousy sprang immediately to most people’s minds, and Rowena wasn’t to know these were two emotions he’d gone beyond in his relationship with Sue-Ellen.
Nor could he tell her.
The doorbell announced a new arrival and saved him from further discussion. Though he was less interested in why his wife had been killed—to him it was totally unbelievable that someone would want to kill her—than in where the trunk had been when the police had searched his farm four years ago. He knew the shed had been searched, and if it had been there at the time, the trunk would have been opened. So where had it come from? And when?
‘Mrs Robinson’s h
ere about the result of her blood tests—I think they came through the other day.’
As Rowena ushered the woman in, David sorted through the patient files on his desk. With so many people not turning up—they’d probably only been coming to check out Sarah anyway—the files were out of order.
‘Hello, Pat!’ he greeted the older woman. ‘How have you been?’
‘Good!’ she told him firmly, but he’d learned Pat Robinson wasn’t one to complain.
In fact, the stoicism of the islanders, the women in particular, had been something he’d noticed early on. Perhaps their isolation made them less reliant on outside help, so they battled on regardless of the obstacles in their way.
Rowena was typical of the breed…
‘No nausea from the drugs?’
‘None,’ Pat Robinson said firmly. Diverting his mind from Rowena to his patient, he thought again of stoicism and wondered if she’d tell him if she was feeling nauseous.
‘The blood tests show no abnormality but, as I explained, they wouldn’t reveal symptoms of Parkinson’s, only rule out anything else.’
‘So what would reveal I’ve got it?’ Pat asked, and David grinned at her.
‘Apart from my diagnosis? A CT scan—the CT stands for computerised tomography, which is a fancy name for taking images of a slice of your body. It enables us to see what changes may have taken place in your brain and is less bothersome than doing a lumbar puncture to check your cerebrospinal fluid to see the results of these changes.’
Pat nodded as if she understood but, then, most patients simply adapted what they knew of more familiar X-ray images, coupled it with the knowledge of what computers could do to alter pictures on their television sets and worked out their own concept of the end result.
‘I’d have to go to the mainland,’ Pat said in the tone of voice most people reserved for visits to the dentist.
‘For further tests, yes.’
‘But you think I’ve got it anyway,’ she persisted.
‘From the loss of movement in your face, and the rigidity in your neck—remember when I tried to raise your arm and turn it and the muscles in your shoulder were hard to move—yes, I think you have. That’s why I started treatment with the levodopa.’
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