He knew one thing for certain. If Karen had been waiting all this time for him and Saslow to arrive before being allowed to start her preliminary investigation, she wouldn’t be in the best of moods.
Vogel could see that there were lights on in the house and also just one other in the close, the house next door to number eleven, on the east side. He guessed that was the home of the Barhams, the couple whom, he already knew, from the preliminary report forwarded by Hemmings, had reported the discovery of Jane Ferguson’s body. All the other properties were still in darkness. They clearly slept well in Estuary Vista Close, thought Vogel. But, of course, these were large and solid detached houses, set well back from the road in their own substantial gardens.
Saslow parked deftly between the Golf and one of the patrol cars. A uniform standing on sentry duty by the gate stepped forward.
Vogel climbed out of the car and introduced himself.
‘Yes, sir, we’ve been expecting you,’ said the young constable, greeting him politely. ‘I’m PC Phil Lake.’
‘Ah, you were first on the scene, weren’t you, along with a woman PC?’
‘Morag Docherty, sir,’ said Phil Lake. ‘She’s nipped back to Fremington to check on the domestic we were dealing with before we were diverted here. The neighbours have been complaining it’s still kicking off. She shouldn’t be long though.’
‘I see. Any sign of the husband at all?’
‘Oh yes, sir. I thought you knew. He came staggering back here in the early hours, and he was well pissed I can tell you …’
PC Lake stopped abruptly. In the ever-brightening early morning light Vogel could see the young constable’s face colouring beneath his uniform cap.
‘S-sorry, sir,’ Lake stumbled. ‘I mean, the deceased’s husband appeared to be inebriated, sir.’
Vogel couldn’t help smiling.
‘Well-pissed will do nicely, thank you, constable,’ he said. ‘But I haven’t been told anything yet about his return. You’d better fill me in.’
Phil Lake did so, in what Vogel considered to be a highly satisfactory manner. The young officer seemed to have a clear mind, and was one of those who paid considerable attention to detail. Vogel liked that in a copper.
‘So where is Mr Felix Ferguson right now, then?’
‘He’s with his parents in Bideford, as far as I know, sir,’ he said.
‘And the children?’
‘He took them with him.’
‘Terrific,’ muttered Vogel.
‘I’m sorry, sir, we had no reason to detain him,’ said PC Lake. ‘At first everybody thought this was just a suicide, and then, well, then, of course …’
PC Lake’s voice tailed off.
‘And then what, constable?’
‘Uh nothing, sir,’ replied Lake.
‘And then, Felix Ferguson is the son of the mayor of Bideford, the commodore of the North Devon Yacht Club, and a prominent local businessman. Is that what you were going to say, constable?’
Constable Lake straightened his back, stood very nearly to attention, and treated Vogel to a display of quite impressive inscrutability.
‘Certainly not, sir,’ he said.
Vogel did not press him further. Privately he considered that this young man might go rather a long way.
‘Right then, let’s go look at what we’ve got in there,’ he said, with just the faintest of smiles.
Karen Crow appeared, apparently from nowhere, just as Vogel and Saslow were getting kitted up in the protective coveralls and over-shoes handed to them by a waiting crime scene investigator.
‘At bloody last,’ she muttered to no one in particular.
‘And good morning to you, Dr Crow,’ said Vogel affably.
Karen Crow grunted and inhaled deeply from the cigarette she was carrying between the extended first and second fingers of her right hand. So, she’d been lurking somewhere in the street having a smoke, thought Vogel with a certain amount of distaste. He hated smoking. He’d watched his maternal grandfather die from emphysema, and, in any case, Vogel was a fastidious man who could not understand why anyone would willingly poison their own lungs, let alone what was left of the world’s atmosphere, with smoke and ash.
Then Karen Crow exhaled. The DCI breathed in at just the wrong moment. He started to cough as soon as the smoke hit the back of his throat.
She turned away – totally unapologetic, if indeed she had even noticed – and along with Phil Lake, led the way up the short driveway to the house, with Vogel and Saslow following as quickly as they could.
‘As we are approaching a crime scene, don’t you think you should put that thing out?’ Vogel enquired.
Karen Crow shot him a withering look. But she reached inside her protective suit, took from a pocket a little folding ashtray, clearly carried for just such occasions, opened it, stubbed out her cigarette, closed it again, and returned it to the pocket.
By then the four of them had almost reached the front door.
Lake held out a cautionary hand.
‘Watch where you put your feet,’ he warned. ‘I’m afraid Mr Ferguson had a bit of an accident.’
Vogel looked down with distaste at the pile of vomit on the ground just outside the porch. He was beginning to take a dislike to Felix Ferguson.
Lake, who was wearing gloves but not a coverall, opened the door and stood back for his senior officers and the pathologist to enter. Then he retreated down the driveway to his sentry duty by the gate.
CSI had already set up their lights and were at work. One investigator was on his hands and knees, shuffling backwards down the staircase checking out each tread.
As Vogel had been assured, nobody had touched the body, which was swinging very gently from side to side, a phenomenon brought about, Vogel assumed, by the slight breeze caused by the opening of the front door.
The high intensity floodlights, which had been erected, illuminated the scene with stark brilliance, their beams crossing each other, so that numerous shadows of the hanging body were cast around the hallway.
It was an eerie sight. Vogel stood for a moment taking it all in. Unlike Phil Lake he had seen more death, and almost always violent death, than, in his opinion, any one man ever should. He’d never got used to it, and he knew that he never would. He looked up at the woman’s distorted face. His stomach heaved involuntarily, as it always did, and as Phil Lake’s had done earlier. But the young officer would never know that.
She hung there, suspended, like a puppet waiting to be jerked into life by its puppeteers. However, this poor broken soul would never know life again. The striped men’s pyjamas she was wearing gave her the look of a somewhat obscene Andy Pandy.
Vogel took a step closer, in order to more intensely examine the body, making himself set aside those feelings he had never quite been able to overcome, and concentrate hard on the scene before him.
David Vogel was a most meticulous man. He had a natural eye for detail, and a rather decent brain which had yet to be numbed into submission by the routine drudgery so often required of the modern police officer, whether or not he might be a fine detective.
This was a fairly large house, probably 1930s built, with high ceilings and a tall ornate staircase. He guessed the drop from the landing to the hallway below to be about fifteen feet. The spacious hallway was probably about ten feet square, and the staircase curved around it. There was little doubt that it was a location rather well suited to a successful suicide.
‘What do you think, Saslow?’ enquired Vogel.
The young detective was standing to one side also carefully scrutinising the body. If she were at all alarmed or distressed by the sight before her, she gave absolutely no sign of it.
Not for the first time Vogel considered that Dawn Saslow was probably made of sterner stuff than him. Indeed, during her relatively brief police career she had successfully dealt with, or at least given every impression of having done so, one almost cataclysmic personal experience far more extreme than anyt
hing Vogel had ever faced.
‘Hard to tell, boss,’ replied Saslow. ‘You can see pretty much from looking at this woman that the cause of death was almost certainly strangulation, can’t you? But it does also look as if someone might have been knocking her about.’
‘Indeed,’ agreed Vogel. ‘Which naturally makes us turn our attentions to the husband, of course. Whether or not Mrs Jane Ferguson ultimately did take her own life.’
‘What, an esteemed local businessman, the son of the mayor of Bideford, and the commodore of the local yacht club, boss?’ responded Saslow sardonically, echoing Vogel’s own words to PC Lake. ‘Surely not.’
Vogel smiled wearily.
‘Do not fret, Saslow,’ he said. ‘At least we can escape back to Bristol when the job is done. No wonder Nobby Clarke wanted to farm this one out.’
He made himself concentrate on the task in hand, taking in the old bruising and the freshly healed cut on the woman’s face, and the way her arm dangled in such a way that it had surely been wrenched from its socket.
Vogel could see at once why the two uniforms had called in as a suspicious death what must have, at first sight, looked like a suicide. Smart work, all the same, which had led to him and Saslow being summoned in the early hours of a Sunday morning all the way from Bristol to the scene of what might otherwise have been dismissed as a domestic tragedy. That and all this local political nonsense. Vogel groaned silently. He hated that sort of thing.
Stealing himself, he continued to study the grotesque tableau before him.
‘So, on balance, Saslow, do you think this still might be a straightforward suicide, our Jane here just got her arm entangled in the bannisters somehow, and there could prove to be an innocent explanation for the old injury to her face?’ he asked. ‘Or do you think, as the D and C bigwigs clearly suspect, that we might be faced with something more sinister here?’
‘Well, suicide could remain a possibility, boss, but—’ Dawn Saslow began thoughtfully.
She got no further before being interrupted by Karen Crow.
‘One thing’s certain, Vogel, if you give the go-ahead for that body to be brought down so that I can examine it properly, we might well all gain a far better idea of what really happened here,’ proclaimed the district Home Office pathologist forcefully. ‘We waited long enough for you to get here, for God’s sake. It really would be nice if we could all now get on with what we have to do.’
Vogel treated her to one of his most benign smiles. He knew that Dr Crow, whose extensive territory also stretched across much of the Avon and Somerset’s beat, was based in Exeter, which even he realized was one heck of a lot closer to the North Devon coast than Bristol. About an hour and a quarter’s drive away he guessed. And the doctor would have been notified almost as soon as the incident was called in, whereas he and Saslow were alerted only after a conflab between two chief constables. So she had possibly been hanging around for as much as three hours waiting for him and Saslow to arrive. He had earlier speculated that she wouldn’t take kindly to that sort of wait. And he had just been proven absolutely right.
David Vogel did not give the appearance of being in any way a forceful or assertive man. He was tall, thin, and heavily bespectacled. He walked with just the slightest hint of a stoop, and tended to wear honourably ancient corduroy jackets and comfortable slip-on suede shoes even when the weather and terrain rendered them highly inappropriate. He rarely appeared to be in a rush either to speak or to act. And it was invariably apparent from every iota of his body language that he was unlikely to speak, or certainly not to venture an opinion, without giving the subject of his vernacular considerable thought and consideration. Indeed, Vogel resembled rather more an academic, a school teacher, or perhaps a clergyman, in his bearing, than he did a police detective. Nonetheless, twenty years or so of being a fairly exceptional detective, or certainly an exceptionally clever one, had resulted in appearances being significantly deceptive.
Vogel could be rather impressively forceful, both physically and mentally, if required, and was actually by nature an assertive man, albeit a quiet one.
In this instance a demonstration of assertion was not required. There were few people Vogel would allow to speak to him in the way Karen Crow just had. But she was definitely one of the exceptions. In the first place she was a pathologist, and pathologists and senior police officers were programmed to indulge in a certain degree of banter, if only as a diversion from the horrors with which they were usually confronted when working together. And in the second place, Karen Crow had earned the right. She was one of the most experienced Home Office pathologists in the country, with a reputation for brilliance. When she had first plied her trade almost thirty-five years previously, hers had been a ground-breaking appointment. And for many years she was the only woman in the UK to acquire and to hold down such a job.
‘My dear doctor,’ he began, in the slightly old-world manner he sometimes adopted. ‘Please feel free to go ahead. Who am I to stand in your way?’
He inclined his head in what might have been a gesture of gracious acquiescence were it not for the persistent twitch of a smile around his lips and the twinkle in his dark brown eyes, which was only partially disguised by his thick-lensed spectacles.
Karen pursed her lips and frowned at Vogel. She knew him pretty well. She said nothing more. Vogel indicated to the waiting CSI team that they could start to bring down the body. And he watched with some admiration as the CSIs worked together to release the body of Jane Ferguson whilst causing as little disruption as possible to it or to the crime scene. The two tallest male CSIs lifted the body from the ground floor, whilst another two forensic investigators untied the rope used to hang the woman from around the upper bannister. Ultimately the CSI team lowered Mrs Ferguson’s body carefully to the ground and lay it on the floor in the middle of the hall directly below where it had been found hanging. The dead woman was positioned on her back, legs straight, with the noose which had caused her death still tight around her neck.
Karen Crow stepped forward at once to begin her preliminary examination.
All the banter left her as she checked Jane Ferguson’s body for any further signs of external injury which may have contributed to, or have born some significance to, her death. The doctor paid particular note, of course, to the left arm, which had seemed to Vogel and Saslow, and before them to Docherty and Lake, to have been dangling unnaturally from the shoulder. She also checked out the signs of old injuries on the dead woman’s face. She did not attempt to remove Jane Ferguson’s clothing. That would come later on the mortuary slab. But she did lift Jane’s pyjama jacket so that she could examine her abdomen. As far as Vogel could see this revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Then Karen Crow pushed the sleeves and legs of Jane Ferguson’s pyjamas upwards, so that her lower arms and legs could be seen.
This revealed several small narrow horizontal scars on both arms, around the area of her wrists.
Only then, and with some difficulty, did she loosen the noose which had strangled Jane Ferguson to death and begin to check out the bruising around her neck, the position of her tongue in her throat and so on.
Eventually the doctor looked up at Vogel.
‘I can confirm that the left arm is dislocated at the shoulder, and there is considerable old bruising to one side of the victim’s face, consistent with her having been hit by a clenched fist, although not necessarily so; plus a partially heeled cut, which again, if she was punched, is consistent with having been caused by a ring worn on one of her assailant’s fingers,’ the pathologist began. ‘The victim’s left hand shows signs of new bruising which could have been caused by her fall from the bannisters, but was more probably sustained a little earlier. It’s hard to say. As for the scars on her wrists, they’re quite old. And, well, we’ve both seen plenty of this before, Vogel. Lacerations caused by a small sharp knife, or possibly a razor blade. Classic signs of self-harming. Although not necessarily so. It is, however, highly unlikely that an
y of this would have directly contributed to her death.’
‘So, what do you consider to have been the cause of death, Karen?’ Vogel enquired. ‘Is it as one would first assume, or might there indeed be more to this?’
‘Not to the cause of death as such,’ replied Karen Crow. ‘I am quite confident that the victim died due to strangulation, presumably caused by being hanged; although that is off the record, of course, until we get her back to the lab and conduct a full post-mortem examination, and it’s impossible for me to rule out internal injuries or any other contributory factors not immediately apparent.’
Karen Crow paused again, as if concentrating her thought process. Vogel waited expectantly.
‘OK,’ he said eventually when it became apparent that the pathologist wasn’t going to speak again without some sort of further encouragement. ‘But as a result of your preliminary examination alone you are prepared to venture your off the record verdict that this is death by strangulation, as indicated by Mrs Ferguson having been found hanged from the neck. But do you think it is suicide, or not? Or to put it another way, is there enough doubt in your mind for this death to continue to be treated as suspicious, at least for the time being?’
‘Yes, Vogel, I have plenty of doubt in my mind about the way Mrs Ferguson died,’ Karen Crow replied. ‘Certainly, and in common with the first responders to the scene, I have yet to be fully convinced that this is the straightforward suicide it might have initially appeared to be. So yes, my opinion is that Mrs Ferguson’s death should definitely be treated as suspicious until or unless we have good reason to be convinced otherwise.’
‘Thank you, I have no doubt at all that you are quite right, Karen,’ said Vogel.
He turned to Saslow.
‘Well, Nobby told me she’s setting up an incident room at Bideford nick, and has already appointed a deputy SIO to run it, so hopefully we can leave that side of things to them for the time being and get stuck in to the nitty gritty,’ he said. ‘Whilst we are here we may as well interview the neighbours who found the little girl out in the road. But there’s little doubt who is the person of most interest to us at the moment, is there? One Felix Ferguson. Jane’s husband.’
Dreams of Fear Page 6