by Wonny Lea
‘That’s been sorted,’ retorted Mr Morris. ‘We were told to come over now to collect everything.’
‘Who told you that?’ asked Sarah.
‘Who do you think?’ was his reply. ‘I deal with the organ grinder, not the monkey, and Mr Cooper himself rang us this morning. He is not here himself but assures us that the death certificate is signed and that Mr Doster will be in his office early so that we can collect it from him.’
‘In that case I suggest you go to Mr Doster’s office, as you seem to know more about the management arrangements of this establishment than I do.’
Sarah turned to the paperwork she had on her desk in a manner that dismissed her visitors, when there was a knock on the office door and one of the care assistants shuffled outside.
‘Come in, Maria,’ said Sarah. ‘Mr and Mrs Morris were just leaving. What is it you want?’
Maria answered. ‘It’s not what I want it’s what the police want. There are two of them in the reception area and they say they want to speak to you about the body.’
Mr Morris had already pushed his wife halfway down the corridor but he had overheard the conversation and with his colour draining he turned back to face Sarah. ‘What does she mean, the police are here to see you about the body? Why are the police involved?’
Sarah could now see no reason to contain her anger and turned sharply towards William Morris. ‘Maria has just brought me a message that is not any of your concern. Why should you care that the police are here to see me about a body? Unless of course you murdered the person they found dead in Coopers Field this morning!’
Chapter Three
Who Is She?
Martin Phelps had barely had enough time to take a good look at the photographs on the first of the display panels in Incident Room One when Matt Pryor came looking for him.
‘I’ve been with Charlie and we’ve trawled through the local and national database systems looking for any females who have been reported missing over the past two months. Locally, there are only three reports, but nationally there are hundreds – makes you think doesn’t it? All those people unaccounted for.
‘Some of the reports link the person’s disappearance to a family row, but in a large number of cases the person reported missing appears to have just vanished without any plausible explanation. The other thing that has amazed me is the age span. There are missing children aged from three up, an old man who was aged ninety-one when he was reported missing eighteen months ago, and all ages, sexes, and ethnic groups between. Where are they all?’
Martin knew his DS was not expecting him to answer this rhetorical question, but Matt was anticipating the next question from his boss and Martin obliged. ‘What do we know about the three locals on that list?’ he asked.
‘I have the computer printouts on all three of them and from the little information we have so far regarding our body she could be any one of them. The information provided for these missing people is really excellent and I must confess I didn’t realise we kept so much on file about them. We have photographs, of course, but also details of height, weight, build, shoe size, blood group, and medical history – some have dental records, and even DNA profiles.’
Martin laughed. ‘If you had come up through the ranks like me you would be aware of the time and effort taken to put together these files – not something they make graduates do, is it?’
It was not unusual for Martin to tease his sergeant in this way but there was no malicious undertone and both men recognised the way in which they were able to complement one another in their approach to detection. Martin had indeed come up through the ranks but, by any standard, he had not been tardy. The position he had held the longest was that of a constable, and on reflection he realised that he had been blocked at that stage because a cantankerous old sergeant probably thought that Martin was after his stripes.
The first-hand experience he had gained as a police officer at constable and sergeant level was something he valued, and was a key factor in his ongoing positive relationship with uniformed staff. After passing his sergeants’ exams he had moved for a short time to Swansea in order to get a position at that rank, but was there for barely a year. As soon as the opportunity had presented itself he was back in Cardiff, transferred to CID as the DS sidekick to Detective Chief Inspector Austin. His DCI was everything Martin was not, and for almost two years Martin endured working for one of the rudest, most brash, and generally objectionable men he could imagine. The time was only made tolerable by the fact that DCI Austin was an exceptionally good detective, and Martin had learned to ignore the man while soaking up his mind and methods.
It was now nearly four years since he himself had become a Detective Chief Inspector and Matt was only the second DS he had worked with. DS Pryor, unlike Martin, was a graduate entrant into the force, and working with Martin had given him his first experience of real-life detection. Most of it was quite different from the theory he had been taught.
The two men had hit it off from the beginning and had an excellent working relationship that allowed for a bit of banter but respected rank.
Until recently Martin had sometimes teased his DS that his acceptance by the constabulary had only been because they needed a prop forward for the South Wales Police Rugby Squad. This was now a jibe that very much needed to be avoided as recently Matt had been forced to give up playing.
He had been with Martin when a particularly dangerous killer had been tracked down and Matt had been injured when he kicked a knife from the man’s hand. The incredibly sharp pointed knife had pierced Matt’s femoral artery and he had needed immediate, potentially lifesaving, surgery.
The arterial surgery had been very successful and Matt, being a fit young man, had recovered quickly but had then been somewhat devastated to learn that for the foreseeable future any contact sports were out of the question.
Although Matt joked that not playing rugby meant he could go out on a Saturday night looking handsome and not sporting the swollen eyes and bruises of the rugby maul, he was not fooling anyone because they all knew how much he missed it.
‘Look at this.’ Matt interrupted Martin’s thoughts and would probably have been surprised to know he had been the subject of them. ‘As I said, our body could be any one of our local missing persons, but only in as much as all three of them are women. But here’s a weird thing. One is a blonde, one is a brunette, and one is a redhead – don’t you think that’s strange?’
‘Only if they are all very young women and they all disappeared at the same time only to turn up later as members of a well-known girl band,’ suggested Martin.
‘No chance, guv,’ laughed Matt. ‘They are all well past that possibility, and of course we don’t know that the colour of their hair is for real. It could be more chemically achieved than natural, they could all be blondes for all we know.’
‘Is there anything that really links anyone of them to the body that was found this morning?’ enquired Martin.
‘Nothing that I can see,’ responded Matt. ‘However it is likely that we will be able to rule two of them out, as they are around the average height for a woman, and from what I could see at the crime scene I would say our victim was short, wouldn’t you?’
‘It certainly looked that way,’ responded Martin. ‘I wonder how long it will be before the Prof is able to give us more specific information? Matt, do you think you could contact Mrs Williams and see where they’ve got to? Don’t hassle the man himself, just ask Mrs Williams.’
‘Don’t worry! I’ll ask Mrs Williams. She’s such a nice lady; I really don’t know how she’s put up with him for as long as she has.’
Matt disappeared and Martin moved away from the photographs and drew his usual three vertical columns on the large whiteboard. Above the columns he put a name to the crime – calling it the Coopers Field Murder. For the time being he only headed the first column, entitling it ‘Absolute Facts’.
There was little to put under this heading and a
ctually all he could do was write the date and time the body was discovered, the location, the name of the person who made the call to the police, and the time the police had arrived at the scene. It was a bit depressing to see so little in this column and in order to move his thinking forward he headed the other two columns ‘Facts to be Checked’ and ‘What If?’ At least he could have some fun and let his imagination run riot in that last column.
The setting out of data under these headings was a ritual Martin used to focus his mind at the beginning of any investigation. He was aware that some of his fellow DCIs had been known to joke about ‘Martin’s three columns’ but it was Martin, not they, who had the best clean-up record of allocated cases.
He was about to list some possible reasons for the neatly folded clothes and the body being naked when Matt came back into the room and said that Prof. Moore was well under way with the post-mortem. ‘He must be in a better mood than he was earlier because Mrs Williams has checked with him and it’s apparently OK for me to attend the post-mortem with you, if you are happy with that.’
‘I’ve got no problem with that,’ said Martin. ‘I’m always struck by the approach we take when a body is discovered but the murder isn’t recent: we’re much more laid back about it, aren’t we? I guess it’s because we don’t have to contemplate the fact that the killer could still be at large and possibly terrorising others. Of course the murderer in this case may well be still a threat to someone else, we just don’t know.’
‘At the moment we just don’t know much about anything,’ suggested Matt. ‘Alex and his lot are working on the clothes and the piece of paper, and analysing samples from the area surrounding the body. When I spoke to him a few minutes ago he suggested they would be in a position to give us some answers early this afternoon.’
‘There is one other thing I’d like you to do, Matt,’ said Martin. ‘It’s to interview the nurse who gave some assistance with Mrs Pattern, the woman who found the body. Two officers have already been to the Parkland Nursing Home and one of them was Sergeant Evans.’
‘I saw him in the corridor when he got back and Evans told me that the nurse had very little to add to what we already know about her involvement. Our sergeant was, however, surprised when the relative of a resident who died last night, had really freaked out when he heard there were policemen at the door of the nursing home.’
‘I can’t see how it has got anything whatsoever to do with the case, but I’m reluctant to ignore Sergeant Evans’ nose – he has been known to have just cause for concern more often than not.’
‘Yes, the Evans nose is legendary,’ said Matt. ‘The man he mentioned is probably one of those people with a phobia about people in uniform, but I’m happy to check it out. I know where the nursing home is, it’s no more than five minutes’ walk from where the body was found, but like you I can’t see there being any connection. I’ll come to the post-mortem with you now and then pay a visit to Parkland before lunch. When will we be having our first briefing, about two o’clock?’
‘Yes, I think we should have enough to talk about by then and I can’t see any reason to hold a press conference – it would be over in five minutes. I’ll get our PR people to release a simple press statement as soon as Prof. Moore is able to confirm the sex of the victim, give us an approximate age, and come up with some idea of how long she’s been dead.’
Martin was as much thinking aloud as he was talking to DS Pryor, and the two men lapsed into their own thoughts as they walked up the steps to the fourth floor. Martin was pleased his cheese omelette was well and truly settled in his stomach, as walking down the corridor he sensed that peculiar churning that inevitably came with being in this part of the building.
Matt obviously shared Martin’s feelings, and as they walked past one of the laboratories he said, almost in a whisper, ‘There’s something about this place, isn’t there? It makes me feel a bit queasy, not in a way where I would actually be sick, but more like massive butterflies in the stomach. It’s a strange feeling.’
Martin nodded in agreement and they both walked into the anteroom for PM Room Two, where they took off their jackets and put on the protective clothing that Mrs Williams had put out ready for them. Matt turned to Martin and made a confession. ‘I don’t mind going to post-mortem examinations, provided the first incision has been made. I just hate seeing the bit where the pathologist cuts into the flesh at the beginning. How can they do that?’
Martin said nothing and moved towards the door of the PM room, where he could see Mrs Williams beckoning them in.
Matt was pleased to see that the professor was well past the first incision phase and with his new-found bravery he moved nearer to the table and caught the Prof’s eye.
‘If only dead bodies could talk …’
Before Matt had finished his sentence, Prof. Moore interrupted him. ‘Oh, but they can, Sergeant. The bodies I get in here tell me the truth about themselves, not like the villains you get out there who tell you lie after lie. Watch and learn, Sergeant. Watch and learn.’
For the next hour and ten minutes that was exactly what they did. Martin and Matt were treated to a master-class in the art of making the dead talk, and as they watched they did indeed learn more than they would have thought possible about their unknown victim.
Her height was pretty much as predicted and recorded as five feet exactly. Working from head to toe, they learned that the victim was not young and that she had cataracts in both eyes. The professor suggested that in order to cope with just everyday living she would have needed really strong glasses and asked if they had been found with her things.
Martin’s mask covered most of his face but he raised an eyebrow in Matt’s direction and Matt took the cue. ‘There were no glasses that I have been made aware of,’ he responded. ‘The only possibility could be that they were tucked into a pocket of the jacket. I know for certain there was no handbag, and that would have been the obvious place for glasses and such like.’
The victim’s nose had been almost completely eaten away, as had most of the skin on the face, but as they all looked it was becoming more obvious that she was quite an old lady. Her gums could be seen as her predators had gnawed through some of the flesh on her cheek. There was no evidence of teeth – perhaps she had worn dentures, but like her spectacles they had, so far, not been found.
Like a well-oiled machine the professor, supported by Mrs Williams, worked his way through all the major organs, taking samples of tissue and things like stomach content. All the while Prof. Moore called out his findings to be caught by an invisible recording machine and he moved to one side at intervals for his assistant to photograph his findings.
The ‘extras’ at the PM examination were not expected to ask questions, just watch in somewhat grisly fascination and occasionally respond to questions that were thrown at them. ‘Did you find a walking stick or any kind of walking frame, like a Zimmer, anywhere near the body?’ The Professor asked this question as he was examining the lower half of the body.
‘No, why do you ask?’ Martin responded with a quick question of his own.
‘Because this woman would not have walked far on her own. In fact this woman would have had difficulty in walking anywhere without help. She has advanced osteoarthritis in her knee joints, they are virtually bare bone with hardly a sign of cartilage left. Walking, if it had been possible at all, would have been unbearably painful. There’s a similar picture with her hip joints and I believe that for many years she would have been virtually chair-bound.
‘This level of osteoarthritis could suggest a very old lady and one who has carried an excess of weight around, but there is barely an ounce of fat on this body. The other cause of such an advanced state of OA could be congenital – so if she has any siblings or children they could be sufferers.’
As he spoke, the professor dissected pieces of tissue from the right hip and popped them into the specimen pots that Mrs Williams held out and then duly labelled.
‘There is no doubt that she had children, and I do mean more than one, as this uterus has definitely supported a number of pregnancies and shows signs of scarring commensurate with Caesarean section incisions. It’s not surprising that she needed to be delivered by CS as her pelvis is of an irregular shape – let’s hope any possible female offspring didn’t inherit her bone structure.’
‘Apart from her cataracts and the skeletal problems I have identified, there is nothing else that would have bothered this woman health-wise. Her heart, liver, and kidneys are in reasonably good shape for her age and apart from the osteoarthritis there is no underlying disease. All things taken into account I am going to put the age at around eighty – certainly not less than that.’
The professor had moved towards the top of the table and turned his attention on the area of the skull that had been injured. ‘This blow wouldn’t have killed you,’ he said to Matt who stood behind him and nearly a foot above him. ‘It’s not a massive injury, but her bones, including the bones of her skull, are more brittle than yours and I can confirm without doubt that this wound would have killed her.’
All three men peered closely at the lesion that was almost perfectly round and measured just a few inches in all directions. All three were wondering the same thing and it was Martin who voiced their thoughts. ‘What kind of weapon are we looking for? Obviously not a house-brick, but perhaps a pebble of some sort, or even the rounded end of her non-existent walking stick.’
‘I’ll leave that for you to determine,’ the Professor replied, as he picked up an oscillating saw and leaned over the skull.
Matt averted his eyes as he knew what was coming next. Had the professor noticed the action and was he getting soft in his old age? Surely not! He probably just wanted to finish the examination without further interruption and turned his head slightly towards Martin. ‘I need to open up the skull and take a look at the brain, but I think you have got everything you will get for now and you will want to get on with whatever it is detectives do.’