by Nick Oldham
The old man was in a terrible mess, something even more apparent now that he lay there naked and pitiful. The car had done a great deal of damage, crushing his chest, stomach, hips and upper legs; breaking numerous bones as though it had driven over a sack of twigs. The bullets had torn his head open.
Henry didn’t flinch. He had seen much violent death over the years, lost count of the number of times he’d inspected a cadaver in a morgue. It was an obvious part of being a detective specializing in murder investigation. He wasn’t immune to death, but neither was he upset by it — unless it touched him personally. The luxury of emotion had long since passed, probably since the first post-mortem he had ever attended as a nineteen-year-old rookie dealing with his first straightforward sudden death. He’d passed that test with flying colours — one of the top five dreaded incidents for all new cops — despite the evil machinations of his sergeant who had closed all the mortuary doors, turned up the heating to a swelter, and prayed that the sight and smell of a bloated, three-week-old corpse would cause him to hurl. It didn’t. The spectacle had never affected him in that way. He couldn’t pretend to be unmoved by the deaths of young people, but his professional detachment had given him inner strategies to deal with such rare occurrences.
The smell always bothered him, though. Never enough to make him physically sick, but enough to know he hated its musty clingy-ness, the way it stuck to clothes and on to nasal hairs for days on end.
But this dead man, mown down and shot, made his arse twitch with excitement. He knew this was no run of the mill Blackpool killing and the prospect of investigating it sent a thrill through him.
‘OK, guys, what’ve we got?’
Henry’s observations were curtailed by the arrival of the appropriately suited and booted Home Office pathologist, entering the mortuary blowing into a latex glove until it expanded like a cow’s udder, before fitting it.
Keira O’Connell was the locum pathologist standing in for the usual incumbent, Professor Baines, a man Henry knew well. His temporary replacement was far better looking, even though she looked exhausted and her hair was scraped severely back off her face and bunched into an untidy bun at the back of her head. And she was wearing a green surgical gown that did absolutely nothing for her figure.
Her steel-grey eyes regarded Henry as she fitted the second glove and then her facemask. He did not answer her question, which he guessed was rhetorical. O’Connell, like all good pathologists had already been out to the scene of the murder and knew as much as Henry.
She looked at the old man — not Henry — then glanced at the creepy-eyed mortuary assistant, who was precisely laying out the tools of the mortician’s trade in a perfect line on a contraption resembling a breakfast-in-bed tray that fitted on runners over the mortuary slab and could slide up and down as the pathologist worked.
‘Are we recording?’ she asked him.
‘Yes, boss… sound and vision on.’
‘OK,’ O’Connell said. Then, for the benefit of the recording equipment, spoke the time, day, date and location, and introduced herself and that she was about to perform a post-mortem on the body of an as yet unidentified male found earlier that evening on a street in Blackpool.
Henry glanced up at the video camera on the wall, and the one attached to the ceiling, both focused on the body.
O’Connell did a recap of what she already knew and gave some general observations such as, ‘Male, aged somewhere between sixty-five and seventy-five, five-eight tall — yet to be accurately measured — and perhaps eleven stones, again, yet to be accurately weighed. Slim build, well-nourished, white-skinned but possibly from a Mediterranean background…’ When she had finished her introduction, she walked slowly around the body, pointing out the various injuries. They were, she said, consistent with having been struck and then run over by a vehicle, possibly a heavy saloon car, and the head injury — massive trauma — consistent with having been shot twice. The obvious always had to be stated.
Henry watched and listened. He admired her professionalism and knowledge, and whilst his professional side nodded sagely at her findings, his less professional man-side cursed the fact he’d once screwed up his chance of ending up in the sack with her. A couple of years earlier, after a post-mortem, they had gone out for a drink. He’d been going through a rocky patch at work and instead of allowing her to talk, he made the fatal error of rambling self-pityingly about his own misfortunes and bored her half to death. When her eyes glazed over she made her excuses and left, leaving Henry mentally kicking the living crap out of himself. She probably didn’t even remember it — he hoped.
He glanced at the wall clock: 2.07 a.m. Then his eyes flicked back to the body.
‘… looks like an old bullet wound,’ O’Connell was saying, words that made Henry jerk upright. She was standing alongside the old man, lifting the body slightly and inspecting an area just below the rib cage on the right-hand side.
‘What?’ Henry blurted.
O’Connell raised her eyes over her mask, tilted her head. ‘It looks as though he’s been shot before.’
Henry scurried around the slab to inspect the discovery. Just below the rib cage there was an entry wound and an exit wound corresponding to it at the back. It looked as though a bullet had winged the old man through the soft tissue around that part of the body, near to the liver. ‘In here,’ she said, putting her forefinger on the entry, ‘out here,’ and she put her thumb on the exit, taking a lump of flesh between her fingers. ‘Obviously didn’t do too much damage, not much more than a flesh wound, though the exit is more of a mess than the entry, as they often are.’
‘I hadn’t noticed it,’ Henry admitted.
‘That’s why we have pathologists,’ she responded. Henry saw her ears rise as she smiled teasingly behind the mask.
‘How old?’
She shrugged. ‘Difficult to say exactly… it’s well-healed and it looks as though it was treated medically and well… maybe five years,’ she estimated.
Henry blinked, did the maths. ‘So if this guy is at the lower age you estimated, he got shot when he was sixty?’ His voice rose incredulously on the last few syllables. O’Connell nodded. ‘Not likely to be a war wound, then?’
‘Not unless he was in Dad’s Army.’
Henry stood upright. ‘Can we get that photographed?’
‘All part of the service.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And so we begin.’
Henry retreated a couple of steps, his forehead creased in thought by the wound in the man’s side as he considered the possibilities. ‘I’ll go bag and tag his clothing,’ he announced.
When the body had been stripped, the clothing had all been dropped into a plastic basket that was now in one corner of the room. He went across and picked it up, then carried it through to the mortuary office where he dumped it on a desktop. He nipped out to his car parked in the tiny car park at the back of the mortuary and brought back several paper bags, sacks, polythene bags, tags, and a notebook he always had with him — just in case. Most detectives are similarly equipped. You could never tell when some bloodstained clothing or other evidence might have to be seized. He left his portable fingerprinting kit in the boot. That job was going to go to a CSI.
Back inside he began the process of inspecting, recording, describing and bagging each item taken from the dead man, aware that care needed to be taken to preserve any evidence that might be useful, and that such evidence might well be invisible to the naked eye. All the stuff would be going to the forensic science lab for analysis sooner rather than later, so he had to do a good job and not compromise any evidence.
The first item he picked up was the man’s sports jacket, which to Henry’s untrained eye, looked quite an expensive one. All the clothing, on brief inspection, seemed to be good quality Italian. In an inside pocket was a slim, pigskin wallet, heavily stained with blood. Henry opened it carefully. There was a maker’s imprint in the leather and Henry guessed it was an Italia
n word, something to check on, perhaps. There was no form of ID in the wallet itself, just a hundred pounds in twenties, a hundred Euros, an old thousand-lira note and a faded, bloodied, photograph of a young child. A granddaughter, Henry hazarded. There was nothing else in the jacket, other than three keys on a ring, one mortise, one Yale, and the other possibly a padlock key.
Henry recorded the items, then carried on with what was left in the basket — trousers, socks, shoes (definitely Italian leather), a shirt, silk tie, a vest — and Henry made sure he noted each item and sealed it in the appropriate manner in the correct type of bag.
Finally he was left with two items, a watch and the old man’s walking stick. The watch was a heavy Rolex and Henry looked at it longingly. One day, he promised himself, and logged it, tagged and bagged it, then moved on to the stick. It was silver tipped with an intricately carved wooden handle. Henry held it up and his eyes skimmed it, but just as he was about to drop it into a polythene bag, something on the shaft caught his eye, about two-thirds of the way down from the handle. He frowned, then packed and did the paperwork for the stick.
The only things he hadn’t recorded were the keys.
He held them up on the simple ring and said, ‘But no ID,’ to himself. He scratched his ear thoughtfully.
An old man, out and about at night with no form of identification. How weird was that? Well-dressed — slightly dashing if anything — well nourished, a bit of money in the wallet. And a not-so-old bullet wound in the ribs.
Unless something turned up in the meantime — such as, ‘My old grandad’s not come home,’ and here Henry thought that unless grandad was a dirty stop-out, that ‘meantime’ might well have passed as it was now well into the early hours — one of the first tasks of the morning would be to flood the area with uniforms knocking on doors armed with an artist’s impression of the old man’s face, as a direct photo might have been a tad too gruesome to shove under peoples’ noses at breakfast time. Although Henry realized he was making an assumption, he’d lay odds that the guy was on his way home — but from where and to where?
Already the questions and ideas were starting to mount up and Henry’s mind, fatigued as it was, was starting to marshal these thoughts. He sat down at the desk in the mortuary office and jotted down a few ideas about the way forwards with the investigation in the notebook. He’d hardly had time to scribble down three headings on separate pages — ‘Victim’, ‘Location’, Offender’ — when someone came into the office and interrupted him.
It was DS Alex Bent, who tapped lightly on the glass door, even though it was open. He was drenched, looked exhausted. ‘Boss?’ he said, quietly but urgently.
Henry squinted at him. ‘I was just about to solve this murder by cracking the intricate medieval and religious code I found in this book,’ he said seriously, tapping his finger on the notebook.
‘Really?’ Bent said, Henry’s little joke flying right over his head.
‘Yeah — so this better be good.’ Henry closed the notebook, realizing it was completely the wrong time of day to have a stab at humour. ‘What?’
‘Well, you being the only SIO in spitting distance — do you want to turn out to another job?’
The shiny, perfectly sharpened dissecting knife was poised above the old man’s chest, ready to make the first incision: the classic cut down the middle of the body from the soft skin just below the Adam’s apple, all the way down to the pubes. From that first cut, the outer layers of skin and subcutaneous fat would be pared away to expose the ribcage which, depending on its condition, would be removed by use of shears, not unlike those found in a garden shed. It would then be lifted off like the lid on a square biscuit tin. Only difference was there wouldn’t be any goodies in this tin, but a squashed heart, lungs, liver and kidneys — organs that would then be hacked out for examination.
‘Don’t even think about it.’ Henry said mock dramatically as he swung through the mortuary door.
The pathologist, Keira O’Connell, paused, keeping the knife hovering just inches above the flesh like the Sword of Damocles. She inclined her head and peered over her facemask. ‘And why not?’ she asked, voice muffled. ‘Has this man actually died of natural causes, meaning a post-mortem is no longer necessary?’
‘Would it be possible to delay?’ Henry asked.
‘Give me one good reason.’
‘Another shooting’s come in — young lad up on Shoreside. No more details as yet, but I’d like you to come to the scene if possible.’
‘OK…’ O’Connell checked the clock and for the benefit of the recording equipment stated the time and date and that the PM was being suspended for the time being, then asked the mortuary technician to turn off the machine. He obeyed, using a remote control. ‘Not much detail you say?’ she said, stepping away from the slab and replacing the knife in its position in the line of tools, then removing her mask, ‘but you must have something?’ she asked Henry. She walked towards him, peeling the latex gloves off, then unpinning her hair, which she shook free and patted into place, even though the expensively cut bob tumbled out perfectly.
Something clogged up Henry’s throat as he replied, ‘No, nothing,’ dreamily.
Ten minutes later the body had been stored on a tray in the chiller, his belongings secured in a locker — Henry taking the key — and they were en route to the scene in his car.
‘You know, if this isn’t a murder, I’ll still have to claim a call-out fee.’
‘It’s a murder. I have enough faith in my officers for them to be right about that — so you’ll be handsomely recompensed for your troubles and you can continue to live in the style to which you’re accustomed. How much for tonight? A grand, I’m guessing.’
She guffawed. ‘I wish.’
They drove on in silence for a few minutes. Rain continued to lash down heavily, the windscreen wipers trudging manfully against the deluge that was like buckets of water being thrown repeatedly over the car. A strong wind was also getting up.
Henry glanced surreptitiously at his passenger — just as she was doing the same at the driver. Both shuffled uncomfortably as their eyes locked briefly.
‘You’re a superintendent now?’ O’Connell said. Henry nodded. ‘Well done. Last time we met I remember you being unceremoniously dumped off an investigation — the Asian woman who’d been set alight.’
Henry swallowed at the memory. Not one of the highlights of his topsy-turvy career.
‘Dave Anger, wasn’t it?’ O’Connell went on. ‘Your boss at the time? He’d got it in for you. Your nemesis, I think you called him.’
‘Yeah,’ Henry growled and added creepily, ‘but vengeance was mine.’ He raised his eyebrows.
‘And we went out for a drink.’
‘Mm — and I blew it, as I recall.’ So she did remember. He squirmed.
‘You did, rather. All me, me, me.’
‘C’est la me,’ he shrugged. They’d reached the outskirts of Shoreside. He drove to the front of the shop parade and pulled up. There was a lot of police activity.
‘And I was in a relationship then, and you were, and then I wasn’t, and you were… and then I wasn’t…’ Her voice dried up and he yanked up the handbrake. She gulped. ‘Still not,’ she said and gave Henry a meaningful look.
‘Just my luck,’ Henry said. He paused, sighed, then clambered out into the rain again. He was almost thankful for the drenching which had the instantaneous effect of dousing his easily aroused ardour. Just the thought of what might have been had been enough to trigger numerous snapshots in his mind’s eye of the ways in which a pretty female pathologist might be naughty. He tugged his hood over his head, banished the images, and dashed over to Alex Bent, who, having made to the scene ahead of him, was waiting under the awning that covered the walkway in front of the shops.
O’Connell was right behind, having flicked open her mini-umbrella. She also carried a medical kit with her.
The trio made their way to the rear of the shop parade — a
lthough the term parade was a bit of a euphemism. The only two shops left on the block were the chippy and a newsagent. The others — formerly a hairdresser, bakery and launderette — had closed, were ‘steeled’ up, rather than boarded, victims of the credit crunch and the encroachment of vandalism and intimidation from Shoreside yobs.
Henry’s face ticked uncomfortably with the memory of the last serious incident he’d dealt with on the tract of ground behind the shops, which was part car park, part rubble heap, part fly tip. A wild young man had been stabbed to death in a gang feud, a case that not reached a satisfactory conclusion.
Henry had lost count of the number of crimes committed in this area. This no-man’s land between civilization and the jungle that was the Shoreside estate. People crossed it at their peril, night or day, to get from the shops to Song Thrush Way. And that did not include the incidents that had taken place in the alley itself. Gangs congregated and sorted out their differences, drug deals were done, rapists and flashers lurked, robbers waited, hiding patiently for their next victim… and occasionally, people were murdered. Henry was very much aware of the local name for the alley.
It was such a hot spot that it had the unusual honour of having its own incident location ID in the police logging system. Unusual because most incident locations related to large areas, such as council wards, not mini-no-go areas. Recognizing the problems, the police were constantly badgering the council to get their finger out, but lack of money and willpower were big issues.
‘Looks like he was crossing from the chippy to the alley,’ Bent was saying as the three of them stepped out of the light and walked towards the scene, heads tipped against the rain. ‘Chips everywhere, apparently. Haven’t seen myself, yet. Obviously met whoever killed him just short of the alley and was shot in the head… apparently.’