Who Killed Anne-Marie?

by CM Thompson

  Colvin tries not to inhale, as the officer moves to guard outside, sealing Colvin inside with the overpowering smell of blood, alcohol and something else. She can’t blame the officer for being eager to leave. Colvin prefers silence to nervous or nosey chirping anyway.

  Directly in front of Colvin, just in front of the stairs, is the main focus point of the hallway: a large, mostly dried, bloodstain, littered with paramedics’ debris. The stain is accompanied by matching splatters and smears. There is no doubting that the victim had lain here, unmoving, for some time. This is the point of impact and there will be nothing momentous and long lasting there to mark her last moments, no cracked floor tile or indentation, nothing more than a pool of blood and a ruined stairway carpet.

  Colvin takes out her notepad and camera. It has never hurt to take her own photos. She trusts the forensics team completely, they take more professional photos than her own point and shoots, but they focused more on the crime, the blood, the evidence. She likes to have a few more reminders of the victim and the accused, if possible, anything that hinted of their own personalities. A home tends to be a good representation of people’s marriages and their mental states, not just from what was in their living space but also what is absent. The forensics teams didn’t need to know who the victims are, but she does. Photographing, making notes, doing these things makes her pay closer attention and it helps her to mentally keep her cases separate.

  Colvin takes a few upwards pictures of the dirty cream stairway carpet, speckled with red, and moves downwards to photograph the blood, the forensics’ markers, the paramedics’ debris. The paramedics’ wrappers suggest that maybe she had still been alive when they arrived or at least still warm. That someone had tried to save her. Annoyingly it would also mean that numerous people had moved the victim before the forensic team had started their photographs.

  The hallway is bare, apart from the red speckles, the walls a grimy green in colour. No family pictures, no works of “art”. No hints in this hallway of the two people who had lived in this house. Just a dying plant placed forlornly next to the front door.

  The living room is also bland. No outstanding features, nothing but white walls and cheap wood flooring. The room’s main features are a green sofa, sun-faded, stained and dotted with cigarette burns, plus an expensive looking television. Already she can guess at the main priorities in this house. There is a noticeable change in odour in this room; the smell of the staircase still lingers but there is a stronger smell of grease and spilt beer. She looks down at the imprint in the sofa cushions, someone has spent of lot of time sitting there. Next to the sofa is a badly repaired side table. There is nothing to make this room look pretty or stylish or even homely.

  She moves into the kitchen. The walls are a garish yellow. A dirty frying pan and several cracked plates sit in the sink, adding power to the greasy smell. Some saucepans sit on a worktop, gathering dust. A fruit bowl in the centre of a worktop contains three yellowing apples that were no doubt bought with good intentions. She takes a photo of the fridge and notes the empty freezer had been turned off, quite some time ago. There are a few bottles of beer in the fridge and some take-away containers. So far all she can deduct is that the people in this house didn’t take care of themselves or their possessions.

  A small pile of opened post lies on the kitchen table. Colvin flicks through – there are the usual bills, but nothing issuing a final demand, a few advertisements and take-away menus. No letters from jilted lovers or angry spouses, nothing to make this easy. She looks out of the kitchen window onto an equally neglected garden. The cobwebs around the kitchen door are undisturbed, there is no point going out there.

  Time to go upstairs.

  She takes a wide step carefully around the blood pool, then steps over the bloodstained step and slowly and carefully climbs up the staircase. When the forensics team were here, they had the job of photographing any stain that looked even slightly suspicious. She does not envy them. They didn’t just have to photograph each stain, they also had to take diligent notes of each stain’s shape and size, what the stain was (if known) and what item had been stained. Each stain has to be given its own marker and number. Colvin is betting the numbers ran quite high in this house. She notes the random holes in the carpet, where samples had been cut away. These photographs and notes are helpful in deciding how the wound was inflicted, the possible weapon used and whether the injured was moving when hit, or if they moved after being hit. The carpet makes it hard to tell, as the blood soaking into the fabric has distorted its shape. Colvin could only describe the blood splatters here as a light rain of blood. Someone had moved around quite a bit, whilst bleeding heavily. She is trying not to form a judgement just yet, but the sight of so much blood makes her feel angry and sick.

  On the upstairs hallway, she stares, mouth wide open in disbelief, at the blood stains criss-crossing the carpet, the splatters and dents in the hallway walls. Numerous fist-shaped dents. A dark feeling shudders through her body as she remembers similar cases where she has seen similar holes. She takes a deep breath and steps into the master bedroom. Colvin starts with the camera, trying to understand it all. She has seen rooms this badly trashed before, quite a few times, but normally it was when unsupervised teenagers and alcohol were involved and normally they had left something standing, but this room is completely wrecked.

  Click, she focuses in on the object closest to her. Click. It’s a wedding photo in a bent silver frame, broken glass falling out as she picks it up. Click. She takes a long look at the picture of the crumbled newlyweds. Click. She takes a photo of the faintly smiling, newly married couple. Click. Already hating the sight of the groom. Here is the point of impact where it must have collided into the wall. Click. Taking a small chunk of stripy wallpaper and plaster with it. Then she moves on to photograph the alarm clock, which will never wake anyone up again. It only just missed the dirty window. Click. She moves across to look outside. She has to be careful not to step on the broken fragments of light bulb or the remains of the lamp. Click. Moving aside another voile curtain, she can see an overview of the garden. It is as she expects, overgrown grass, a forlorn washing line and a rusty barbecue set in the corner. She turns back to the room, photographing a bedside novel, How To Love Again, which has been trodden on, its spine for ever broken, a droplet of blood adding to its cover. Click. The wardrobes, not destroyed, being too heavy to throw. Click. There is little point in throwing throw pillows but they had been thrown anyway. A bent comb. Colvin scans the wreckage carefully but can see no trail of blood drops in here, just a couple of random drops. A connecting en suite had been spared the onslaught. Colvin notes the single toothbrush and toothpaste next to a dirty sink and the toilet seat firmly up. Nothing seems out of place in this small en suite, no blood spots or splats. She moves on.

  A garish green bathroom is next. She peers into and photographs a dirty shower and a cheap bottle of shampoo. Apple flavour. The forensic team had the unpleasant job of documenting the toilet, which is flaked with vomit and smeared with blood. Colvin takes a few quick photos then rapidly moves away. The blood spots in here indicate that the bleeder came in, then they stayed in front of the toilet, being sick, smearing blood around the toilet. The evidence indicates only one person came in here, and they walked in, they didn’t run by the looks of the spots, then walked out again. Some of the blood smears are at a height that suggests a hand may have leant on the walls for support as they came in. She thinks this bleeder is the same person as the victim but is unsure. She follows the blood tracks out of the bathroom and into the last room, maybe she will find more answers in there.

  The last room feels like a suicide note laid bare. It has been decorated in depression, intertwined with gloominess, the heavy scent of alcohol, dust, body odour and urine. The room is lit only by one bare overhanging bulb, still turned on. The light from the room’s only window has been completely shut out by dusty blinds, curiously framed by curtains with a childish blue elephant moti
f. These curtains now hang limp, almost completely pulled off their rings by a bloody hand.

  Glass shards, representations from all of the major spirits bottles, border the room’s floor, having been thrown with some force into the dented walls. Everywhere Colvin looks is glass, glass and more bloody glass. Colvin is feeling slightly tipsy just breathing in the alcohol fumes. A surviving empty bottle lies half in, half out of a kicked over bin, complete with a bloody footprint. Colvin moves closer to the bed, glass crunching under her feet. The bed is crumpled and stained, with a smell so strong that Colvin has to check that someone isn’t still sleeping there. Just in case.

  Curiously, like the elephant curtains, the dirty duvet has a faded pink polka dot motif, another thing that felt childish and out of place. Next to the bed is a splintered, overturned bedside table, haloed by spilt pills and more broken glass. Colvin picks up one the pills, paracetamol judging by the stamp. Colvin turns, finally noticing the writing on the wall. A wobbly hand had written Fuck you Daniel on the chipped, baby blue walls with a marker pen, then hand stamped it with more blood.

  In the centre of a room stands a mostly empty tequila bottle, its lid off, looking as if someone has left it and will come back for it at any moment, another full bottle of vodka also faithfully waiting close by. Judging by the numerous blood spots on the wooden floor and the blood smears on the tequila bottles, she thinks someone sat here for a while, just drinking or possibly they had continued throwing the empty bottles at the walls, or even emptying any remaining bottles and then throwing them at the walls. It is hard to tell but either the two rooms were wrecked by two different people or the person started in the first bedroom, then came into this one. The drops and smears on the floor suggests that they moved around a lot in this room, cutting open feet and hands on the glass shards as they operated. The alcohol would explain why they continued smashing despite their injuries. It will be a nightmare waiting for all those samples of blood to come back.

  Colvin finds it hard to believe that this is it, that there is nothing else to show that in this house lived two married people, loving each other. Everything in this house feels lonely and separated, hinting at people barely there. This was a house, not a home, for the Mills, and to her this felt like long-term abuse and neglect, and not just to the house. What she has seen so far has only made things more complicated: someone or some people had been drinking heavily in this house, and an accident could have happened today resulting in the victim’s death, but the Fuck you Daniel in here and the smashed ornaments in the main bedroom, they all suggest a fight, a very angry fight, a possible motif for murder. Then the smaller bedroom just screamed of suicide and despair. Something had been building for a while in this house. Either way the survivor has a lot of explaining to do.

  Downstairs, the front door loudly swings open, intruding on the concentrated silence. “Sam?” a voice calls.

  Colvin takes one last look then carefully treads back downstairs to meet her partner, DCI Nicolas Grimm.

  If Anne-Marie could still smell, she would smell the sharp scent of cleaning fluid, barely masking other rotting smells, including herself. The kind of smells we are normally forbidden to mention in polite conversation. If she could still see, she would think she is in another hospital, but she is not. Thankfully she can no longer feel, because she is not going to like what happens next.

  The staff confirm her identity then carefully strip away her clothes, bundling the dirty garments into waiting bags, carefully labelled by police officers. The forensic pathologist begins the arduous task of photographing, examining and swabbing every single one of her bruises, abrasions and lacerations. The pathologist carefully notes the size and shape of each wound, then swabs it, looking for fibres, flecks of paint and other evidence. They find quite a lot of glass, clear glass, green glass, brown glass, even a shard of a blue glass. The glass shards are lodged in a number of wounds and to their horror, these wounds are definitely pre-mortem. They brush her knotty short hair very carefully, wincing as even more glass falls down into awaiting containers. Then from beneath Anne-Marie’s fingernails, small traces of flesh are removed. The autopsy is going to take a few more hours and the analysis and testing a few weeks.

  Questions are asked. Did she put her hands out as she fell or was she already dead? It is not dinner conversation, the present officers never talk to their families about how to spot the difference between the marks on someone who has fallen whilst alive against someone pushed when already dead. It is sickening what some people will do for insurance money. This body is difficult because of the scale of the wounds. The questions have become harder – does that head wound suggest she had been hit by anything except the stairs? And most importantly, what has caused those circular dark bruises around her wrists?

  “You should return tomorrow, when the lividity has settled. Sometimes then, we see even more bruising, especially if they were caused just before death,” one of the mortuary technicians tells the police officers. “These bruises,” she gestures to the wrists, “all show signs of inflammation, meaning that they were inflicted before she died.”

  The police officers nod, taking even more meticulous notes. The technician is thinking of a similar case, another frail lady, another tragic “accident”. They had almost signed it off as such, but decided to do one last check before releasing the body. To their horror and disgust, they had found ten very distinctive finger sized bruises, inflicted just before death, on the victim’s back. Bruises the partner had no explanation for.

  One thing they could be sure of, judging by the smell on her clothes, judging by the faint, sickly sweet odour that wafts as they cut open her internal organs, Anne-Marie had been wearing the smell of alcohol like a cheap perfume. When she had died, she had definitely been pickled.

  Chapter Seven

  Daniel can barely think straight. His wife is dead, that’s something he didn’t expect, not today, not ever, despite his hopes and fantasies. He expected her to be the thorn in his side for a lifetime, just to spite him. The world could end and she would still be at his side, screeching for a beer. No matter what happened, she would be there.

  But suddenly she is gone and he doesn’t know how to feel, he has forgotten how to feel anything, other than empty. He has felt nothing since he found her, lying at the bottom of the stairs, just like before, except this time she wasn’t screaming for a plaster. She wasn’t gripping him tightly in her claws, shrieking. She was quiet, serene, bloody and very dead. It was all his fault. It wasn’t his fault.

  He doesn’t feel sad, doesn’t even feel the occasional flashes of anger that have been a constant norm in the last year. He knows he should be feeling a little humiliated but doesn’t. When he arrived at the police station, hours ago, the officer unemotionally ordered him to stand on a large sheet of paper, then made him remove his shoes and then his clothes. The officer took everything away “for processing”. Gone were his favourite jeans and shirt. Gone were his socks with the pizza motif. In return he has been given a pair of custody shoes and clothes. The custody clothes don’t feel right and the shoes are plimsolls. Plimsolls, the last time he wore plimsolls was at school. Any other time these plimsolls would have reignited the old feelings of shame and humiliation, but right now he is a worm and life is a bird.

  He suspects that the police are laughing at him right now. Isn’t that what police do? On crime shows, the detectives were always making wisecracks about their victims and the murderers. No doubt they were holding up his favourite jeans and making some wise-ass remark about his weight. Fuckers. They had probably been in his house too, criticising the décor, his wife, his everything. Judging him. Finally a flash of anger cuts through the nothingness, overwhelming him. They should leave him alone, he just wants to punch all those fuckers and scream that he didn’t do anything wrong.

  He can’t keep control of his anger today, the argument opened up a whole vault of his repressed anger. The anger that has been building up for years keeps gushing out,
like a nosebleed on a hot day. His stomach rumbles. The argument meant that he missed lunch, and now Anne-Marie is making him miss dinner. Her last laugh. He doesn’t expect anyone here to offer him food, despite the fact he pays their salary. They could use some of his taxes to get him a sandwich, couldn’t they, just one measly sandwich? Not that he feels hungry or could eat, but the gesture would be nice, someone acknowledging he was there and actually treating him like a human being would be nice.

  What is taking them so long?

  He has seen no one for the past hour. The last person was some sour-faced officer offering him the chance to call his lawyer. His lawyer! Like he could afford his own personal lawyer and had them on speed dial! What does he need a lawyer for anyway? That’s what the guilty ones do, isn’t it? They immediately start calling their lawyers. Because lawyers aren’t expensive and he is just so rich, he can afford anything he wants. When their questions start, they will just be prodding him, waiting for him to say, “I want my lawyer.” Then they will know that they have hit a nerve and to keep probing. No, he isn’t going to waste good money on a lawyer. He can prove he is innocent without one. It is just a case of saying the right thing, at the right time. He can do that.

  Deep breath, what is taking them so fucking long? Another deep breath to stay calm, he needs to appear calm, co-operative, as co-operative as possible. It’s not like he wants to go home. Home is never going to feel like home again. Not that it has felt like home in a long time.

  Outside the room, Colvin and Grimm are watching him. They have already decided that Grimm should lead on the interview. Grimm is of a similar age to Daniel and might be able to create an us-lads-together vibe; it might make him relax a little, and if they get lucky, slip his guard occasionally. Colvin is going to observe and take notes – she will watch Daniel’s facial expressions and movements carefully, writing down any questions that Grimm might miss. She will ask a couple of questions, just to see how Daniel reacts to talking to her – will he sneer at her? Will he be dismissive? Or treat her indifferently? Or perhaps he will respond more positively to her. In which case, she will take over the questions. Grimm and Colvin have been partners for over a year now, there is no longer a power struggle between them … most of the time.