by Ford, P. F.
‘I suppose that might be quicker.’
Murphy picked up a report, turned to face Slater, and began to read.
‘There’s not much to it really,’ he said, scanning the pages. ‘There was a contusion to the back of his head, which was consistent with hitting his head when he fell backwards. He had a broken rib that could also have been consistent with a fall. When I went inside, I found he’d had a heart attack which was brought on by the fall.’
‘Is that it?’ asked Slater.
‘That’s enough to confirm his accidental death,’ said Murphy, curtly. ‘And that’s what I was asked to do.’
‘How bad was this contusion?’
‘Bad enough to cause a blood clot at the back of his head.’
‘Would that have killed him?’
‘Untreated it probably would have, eventually,’ said Murphy.
‘Wouldn’t it take more than a fall to cause that?’ asked Slater.
‘What exactly are you getting at?’
‘Were there any other bruises?’
‘Well yes,’ said Murphy. ‘Of course there were, but this was an old man. Old people often bruise very easily.’
‘Where were these bruises?’ Slater felt like he was wading through treacle.
Murphy sighed heavily and thumbed through the report.
‘There were bruises to the forearms and shoulders and, of course, there was a huge bruise where the rib was broken,’ he said, closing the report.
‘Were these old bruises?’ asked Slater.
This time, Murphy tutted loudly as he reopened the report.
‘No,’ he said. ‘They were very recent and hardly showed on the skin surface. I assumed they would have been caused by the fall.’
Slater felt a familiar tingle.
‘Suppose I was an old man, and I discovered someone had broken into my house, and then this someone turned on me and tried to punch me in the face. So I put my hands up to protect myself.’ He raised his arms as if to defend himself. ‘Would those punches bruise my forearms?’
‘Err, yes. I suppose they would,’ Murphy said, looking uneasy.
‘What if my attacker then punched me, or maybe even kicked me, in the ribs? I’m old and slow so my arms are still up to protect my head. Could that kick break one of my ribs?’
‘Easily,’ said Murphy. ‘Old bones are brittle bones.’
‘And then, while I’m gasping with pain from my broken rib, my attacker grabs my shoulders and shoves me back out of his way. Would I hit my head hard enough to cause a blood clot?’
‘But I was told it was accidental death from a fall,’ Murphy said, defensively. ‘I’ve been rushed off my feet here. And anyway, I’m not a forensic pathologist.’
‘Whoa, slow down, doc,’ said Slater. ‘I’m not blaming you. You found what you were asked to find. I’m just offering an alternative means by which those injuries could have occurred. And I might be wrong.’
‘But I should have seen that possibility too. I should have been pointing it out to you, not the other way round.’
Slater thought the pathologist was right, but he didn’t feel rubbing it in was going to achieve anything, so he said nothing. Murphy turned back to his desk and Slater thought their discussion was over, when the doctor turned round again, holding something in his hands.
‘In view of what you’ve just said, you’d better have this.’ He handed a clear plastic bag to Slater.
‘What’s this?’ Slater asked, holding up the bag and peering at it. Inside was a scrap of paper with some numbers written in biro.
‘I didn’t report it to anyone, because it didn’t seem important,’ said Murphy. ‘When he was brought in, his right hand was clenched into a fist. When I opened his hand, this dropped out. Is it important?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ Slater sighed and studied the piece of paper for a moment.
‘Any suggestions?’ he asked, turning to Murphy and indicating the bag.
‘Well, you’re the detective.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Slater, ‘but that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed an opinion.’
‘But I’m not qualified-’ began Murphy.
‘I’m not asking you to solve the case,’ interrupted Slater. ‘And you won’t get fired if you’re wrong.’
He placed the bag down flat on the desk in front of them.
‘Come on, Eamon,’ he said, encouragingly. ‘You must have an opinion, right?’
‘Well,’ said the pathologist, reluctantly, ‘now we’ve decided there was a struggle it changes everything doesn’t it? So how about during that struggle, our victim was holding a sheet of paper in his hand. His attacker pushed him away and snatched the sheet of paper, but didn’t get all of it.’
He pointed to the edges of the paper.
‘If you look here, you can see it’s been torn.’
‘That adds up,’ agreed Slater. ‘I wonder what the numbers mean,’ he added, thinking aloud.
‘It’s not the complete sequence,’ said Murphy. ‘If you look to the left side you can see there’s half a digit missing. It could be a three, or maybe an eight. And it’s quite possible there are more digits missing from the right side. There’s no way to tell.’
‘So it could be a phone number or a bank account number,’ Slater mused.
‘Not my field I’m afraid,’ said Murphy, with a wry smile.
‘It’s not mine either,’ said Slater, ‘but it could prove to be a key piece of evidence. Well done for holding onto it, Eamon.’
‘You need to get this to the Chief Smurf,’ said Murphy. ‘This is more his field. He’ll figure it out for you.’
‘Ha!’ Slater smiled broadly. ‘So you’ve seen the new suits, too.’
Chapter 7
Slater thought his boss, DCI Bob Murray, seemed to have aged noticeably over the last couple of months, and he looked particularly tired today. Murray had never been one to complain, but Slater knew he was getting sick and tired of having to spend all his time playing politics and balancing budgets. It went with the job, of course, and anyone achieving such a rank these days knew what they were letting themselves in for, but it wasn’t like that when Murray had made his way up through the ranks. Slater knew he found it frustrating spending almost all his time filling forms – he would have been frustrated, too.
There had been a whisper that Murray had expressed an interest in the latest round of voluntary redundancies, but Slater didn’t know if it was true. He found it hard to imagine Murray anywhere else but behind his desk.
‘So,’ growled Murray. ‘What the bloody hell’s going on at Canal Street?’
‘It’s beginning to look as if Mr Winter may have been murdered for something on his computer,’ said Slater.
‘Do we have any idea what it’s all about?’
‘No, Guv. I’m afraid not,’ said Slater. ‘Whatever it was must have been on the hard disk.’
‘So why come back and trash the place?’
‘I don’t think it was the same person,’ said Slater. ‘I think the night he was killed he disturbed someone, probably a man, who then took the hard disk from the PC. This time we’ve got some fingerprints, and Becks is sure they’re a woman’s. We’ve also got a size ten footprint, and we might get lucky identifying his car.’
‘How many women do you know with size ten feet?’ snorted Murray.
‘Yeah,’ said Slater. ‘I know. It doesn’t add up really, does it? Maybe there’s a man and a woman working together.’
Murray swore quietly.
‘This is just what we don’t need right now,’ he said bitterly. ‘We haven’t exactly been covering ourselves in glory recently, and now you tell me we might have a murder on our hands. And if we have, we’ve given the murderer two weeks’ start. Oh, and we’ve also allowed the victim to be cremated. Wonderful.’
Slater bridled at the criticism, but he chose not to respond to it. He could only guess at the kind of pressure the old man was under. If Murray was in this
sort of mood, it would be better to ride the storm carefully, not go into battle.
‘Maybe we need to focus a few more resources on the problem,’ he suggested quietly. ‘At the moment it’s just me.’
‘I know, David, I know,’ Murray said, heaving a sigh. ‘But you’ll only have a small team, and you’ll have to keep on top of anything else you’re working on. I’ll speak to DS Norman and he can join you on the same condition. I’ll assign Jolly to work with you, and that’s it. It’s all I can spare right now.’
Slater considered it was hardly enough people to call a team, but again he thought better of complaining.
‘Of course,’ continued Murray, ‘if Biddeford was still here you could have had him too.’
The implication wasn’t lost on Slater, but again he resisted the urge to answer back. What had happened hadn’t been his fault, and he resented Murray suggesting it was. He had just been doing his job, after all.
DC Steve Biddeford was the best young detective they had at Tinton, but after an unfortunate misunderstanding in a case they were working on a few months ago, he had first accused Slater of being a sex pest, and then requested a transfer. Murray didn’t approve of people who rushed in without thinking, nor did he like people who disrupted the harmony among his staff, and so, despite Biddeford’s attempts to apologise and rescind his request, he had found himself shipped out of Tinton.
Even Slater had appealed to Murray, but the boss had been adamant – Biddeford had to learn his lesson. He had, however, drawn the line at a full-blown transfer, and instead arranged for Biddeford to be seconded to a bigger station. He would, hopefully, return to them as a much more rounded individual with additional experience and training that he couldn’t get here at Tinton.
‘That’s okay, Boss,’ said Slater. ‘A small team will do just fine.’
‘They’re all yours from first thing tomorrow,’ said Murray, turning back to his paperwork. ‘Just keep me informed, please.’
As Murray bent his head down to study yet another report, Slater realised the meeting was over.
‘Yes, Boss,’ he said, heading for the door.
‘Oh by the way,’ said Murray, just as Slater reached the door. ‘Have you ever considered promotion?’
‘What, me?’ asked a surprised Slater.
‘Why not? It’s a natural progression from DS to DI.’
‘To be honest, I’ve not given it much thought,’ said Slater, turning back to face his boss.
‘Well, perhaps you should,’ said Murray. ‘I’m not going to be here forever, and when I do go it’s quite possible they’ll take the opportunity to change the structure here, and that means there will almost certainly be vacancies created.’
Slater didn’t know what to say to that so he just stared at Murray.
‘Give it some thought,’ said Murray, returning to his paperwork once more.
‘Right,’ said Slater. ‘I will.’
Chapter 8
Next morning, the two man, and one woman, team had assembled in the canteen for a breakfast briefing. It had been Norman’s idea, of course, to eat breakfast while Slater brought him up to speed with the case.
‘Right then, this is what we’ve got so far,’ said Slater. ‘On Tuesday the fifth, eleven days ago, Jane was called to investigate when an elderly man, Mr Dylan Winter, wasn’t answering his door. When she gained access to the house, Jane eventually found Mr Winter lying dead on a bedroom floor. There was no sign of any forced entry or any sort of struggle, and nothing appeared to be missing apart from a spare back door key and his dog.
‘There was no sign of any struggle or anything missing so I thought it was just a case of another sad, lonely, old person dying alone. And that was it, until yesterday. Jane looked in to see if the dog had turned up, narrowly missing someone who fled through the back gate. She noticed the shed had been broken into, and returning to the house, she then found it had also been entered, and it appears a print in a frame was stolen.
‘Then, yesterday afternoon, Forensics told me a couple of things that make me feel we may need to ask some serious questions about Mr Winter’s death. First they found a set of fingerprints they can’t account for, and second, there was no hard disk in Mr Winter’s computer.’
He stopped for a couple of moments to take a mouthful of coffee and let Norman absorb this information.
‘Murder?’ said Norman. ‘Just because his PC got broken, it’s murder?’
‘Forensics say there are traces of paint, dust etc. that suggest the PC was taken apart very recently on the table in Mr Winter’s office. The hard disk was taken out, the insides smashed up, and then it was put back together and placed back on the floor. From the outside you’d never know it had been damaged,’ explained Slater. ‘Taken in isolation that’s not such a big deal, but now we’ve had another look at the PM, the pathologist thinks his findings could be interpreted in another way.’
‘So how do we think he died now?’
‘This is just a guess, but I think he may have disturbed an intruder and then been attacked and pushed out of the way. His injuries are consistent with possibly being punched and kicked in the ribs, then being pushed backwards, banging his head against the wall,’ Slater said. ‘The pathologist agrees with me.’
‘So not the work of your average local house-breaker, then.’ Norman looked thoughtful.
‘There is a possible clue in a small scrap of paper the pathologist found in Mr Winter’s hand. It could be part of a phone number, but without the rest of it to match up it’s not much help.’
‘Maybe it was someone who isn’t from around here,’ Jolly said, tentatively. ‘Perhaps he was working for someone else.’
‘A contract killer sent to kill a little old man? That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?’ asked Norman.
‘You’re assuming he came to kill Mr Winter,’ said Jolly. ‘What if he was just supposed to steal the hard disk? What if his death was an accident? Suppose Mr Winter surprised him and he just lashed out with no intent to kill him?’
‘Now, that’s an interesting theory,’ Norman said, smiling.
‘It makes sense,’ agreed Slater. ‘If it was just some regular local burglar the house would probably have been thoroughly turned over, but this was a very specific, neat, tidy job. There was plenty of stuff that would have been worth pinching if the intruder was just looking to make a few quid, but it looks as though none of it was touched.’
‘But I thought in the second break-in the house was thoroughly turned over?’ said Norman.
‘Yeah, it was,’ agreed Slater. ‘But Mr Winter was killed during the first break-in and that time the house was left damned near spotless. All that seems to have been taken was the hard disk from the PC.
‘Do we know what he was looking for?’ asked Norman.
‘No,’ said Slater. ‘Not a clue, but it must have been on that hard disk.’
‘So we need to figure out what Mr Winter had found out that someone else might kill him for. But if they already had the hard disk, where does this second break-in come into it?’
‘That’s a good question.’ Slater rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘But I don’t know the answer I’m afraid.’
‘Maybe what they were looking for wasn’t on the disk?’ suggested Jolly.
‘What about the person you nearly caught?’
‘I was nowhere near catching him, to be honest,’ said Jolly. ‘If he hadn’t slammed the gate shut I wouldn’t even have known he was there.’
‘We don’t know for sure if the second intruder has anything to do with the original crime’, said Slater. ‘But for now I think we have to assume it’s all related. And now at least we’ve got some fingerprints and a footprint, from a size ten trainer. It’s a start.’
‘Probably not a woman then.’ Norman smiled.
‘But the fingerprints they found are a woman’s,’ said Slater.
‘Two people?’ suggested Norman.
‘Luckily for us, Jane had the bright id
ea of making a note of all the car registrations in the street,’ continued Slater, looking in her direction. ‘She’s going to focus on that today. We might just get lucky and find our intruder that way.’
Jolly nodded her head in agreement.
‘Where are we gonna start?’ asked Norman.
‘We need to learn about Mr Winter, so we’re going to see his solicitor, John Hunter,’ said Slater. ‘He seems to be the only person who might know something about him.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But first I’ll let you eat your breakfast.’
‘Good idea. My stomach is starting to think my throat’s been cut,’ Norman said, digging in to the mound of food in front of him.
Slater had figured the solicitor wouldn’t start work before 9am, so he and Norman enjoyed a leisurely breakfast in the canteen. They were just finishing up and Slater was thinking about leaving when the door swung open and a young PC entered. He stood in the doorway frowning as he looked around. He was obviously searching for someone and as Slater made eye contact with him, the frown vanished to be replaced by a look of recognition.
‘I knew we should have left five minutes ago,’ muttered Slater to Norman, as the newcomer made his way across the canteen.
‘I’m innocent,’ said Norman. ‘So whatever it is, it must be your fault.’
‘Err, excuse me, sir,’ said the PC to Slater. ‘The duty sergeant asked me to give you this.’
He handed over a sheet of paper. As Slater read the notes, Norman’s phone broke into a tinny rendition of Blondie’s ‘Call Me’. Slater and the younger man exchanged glances.
‘What the hell’s that?’ the young PC asked, wincing.
‘A crappy phone making a mess of a ringtone,’ Slater said, grimacing at the racket.
‘Thanks for this,’ he added, indicating the paper, then nodded towards Norman and his squawking phone. ‘I should escape now if I were you, before it gets even worse.’
‘I’ll do that,’ the young PC said, grinning. ‘Thank you, sir.’
He turned on his heel and headed off. A moment later, Norman placed his phone back in his pocket.