by Adam Croft
‘Heart attack?’
‘Doesn’t look like it. Trauma to the head. Frozen solid, apparently. No idea how long he’s been there.’
‘At least fifteen minutes, judging by the weather out there this morning.’
Dexter chuckled. ‘I don’t fancy it much either. I presume it’ll be going up to EMSOU, but thought I should let you know, anyway.’
It was normal for major crimes to be taken on by the East Midlands Special Operations Unit, but this was far from canon, and Caroline’s background as a DCI with the Metropolitan Police before coming to Rutland meant she was always keen to take on cases for herself.
‘Actually, isn’t Harringworth in Northants?’ she asked.
‘The village is. Most of the viaduct is, too, but the northern part’s in Rutland. Guess where our man is.’
‘Typical. How far in?’
‘Barely two hundred and fifty metres inside the county, believe it or not.’
‘How inconsiderate.’
‘I know. Still, it makes it even more fun to drag the EMSOU boys down from Derby or Nottingham for it, eh?’
Caroline thought for a moment. ‘Actually, no. Don’t do that.’
3
‘Are you going to keep giving me the side-eye the whole way there?’ Caroline asked as she turned off the A47 at Glaston and headed towards Seaton.
‘I’m not,’ Dexter replied.
‘You are. I can see you. Don’t worry, you’re not going to catch me nodding off or blacking out. I’m perfectly capable of carrying on. If only you knew the hoops I had to jump through just to get into the office again.’
‘And I know you’d find a way to jump through them, regardless.’
‘I’m fine, Dex. I’ve had the exact amount of time off the doctor suggested, and I’m back at work with the blessing of my superior officers, who, I might just mention, one should always listen to.’
Dexter raised his hands as if to surrender. ‘Alright. You’re the boss.’
A few minutes later, Caroline’s car came to a stop on the B672, a hundred yards or so short of the viaduct. The whole road had been closed, with an outer cordon formed to keep people away from the crime scene.
Caroline and Dexter got out of the car, feeling the bitter chill hit them the moment they did. Neither of them wanted to spend any longer out there than they had to. They showed their ID cards to PC Vickie Hughes, the officer manning the entry point, and asked her what she knew.
‘Male, probably late forties to early fifties. Clearly been out for a run, as he’s got all the gear on. Lycra shorts and all that. God knows how long he’s been out here, but he’s like a bloody Linford Christie ice lolly.’
‘You had a lick?’ Dexter asked, smiling.
‘Course. Had to check the flavour. Rude not to.’
‘Any signs of decomposition?’ Caroline asked.
‘Not much, to be honest. I’m no expert, but I’d say he’s probably only been there overnight. Plenty of people come and walk their dogs round here, so they would have found him earlier otherwise.’
Caroline and Dexter stayed outside the inner cordon, the area that had to be kept forensically secure. Right from the start of any investigation, one of the main focuses had to be on ensuring they didn’t cause any potential problems further down the line. It had been known for defence briefs to get their clients off a charge based on the same officers having attended the crime scene and later arrested the defendant. When the police then stood up in court to claim forensic accuracy, the case would fall apart over the possibility of cross-contamination.
‘What sort of build?’ Caroline asked.
‘Runner’s build. You know the sort. Slim. Wouldn’t have lasted five minutes out here with the temperatures the way they’ve been. If it weren’t for the blood, I’d have said it looks like he’s sat down for a rest and frozen to death.’
They got as close as they could, watching as the body was moved to allow them sight of the back of the victim’s head, which was caked with dried blood.
‘Not much on the wall of the arch, is there?’ Dexter asked.
‘No, I was going to say,’ PC Hughes replied. ‘You’d expect to see a lot more, particularly with a head wound. There’s not much on the ground, either.’
Another car arrived at the cordon. Dr David Duncan, the pathologist, spotted Caroline and walked towards them. ‘Beautiful morning for it, isn’t it?’ he said, his smooth voice alone raising the temperature a couple of degrees.
‘Not for him, it isn’t,’ Caroline said, nodding her head in the direction of the arch under the viaduct.
Dr Duncan smiled, the grey bristles of his beard moving as he did so. ‘Well, we can’t please them all, can we? Still, he’s our client today, so I’d better go and make myself look presentable.’
Caroline and Dexter went and sat back in the car, Caroline switching the engine back on to circulate some heat.
‘I don’t think we should hang around any longer than we need to,’ Caroline said, rubbing her hands to try and keep warm. ‘But if he’s been killed then put in that position, we’re going to need to get the whole area searched. I don’t envy the poor buggers who’ll have to do that. Just make sure they wrap up warm, at least.’
Caroline’s phone rang, so she pressed to answer it through her car stereo. It was DC Sara Henshaw.
‘Guv, are you still down at Seaton?’
‘Ish. Middle of bloody nowhere, to be more precise. What’s up?’
‘We’ve just had a misper passed to us,’ Sara said.
Dexter and Caroline looked at each other. A missing person reported on the same morning as a body was discovered didn’t tend to be a coincidence.
‘Go on,’ Caroline said.
‘A woman called Sandra Forbes filed the report. Says her husband, Martin Forbes, has been missing since last night, when he went out for a run. Last seen leaving his house on the edge of Seaton.’
‘Let me guess the next bit. Late forties or early fifties, slim build, dressed in running gear?’
‘Got it in one. Not a bad start to the morning, eh?’
‘Not a bad start at all. Can you text the details over to me, please? We’ll wait for Dr Duncan to do his bit, then we’ll pop in and see Mrs Forbes on the way back.’
‘Will do.’
‘Cheers, Sara.’
Caroline ended the call and turned to Dexter. ‘There we are,’ she said. ‘Now what was all that worry about easing me back in gently?’
4
A short while later, Caroline and Dexter stood at the edge of the inner cordon and watched as Dr Duncan carried out his examination. They didn’t know anybody — apart, perhaps, from Dr Duncan — who particularly wanted to look at dead bodies close-up.
One of the underlying principles of forensic evidence was that of contact. When Locard said that every contact left a trace, this became the foundation on which forensic evidence as a marker of guilt was based. It was incredibly unlikely that a murder suspect had the victim’s blood on their clothing because a police officer had forgotten to wash his hands after attending to the victim, then accidentally or otherwise smeared it all over the suspect’s jumper. But ‘incredibly unlikely’ still didn’t cut it in a court of law whose threshold for conviction was guilt beyond all reasonable doubt. Anything which allowed a defence lawyer to introduce the slightest level of doubt in a jury could be catastrophic.
After he’d concluded his initial observations, Dr Duncan skipped back over to Caroline and Dexter, looking more like a man who’d just proudly completed a particularly challenging jigsaw puzzle than someone who’d spent the last few minutes poking a dead body.
‘Very interesting!’ he said, beaming. ‘This one’ll keep you busy.’
‘Go on. How bad is it?’ Caroline asked.
‘Well, he’s dead,’ Dr Duncan replied. ‘So pretty bad, from his perspective. In terms of the cause of death, there’s a pretty clear blow to the skull, towards the back but slightly towards his left-hand si
de. Impossible to say just yet whether he was facing the person who did it, but if he was I’d put money on them being right-handed. The opposite, if they were behind him.’
‘He’s fallen backwards against the wall, though, so does that mean he was facing them?’ Dexter asked.
‘Ah, no. See, this is where things get interesting. There’s blood matting in his hair, but next to nothing on the brickwork he’s propped up against. Certainly nowhere near the amount we’d expect to see if he ended up there immediately after the blunt trauma. Having said that, there are also signs of strangulation. There’s petechial haemorrhaging in the eyes, for instance. So it’s entirely possible the blow happened earlier but didn’t kill him, and he was then strangled. We won’t be able to say for certain until we’ve got him on the table. But there really isn’t anything in the initial indications that suggest he put up a fight. No skin under the fingernails, no scratching. I did notice something suspicious, though.’
‘Go on,’ Caroline said.
‘After death the heart stops beating, and the blood descends according to gravity. If you die on your back, for example, you end up with some lovely purple bruising all over the back of your body. Now, when we look at our chap here, we see the vast majority appears on the backs of his legs, but there are signs of blood pooling on his left-hand side. Small, but noticeable. It seems to indicate to me he either died on his left-hand side or was laid on it shortly after, and was then moved into this sitting position.’
‘How long after are we talking?’ Caroline asked.
‘Difficult to say. Livor mortis can start in as little as twenty minutes, particularly in temperatures such as these. It might also mean the pooling on his left-hand side is more noticeable as a result. I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess, but considering the ambient temperatures there’s a decent chance he was moved within an hour of dying.’
Caroline nodded, trying to organise this information in her own mind. ‘So can we determine how long he’s been dead?’
Dr Duncan smiled. ‘I wondered how long it’d take before you asked me that. The million dollar question, eh? Well, the huge caveat here is the conditions. Temperatures were sub-zero overnight and still are. We had icy winds through the night, too. All that will have sped up the cooling of the body, but rectal temperatures are usually pretty accurate, even if he is sitting on frozen ground.’
‘Rather you than me,’ Dexter remarked.
‘To be honest, it’s nice to have somewhere warm to pop your hands for a few moments. In the case of our customer over here, rigor mortis is heavily apparent. We’d usually expect to see that level of onset over the first twelve hours or more, but again, look at the conditions. If you chucked a leg of lamb in the freezer you’d expect it to stiffen up pretty quickly, and human meat’s no different. It’s likely we’ve got some freezing of the bodily fluids and fat tissues adding to the stiffness. Not that there’s much fat on him. Looks like he was in pretty good shape.’
‘Would that have made a big difference?’ Caroline asked.
Dr Duncan shrugged. ‘Difficult to say. Not as much fat tissue to freeze, but he’d certainly cool down much quicker. Out here, I imagine rigor mortis would’ve been sped up somewhat.’
‘So are we talking overnight?’
‘It probably won’t surprise you that I wouldn’t want to put a specific time on it, but I’d probably be looking somewhere around there. Even from a non-scientific point of view, he’d have been spotted long before now if he’d been there during the day yesterday. The rectal temperature seems to indicate somewhere in the early part of the night, but I wouldn’t want to offer anything more specific just yet. Sorry.’
‘No. No, that’s fine. Thanks. Very helpful.’
Caroline and Dexter headed back towards the car, the bitter air cutting in through their clothes as they walked.
‘Got to say, I’m looking forward to a warm cuppa and a biscuit at Mrs Forbes’s house,’ Dexter remarked.
‘All that talk of rectal fingering got you peckish, has it?’
Dexter chuckled. ‘Something like that.’
‘Better hope that’s not her husband over there, then, hadn’t we?’ Caroline replied. ‘Otherwise I’m not sure PG Tips and a tin of Fox’s will be the first thoughts on her mind.’
5
Sandra Forbes’s house was an impressive farmhouse-style building on the far western edge of Seaton, bordered by a decent amount of open land. Caroline hadn’t been measuring the distance, but it seemed like a fair old run from here to the viaduct, especially in this weather.
With the gate to the house closed, Caroline bumped her Volvo up onto the kerb and came to a stop at the end of the drive. ‘Have to be careful how we handle this,’ she said. ‘Probably best we stick to the facts until we can get a positive ID, even though I think we both know which way this is going to go.’
Dexter smiled. ‘What, you don’t think there might be two slim middle-aged runners from Seaton who went out for a run last night and didn’t come home?’
‘I’m always one for keeping an open mind, Dex, but even I have my limits. Come on.’
As Sandra Forbes opened the door, she seemed to clock immediately they were police officers, and her demeanour changed.
‘Oh no. Oh no.’
‘Mrs Forbes? I’m Detective Inspector Caroline Hills, and this is my colleague Detective Sergeant Dexter Antoine. I believe you made a call to the police about your husband?’
‘Yes. Yes I did. You’ve found him, haven’t you? What’s happened?’
‘Is it okay if we come in?’ Caroline replied. They couldn’t be too cautious when it came to telling people their loved ones had died, especially when they were yet to confirm for definite that this was the case.
The house was tastefully decorated — a lot of light-coloured wood and large windows — and Caroline felt almost out of place delivering such bad news in these positive and airy surroundings.
‘Please. Please, can you just tell me what’s happened. Please don’t keep me waiting like this,’ Sandra said as they reached the living room.
‘We don’t yet know what’s happened,’ Caroline said. ‘A body has been discovered not far from Seaton, but we don’t know for certain that it’s Martin.’
Sandra’s face dropped, and Caroline could almost see her soul disappear from her body as she registered this. ‘What… what happened?’
‘I think it’s probably best that we confirm a few details first, if that’s okay? We don’t want to cause any undue distress if there’s any chance the body isn’t Martin.’
Sandra nodded slowly. ‘Okay.’
‘When did you last see Martin?’
‘Uh, last night. About half six. He gets home from work about quarter-to, eats, then goes out for a run.’
‘And what was he wearing?’
‘I told them all this on the phone. A blue running top with reflective bits on it, black shorts, running shoes. He usually carries a small torch, too. The roads aren’t that well lit round here.’
‘Would he wear shorts even at this time of year?’ Dexter asked.
‘Yes. All the time. He comes home drenched in sweat whatever the weather.’
‘And what time does he usually get home?’ Caroline asked.
‘Well, that depends. He’s got a five kilometre route that goes out the other side of the village, round the back of the salvage yard and back in again. Then there’s a ten kilometre one that goes up to Glaston, across to Morcott and back round. And more often than not he’ll stop off at the George and Dragon on the way home.’
‘Okay. So how long are we talking?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. If he does his short route then half an hour, maybe a bit more. If he does the full route and stops at the pub, who knows? I’m usually in bed by then.’
‘And what time did you go to bed last night?’
‘I really don’t know. About eight, I think. I had a migraine coming on, and I realised he’d probably stopped off at the pub, so I
left a note on the kitchen table. It happens quite a lot. He usually sleeps in the spare room so he doesn’t disturb me.’
‘I see. So you wouldn’t necessarily have noticed he wasn’t home until the next morning?’
‘No, that’s right. I got up this morning and thought he’d left for work early, but the door to the spare room was still open and the bed was perfectly made. He never leaves it like that, so I knew he hadn’t slept in it.’
‘So what did you do then?’
‘I called him, but his phone was still on the side in the dining room, so I knew he hadn’t come back after his run. He always leaves it there when he goes out running. He’s got one of those fancy fitness watch things that tracks his times, heart rate and all that, then puts it all on his phone when he gets home. That’s when I started to get worried, so I went out for a drive round his usual routes in case he’d been hit by a car or something, but I couldn’t see him. So I phoned the police.’
‘Okay. Thank you. Of course, we’ll need to do a formal identification, but the description you’ve given us does match that of the body that was discovered this morning. It might be sensible to prepare yourself for the likelihood that the body is Martin.’
Sandra Forbes seemed to freeze in her seat, staring off into space. ‘What… How?’ she finally croaked.
‘We’re not sure yet, but we think he was hit round the head. It’s possible that was what caused his death, but we’ll have to wait for the post-mortem to confirm that.’
Sandra’s eyes didn’t leave the wall on the other side of the room. ‘But it’s so cold out there. It’s freezing.’
Caroline nodded slowly. ‘It’s possible the cold might have played some part, particularly if Martin lost consciousness after the blow to the head. But as I say, we’ll know soon what happened.’
‘I can’t… I can’t identify him. I… I can’t.’
‘It’s okay. If you don’t feel comfortable with a physical identification, there are plenty of other ways we can do it. We can have an officer take Martin’s hairbrush or toothbrush and we can match DNA from there.’