by Graham Smith
Upon returning to Arthuret Hall, Beth and Thompson joined a serious O’Dowd and Unthank. The chastened look on Unthank’s face warned Beth to choose her words with care when speaking to the DI.
Now darkness was imminent, the house’s initial eeriness had increased as the gables and dormer surrounds were backlit by the setting sun. There were no sounds from wildlife or even farm animals. All she could hear was the puttering of the portable generator which powered the lights being used by the CSI team.
O’Dowd strode off towards a deserted area of the car park. ‘Come over here.’
When the FMIT team arrived at the fence at the far end of the grassy car park, O’Dowd rounded on them. ‘Some bugger has already leaked this to the press. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how badly you’ll need a proctologist if I find out it was any of you.’ O’Dowd ran a hand over her face and pushed back the strands of dark hair that had fallen onto her forehead; she used the other hand to point at the house. ‘Because if the press get wind of exactly what happened to that poor sod in there, we’re going to face media pressure like you’ve never imagined. Not, of course, that media pressure should matter to any of you; the person, or indeed persons, who killed that poor man and left him here like that has to be caught. Preferably before he decides to put wings onto anyone else’s back.’
O’Dowd gave each of them a stern look to emphasise her points.
‘We spoke to the new Mrs Welton like you asked, boss.’
To Beth, it was inevitable that Thompson would be the one to break the uneasy silence. Typical that it would be a brown-nosed comment as he played the good little minion.
‘And?’
‘She was pretty shook up. When I questioned her she seemed to have thought it was a sick joke someone had played on her. She didn’t realise it was real until we showed up. At least, that’s what she said.’
‘You’re implying there are things you picked up that she didn’t say.’
Beth was about to speak, but Thompson beat her to it.
‘I think she was lying through her teeth.’ Thompson pulled a face. ‘She grasped the seriousness of why we were there as soon as she saw my warrant card. Never once did she break down, although there were a few times when I could tell she was acting. She looks to be about half the age of her new husband and, unless I’m mistaken, he’s got a good few quid behind him. There was a marquee the size of an aircraft hangar for her reception at Farlam Hall. There must have been well over a hundred guests and Farlam Hall isn’t the kind of place you or I could afford if we had to feed and water a hundred people. The cheapest car I saw there was a top of the range Jag, and there were still people arriving. If you ask me, and you just have, she knew all along that she’d found a murder victim and invented the practical joke story as a way of not letting it interrupt her wedding day.’
Beth struggled to keep her mouth shut as Thompson took her initial idea about Emily Welton being a liar and ran with it; but there was also a warning in his eyes that kept her lips sealed. There was nothing she could do about the scar on her cheek though. It always pulsed when she was annoyed as her half-ruined blood vessels felt pressured to work again.
‘That’s quite a leap. Especially considering she got her cousin to call it in.’
‘That kind of proves my point, doesn’t it?’
O’Dowd scratched her chin and adopted a pensive look that made Beth wonder if she’d been very wrong, and that Thompson was about to catch merry hell for her mistake. That would be the most poetic of all the justices. The idea thief berated for a bad idea.
‘Not really. You might not get it, but no woman wants their wedding day spoiled. She found a body and did the responsible thing by getting a copper to deal with it. The poor woman will probably have nightmares after seeing what she saw. Do you think she should have put her wedding on hold?’
‘Not exactly, boss.’ Thompson’s voice held conviction. ‘But you should have seen the way she looked at her husband. Her eyes were filled with greed, not love.’
‘So what? So she’s married an older man with a few quid in his bank account. Unless she kills him for some reason, their relationship is none of our business. And another thing, have you any idea what a chauvinist prick you sound with theories like that?’
A coughing fit enveloped Beth as she fought not to laugh at Thompson getting a roasting for the theories he’d put forward. She’d noticed a lot of the same things herself, but had drawn different, less judgemental conclusions from them. Like O’Dowd, she’d taken the bride’s side and empathised with what it must have been like to discover a dead body on her wedding day.
She now understood the warning the DI had given her earlier and cursed herself for her naivety in sharing a theory with Thompson. This wasn’t the first time a male superior had stolen her ideas with the aim of taking credit for them, but she was determined it would be the last.
‘She still shouldn’t have disappeared off. She should have waited around to speak to us.’
‘You make a good point, Sergeant. What did you do about it?’
A worried look touched Thompson’s craggy face. ‘Boss?’
‘You thought she was withholding something and therefore interfering with an ongoing murder investigation. Surely you arrested her?’
The worried look wasn’t so much touching Thompson’s face now, as inviting it in for coffee and sliding its arm across unsuspecting shoulders.
‘Erm… er, in the circumstances, ma’am, I thought it best to not attract any bad publicity. Would you like me to go back and arrest her?’
Beth hated him for it, but she couldn’t help admiring the way Thompson had lifted the burden of decision from his shoulders and placed it squarely on O’Dowd’s.
‘First off, what would you arrest her for? And second, what would that achieve now? I’ll tell you, it would make it look like you didn’t know what you were doing the first time. Imagine the kind of publicity that would generate.’
‘As you say, boss.’
She would never admit it to O’Dowd, but Beth caught a glimpse of mischief in her boss’s eye as she toyed with Thompson.
Rather than waste any more time on a closed subject, Beth asked what news O’Dowd and Unthank had.
‘We’ve got the square root of bugger all, and the only good thing we can say about that, is that it’s confirmed as an accurate calculation.’
‘I don’t follow, ma’am.’
‘You were right about there being no security cameras, about nobody living here and about the gate being locked at night.’ A hand was raised in the halt gesture. ‘And before you ask, the only key holders are the owner, the gardener and the woman who mans the wee shop cum reception place. None of them have admitted to leaving the gate open any time recently, or to having found it that way because of someone else’s carelessness. The woman who looks after the shop was the one who put out the chairs and acted as the wedding planner because the place was closed to the public due to the wedding.’
‘Do you believe them, ma’am?’
‘Actually I do. All three of them are middle-aged which means they’re all a long way from being either in their dotage, or immature idiots who’d forget how to breathe if their bodies didn’t do it for them. The three of them seem trustworthy to me, and, while I know we’ll have to consider them as suspects, I can’t for one second see any of them being our killer.’
Despite O’Dowd’s withering assessment of young and old, Beth couldn’t find fault with her logic.
‘Did you ask them why the body was found by a visitor and not staff?’
An eyebrow leapt upwards onto O’Dowd’s forehead, and enough steel to construct a battleship filled her tone. ‘Of course I did. I do know how to run an investigation.’
Beth dropped her eyes to the threadbare grass of the car park. ‘Sorry, ma’am.’
‘For your information, the owner has been away all week on business and only returned home this morning. As for the other two, before I tell you about them, describe the brid
e’s physical appearance for me, please.’
Beth flashed her mind back to following Emily Welton towards the room where they’d interviewed her.
‘She was tall, thin and had strawberry blonde hair. At least a couple of inches taller than me and I’m almost six foot.’
‘The groundsman and the shop lady aren’t tall; in fact, both are smaller than me. But when I tried to peer through the window that overlooks the cellar, as the bride did, I couldn’t see the body. I had to stand on tiptoes to achieve it, and even then, I could only see the top of his head.’
‘Sorry again, ma’am.’
‘Well, at least you’re asking the right questions, even if you’re asking them of the wrong person.’ O’Dowd stomped her feet and tossed a few scowls around as she fished a packet of cigarettes from her pocket.
As O’Dowd drew smoke into her lungs, a compact man wearing an oversuit stepped from the house and walked towards a small green car.
‘Beth, do me a favour, and go see what Dr Hewson has for us.’
Seven
As she walked across to speak to Dr Hewson, Beth was working out the questions she would need to ask and preparing them into the right order. She knew the scarring on her face would draw his eye and then there would probably be the mini-stare followed by an embarrassed look away.
At first, such encounters had bothered her, and made her want to run away to a safe place, such as the sanctity of her bedroom, or maybe a shack on a deserted beach where the nearest she was to danger was reading one of her books on serial killers, but as the years had passed, she’d grown accustomed to the ritual. Now she used people’s reactions to her scar as a way to judge their character. She lived with the scar and she’d come to terms with it; how others dealt with it spoke more about them than anything else.
Dr Hewson looked out from the boot of his car when she spoke his name. He straightened to his full height and looked up at her. ‘Let me guess, Dowdy O’Dowd has sent you over to ask me about time of death, cause of death and a dozen other stupid questions that can’t be answered until I have done a post-mortem.’
While Beth didn’t care for the way that Hewson had given her DI a moniker that was overtly sexist, she didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the pathologist at their first meeting.
‘Actually DI O’Dowd asked me to find out if you had any preliminary thoughts. She never mentioned time or cause of death.’ Her words were something of a lie as she knew that’s exactly what O’Dowd had wanted to know, but to Beth it wasn’t so much about being truthful, as salvaging an already bad situation. ‘She spoke highly of you and said you’re the best pathologist in Cumbria.’
Hewson raised a bushy grey eyebrow. ‘Nice try, lass, but your flannel isn’t going to wash with me. Thanks to cutbacks, there are only three pathologists for the whole of Cumbria.’ A finger jabbed at his chest. ‘One doddery old fool whose hands shake like buggery, a raw recruit who’s so wet behind the ears it’s a wonder she doesn’t have gills… and me. And I’ve had so many run-ins with Dowdy over the years, I reckon I’d still make third place on her list despite the lack of credible competition.’
Beth licked her lips and kept her face neutral. It was obvious that the DI and Hewson had some sort of running feud, but while she didn’t want to be drawn into the no man’s land between them, she still needed to come away with some information from the pathologist.
Some officers might use charm and try to flirt in this situation, but that wasn’t her way. To Beth, her mind was a far better weapon than her femininity. Instead she tried a different tack. ‘Right. You don’t like her and she doesn’t like you. So I guess she’s thrown me to the wolves by asking me to see what you know. I suppose you have two choices then: you can return her compliment to me, by telling me nothing and sending me back there to get a roasting from her, or, you can give me what you know at the moment, taking the higher moral ground and putting the case first.’
Beth let her gaze wander across the wallheads where the skeleton of the house was now backed by a deep royal blue as the sky darkened. For the first time that day, she noticed the strong earthy smell of the countryside. Somewhere in the trees an owl hooted loud enough to be heard over the generators powering the CSI team’s lights.
The sound ought to have been reassuring, a return to normalcy. It wasn’t though; instead it added a layer of spookiness to the atmosphere. Beth stuffed a hand into her jacket and wound her fingers around the handcuffs, collapsible baton and pepper spray she always carried. The action worked; it gave her the calmness she needed and pulled her away from macabre thoughts. The case was bad enough to deal with, without her adding unnecessary layers of horror.
Hewson took a puff on his e-cigarette and released a sizeable cloud of fumes that drifted past Beth. She caught a fleeting whiff of raspberry until the smoke dissipated on the wind. To her, raspberry was all wrong for a man of Hewson’s intensity. It reminded her of the fruity lip balms she had grown out of using more than a decade ago.
She pushed his idiosyncrasies from her mind and fixed him with what she hoped was a patient but enquiring look. ‘So what’s it going to be? Which is most important, helping me catch whoever left that poor man in there?’ Beth pointed to the area of the house where the victim was being examined by members of the CSI team. ‘Or you scoring a couple of points against O’Dowd?’
The beginnings of a grin were twisted away from Hewson’s lips as he opened his mouth to speak. ‘You’re good, lass. I’ll give you that. There’s not a lot I can give you until I get that poor bugger back to the lab though. He’s mid-forties; in good physical shape for his age; there’s significant burning around the mouth, which is interesting; and of course the wings attached to his shoulder blades.’ He raised a hand to forestall Beth’s comment. ‘But you’ll have seen all that for yourself. My early impression is that the wings were attached pre-mortem.’
Beth had guessed as much about the wings herself. Each shoulder blade had a rivulet or two of dried blood running downwards across the exposed bone.
‘What else did you discover? Or rather, what preliminary assumptions can be made?’
‘Good question.’ Hewson tilted his head as he looked at her. ‘Before I answer you, I’d like to know what you thought of the injuries to the lower part of our victim’s body?’
Beth closed her eyes and pictured the man in his final stance as she spoke. ‘The man’s genitalia were missing, but they didn’t look to have been cut off. Could it be that a fox, or some other animal, had stood on its hind legs to get an easy meal, as there were scratches on the man’s legs, and what appeared to be bite marks and tearing on the remains of his scrotum?’
‘Very possibly. What else?’
‘His hands also looked to have been chewed on as each was missing fingers and had stumps, but again,’ Beth winced at the memory, ‘there were no clean cuts.’
‘At least you’re not blind.’ Another cloud of raspberry vapour enveloped Beth as Hewson pushed the boot lid down with a metallic thud and leaned against it. ‘I found a number of larvae nestling in the exposed eye sockets, and while there was some discolouration of the flesh, that’s more to do with exposure to the elements than any rough treatment.’
‘So you’re saying that, apart from what happened to him here, he wasn’t mistreated?’
‘I am indeed. He wasn’t beaten or tortured in any other way.’
‘The eyes: were they removed by the killer or eaten by an animal?’
‘Pecked out by a bird most likely. Soon after death would be my guess. The animal world doesn’t show any manners when it comes to a free meal.’
The larvae were a clue to the length of time the body had been a corpse. Once a person died, insects, maggots and other creatures were drawn to it for a free meal. Some would lay eggs in the body as soon as they happened upon it. By studying the stages of development of larvae and pupae, pathologists could make informed guesses as to how long a corpse had been in situ.
‘You mentione
d larvae, what are they telling you – from what you’ve seen of them?’
This time Hewson’s grin was allowed to blossom. ‘You are good, DC…?’
‘Young.’ Beth held out a hand. ‘Beth, if you prefer.’
‘So, Beth, you’re young by name and nature, yet you’re not youthful. You’re a serious beggar, aren’t you? Driven. Probably something to do with that scar on your face.’ Hewson tilted his head back and appraised the scar in a way that only a doctor could. ‘I’d say that you picked that up about four years ago. Would I be right?’
Beth nodded rather than risk speaking and having her voice betray her amazement at Hewson’s perception.
They may come less often now, but she still had occasional flashbacks and nightmares about the night her life had suffered irrevocable changes.
A night out with friends had been going well when a fight erupted. Beth and a friend had been trapped against a wall as two men traded punches.
A beer bottle had been smashed and thrust forward. Its intended target had swung an arm to deflect the blow. The attacker had put such force into his swing, the arm holding the bottle continued its arc until the jagged edges of the bottle made contact with Beth’s cheek.
The plastic surgeon who’d tried to repair her face was competent, but nothing more.
She’d had no justice for her injury or disfigurement. As soon as they’d seen the blood gushing from her face, both fighters had charged from the bar and legged it down the road. Neither had been identified, let alone arrested or charged.
She didn’t blame the intended target as much as the man who’d held the bottle. He’d been the one who had tried to wound and injure. In her more reflective moments, she recognised that any person would have done what the intended target did and deflected that bottle away from their face, and that it was nothing more than bad luck that had caused the broken bottle to connect with her cheek. But then, she reasoned, it had also been the intended target who’d thrown the first punch. And, as the person who started the fight, there was no way he was entirely blameless.