Blood is Thicker Than Water (3 page)

Harrison was right, the scene wasn’t quite as one expected, but then they rarely were. He said as much to the veteran crime scene investigator.

“Again it’s very circumstantial, Andy. I agree it’s weird that he hung his walking stick off the back of the chair, pushed his frame out of the way then decided to walk unaided. But it’s pretty clear his bowels were full. Maybe he got caught short and decided he didn’t have time to shuffle to the bathroom? People do silly things all of the time.”

Harrison still looked unhappy. The man was a highly experienced CSI and Warren could see the man’s gut was troubling him, and that troubled Warren.

“You said on the phone that you had some concerns about the body as well?”

Harrison led Warren over to the broken fireplace. “Look at the pool of blood. What do you see?”

The puddle was larger than Warren had initially thought, the body having hid some of it. The blood gleamed, wet and shiny against the stonework.

“This probably happened in the very early hours; his temperature was already down slightly when the surgeon measured it mid-morning.”

“It’s still wet.”

“Exactly. It should be sticky by now.”

Warren thought for a few moments. Now his own gut was uneasy.

He was the senior investigating officer; it was his call.

“Let’s call it an unexplained death for now and treat this as a potential crime scene.”

* * *

By eight a.m. the following morning, Middlesbury CID was buzzing. The death was still classified as unexplained, but Warren was under pressure to try and decide if it was suspicious or not by the end of the day. His decision would determine how much manpower and resources would be thrown at the investigation. If Warren declared it a suspicious death, then the cost could run into hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds, perhaps for nothing. If he decided to be conservative and treat it as non-suspicious and it turned out to be the result of foul play, valuable clues could be lost and prosecutions placed in jeopardy. In either case, Warren would find himself in front of the chief constable explaining himself. Warren had been promoted to DCI less than a year ago—he didn’t want the chief to even know his name this early into his career.

Gary Hastings had conducted a follow-up interview of Kathy Mackay early the previous evening, before Harrison’s call to Warren, and he was reading the highlights to the rest of the team.

“It’s pretty much as the boss has already stated. She found him when she went to make his breakfast at eight a.m. She doesn’t work, but she and her husband have two children, both at primary school. Her husband works nights as a parcel sorter at the Anyjob Package Delivery firm up on the estate.”

Whilst Gary had been interviewing the grieving daughter, her brother had turned up. He confirmed that the two had shared caring duties for their father since his stroke a decade earlier. Their mother had died two years before his illness and he had been alone ever since.

“I got the impression that the old man had been a bit difficult at times. There also seemed to be some resentment that they didn’t get any help looking after him. He owned the house and had a good pension from his days as an engineer, so they didn’t qualify for state funding, but he didn’t want to spend his own money on carers. It had been difficult to persuade him to contribute towards the stairlift.” Gary glanced around the room. “My gut feeling is he was a tight sod and his kids were stuck with looking after him.”

Warren thanked him and made a note to follow up the interviews again if they found anything suspicious.

“Anything from the neighbours?” DI Tony Sutton asked.

Detective Sergeant Mags Richardson had organised a doorknocking the previous night. “Most of the neighbours are fairly new to the area and didn’t really know him. They confirmed that he rarely came outside and that his son, daughter or her husband visited at least twice a day. The most interesting reports came from the house directly opposite and his immediate neighbour, who has been there almost as long as he has.

“The old woman next door reckons she used to know him and his wife before the wife died. She was clearly reluctant to bad-mouth him, but she implied that he was difficult and overbearing. He was very controlling of his wife when she was alive and the neighbour suggested that he should be rather more grateful for the assistance his kids gave him than she had ever observed. I think she has more to say, sir, and we should consider a full interview. Encourage her to open up a bit more.”

Warren frowned slightly; intimidating little old ladies wasn’t really his style, but there was no denying that many people were torn between speaking ill of the dead and doing their public duty. He’d have to tip the balance.

“What about the second witness?”

Mags consulted her notes again. “The man across the road reckons it wasn’t unusual for the light in the front room to stay on until very late, sometimes all night, which agrees with what the daughter said about him sometimes falling asleep in front of the TV. However, Monday night, he went out for a smoke about midnight and said that the light was off. Didn’t you report that the light was on when you entered the room?”

Warren nodded slowly. “Yes. Definitely.” He thought carefully. “The light switch was next to the door in the usual place, as I recall. What did the daughter say, Gary?”

“Never touched it, sir.”

A murmur went around the table. “The position of the body suggests that he was on his way out of the room when he tripped. But surely if he was in the room watching TV with the light on he wouldn’t have got up and turned the light off for a snooze, then got up to turn it back on again? And then got up a third time to leave the room and fallen?”

“If it was off when he fell, then that might explain how he could fail to see where his Zimmer frame was then trip over the rug,” suggested Karen Hardwick.

“So if he fell in the dark, who put the light back on again?” finished Sutton.

* * *

The post-mortem of Charles Michaelson was completed within an hour of the meeting finishing. Warren had organised follow-up interviews for the two neighbours and Michaelson’s children for that afternoon. In the meantime, Tony Sutton was in charge of finding out all that he could about Michaelson’s past and that of his immediate circle.

If the autopsy came back at all irregular he was upgrading the investigation to a suspicious death and he wanted to be in a position to pick apart any lies that may be told in interview.

“The man was a walking time bomb,” started Professor Ryan Jordan, the Home Office certified pathologist who’d picked up the case that morning. He’d stopped by Middlesbury on his way to attend a meeting in Cambridge, saving Warren the trouble of a trip down to the Lister Hospital where he was based.

“The fall was a nasty one, but wouldn’t necessarily have killed him. He didn’t suffer a fractured skull. He died of a massive brain haemorrhage, sometime between about midnight and two a.m., Tuesday morning.”

“Is that why he fell? Did he collapse?” asked Warren, taking a sip of his coffee.

Jordan shook his head. “No, the brain haemorrhage was purely from the impact with the fireplace. He suffered from heart disease and he had physical frailties consistent with somebody suffering a stroke years previously; the musculature on his left side, especially the arm, is significantly atrophied compared to his right side. It is entirely possible that he stumbled and fell.”

“So what do you mean by ‘a time bomb’?”

“The deceased was on anticoagulants, warfarin according to his medical records.”

“You mean blood thinners. Because he had a stroke, right?”

Warren’s grandmother had suffered a stroke and he remembered the brightly coloured pills that she had taken every day with her tea.

“Yes, although they don’t actually thin the blood
per se
, they just reduce its ability to clot. Blood clots in major vessels can lead to heart attacks or strokes. Michaelson had suffered a stroke previously, and had a family history of cardiovascular disease so he would have been prescribed them as a matter of course.

“I saw your note about how his blood was still wet, hours after he was found, and did a quick and dirty INR—I’ve sent a sample to Addenbrooke’s anticoagulation service for confirmation, but I measured it at fifteen.”

Many of the words in Jordan’s sentence were familiar to Warren; nevertheless, the meaning of what he had just heard was beyond him. His face must have said as much.

“Basically, an INR is a measure of how fast blood clots. It’s normalised—that means that a typical, healthy person off the street will have an INR of one point zero. People who have had strokes or have heart conditions are given drugs, such as warfarin, that slow the clotting of their blood. They usually aim to have an INR of two to three. That means it takes their blood two to three times as long to clot as a healthy person. It’s an extremely effective method for reducing the likelihood of another stroke or cardiac event, but it does have side effects.”

“Increased bleeding?”

“Exactly. Most of the time it’s not a problem; it just takes a little longer to stop bleeding if they cut themselves, but more serious wounds carry a risk of serious blood loss.”

“But Michaelson had an INR of fifteen?”

“At least. At that level he would have been at risk of internal bleeding from the slightest bump. It’s probably a good job he had a largely sedentary lifestyle. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to have cut himself in the garden, say, and bled out. I looked at his stools and there were traces of blood in them, probably from tiny bleeds in the gut.”

“Don’t they have regular blood tests to make sure they’re on the right dose?” Warren remembered his grandmother’s dislike of the procedure.

“They do and according to his medical records, Charles Michaelson was a model patient. As steady as a rock. His INR had been between two point one and two point five for years. He took four milligrams of warfarin daily and has done for a decade. He’s so consistent they only test him every three months now. His last test was two point two and he was due another test in a week.”

Warren didn’t like where this was going. “Any signs of abuse?”

Jordan shook his head. “I don’t think so. I found no suspicious cuts, bruises or evidence of unhealed fractures, just a couple of shaving cuts and a smattering of minor bumps that you’d expect for someone whose left side was largely uncontrolled and insensate. He was frail, but well-nourished and apparently healthy; I didn’t find any obvious signs of illnesses that may have made him suddenly sensitive to warfarin.”

“His daughter said that he was a bit quiet and had been tired the past few days.”

“Those are symptoms consistent with too much anticoagulant.”

“What about his stomach contents? Could he have taken an overdose of warfarin?”

Jordan signalled a negative. “Not within the twelve hours or so before death. There were the remains of a cheese sandwich and some crisps, probably eaten about six hours before he died. There are some small traces of what could be tablets. They’re being checked now, but I don’t think there was an unusually large amount. I have the number of the anticoagulation service at Addenbrooke’s if you want to talk to them directly, but all my reading suggests that it takes several days for warfarin to get into your system enough to cause changes in your INR, so he could have been overdosing in the days or weeks before his death and not taken any more than usual that day.”

Warren thanked the pathologist for taking the trouble to visit. He tapped the pen against his teeth thoughtfully, before finally making up his mind. Picking up the phone, he dialled DSI Grayson’s mobile. There were several long rings before it picked up. The sound of wind in the background hinted that his boss might just be on the golf course.

“Grayson.”

“I’m declaring it a suspicious death, sir.”

* * *

DC Karen Hardwick was in charge of accounting for Michaelson’s warfarin dosage and she reported back at the same time Warren got off the phone to the anticoagulation specialist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

“He took four milligrams each day with his dinner.” Karen had a colour photograph in her hand. “The pills come in three types: brown for one milligram, blue for three and pink for five. Mr Michaelson took one brown and one blue each day. The medication is prescription only and he has his order filled three-monthly by his local Boots. Their records show that he had ordered the correct amount consistently for the past few years. SOCO retrieved his tablets from his bathroom cabinet and there are the expected number of each colour remaining.”

“So he didn’t shove the whole lot down his neck in one go then,” Warren mused. “According to Addenbrooke’s, his INR was fifteen point three. He’d have had to take handfuls of the pills for days or weeks to achieve that level.”

“Is there anything else that could have interfered with his INR or made him sensitive to warfarin?”

“Well patients have to be pretty strict about when they take the pills and Addenbrooke’s sent me a list of foods that patients should avoid, but the specialist reckoned it was unlikely that he could have sustained such a high INR through illness or eating stuff he shouldn’t.”

“So where does that leave us?”

Warren sighed. “Waiting for blood tests.”

* * *

The whiteboard in the CID office was depressingly sparse. As a matter of routine, they had pinned photographs of Charles Michaelson’s children and Kathy Mackay’s husband in the suspects’ column, but as yet there was no evidence of their involvement in his death.

Charles Michaelson’s world was depressingly small. Aside from his children and grandchildren, he had almost no other acquaintances. His weekly trips to the British Legion involved a slowly dwindling group of similarly aged men. His neighbours couldn’t recall the last time they had spoken to him and he had no other visitors.

“He wasn’t a very nice man.” Gladys Blenkinsop had lived next door to Charles Michaelson for over forty years. A small, frail widow with snowy white hair, she clutched her walking stick with gnarled, liver-spotted hands. “I’m not one to gossip, you understand, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter now.”