Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (33 page)

‘Great news, Luce. So our first appeal court victory isn’t about to be overturned as soon we’ve won it, after all. Have you traced our charming client to tell him?’

‘No can do, I’m afraid. I left a message with his cousin, but he hasn’t come back, apparently. Vanished into the wide blue yonder.’

‘He didn’t leave a forwarding address?’

‘Nope. Not a dicky bird.’

‘And no mobile number either, I suppose?’

Lucy laughed. ‘This lad’s been in prison for 18 years, remember. They didn’t have mobiles when he went down. He’s probably still wondering why he sees so many people in the street talking to themselves and holding their ears.’

‘So we have no idea whether he knows Brenda’s body’s been found, or not?’

Lucy sighed. ‘No, ‘fraid not. No idea what he feels about it, either. But he hasn’t been arrested for any new crime, so far as I know. So the good news is, he’s still free. And not guilty too, it seems.’

‘Always a bonus. Thanks, Lucy love.’ Sarah smiled, and put down the phone.

36. Necessary Ghoul

T
HE BODY, as usual, looked horrific. More like meat in a butcher’s shop than human. Terry had been here many times in the course of his career, and always loathed it. As a young officer, he had shielded himself against the horror by somehow denying the humanity of the bodies on the pathologist’s table. They were not human but corpses, meat, a corpus of evidence, something to be examined and studied but not loved. Love was for the relatives, who were shown a body tidied and covered and prettified as much as possible, with only the face showing and of course - crucially for identification purposes - still in its normal place on the front of the skull.

Linda Miles, today’s pathologist, seemed untroubled by such thoughts. She was a cheerful, extrovert mother of two whom Terry met at parents’ evenings. His daughters had even spent the night at her house when Trude was away. As parents they were friends, but here, in her white overalls, her hair covered by a protective cap, her hands by latex gloves, she looked like a maggot in a meat store. Terry forced down his nausea, and smiled.

‘What have you got for us, Linda?’

‘Your suspected suicide, you mean?’

‘Yes. If that’s what she is.’ Terry looked at the body on the table. Most of it was mercifully covered by a sheet, but the feet and hands stuck out, lifeless, waxen, still. Like the feet of medieval statues in the Minster - but the souls of those people, if father Roberts was right, must have served their time in purgatory by now and be in heaven, whereas this poor woman’s soul might be in everlasting hell.

And where is that, Terry wondered. Under our feet, in some furnace at the earth’s molten core? Or here, in this room? He looked around, at the eviscerated body of a man on another table. The skull was sawn open and the brain, heart and liver lay in a set of bloody dishes on the workbench. Hell is all around us, and we’re in it.

‘She had cancer, you know,’ the pathologist began, brightly. ‘Quite an advanced ovarian cancer which had spread - look here.’

Terry glanced, nodded, looked away. ‘Could it have been cured?’

‘Hm. It was fairly advanced. I wouldn’t have put the chances very high, myself.’

‘Still, that wasn’t what killed her.’

‘Oh no. Clearly she was strangled - hanged, I believe, by this scarf.’ She pointed to the silk scarf, which had been loosened from the neck and lay in a bag on the workbench, ready to be taken to forensics. ‘Pretty fancy scarf. Rich lady, was she?’

‘Hardly. Just a writer, living in a rented cottage.’ Terry had already given the other half of the scarf, the part still attached to the banisters, to a detective constable to trace where it came from.

‘Well, it was the scarf that killed her. No doubt about that.’ The pathologist pointed to a dark purple bruise round the neck, where the skin had been crushed and not sprung back.

‘Would it have taken long?’

‘A few minutes possibly. Her neck wasn’t broken, so she was suffocated. She’d have lost consciousness within a minute or two, and her heart stopped a short while later.’

‘She’d have known what was happening to her, though?’

‘Oh yes, she couldn’t avoid it. She wasn’t drugged or anything, if that’s what you’re asking. Just a faint trace of alcohol in her blood - a glass of wine, no more than that. She probably had it with her supper.’ She indicated a bowl on the side. ‘Chicken stew.’

‘But she made no attempt to save herself?’ Terry asked, averting his eyes.

‘No, well, not obviously. There are no scratches on her neck, where she might have tried to claw the scarf away, nothing like that. Just a single small cut, just here, under the chin. Only a couple of millimetres deep, but it could be significant, all the same.’

‘Significant of what, exactly?’

‘Well, if this was a man, you might wonder if he’d cut himself shaving, in a place like that. But not this lady. Anyway, it’s not really a razor cut, more a sharp prick, really, with the pointed end of a knife. Caused before death, not after, not after - there are traces of bleeding. The sort of injury that might be caused by someone holding a knife to her throat. Sticking it in a little so she’d know he meant business.’

Terry peered where she was pointing. The cut, in the pale waxy skin, was scarcely visible. ‘Are you sure about that, Linda?’

She raised an ironic eyebrow, as if he were questioning her expertise. ‘Am I sure it’s a cut, caused with a sharp implement before death? Yes, definitely. Am I sure how it was caused? No, that’s less certain. I give you an educated guess, no more.’

‘Any other way it could have happened?’

‘None that comes to mind, no.’ Linda Miles shrugged. ‘And then there’s this. Look at her wrists. What do you see?’

Again, nothing obvious. Terry shook his head. ‘I checked for signs of rope or tape at the time. Is there something I missed?’

She smiled, took a large magnifying glass from the workbench, and held it over the left wrist. ‘Try this, detective inspector. Sherlock Holmes carried one all the time.’ She focussed a bright lamp on the wrist, and moved a fine pointed needle beneath the lens. ‘We’ve got photos on computer, of course, but I like to use the old methods first. See? Here, here, and here. It’s a straight line. She only had fine hairs on her wrist but they’ve been torn out, do you see. And the same on the other hand too.’

A pulse began to throb in Terry’s throat - excitement this time, not revulsion. ‘You mean, her wrists were taped?’

‘That’s what it looks like to me. If you fold her wrists together, behind her back - we did it earlier, and took photographs - then you see exactly where the tape would have run, and where it didn’t. There are still hairs where her wrists were pressed together. That’s why she didn’t try to tear the scarf from her throat. She couldn’t - she was bound.’ The pathologist’s eyes met Terry’s, triumphant, excited.

‘So this isn’t a suicide after all?’

‘Not unless you can tell me some way this woman could tape her hands behind her back, jab a knife in her throat, hang herself, and then untape her hands when she’d finished, no.’ She studied Terry quizzically. ‘You didn’t find any tape, did you?’

‘No, not a trace. Unless the SOCOs are hiding it.’

‘Well, then.’ Linda Miles’s eyes gleamed with amusement. ‘Not only did our suicide have to remove the tape after death, she must have tidied it away neatly somewhere before going back to lie on the floor where she was found. Good ghost story but not very likely, is it? However houseproud she was.’

Terry smiled, relieved. He felt grateful for the efforts of this necessary ghoul. ‘You’re a genius, Linda. Her soul’s probably blessing you now from heaven. Or purgatory, perhaps.’

‘What?’

‘Suicides go straight to hell - didn’t you know? A priest told me. But victims end up in heaven, thank God. After a spell in purgatory, that is.’

‘Really.’ Her eyes met his. ‘Don’t mock it, Terry. We only deal with the body here. What happens afterwards, that’s not my province. Did she have family?’

Terry sighed, recalling his efforts to answer this question in the past few days. ‘No one local - just an elderly mother in Peterborough, who’s reluctant to travel. A neighbour identified the body. Before you ...’ he glanced at the table ‘... started your work.’

‘No husband then? Partner, whatever?’

‘Not so far as we know. Why?’

‘Well, there’s one other thing you should see. I’ll need a hand to turn her over. If you take her legs, there ...’ Briskly, Linda Miles slipped her hands under the shoulders of the corpse while Terry, fighting down the urge to vomit, took hold of the cold, waxy legs. ‘Ready? One, two three ...’ Together, they lifted the body and turned it. For a dreadful second Terry felt his hand slipping, and had a vision of the dead woman falling to the floor; then she was safely over, face down like meat on a slab.

‘See there? Those marks, what do they suggest to you?’

Terry looked where the pathologist was pointing, and saw a set of lines, like thin bruises, criss-crossing each other across the pale flabby buttocks. ‘Whip marks?’ he suggested.

‘Exactly. A whip or a cane, something like that, thin and hard. Someone’s been punishing this woman.’

Terry thought back, to the dead woman’s bedroom. Sex books, condoms, and now this. There’d been no sign of a whip or a cane, though. ‘You think the killer caned her first?’

‘Someone did. That would fit in with the ritual nature of this hanging, the way you describe it. It could be some sort of sado-masochistic thing, gone wrong.’

‘Or perhaps not wrong,’ Terry said thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps he meant to kill her all along. But punish her first.’

‘On the other hand, sadistic rituals like this are often associated with sex,’ Linda said. ‘And there’s no sign of intercourse. I checked.’

‘She wasn’t raped, then?’ Terry said grimly, staring at the bruises. How anyone could do this to a woman for pleasure escaped him entirely.

‘No. No vaginal tearing or trauma, nothing to indicate forcible penetration.’

‘Can you tell if she had sex at all, the day she died? Did you find semen, DNA?’

‘Unfortunately not. If she did have sex that day it was perfectly consensual, and she seems to have bathed afterwards. Her vagina was quite clean - in fact her whole body was clean, apart from the dirt where she fell on the floor and soiled herself. I checked carefully. Traces of soap and bubble bath salts. But no male pubic hairs, semen, saliva, nothing like that.’

‘So her killer was a sadist, but not a rapist, is that what you’re saying?’

‘So it seems.’ A sad smile flickered over the pathologist’s face. ‘Not that that was much consolation to her, poor lady.’

37. Lovers’ Gateway

J
ANE CARTER spent the day in Crockey Hill, interviewing Alison Grey’s neighbours. They were hardly neighbours in the sense that people in the town would understand it, but they did live within half a mile of her house. No one, however, knew much about Alison Grey. Most people had seen her once or twice, driving her Rover down the track to her house, but few had spoken to her for more than a moment or two. It was something to do with the isolation of the house, Jane concluded, and the lack of a focal point in the village. No shop, no pub, no school - the only place people were likely to bump into each other was the garage, and then only rarely.

The garage staff recalled her as a pleasant woman whose elderly Rover had needed a new cambelt at its last service. They’d tried to sell her a Toyota Auris, but after a test drive she’d refused. She was comfortable with the Rover, she’d said, it suited her style of driving. They shook their heads at such folly, but were shocked to learn of her death. They had no idea if she had enemies, or any friends either.

Terry had asked Jane to trace any male visitors Alison might have had, but it didn’t prove easy. Mrs Phillips, the neighbour who had offered to feed the cat, had seen trade or delivery vans drive up to Alison’s house from time to time; there’d been several of those. A small red hatchback had been there for a couple of days, and she’d seen a large black car too, from time to time. But what make the cars were, who they belonged to, or what their owners’ business with Alison was, she had no idea - why should she? If she was asked to give a list of visitors to her own house over the last month she would find it difficult.

For Jane, it was the connection with Peter Barton, rather than a possible lover, that set alarm bells ringing in her mind. Here was a woman, dead, with a noose around her neck, living alone in an isolated house near woods with a bridleway running through them. After Peter’s earlier assaults on women, all living alone near footpaths or cycletracks - the coincidence seemed too great to ignore. But so far she had no conclusive evidence that the house had been broken into, let alone that Peter Barton had been there. For all she knew, he might be in Australia by now.

She walked down a track behind a transport café, where the bridleway joined the main York-Selby road, by woods north of Alison Grey’s house. There was a quiet leafy track running through the woods, and a farmhouse nearby. Behind the house was a paddock with a pony in it, and beyond that a further strip of woodland. Peering through the leafless trees, she could just make out the outline of Alison Grey’s house a quarter of a mile away.

She looked around, wondering. The bridleway ran through the woods to her left, before taking a sharp right turn along the track down which she’d come. But what if someone coming from York turned left instead, skirting the paddock and going through the woods behind the house? Could someone approach Alison’s house that way? It would be easy enough, surely. No one would see a person doing that, except the occupants of this farmhouse.

She knocked on the farmhouse door. A dog inside barked fiercely. After a few moments a woman opened the door, holding a straining alsatian on a lead. ‘Yes?’

‘Police.’ Jane showed her ID. ‘We’re making enquiries about the death of your neighbour. A woman called Alison Grey?’

‘Oh right. You’d best come in. Don’t mind the dog, he’s just a pup. Give him a pat, he’ll be fine. Max, that’s
enough
!’