Fragile Cord (6 page)

Without another word they moved
back onto the landing, Benson raising his eyebrows as he motioned
towards his assistant, indicating the child could now be moved.

Both men stood silently,
looking around until they found a place on the landing wall they
could focus on. A framed picture of the boy as a curly haired
toddler caught their attention. It had been taken at Disney, one of
those meet-the- character photo opportunities. The boy wore a plain
tee-shirt and short dungarees, chubby legs rolled over the top of
his ankle socks as he stood knock-kneed for the camera, his scuffed
leather sandals turned into each other as he beamed at his mother,
his arms wrapped around an adult size Minnie Mouse. Coupland
studied the happy scene as he cleared his throat.

‘When did he…’ he asked, unable
to finish his sentence.

‘A couple of hours ago.’

It was as if they’d been struck
by an affliction that prevented them from saying the word death or
anything alluding to it. Like they were taking part in some bizarre
game of charades where they had to second-guess each other’s
sentences.

‘And the mother….?’

‘Through here….’

The master bedroom had been
tastefully decorated in shades of cool blue; fitted wardrobes
surrounded a king size bed. The sun streamed through the large
central window, its rays bouncing off a carefully placed crystal
that hung in its middle, catching the light and transforming it
into coloured beams like a miniature laser show. To the side of the
window a dressing area complete with dressing table and large
vanity mirror led through to an en-suite bathroom. In the mirror’s
reflection Coupland could see a corner bath, an assortment of bath
products arranged around its edge.

Confused, he turned to Benson,
‘Where…?’

‘Far side of the bed…..’ and so their
fractured word game began again.

With a jolt Coupland saw the
top of the woman’s head jutting out from behind the neatly made
bed, tilted forward as if in prayer. He almost expected her to turn
around, disturbed by the strangers standing in her bedroom doorway,
ask them what the hell they thought they were doing. Except she
wasn’t able to turn, nor would she be able to ever again.

His immediate thought when he
stepped towards her was that she looked like a puppet on a string.
A rope of some kind had been secured to the bedstead; the other end
of it had been tied around her neck. Coupland turned back to Benson
for clarification. ‘I was informed it was sui-’

‘It is.’

‘I don’t get it, she-’

‘She has a noose around her
neck, Kevin,’ Benson said sharply, ‘and the pressure of the cord
has cut off the air supply to her lungs and brain, what bit of that
is hard for you to take in?’

Coupland stared at the
semi-kneeling body of Tracey Kavanagh, the angle of her torso as it
slumped forward putting pressure on the taut rope. He was unnerved
by the fact he was unable to see her face, could only see the crown
of her head, a central parting in her dark hair, which hung down
like a curtain obscuring her forehead and eyes from view. What
bothered him most was the fact both her feet – indeed her knees -
were on the floor. There were no restraints on her arms or legs,
nothing inhibiting her freedom. The colour drained from his face as
realisation dawned:

‘But she could have stood up at
any time.’

‘She didn’t want to, Kevin.’

She was fully dressed; a
cheesecloth maternity dress was bunched up around her knees,
exposing the back of white calves that were beginning to show signs
of mottling.

Benson provided a voiceover:

‘When Alex arrived at the scene
she checked for signs of life. Although the mother was dead she
hoped there was a chance to save the baby. She lifted the woman’s
head to remove the pressure of the ligature from her neck, tried
breathing air into her mouth. She thought that if she could prevent
the brain from being starved of oxygen, there’d be a greater chance
of the foetus surviving…..Only it was obvious to the paramedic and
the emergency doctor who responded to the call that the life of the
foetus – and the mother - had been extinct for some time.’

‘
Jesus
.’

A cold draft blew through the
room lifting the hairs on the back of Coupland’s neck as he
pictured Alex fighting to keep the woman’s unborn child alive. He
let out an involuntary shiver.

‘I thought the whole point of
hanging was to step off something and dangle by the neck – that you
hung from a height until your body was starved of air - eliminating
any room for second thoughts.’

He stepped closer to the woman,
lifted the hair at the nape of her neck so that he could see where
the noose had been tied. The knot was just beneath her hairline,
easy enough to reach if she’d changed her mind.

‘
In many ways it mirrors a
traditional hanging,’ Benson informed him, ‘by which I mean the
body dangles from an overhead rope. The rope mark – as you can see
here-’ he pointed to the line just visible beneath the ligature,
‘is characterised by an upward slant. Garrotting, or a faked
suicide, would leave a horizontal line.’

An image of her lifting her
arms behind her head came into view, tying the knot precisely,
allowing no margin for error.

Coupland looked up at Benson,
‘It must’ve taken a hell of a lot of willpower to fashion a noose
and then use it in such a way that she could stand up at any time
she wanted.’

‘Or desperation.’

Both of them
remained silent, then Benson said: ‘
Cases
of asphyxiation where the victim could simply have stood up to save
himself or herself, are, for the most part, quite rare. They tend
to be associated with autoerotic or unusual partnered sexual
practices,’ he folded and unfolded his arm as he said this, giving
the impression he wasn’t entirely comfortable with this line of
thought, ‘but the intent is never to actually die.’

Coupland recalled a similar
incident involving an Australian rock star at the end of the
nineties, half remembered reading interviews with the singer’s
close friends who claimed he’d never intended to die, that
something that evening had gone terribly wrong. At the time he
didn’t get it, the need to push life to the furthest limit. He
wasn’t so sure he was any nearer to understanding it now.

‘You think that’s what happened
here?’ Coupland wasn’t convinced, whether because unusual sexual
predilections didn’t fit with his image of the cosy family scene
he’d encountered downstairs he wasn’t sure. There certainly didn’t
appear to have been anyone else in the bedroom with her – no other
belongings – other than her husband’s – certainly no evidence of
sex play. Given what she’d just done to her son, Coupland surmised,
suicide seemed the most probable cause. The shake of Benson’s head
implied the pathologist thought the same.

Crouching down onto his
haunches so that he could see her face, Coupland found himself
staring into eyes that bulged out of their sockets like some
grotesque animation. Her swollen tongue protruded though her mouth.
He felt the displacement of air as Benson crouched beside him.

‘A suicide hanging causes death
in several different ways, Kevin: Pressure on the jugular vein and
carotid artery, which result in a lack of oxygen reaching the
brain. …Pressure on the vagus nerve causes breathing
inhibition…which in turn causes asphyxia, because the breathing
passageways are obstructed by the tongue and glottis, which are
pushed into the pharynx.’ He paused, as though mentally checking
he’d included the most salient points. ‘I’m certain all this will
be confirmed when I open her up.’

Benson’s words
set Coupland’s teeth on edge, yet he knew the pathologist wasn’t
being insensitive. It was his job to cut people open and rummage
inside their bodies, to identify the reason for their death, in the
same way it was Coupland’s job to get inside their
head.

He walked over to the bedroom
door, to where the photographer stood kicking his heels in case he
was needed again. These cases were never as straight forward as
they looked, and this one….

‘You’ve taken shots of the knot
and the angle of the rope?’ Coupland called out to him. The man
nodded, piqued, he knew how to do his bloody job.

‘And the knot where she secured
the rope to the bed?’

He nodded again.

The DS scratched his chin,
moved his hand down to the base of his neck and then up to just
under his jawline as though his shirt collar was chafing him. He
rubbed the area of skin from ear to ear absentmindedly as he looked
back into the bedroom at the rope securing Tracey Kavanagh to the
bed.

Benson watched him from inside
the room. ‘Are we done here?’ he asked.

Coupland waived him away
impatiently, pointing to the photographer’s equipment lying by his
feet, half packed away.

‘You got a video recorder in
there?’

The photographer nodded, knelt
down to unclasp his case while Coupland motioned with his hands for
him to come back into the room.

‘Here.’ He motioned for him to
approach the body.

‘I want you to record me
releasing her.’

He paused, thinking for a
moment, ‘I’m going to cut the rope either side of the knot, both on
the bedstead and around her neck so they’re preserved for testing,
but I want to be sure we’ve captured how this rig-up looks from all
angles, so I can replicate it later. Got that?’

The photographer nodded, tried
out the camera from different points in the room until he was happy
with the view through his lens. To get the shot of Coupland cutting
around the knot on the bedstead was easy enough – he took up
position at the foot of the bed, using the zoom lens to home in and
capture the detail as Coupland worked a knife to cut through the
rope’s thread. In order to capture the clearest image of the
Detective Sergeant cutting the rope either side of the knot behind
Tracey’s head he had to crawl along the length of the bed while
Benson lifted her hair.

‘Closer.’ Coupland kept
repeating this instruction until the photographer was near enough
to the woman he could smell her shampoo, its unmistakable fragrance
catching in his throat.

The brand was a popular one. He
would never be able to smell it again without gagging.

Angus Kavanagh sat rigid on the
oversized settee, staring blankly at Coupland as he introduced
himself and DC Alex Moreton. Angus was medium build; square
shouldered with closely cropped fair hair. Pale blue eyes looked up
from under patrician brows, his lashes barely visible. His skin was
pale too, reminding Coupland of the cream you used to get on the
top of fresh milk before government health advisors turned such
things into a guilty pleasure, today’s cartons contained a watery
imitation that didn’t even taste like it came from a cow.

There was a slight tremor in Angus’s
hands and two spots of colour flashed across his cheekbones, which
Coupland put down to shock. Even so there was an air about him, a
self-assurance that hinted at a privileged upbringing making him
look older than his thirty years. The information the uniformed
officer who’d stayed with him had gleaned was sketchy, he’d spent
most of his time restraining him, preventing him from bolting back
upstairs to his wife and child than finding out his personal
details and that of his family. Even now the officer bounced on the
balls of his feet, ready to lunge if the poor bastard made another
move to dash out of the room.

Coupland flicked
through the officer’s notebook. Angus had been married to Tracey
for six years; Kyle attended a local independent school. They were
happily married – Coupland noticed the PC had underlined
happily
several times,
as though there were degrees of happiness and each line represented
a different level. Angus and Tracey, going by the number of lines,
were extremely happy. They had no financial worries, no problems
within their marriage and Kyle was doing well at school.

‘Can I get you something Angus?’

Alex crouched down on her haunches so
she was the same level as Angus, the way an adult would try to make
themselves appear non-threatening to a distressed child. He seemed
incapable of moving his head, had stared at their middles all the
while Coupland told him how sorry they were, asking if there was
someone they could call. The PC had poured him a shot of something
he’d found in the kitchen, and Angus nursed it now in his hands,
swirling the liquid round and round in his glass without taking a
sip.

‘Can’t face it…..’ he whispered to no
one in particular. His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed and his nose
looked as though he’d blown it several times in succession.

‘How about I make us a nice cup of
tea?’ Alex soothed, smiling at him sympathetically as she slipped
from the room. Coupland knew it was an act, that she was using all
her reserves to stay in control, digging deep to retain a
professional exterior in front of him. He knew that she, like
himself – like all of the officers called out to this house for
that matter – would wake up one day, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day
after, or maybe even a long time after that, and her heart would
weigh a little bit heavier, for working on this case. It was the
price they would pay for doing what they did for a living, and
there was as much chance of any of them moving on to do something
different as there was of night deciding not to follow day.

With Alex gone the room lapsed into
silence. A carriage clock sat centre stage over an Adam-style fire
surround, the second hand tick tocking its way around the gold face
oblivious to fact that for this family time had long since ceased
to matter. A leather armchair faced towards the centre of the room,
Coupland moved it closer to Angus and sat down.