Stranglehold (2 page)

The two men remained silent for a moment opposite each other, each speculating on what could be important enough to stop them at this crucial stage, fellow sufferers now in their exhaustion, instead of the opponents they had been a moment earlier.

They did not have long to wait. Lambert came back grim-faced, scarcely looking at the man he had struggled with for half the night as he said, ‘All right, Tommy, you can go and make your statement on your movements that night to DI Rushton or one of his men.'

Clinton followed Rushton obediently from the room. Lambert scarcely waited for the door to close before he said, his voice grating harsh in the airless room, ‘There's been another one. Tonight. Not more than a couple of hours ago.'

Lambert's exhaustion seemed to drop away with this new and appalling development. Hook, watching him surreptitiously as they sat together in the back of the car, wondered if he could really be as alert as he suddenly looked.

The Superintendent did not speak. And he had allowed himself for once to be driven to the scene of the crime, leaving his old Vauxhall within the walls of the CID car park. Gazing unblinkingly through the side window into the deep darkness of the moonless night, he seemed scarcely like a man who had turned fifty and been working now for eighteen hours. The strain was there, but it was strain channelled into a raw, fierce concentration.

They had no difficulty finding the place. Oldford did not have a red light area: it was too small a town for that. Most of its inhabitants would have said it was too respectable, but the police knew better than that. The white car with its police emblem on the side drove through an area which had come down in the world, where practitioners of that oldest of trades walked their streets, where men like Tommy Clinton did their drinking.

A little to Hook's surprise, they drove right through that area, out to the edge of the town, where the country came rather abruptly to meet it. They had no difficulty finding the place, for the floodlights were already blazing white and garish behind the hastily erected canvas walls, which were almost complete now around the spot where the corpse had been discovered.

The long ribbons of ‘incident tape' which would keep out a curious public and allow the Scene of Crime team to search the whole area minutely were already in place. At three o'clock in the morning, neither they nor the young uniformed constable who guarded the entrance seemed strictly necessary, but it was a reassurance to the man who would take charge of the investigation to see them there. Murder has its rituals, and the men charged with detection are rightly tetchy if the ones they have devised are not observed.

The police surgeon was already there: whatever the gore and violence, it was necessary to have the fact of death professionally confirmed. Lambert met Dr Donald Haworth as he came from the canvas enclosure. He was a tall man, who could have secured for himself had he wished it that adjective ‘distinguished' which seems to be so highly desired by medical men. Perhaps he felt himself too young for that: he was still no more than thirty. Instead, he chose a deliberate informality; there was always a hint of untidiness about him, and the haste of a busy man in most of his actions.

He did not wait now for Lambert to ask the questions he knew were inevitable. ‘She's dead, and it's murder all right, I'm afraid, John.' He asserted his civilian status by the use of the Superintendent's first name; they knew each other through a succession of professional contacts, but had scarcely met apart from these. Haworth had but recently arrived in the area; the grapevine said that there was a failed marriage behind him, but that was scarcely material for comment nowadays.

‘How was she killed?'

‘Strangulation, almost certainly. I haven't disturbed her more than was strictly necessary, but there are pinpoint haemorrhages in her eyes.' Haworth carried his torch in his hand still; the lights behind him made him scarcely more than a silhouette to Lambert and Hook, but the Edinburgh accent came softly to them through the darkness, the words carefully and economically chosen and delivered.

‘Has she been sexually assaulted?' Lambert thought suddenly that he sounded like a journalist: that was always the first thing they wanted to know. An affirmative reply would double the size of their headlines.

‘I can't tell you that. I didn't want to lose evidence. No doubt your pathologist will be able to tell you.' Some slight nuance in his tone suggested a little resentment; perhaps he had at some early stage of his career as a police surgeon gone beyond his brief, and been reprimanded for it by the forensic medical men who followed behind him.

‘No, of course.' Lambert turned to Sergeant Johnson, the Scene of Crime Officer. ‘Has Dr Burgess been contacted?'

‘Yes, sir. He should be here within the hour, and he'll do the PM first thing in the morning.'

Haworth said, ‘I'm sure the good Burgess will confirm she's been strangled. Vagal inhibition, if you prefer it. Probably by someone wearing gloves, I'm afraid.' He brushed away a shock of hair which had been allowed to grow a little too long, so that it fell over the side of his face. This time Lambert was sure he caught a note of irony, a touch of resentment as the younger man mentioned Burgess, the pathologist. It was understandable enough: the two would be chalk and cheese. Lambert thrust the thought away, angry with himself for indulging it, when it was so irrelevant to his business here.

‘Any idea how long ago she died?' He saw what he thought was a professional caution descending upon the police surgeon's features, and said irritably, ‘Only an opinion, Don. No one's going to hold you to it.' He was surprised to find himself using the doctor's name; he liked the air of helpful spontaneity which the man carried about him. He might be something of a loner, but they were often the most useful among those who assisted the police from outside the system.

Haworth grinned. ‘I know that. I was only thinking how I might be as precise as possible.' He looked up at the starless sky, sniffing the night air a little as he assessed the temperature. ‘I would guess between two and three hours ago. But that is a guess. The body hasn't cooled much, and the bruises around the throat look quite fresh.'

Ahead of them an unseen hand drew back the canvas a little to admit Sergeant Johnson, and the shaft of light from the canvas enclosure fell briefly across the doctor's feet. Lambert was surprised to see them encased in training shoes beneath the polythene bags which all visitors to this site would now be required to wear, looking slightly ridiculous at the end of the trousers of a formal dark suit. He grinned a little at himself and his out-of-date ideas, which expected a professional man to be wearing city shoes, even when he was called out in the middle of the night. He said, ‘We won't hold you to it, but thank you for trying to be so precise.'

His gratitude was genuine. The early inquiries were often the most productive, and he could send his team now to find who had been seen around here at a precise hour. He said, to Hook and himself as much as to Haworth, ‘Around midnight, then. After the pubs had shut.'

Haworth pursed his lips. ‘Maybe a little later. I'd say this probably happened between twelve and one.'

Lambert was surprised but pleased to find him trying so hard to pinpoint a time for them. In his experience most medical men were too mindful of their reputation to be actively helpful; they usually sat on the fence until they had much more evidence than had been available to this man. He volunteered in response a little more of his own thoughts than he would normally have done. ‘The later the better, from our point of view, in some respects. The fewer people about, the fewer suspects. Though of course that also means fewer witnesses as well. But we only need one, if it's a good one.'

Haworth nodded. ‘I wish you luck, then. I hope you find the one who did it.' It was a strange wish, like a priest stating that sin is a bad thing. But the public, when confronted by evil, often produced these nervous truisms; it seemed that by asserting their own, conventional virtue, people distanced themselves from what had disturbed them. Haworth by his calling must have seen death often. But he had not been a police surgeon very long: Julie Salmon and this were his first murders, apart from the routine domestic killings which became ever more frequent.

Lambert nodded and turned towards the spot where the body lay, but Haworth's only move was to lift his right foot a little and tap the toe of his trainer against the hard summer ground. His black businessman's case with the tools of his trade swung lightly by his knee, contrasting oddly with that informal footwear. He said, ‘You'll find her – odd. She's been – well, you'll see for yourself.' He smiled briefly, so that his teeth caught what little light there was, then turned on his heel and left them.

Lambert watched him as he went to his car, a sleek low Japanese coupé. He did not look back or speak again, as if he was embarrassed by his last, halting words. Perhaps he thought a man with his background should have expressed himself better, or said nothing at all. Death should be an impersonal thing, a fact of life, for medics as for policemen.

When Lambert went into the little canvas enclosure, he saw immediately what had ruffled the doctor. This corpse had been prepared for their viewing.

The girl lay on her back. She had fair hair; it was impossible to tell in that light whether it was natural or peroxided. But it was neatly ordered. Either it had not been disturbed in death, which was unlikely, or it had been tidied up after the event. The young features had a serenity which perhaps they had not had in life, and almost certainly not in the last minutes of it.

The arrangement of the limbs was as regular as if this corpse had been laid out in a coffin in a funeral parlour. The heels and knees were together, the slim calves and shins pathetic in their youth and the absence of any trace of veins. The tight skirt was pulled decently and regularly over the knees; it was easy to see why Haworth had felt that ascertaining whether there had been a sexual assault might destroy important evidence. Whoever had touched that skirt and rearranged those limbs and hair might have left traces of himself upon his gruesome handiwork. Already Lambert was assuming the killer was male; statistically that was overwhelmingly probable.

It was the arrangement of the arms which shocked even policemen attuned to such bloodier deaths than this. They were carefully composed, with the hands drawn together between the small, tight breasts as if in prayer. Whoever had done this had slipped a strong elastic band around them, holding them together until they could set into the coldness of death. And already on this warm night rigor had begun to set in upon the small muscles of the victim's face.

The murdered girl looked like a marble figure upon a cathedral tomb, or a saint in a religious painting. Her killer had mocked her, and through her the men who would try to arrest him.

Lambert decided that he could not wait for the pathologist to arrive. He needed sleep more than anything else in the world, and Hook had come on duty at the same time as him. He checked the mechanics of the investigation with ‘Jack' Johnson, agreeing that the SOC team should not attempt the detailed examination of the area until daylight.

‘How long is it since it rained?' he asked Johnson wearily. He had tried to compute the answer himself, but found one day merging with another in his fatigue.

‘Four days. And not much then.' Johnson had worked with Lambert over many years, even though he was not CID. He knew there was no need to ‘Sir' him unless an audience demanded the formalities.

‘Any chance of footprints?' Lambert was stiffly removing the plastic bags which all who went into the area around the corpse would put over their shoes, to eliminate the risk of a confusion of sole-marks.

‘Not a lot. It wasn't much more than a shower four days ago. The ground s pretty hard, but there might be something among the long grass. The photographer's already taken a picture of one print; it had a heel and most of a sole; it looked fairly fresh to me.'

Lambert looked round. The ragged bushes looked sinister on the edge of the harsh white floodlights, as if they held more secrets than they cared to reveal. Above them, the higher branches of a beech tree were perfectly still. The big house which had once stood behind them in the darkness had been demolished. A few yards from his head, a board said, SITE FOR 16 LUXURY FLATS, with the builder's and the agent's names beneath it. They were almost into green belt land here, but there was no need for builders to breach that when they could replace one residence with sixteen.

But recession ruins the most lucrative plans: the paint was peeling on the agent's board, and the weeds around it had grown head-high, while the builder waited for the green shoots of economic recovery that were so reluctant to show themselves. ‘Do many people come here?' he asked Johnson.

The Sergeant shrugged. ‘The local beat man says plenty of kids mess about here. And young couples in urgent need of a bunk-up. We've already found two rubber johnnies; no doubt there'll be plenty more tomorrow.' He looked automatically towards that silent figure in its pose of mediaeval piety, as if he might have committed an impropriety by his coarseness. But the dead are less easily offended than the living.

Lambert nodded, feeling his exhaustion surge swiftly back as they moved to the detail of the investigation. ‘Bert Hook and I are for bed. Would you radio in to DI Rushton with any news when Dr Burgess arrives. We'll begin the door to door inquiries first thing in the morning – but Rushton will have all that in hand.'

Johnson nodded. Lambert was one of the very few Superintendents who did not run his investigation by directing his team from an office, preferring to be closer to events himself. It occasionally led to tensions in the ranks above and below him, but he had men about him who understood the way he worked. And he got results: even as an anachronism, that guaranteed his survival.