A Deadly Thaw (3 page)

Palmer deposited three Styrofoam cups of coffee onto Sadler’s desk. ‘Hot off the press, as it were.’

Connie gave him a sour look. ‘You’re mixing your metaphors. I thought we were boycotting that place.’ A well-known chain of coffee shops had recently opened a branch in Bampton despite vociferous opposition. Some of the smaller cafés that had been in the town for generations predicted their own demise as they struggled to cope with the competition.

Sadler forced his attention back to the voice on the phone.

‘I like the coffee there.’ Palmer picked up one of the cups and took a long swig. ‘I’ll have yours if you don’t want it.’

‘Coffee is the least of our worries.’ Sadler put down his phone, got up and shut the door to the office. ‘That was Superintendent Llewellyn. For the third time this evening. We’re getting a media strategy together before the details of the victim’s identity get into the press. Because once the body that was found at Hale’s End Mortuary is confirmed to be that of Andrew Fisher, we’re going to be bombarded with questions. I need to go through with you what we’re going to have to cover. Let’s start with 2004.’

Connie opened her notebook. ‘I’ve had a chance to glance through the old files. On the morning of the twentieth of September 2004, a Monday, Lena Fisher, now Lena Gray, awoke to find her husband, Andrew, dead in bed. She called an ambulance, which arrived at the house twenty-two minutes later. He was taken to hospital and pronounced dead on arrival.’

‘That was certainly what we believed to be the initial sequence of events,’ said Sadler.

Connie nodded. ‘According to her later statement, following her arrest, she changed the story slightly to say that they had sex when he got into bed, and then they both went to sleep. I’m telling you this because it might be relevant to helping us identify who the man was. It was someone she was willing to admit she’d had a sexual relationship with.’

‘But why did the sex come out in the later statement?’ asked Palmer. ‘Why didn’t she tell us at first?’

Sadler picked up his coffee and frowned at the logo emblazoned on the cup. ‘Because when Lena Gray was first questioned, it was as a woman whose husband had died in the night of natural causes. Whether or not they had sex the previous evening was none of our business.’

Connie was looking disapprovingly at her notes. Sadler guessed that she would have asked the question. He felt the prickle of irritation. ‘In any case, the question wasn’t asked.’

Connie, always quick to pick up on his mood, turned the page of her notebook. ‘Given that Andrew Fisher had been positively identified by his wife and death wasn’t considered to be suspicious, no further DNA proof was obtained or required. This is standard procedure in cases of natural causes.’

Sadler could feel Palmer’s eyes on him.

‘However, an autopsy was carried out two days later by Dr Shields – Bill – and he concluded, given a small amount of bruising around the mouth and some evidence of burst blood vessels in the ocular orbit (that’s eyeballs, in layman’s terms), that death was, in fact, most likely due to asphyxiation.’

‘And no further checks were done on the man’s identification, even though the cause of death was now considered to be suspicious?’ asked Palmer.

There was silence in the room.

‘That’s what’s going to be investigated. We would have done identity checks and I’m pretty sure these were carried out,’ said Sadler. He could see them both looking doubtful. ‘I have to say that I strongly suspect that the correct procedure was followed. However, I don’t want you to get involved in any mistakes that might have been made over the misidentification of the body. The case has been referred, by us, to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. There’ll be an investigation, and we can’t let that hinder what we’re having to do now.’

Palmer looked concerned. ‘You’ll be all right, though, won’t you? You said you weren’t directly involved in the case.’

Sadler made a face. ‘It’s a small team here. We all got involved one way or another. I may need to look at my own actions in relation to how we policed this.’

‘Hold on,’ Connie’s face was indignant. ‘First of all, as you said, you weren’t the investigating officer, so I hardly think you should be doing too much mea culpa. Second, let’s not forget that the body had already been positively ID’d by his wife. It’s not you that the press are going to go for when they find out about this. It’s her.’

Sadler looked at the two members of his team sitting across the desk and wondered, not for the first time, what he had done to deserve such loyalty. ‘Which brings us on to Lena Gray. What do we know about her?’

Palmer opened his mouth to speak, but it was Connie, once again, who got in first. ‘Lena and Andrew Fisher had been married for five years, no children. It was his second marriage. Lena’s first. Andrew worked as a consultant for one of the big City accountancy firms. By rights, they should have been living in a house in the London commuter belt. However, Lena, by her own admission, didn’t want to leave the family home, Providence Villa, where she is, in fact, still living. So she stayed in the house all week while her husband rented a flat in London, paid for by the company, and joined his wife at weekends.’

Finally, Palmer was able to interrupt. Sadler noted that he’d clearly skimmed through the file too. ‘The marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one, as far as these things go. Neighbours hadn’t reported any domestic disturbances, and both persons were under the police radar. However, subsequent scrutiny of Lena’s medical records revealed that she had, on a number of occasions, sought medical help for stress and depression. No other information was held on her medical file so it’s only guesswork as to what caused these illnesses.’

Connie turned to Palmer. ‘Mental-health problems aren’t simply a question of cause and effect. Lena could well have suffered from stress and depression without any direct cause.’

‘Did Lena talk about any problems in her interviews?’ Palmer asked.

Sadler rubbed his face. ‘She didn’t talk about anything, from what I can recall. When the results of Bill’s autopsy came in, she was arrested on suspicion of her husband’s murder. It was strange really. You’re not going to be able to hide the physical evidence of asphyxiation. She was always going to be found out after the PM.’

‘What was she like?’ asked Connie. ‘During the court hearings, I mean.’

‘She was calm. I assumed it was because of the trauma but clearly we underestimated her, because all the time she was hiding a much larger truth from us all.’

‘That the man in her bed, suffocated with a pillow, wasn’t her husband at all. He was, in fact . . . ’ Connie let the words hang in the air.

Sadler put down his pen. ‘That is the first of many questions we’re going to have to answer. It’s been quite a day. I can safely say, without a doubt, that it’s been a first for me. There’s going to be a lot of fall-out tomorrow. Let’s call it a night.’

Kat woke the following morning and listened to the rain splatter the window next to her bed. Spring hadn’t decided whether it had completely arrived. They’d had a week of true warmth where she had felt the chill of winter lift from her bones. But it had been followed by a cold snap, and winter and spring were still battling it out for ascendancy in Derbyshire.

The sash window had an inch gap at the top where the wind tried to whistle through the packing tape she’d put up over the winter in anticipation of the usual cold bite. It was the problem with having a room at the top of the house. In summer she overheated in the stuffiness as not only did the window not close properly, it also failed to open to its full extent. But it was the room that Kat had slept in since she was a teenager, when she had finally been allowed to move out of sharing the large bedroom below with Lena.

At the time, Lena had been exultant at being in the bigger bedroom, hers by right because she was older by one year. Kat had preferred this room, with its faded rosebud wallpaper which would now be known as shabby chic. It was to here she had come back after Lena’s arrest.

The door eased open, and Charlie marched into the room, his tail upright, a sign he was hungry. To emphasise his deprivation, he jumped on the bed and began to meow at her. Kat looked longingly at the hardback book she’d treated herself to the previous day but thought also of the warm tea that would take the chill off the bedroom. She found her slippers and padded downstairs after the swaying tail of the ecstatic cat.

In the kitchen, she tipped some dried cat food into the bowl and went to fill the kettle. It was cold, an unusual sign, as invariably Lena would be the first to wake and make a cup of tea to take back to bed. While the cat crunched in satisfaction, Kat made her way back up the stairs to her sister’s room. ‘Lena?’

Even before she entered, Kat could sense the emptiness behind the door. Lena’s presence could always be felt, but Kat knew she would not find her in the room. The bed was made, the smoothness of the duvet suggesting that care had been taken.

She moved over to the wardrobe and opened the door. Clothes hung on neat hangers, the trousers together, next to shirts, then woollens. She looked inside the bedside table drawer. Her sister’s passport, still bearing her married name, sat among the jumble of pens and hairgrips. She made her way along the landing to Lena’s studio, the smell of oil paint and turpentine growing in intensity with every step. As usual, she was surprised by how much light entered the room through the windows. It was their parents’ old bedroom. Lena had been adamant that this was the room she wanted for her painting. At the time, not long after their mother died, it had seemed an act of sacrilege to remove the huge marital bed and heavy oak wardrobe. They had given the furniture to a local charity as neither of them could bear to sell it.

The studio was empty. Kat ran her hands across the brushes and palette boards. It didn’t look like anything had been taken, but she wouldn’t have been able to swear to it. There was a half-finished painting on the easel, one of Lena’s signature flower pictures. This one was of a blue iris against a black background. The flower’s petals were daubed with spots of pink pollen. It was a powerful image, but also nauseating, the bright splashes reminding Kat of blood. She turned away from the picture and went back down to the kitchen to think.

The man known as Andrew Fisher had been cremated on the twenty-ninth of November 2004, which saved the police having to apply for an exhumation order. This, in Connie’s eyes, was the first blessing of the case. Graveyards gave her the creeps at the best of times, and, deep down, she dreaded the time she would have to attend an exhumation. Once, on a training course, she had confided her fears to another of the attendees. The roaring laughter that her words had produced meant that Connie had never again spoken of her deep-seated fear of the buried dead.

Of course, Connie knew that procedurally this was, in fact, a disaster. It gave them nothing tangible to test for the victim’s true identity. This meant that the only person who knew the identity of the man for sure was Lena. Which would mean more questioning.

Connie had got nowhere with Lena the previous day, so Sadler had decided to try himself. Connie would be concentrating on the investigation into the murder of the man found the day before, the man they now believed to be Andrew Fisher. There would be no more mistakes. A visual identification had been made by Sadler. Given Lena’s role in the deception over the first body, she would not be called upon to make an ID. Rather belatedly, in Connie’s view, Andrew’s dental records had been sent to Bill Shields, along with the medical records held by Fisher’s GP. It was to the pathology unit that she was headed.

Tucked away from the main hospital building, the grey plastic-cased pathology unit looked bleak and uninviting. Given that grieving relatives often had to visit the building to see loved ones, they could have made the building more presentable. Connie thought back to Hale’s End morgue with its lovingly crafted stonework and wondered how the world had changed in such a short period of time.

‘You coming in, or are you going to stand there gawping all day?’

Bill Shields was loitering in the entrance with what looked like a cup of tea in his hands. He was a heavily built man whose clipped accent disguised his Derbyshire roots. He and Connie had hit it off from the start. Her mother had been a pharmacist, and she had grown up amid the accoutrements of the sick.

‘I was just wondering where we went wrong. You know, between Hale’s End and this place.’

Bill Shields shrugged and went back inside. As she followed him, she saw Scott, his assistant, hunched over a computer screen. ‘You looking at dodgy sites again, Scott?’

He didn’t lift his eyes from the monitor. ‘The dental records are a match. There’s a slight gap between the central incisors. The measurements match an X-ray on the patient’s file, as do the details of dental work. Do you want to take a look, Bill?’

Bill made a face. ‘I better had, hadn’t I? We don’t want any more mistakes.’

‘Hey! It was before my time,’ said Scott.

He was smirking at Connie, and she resisted the temptation to stick her tongue out at him.

Bill sat down heavily in the chair. ‘What are you here for anyway? We did the PM this morning. I was going to phone the results through to Sadler.’

She took the chair opposite him. ‘He’s on his way to interview Andrew Fisher’s wife. He’s going to take her to the station and question her under arrest once we confirm that ID. Can you give me the gist of what you’ve found?’

‘I don’t see why not.’ He pulled a file towards him. ‘Although I’m sure you worked out the cause of death yourself. Massive trauma to the chest cavity as the result of a gunshot wound. What was interesting, however, was that the bullet I extracted didn’t come from a rifle as I expected. It’s what you would assume around here. Given the hunting community.’

‘Go on.’

‘What was used was a pistol. I haven’t seen that for a long while. Not that easy to get hold of these days. I’m surprised.’ Bill’s eyes flickered.

‘What is it?’ asked Connie.

‘I’d prefer not to say. Not at the moment. I’ve sent the bullet off to Ballistics for more information. Let’s wait for their report, shall we? There’s been enough problems with this case already. You don’t need me blundering along with something I’m not confident about.’

Connie decided to leave it. He clearly wasn’t going to be telling her anything before the report came in. ‘It’s my first shooting, you know. I wonder how you’d get hold of that sort of gun around here. Anything else?’

Bill shook his head. ‘He was a physically fit, large man. “Well-nourished” is perhaps the best phrase. Like me, I suppose. He had a slightly enlarged liver, probably liked a drop or two every evening but nothing that should have killed him.’

‘That’s it?’

‘For now. I’ve taken blood samples to send off to the lab. They’ll be about a week, unless you want me to ask them to speed it up. There didn’t seem much point given the clear cause of death.’ Bill shut the file and rubbed his hands on his trousers. ‘Any idea how old I am?’

Connie started. ‘Bill, I’ve never given it a thought. You’re timeless, I mean . . .’

She saw him smile and look pleased. ‘I’m fifty-five. I know I look older. I’ve got a good ten years before retirement, and, ideally, I’d like to see them out. No other hobbies to speak of, although my wife keeps nagging me to join her badminton group.’ It was the first Connie had ever heard of his wife. Where was this conversation going?

He read her thoughts. ‘The thing is, if we misidentified the body in 2004, and it’s certainly looking that way, then it’s a monumental cock-up. They could have my head on a platter.’

First Sadler and now Bill. Connie felt queasy at the thought of the men in her professional life lining up to take the blame for what appeared to be a genuine mistake in the way that bodies were identified. ‘Look, if you woke up tomorrow and told me that your wife was dead in your bed, I’d take your word for it. That it was her. I mean, you’re the one who would know her identity. Especially if we initially thought it was a natural death.’

The pathologist smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Connie. I harbour no malicious thoughts towards Jill. But you know it doesn’t work like that. And Jill may well be seeing more of me around the house. We’ll see. Let’s hope I can ride out the storm.’ He turned back to Scott, who handed him a large pink folder. Bill cast his eyes over the results. ‘At least we’ve got the right bugger this time.’