Already Dead (17 page)

‘Detective Sergeant Fry,’ said the pathologist. ‘Interesting to see you back here again.’

‘Interesting in the sense of the Chinese curse?’ asked Fry.

‘Well, you can’t deny we live in interesting times.’

‘No.’

Fry thought the pathologist was looking older these days. Her face was harder, the creases around her eyes noticeably deeper. And she seemed very tired. It was the sort of tiredness that made her more spiky, more inclined to look for a target to take it out on. In other circumstances, Fry could have empathised with her. She suspected she might be like that herself sometimes.

But Mrs van Doon had long since taken a dislike to her for some reason, and they were well past the point where they might ever become friends.

‘But if this is your latest career move, DS Fry, it has me mystified,’ said the pathologist.

‘I hate to be predictable,’ murmured Fry.

‘Oh, really?’

The body from the woods lay on the autopsy table. Like most victims of sudden death, the man’s face had sagged into an empty mask, devoid of character or expression. Fry had seen relatives of murder victims have initial difficulties identifying a body in the mortuary. It was because the person they’d known in life was gone. Robbed of its animation and personality, the physical shell was blank and meaningless.

The victim’s skin was pale and waxy, his lips shrivelled away to expose uneven teeth. He looked like a movie vampire sleeping in his coffin, waiting for a stake in the heart to destroy him, or a drop of fresh blood to bring him back to life. It wouldn’t work here. No amount of freshly spilt blood would revive this victim.

‘I suppose there’s a sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Sergeant?’ said the pathologist. ‘There usually is.’

Fry nodded. ‘Yes. Did he drown?’

‘Ah. Well, first of all, I’m afraid there are no universally accepted diagnostic laboratory tests for drowning.’

‘That’s unfortunate.’

‘Indeed. How remiss of forensic science not to be perfect in every respect. We can perform so many magic tricks for you, yet we can’t tell for certain whether someone drowned or was already dead when he went into the water.’

‘I’ve never expected you to be perfect, Doctor.’

Mrs van Doon looked at her and pulled down her mask. Fry thought perhaps she’d scored a small victory, until the pathologist smiled in satisfaction. Then she realised she’d just been led into making the remark. She’d proved herself to be shallow and predictable after all. Now she was at a disadvantage from the start.

‘And you’re right as usual, Sergeant Fry. So all is well with the world, after all.’

‘Drowning?’ said Fry stiffly.

‘When a victim is dead at the time of submersion, water and contaminating debris can enter the pharynx, trachea and larger airways. Small quantities might enter the oesophagus and stomach. However, water will not reach the terminal bronchioles and alveoli to any significant extent. So if we find a substantial amount of foreign material in the alveoli, that provides evidence of immersion during life. Well – so long as the body is recovered within twenty-four hours, and from shallow water. The water was shallow in this case, I believe? Less than three metres deep?’

‘Certainly. But twenty-four hours—?’

‘Yes, that’s our problem. Our victim was in the water a little too long before his body was recovered.’

‘Any other way we can tell?’

‘Well, if there was a large quantity of water and debris in the stomach, that might suggest immersion during life. But my examination shows very little in the stomach in this case.’

‘So…?’

‘So what I can tell you is that I can’t tell you for certain whether he drowned or not.’

‘Great.’

‘Basically, what we have here is a white male aged thirty-five to forty years, five feet ten inches in height, weighing around a hundred and ninety-five pounds. The subject was in good general health – though I would suspect a rather sedentary lifestyle. Cause of death unknown at this stage. We’ll have to await test results. The blood alcohol level might be interesting. Accidental drowning in adults is usually associated with alcohol consumption or drug use. The literature says two-thirds of adult males found drowned have consumed alcohol.’

‘But we don’t know that he drowned.’

‘And we don’t know that he didn’t.’

Fry bit her lip. ‘Other injuries?’

‘Well, these contusions are puzzling me,’ said Mrs van Doon.

Reluctantly, Fry leaned forward to follow the pathologist’s gesture.

‘Yes, I see.’

Trust the woman to save the best detail for last. There were red welts on the body, each one a round mark surrounded by a halo of bruising. They looked almost like cigarette burns, but larger in diameter. And cigarette burns didn’t cause bruises.

‘Perhaps about four days old,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘The colour of the bruising is starting to turn to yellow on the inner edge, look. Bilirubin.’

‘Who?’

The pathologist restrained a smirk. ‘Not “who”, but “what”. The yellow colour is a waste product called bilirubin. It’s the same substance that turns your urine yellow.’

‘I always learn something from you that I didn’t want to know,’ said Fry.

The pathologist took no notice. She rarely did.

‘Bilirubin is the last bit of congealed blood to be broken down and dispersed by the white cells,’ she said. ‘First the dark purple – that’s the colour of oxygen in the haemoglobin. Then the green of biliverdin. It’s generally estimated to take about four days for only bilirubin to be left.’

‘Unexplained contusions approximately two centimetres in diameter will appear on my report. Obviously not the cause of death.’

‘The bruising is wider than two centimetres,’ said Fry.

‘Ah, yes. Well observed.’

A compliment was never what it seemed when it came from Mrs van Doon. Although it wasn’t evident in the tone of her voice, she was certainly being sarcastic. The diameter of the bruising should be obvious to anyone.

‘So?’ said Fry.

‘The bruising isn’t actually at the site of the contusion. With an injury like this, blood is forced away from the site by the impact and forms that circle around the contusion itself.’

‘He was being hit with something.’

‘Yes. But it was an odd choice of weapon, whatever it was,’ said the pathologist. ‘Minor bruising, that’s all. It would have been quite painful at the time, I dare say.’

‘Perhaps he was being tortured.’

The pathologist shrugged, without replying. It wasn’t for her to say. It was speculation, and that was the job of the police. The shrug expressed a degree of professional disdain, her scorn for a lack of scientific rigour.

‘Four days ago?’ asked Fry.

‘An approximation only. There’s no way we can fix time of death from the temperature of the body when it was found. A body cools in water about twice as fast as in the air – about five degrees Celsius per hour. It reaches the temperature of the water usually within five to six hours. So all I can tell you is that he was dead in the water for at least that long. You’ll have to rely on circumstantial evidence to establish the time more accurately.’

‘Dead in the water?’ repeated Fry.

‘I always like to use that phrase. It has so many layers of meaning, don’t you think?’

‘I believe it refers to a ship when it loses power.’

‘And metaphorically to someone’s career,’ said the pathologist.

‘So he was tortured?’ asked Luke Irvine when Fry reported on the post-mortem results.

‘It looks like it.’

‘It’s more than just a simple robbery, then.’

‘It never was a simple robbery,’ said Fry. ‘You don’t dump your victim dead and naked in a stream if you’re just robbing them for a few quid.’

‘A robbery gone wrong,’ said Hurst. ‘It happens all the time.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ scoffed Irvine. ‘On TV it does.’

‘It happens,’ insisted Hurst.

‘It
is
possible. He could have been tortured to get the PIN for his credit card. Then he died. A weak heart perhaps, or something like that – the test results might tell us. And his robber panicked and dumped his body. That would explain why he was left naked. They took his clothes so that he wouldn’t be identified. You can definitely learn that trick from watching TV.’

‘What? And then they left the clothes piled up a few yards away for us to find? Complete with his driving licence to make it easy to ID him? And his credit cards were in there too. Not to mention the cash. Pretty slapdash robbers, Luke.’

‘Could you two just call a truce for a bit while I’m out of the room?’ said Fry. ‘I want forensics chased up on Glen Turner’s computer and laptop, so we can get a proper examination of his bank accounts. Then maybe we can pick it up when I get back.’

‘It’s such a pity we don’t have Ben Cooper available,’ said Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens when she’d brought him up to date. ‘He’s always been such a big asset to the team.’

‘We can manage perfectly well,’ said Fry. She didn’t really feel she needed to answer to a Divisional DI. Especially not Paul Hitchens. She’d worked with him, and she knew him. Most importantly, she knew all his weaknesses.

‘If you establish that it was murder, we’ll have to call in the Major Crime Unit,’ said Hitchens. ‘But then, you know that.’

‘If we need the MCU, we need them. What we don’t need is DS Cooper. We’ll manage fine without him.’

Hitchens chewed his lip. Fry could see the problem he was facing. No matter how he felt, how much misplaced faith he had in Ben Cooper, he couldn’t display a lack of confidence in his own team.

But it turned out that wasn’t what was on his mind.

‘This won’t come as a huge surprise to you, Diane,’ he said. ‘But I’m moving on. It’s time for me to do something different. I don’t fit in here any more. It was different when DCI Kessen was here, or Stewart Tailby before him. They were good to work for.’

‘You used to take the piss out of them both,’ said Fry. ‘All the time.’

She had no idea what else to say. Hitchens was wrong – it
had
come as a surprise to her. But perhaps it shouldn’t have done. She’d seen a leaflet on his desk one day, promoting a seminar for inspectors.
Meeting the challenges of the new performance landscape.
She’d thought it was just another Human Resources initiative. But he spoke as if she ought to have known. Perhaps she had missed all the gossip.

Hitchens coughed. ‘Perhaps occasionally. But you understand. I did talk to you about it earlier in the year.’

‘I don’t believe you’ve ever mentioned it to me,’ said Fry.

‘Oh?’ He looked confused. ‘I suppose it must have been DS Cooper, then.’

‘Yes, I suppose it must.’

‘I’ve worked in E Division for a while, you know. I came to rely on Ben quite a lot. It was good having Cooper as DS.’

Fry said nothing. Presumably Hitchens had also forgotten that Cooper had replaced her as DS on his team. That was a convenient lapse of memory. It allowed him to speak the truth without worrying that she might take offence at the implications.
It was good having Cooper as DS. Much better than whoever it was doing the job before him.

‘We have reports coming in of vehicles sighted in the area the night of the murder,’ reported Irvine when she got back. ‘So far, we’ve got two white vans, a red car, and a BMW.’

‘Are they reliable witnesses?’ asked Fry.

‘I don’t know. The red car and the BMW were noticed by a passing motorist. There weren’t many on that road at the time, so it’s a bit of luck for us. And the two white vans were seen by an employee at the quarry company nearby. We’ve got good descriptions of the vans. A Mark 6 Ford Transit, and a Renault Trafic. One had a name printed on the side. Do you think either of those could be of interest to us?’

‘Possibly,’ said Fry. ‘We’ll need to talk to the witnesses to see how well they stand up.’

‘Want me to run with that, Diane?’

‘Fine.’

‘
Two
white vans, though?’ said Murfin. ‘One is more than enough, if you ask me.’

‘What are you talking about, Gavin?’

‘I’m saying everyone is always looking for a white van. Any inquiry I’ve ever been involved in, we were always trying to track down a white van. And when we found it, the driver never had anything to do with the crime we were investigating. He was always just passing or happened to be in the area at the time.’

‘Maybe they’ve been sent as observers,’ said Irvine cheerfully.

‘What?’

‘Observers. You know, like that American TV series – where these sort of bald aliens always turn up making notes in the background when anything significant happens. They’re observers. It could be why there’s always a white van man in the area when a serious crime is committed.’

Fry scowled at him. ‘Now I have no idea what you’re talking about, Luke.’

‘When was that on?’ asked Hurst. ‘And what is the series called?’

‘I can’t remember,’ said Irvine. ‘It’s American. A bit like
The X Files
, but more recent.’

‘I think you just made it up.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Look, I don’t care whether you made it up or not,’ said Fry impatiently. ‘Can we please get back to—?’

‘
Fringe
.’

They all turned to stare at Gavin Murfin.

‘It’s called
Fringe
,’ he said. ‘The TV show that Luke is talking about. There’s this FBI agent and this mad scientist—’

Fry turned away from the conversation in frustration. How was she going to track down witnesses to the death of Glen Turner, or whatever went immediately before it? There were too many white vans, and too many dark nights. One vehicle looked much like any other in the black, rain-lashed depths of the Derbyshire countryside.

She looked out of the window as the thought came into her head.

‘Oh God, look at it out there,’ she said. ‘What have we done to deserve this?’

Murfin turned and examined the water lashing against the panes. A thundering downpour filled the air, surging off the tarmac and overwhelming the surface drains in an instant to form swirling pools between vehicles in the parking compound. But for the sweep of headlights in the road outside, the world had been plunged into saturated gloom.