An Expert in Murder (11 page)

‘It’s a nasty one, this,’ he said, without wasting any more time on social niceties and, as he always did, affording Penrose the respect of a fellow medic. ‘The cause of death is fairly straightforward –

internal haemorrhage as a result of sharp trauma to the heart from a penetrating injury originating just below the breast bone. From the angle of the wound, I’d say that she was standing up when the weapon entered her body and that the injury was made with an upward stab – you don’t often see that – by someone a few inches taller and right-handed.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘Could be either, I’m afraid. The victim was only a couple of inches over five feet, so the height issue doesn’t help us. If she’d been wearing something a little more robust, I’d have said quite confidently that the assailant was a man, but her coat was undone and a sharp point would have gone through that dress very easily.

The tissues are quite soft, you know, and a reasonably fit woman, particularly an angry one, could have done it without a problem as long as the weapon was keen enough – which it most certainly was.’

‘Have you ever come across a hatpin used as a murder weapon before?’

‘No, Archie, and I still haven’t; that’s where it gets interesting.

The weapon you found in her body wasn’t the one that killed her

– that much I can be sure of.’

Even with all the possibilities Penrose had been considering, that one had not occurred to him. One of the few things he believed he could take for granted was suddenly removed and he felt the foundations of the case shift again beneath his feet. A feeble ‘How do you know?’ was the best he could come up with.

‘Because of the blood. No hatpin would have caused such massive internal blood loss. It wasn’t obvious immediately because there was virtually no bruising to the puncture point and no obvi-74

ous external haemorrhage, but inside it’s a different story. There was a huge amount of blood in the pleural cavity and in the area around the heart, and some had passed into the abdominal cavity along the line of penetration. Yes, it’s conceivable that a hatpin could cause enough damage to be fatal, but it would be a much slower death than was the case here and you certainly couldn’t rely on it. Once you know you’re looking at two different entries, you can see that the hatpin has taken a slightly different route from the initial thrust with the blade, but it’s only marginal and the swapping of one for the other had very little effect on the external wound itself.’

‘So what sort of weapon are we looking for?’

‘Something narrow – like I said, very little blood found its way out from the entry point – and fairly long; it would need to be at least six inches to reach the heart through the liver and diaphragm.

A nice paper knife would work, for example, if it were sharp enough – and that’s the key: there’s no drag on the tissues at the edges of the wound, so it went in and came out cleanly.’

‘How much did she suffer?’ Penrose asked, conscious that he was soon to see Elspeth’s family.

‘It would have been very quick and it’s doubtful that she knew much about it. From the damage to the wall of the heart, I’d say the assailant moved the knife around in the body once the initial wound was made, and that will have speeded up the process even more. The blood in the pericardium will have prevented the heart from pumping effectively and her blood pressure will have dropped almost instantly, before the impact of a hard and fast stab really registered. It’s likely that the shock of what had happened, together with the rapid loss of blood pressure, would override any behavioural pain response in the victim and I should think she was unconscious within a minute, perhaps less. So, depending on your point of view, this particular weapon did a lovely job. It always amazes me that more of our villains don’t favour the knife, you know. It’s a much better bet than a poker or a piece of lead piping, and so much more imaginative. And that’s something there’s no shortage of here – imagination.’

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Penrose agreed. Flicking through the post-mortem report, he found the section that dealt with the shaving of the girl’s neck, a seemingly purposeless act of defilement which, bizarrely, he found more disturbing than the fatal injury. For once, Spilsbury’s conclu-sions told him little; the tiny amount of blood indicated that the cut had been made very shortly after death had occurred, but he had already suspected that. It was pointless to ask the pathologist to speculate on its meaning, so he turned his attentions back to more material evidence. ‘Can you tell me anything else about the killer? A name would be nice, but I’ll settle for hair or clothes.’

Spilsbury smiled. ‘Well, he – let’s say he for convenience’s sake –

certainly wasn’t covered in his victim’s blood when he left the train, so you can rule out that appeal to the public. There may have been a little on his hand but not enough to make him stand out from the crowd, and there was no blood or skin under the girl’s fingernails to indicate any injuries that might arouse suspicion. The shock would have stopped her putting up much of a fight, even if he’d given her the chance to struggle. And there were no prints on the hatpin other than hers. On a more positive note,’

he continued as Penrose looked increasingly despondent, ‘there were some fibres under her nails and more in her mouth which don’t appear to match anything she was wearing so, when we’ve done more tests, I might be able to tell you what his coat or jumper was made of. My guess is that the killer pulled her towards him with his left hand – there’s a mark on the back of her neck to support that – and muffled any noises she might have made by holding her face against his chest as the knife went in. There was a lot of dust on the skirt of her dress but that’s consistent with what was on the floor of the carriage, so it tells us very little except that it’s certainly not the cleaning you pay for in first class. She must have fallen forward onto her knees when she lost consciousness, and then been lifted onto the seat where she was found: easier for a man to do that, of course, but again not impossible for a woman.

There are some pulls in her stockings and the dress is slightly torn under one arm, which could suggest that she was shifted without much care or ceremony, but it’s hardly surprising that it was done 76

in a hurry. This is one of the riskiest crimes I’ve seen – you’d need to be in and out in a matter of minutes. Anyway, I’ll let you know as soon as the tests are done on those fibres. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got for you at the moment. Just for once, the time of death is certain almost to the minute, but you know as much about that as I do.’

There was silence for a moment while Penrose thought about the information that Spilsbury had given him. ‘I can think of two reasons for switching the murder weapon,’ he said. ‘Either the blade that he used was so distinctive that to leave it behind would be to give himself away; or there’s something significant in what he chose to substitute it with. What would you put your money on?’

Years in court had taught Spilsbury never to volunteer his views unless asked – and Penrose asked more often than most of his colleagues – but, when he did offer an opinion, his eye for detail, acute gifts of reasoning and a memory which served as an index to death in all its forms meant that he was always worth listening to.

‘This killing is personal – as personal as it gets – but it was also carried out quickly and efficiently, so it’s almost certainly premed-itated. In which case, the killer would hardly plan to use something that was likely to give him away and then be forced to swap it. No, the method of killing here is about the victim; get to know her, and she will lead you to your man.’

Penrose thanked him more perfunctorily than was characteristic of him, but his mind was playing with an imbalance of questions and answers, the most persistent thought being that it was all very well getting to know the victim if you were sure it was her death which had been intended – but his personal jury had yet to deliver its verdict on that one. There was little to be gained from sharing his doubts with the pathologist at this stage: he should be gathering information on the murder which had actually been committed rather than trying to investigate one which existed only in his worst fears.

‘I’ll let you know if I come up with anything else,’ Spilsbury said. ‘And good luck – I think you’ll need it.’

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Looking at the clock and realising he was late to pick up Josephine, Penrose went to find Fallowfield to give him the glad tidings: firstly, that the murder weapon was devoid of any prints other than the victim’s; secondly, that it was not actually the murder weapon at all. There was really only one way for their luck to turn.

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Six

Josephine was already waiting on the pavement when Penrose’s car turned into St Martin’s Lane, and he imagined she had been there for some time. Looking at the anxiety etched on her face, he questioned for a moment the wisdom of allowing her to accompany him in what must surely be a painful interview for all concerned but he knew that, had he refused, she would merely have passed a long afternoon alone, grieving for a situation which she believed to be partly her fault, or embroiled unnecessarily in the tangle of raw egos and ruffled feathers that lay in wait at the theatre. Less philanthrop-ically, his instincts told him that Josephine would be a useful string to his bow when it came to questioning the Simmonses. Undoubt-edly, there was important information to be had from the encounter and a mildly spoken woman with a natural curiosity and gentle eyes was likely to get much closer to the heart of the matter than either Fallowfield or himself, particularly if she held a certain celebrity status in the eyes of half her audience. When he had telephoned ahead to make sure there was no objection to Josephine’s inclusion in the appointment, Frank Simmons had implied that, on the contrary, it was the one thing that might just make the ordeal bearable.

In all their years together, Penrose had yet to decide if Fallowfield’s driving was very good or very bad. Down broad streets and across open countryside, he supposed it might be called exhilarating, but breadth and space were rare commodities in London and the Sergeant never allowed his surroundings to intrude upon his style. Within minutes, the car came to a shudder-ing halt in front of Josephine, who managed – with considerable pluck, Penrose thought – to take only two hurried steps back.

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He kissed her briefly, gave her arm a reassuring squeeze and stood aside to allow her to get in. With a jerk, they moved off and the car was soon proceeding at a terrible rate up Monmouth Street. Resisting the impulse to close her eyes, Josephine smiled at Archie as a fellow passenger on the road to perdition and handed him a solid-looking parcel, wrapped in greaseproof paper. ‘The Snipe insisted I bring this for you,’ she said. ‘It’s cheese and tomato with extra pickle. She thinks you need feeding up because you’ve already left two meals she’s put in front of you today, and she specifically asked me to tell you that this is your last chance. Eat these or she’s giving you her notice.’

‘Three Snipes and you’re out then, Sir,’ chipped in Fallowfield from the front seat as they shot across Hyde Park Corner, oblivious to the set of traffic lights that had just turned red. ‘Mind you, she’ll always be welcome at my house if she does give up on you.

You can tell her that, Miss Tey, when you see her next,’ he continued, winking at Josephine in his rear-view mirror while she watched the road ahead on his behalf. ‘Fine figure of a woman, she is, and wasted on you sparrows.’

‘She speaks very highly of you, too, Bill,’ said Josephine.

‘There’s a sandwich here for you as well.’

‘It’s a queer business, this, Miss Tey,’ he continued with relish, apparently undeterred by having spent a fruitless morning at King’s Cross questioning the station staff and going through a passenger list which threw up nothing whatsoever of interest. One of the many qualities that Penrose admired in his sergeant was an utter immunity to despondency, no matter how many setbacks he came up against. Fallowfield was of that school of policing which had an unshakeable faith in the fact that truth will always out in the end; his optimism, which was no doubt nurtured by the amount of leisure time he spent in the company of fictional detectives for whom luck and inspiration knew no bounds, had been a spur to the more cynical Penrose on more than one occasion, and it lifted his spirits again now. When he had given the Sergeant a succinct account of Spilsbury’s report on their way to the car, he had expected Fallowfield to share his disappointment at the lack of evi-80

dence, in particular the blow of the absent murder weapon, but that had not been the case. There was nothing the Sergeant enjoyed as much as a puzzle, and here he had plenty to occupy his thoughts.

Josephine, keen to hear more about the ‘queer’ nature of the case than she had been able to glean earlier from Archie’s troubled account, and knowing she would get far more out of his sergeant, made an encouraging murmur of agreement. ‘From the start, it reminded me of your book, Miss,’ he expanded out of the blue, referring to Josephine’s detective novel in which a man had been stabbed in a theatre queue. ‘You know, a murder in a busy place and a risky one into the bargain. And then when the Inspector told me that the real weapon was a thin knife and not a hatpin – well, I half expected us to start looking for a Dago with a scar on his left hand, brandishing a stiletto.’

The suggestion was not a serious one, but the similarities had already occurred to Josephine and it struck her as ironic that she of all people should find herself on the periphery of a real murder case, travelling to talk to the victim’s family with the policeman upon whom she had based her popular fictional inspector, Alan Grant. Not to look at, of course: Archie’s height and dark good looks were a million miles from Grant’s slighter build and – for want of a better word – his dapperness; no, a pleasant voice and a well-tailored suit were all they shared physically, but professionally speaking they were a perfect match. She had wanted a hard-working, well-meaning police inspector, a credible detective to stand out among the figures of fantasy and wish-fulfilment found in so many other crime novels, and in Penrose she had the perfect model. He could not quite claim Grant’s perfect record of never an unsolved murder to his name, but he was patient, considerate and intelligent, a sensitive individual who cared about people both as a human being and as a policeman. She had added a few passions of her own – Archie had never been known to pick up a fishing rod, for example, whilst she was an expert with a fly – but the essence of Grant, the egalitarian nature of his view on the world, had been inspired for the most part by what she liked about Penrose. Seeing him now, though, preoccupied by thoughts which were out of kil-81