Dead on Demand (A DCI Morton Crime Novel) (15 page)

The morning's floater hadn't been in the water long. Time of death was estimated at thirty to forty hours. It was long enough for the skin to start to pimple and roughen, and the fatty layer underneath showed only minimal adipocere. If the body had been submersed for a protracted period the fat would have begun to turn soapy, and it would have obscured any surface marks. With the body mass this victim had, the ensuing results would have severely stalled the investigation.

The body had been found face down, with the head hanging beneath the water. Severe lacerations were evident on the face and neck, but there did not appear to be any blood, which indicated they were probably post-mortem, caused by the rough tidal waters.

The lungs had been weighed during autopsy and been found to be significantly heavier than expected. This was almost certainly due to water retention, but it was not conclusive evidence of drowning.

Compression fractures suggested that the body had suffered a fall of some kind. Rosenburg was immediately mindful of a body-dump scenario, although if the victim had drowned it would be hard to marry those facts. Who would dump a live body?

It was possible the victim couldn't swim, and that he had been murdered by ineptitude. It was a risky way to off someone though, as the Thames was busy and passers-by would almost certainly render aid.

Rosenburg hoped it was simply an accident. If he could write it off he'd have more time to investigate his other cases. No one in London had reported the man missing, and Rosenburg had enough work to do chasing after those who were missed, without creating work. Maybe the coroner could be persuaded to rule this one an accident.

***

The investigators were not the only ones suffering from an increased workload. The morgue was backed up ten deep, with most gurneys in use. The coroner didn't have the luxury of working with just the confirmed murder cases, but had to examine anything unexpected or suspicious. He had an assistant and several techs, but his signature was on every report and he took pride in making sure every piece of work done in his lab was up to par. Larry Chiswick had not always been a coroner. He'd originally trained as an accountant because his parents wanted him to. As a postgraduate he'd rebelled and become a lawyer only to find that the calling was not for him. While he was distinctly middle-class he didn't go to Harrow, nor did he play rugby, and he found he had nothing in common with the vast majority of the legal profession.

At the time education was free. He didn't have to pay, and got a small government grant as well as benefits to live on. It wasn't the high life, but Larry wanted to stretch it out for as long as he could. He liked being irresponsible. Medicine was the longest course he could get onto, and it was in med school that he really found his calling. He met his wife over an autopsy table, and soon qualified as a doctor.

Realising the unique skill set he possessed, he became a coroner. There wasn't much competition; few individuals ever take the time to train as both a lawyer and a doctor, and the combination ensured a diligent and faithful servant to London's legion of the dead.

He had been his typically diligent self with the latest floater to be found. Weight and fat percentage as well as bone density were recorded in his charts. It was not information required by law but Larry believed in being thorough. The information could help to determine buoyancy, which would allow the crime scene techs to work out how fast, and therefore how far, he had floated.

Combining that with time of death they would be able to estimate where he entered the water, and hopefully use that to determine how he entered it. The damage to the body perimortem showed a significant fall followed by drowning. It wasn't conclusive, and the death could just as easily be either accident or murder.

Larry had no choice but to rule the death suspicious and so require further investigation by the Met.

CHAPTER 28: FLOW

Rosenburg hated Wednesdays. He always had. They were as far as he could get from the weekend. He still had to work some weekends, but it was mostly by being on call rather than active duty. Even police inspectors need a break sometimes.

The floater still hadn't been identified. His skin had been macerated while in the water, and only the exposed dermis was left. Without fingerprints it became exponentially more difficult to determine who he was. The lab would try to create reverse fingerprints from the exposed dermis, but it was expensive and slow, so Charles would have to start the investigation on the basis of what they already had, which wasn't much.

Water currents in the Thames had been studied for decades, and the Met had an accurate water flow simulator that could use known weather conditions such as temperature and wind speed to compute how fast an object in the river would move.

Toxicology had confirmed there was no alcohol in the man's system, so the chances of its being an accident were becoming more remote. While the nerds in the basement ran simulations to try and discern point of entry into the Thames, Charles studied the man's clothing. He was impeccably attired. The suit was flattering despite his bulk, and that suggested a quality tailor, which wouldn't have been cheap. He should have been missed. There wasn't a wallet on him, but the Thames was known to churn violently, and anything in his pockets was probably on the riverbed within minutes of his entering the water.

***

The boys in the basement came good for Rosenburg in less time than he expected.

The man weighed approximately twenty-two stone, which, combined with a flow rate at that end of the river of almost one point two billion gallons a day, put the point of entry near the Thames Barrier.

The barrier would normally trap anything that passed through, but it was raised on the night the man entered the river, allowing the body to pass onwards to the East out of the built-up part of the city and towards the suburbs. It had only stopped because of a sandbank built up around the sewage works that had caught the body and prevented it carrying on much further. The speed of the Thames carries on increasing as it meanders towards the sea, as more inlets join it. If it hadn't been caught the body could easily have turned up many miles downstream.

***

The entry point was well lit, but relatively sheltered. It was near the popular running routes for the area as well as the tourist centre, but the start of the Thames Path was sheltered behind industrial-use land. It received some foot traffic, but not at the time the body was estimated to enter the water.

Rosenburg was on scene for only a moment before a deputy called out.

'Over there! Look.' The deputy waved his hand upwards.

Above the point of origin of the path was a CCTV camera. It was aimed at the entrance to the pier below and to the side, but it appeared to be wide-angle, which meant it might have caught something.

'The wires go down to the Barrier Control Building,' another deputy chipped in.

The building was the home of the major controls for raising and lowering the barrier. It was used to study changes in the waterway to prevent the flooding that had devastated London several times before the construction of the barrier.

Rosenburg hated formalities. He should go to the Crown Prosecution Service and get a warrant. It was private CCTV and he couldn't compel the owner to hand over any footage. Blustering had worked in the past, so he walked straight into the building and thrust his badge at the poor girl on the desk.

The colour drained from her face. She was clearly feeling guilty about something.

'I didn't mean to. It just sort of slipped in.'

Rosenburg frowned. He had no idea what she was referring to, but he wasn't going to overlook a chance to get her to hand over the CCTV.

'We might be able to overlook that.' He smiled confidently.

'Really?'

'If you can get me the CCTV for that,' he pointed out the window at the camera in question, 'in the next ten minutes, I'll forget all about it.'

She bolted from her desk in a flurry of guilt. Gary, the CCTV guy, worked in the back monitoring the feed, and he was sweet on her.

'Hey, doll, come to ask me out to lunch?' It was a long-standing joke between them. Gary was decades older and a widower.

'Naw. I need a favour.' She smiled coyly.

'Anything for you.'

'I need some CCTV tapes.'

'Except that.'

'Aww, why not?' she fluttered her eyelids.

'Company policy. What do you want them for anyway?' Gary raised an eyebrow.

'There's a copper in reception. He wants 'em, don't he?'

'Well, send him in. If he's got a badge, I'll sort him out.'

***

After the tenth phone call pleading with him to go on television and appeal for information, Edwin agreed. He also offered to stump up a modest reward. He never expected to pay up, but it gave him a veneer of respectability. Once he said yes the Met moved startlingly quickly. Barely a day later Edwin found himself in a drab conference room on the second floor of New Scotland Yard. A solitary window offered a view over Dacre Street, but Edwin couldn't have taken the time to stop and stare if he had wanted to. The room was full of journalists. The BBC, Sky News,
The Times
, as well as international names such as Reuters were all represented. A few independents filled out the rest of the seats, with everyone else left to stand at the back of the room behind them.

Eleanor's murder had been big news. She was white, middle class, a lawyer, and lived in Belgravia. The tabloids had already run features with headlines like "Murder in Paradise". None had printed anything negative about Edwin, but that was only because they didn't want to fall foul of the Press Complaints Commission.

A deputy had prepped him before he walked out to the waiting carnivores. A dozen cameras flashed as he made his way to the lectern facing the journalists.

Edwin cleared his throat, took a sip of the provided water and began. He knew these people. They were, until his recent departure, his people. He was brief, but managed to moisten the eye of every journalist present. Some of them had even met Eleanor at various industry functions. Edwin may have been acting, but none of them noticed. He was preaching to the choir.

***

They kept CCTV on site for only 24 hours. After that it was backed up to a central server for a further 28 days by an outside contractor. Gary couldn't supply Rosenburg with what he wanted.

The contractor was wary of liability should they hand over the footage, and wanted a court order.

Rosenburg hated it, but he had to go cap in hand to the prosecutor assigned to the case, a young shyster called Kiaran O'Connor.

'I need CCTV from a private firm for a murder investigation.' It came through gritted death. Rosenburg and lawyers did not generally mix.

'Ya gotta give me more ta go on tan that.' Kiaran typically dropped his accent when dealing with the police, but he knew Rosenburg hated it, and enjoyed making him uncomfortable. It was one of the few perks of being a criminal lawyer.

'A body was dumped in the Thames near the barrier. Private CCTV on a dock there has a wide-angle lens that covers the dump site. The CCTV is processed locally, and the local centre was cooperative, but CCTV is archived off site. We need access to the archives.'

'That's better. Why couldn't you have said that in the first place?' he teased. 'Consider it done.'

***

The CCTV was clear-cut. A man was shown loitering against the barrier when the victim came down the hill. He spoke to the victim, but without audio Rosenburg had no idea what they discussed.

As the distance between them closed the victim raised his left arm, with something metallic visible in his hand, at which point the first man flipped him over his shoulder and past the barrier.

If Morton had still been on the case he would have recognised the man in a heartbeat, but Rosenburg had failed to dedicate much time to any of his adopted cases. He had given each a cursory read, but without having looked at the primary evidence himself he was flying blind.

Rosenburg was therefore highly curious about the identity of both parties, and what was said between them before the incident. It was clearly self-defence, and thus it was not a job for Charles Rosenburg, but the police would still need to identify the victim. As far as homicide was concerned, it was case closed.

***

Once the case had been deemed self-defence, uniforms were drafted in to trace the victim's identity so that the family could be informed. It was a fairly simple affair in the end. CCTV in the area was used in conjunction with facial recognition to check public transport. The man had clearly arrived on foot, and so the logical point to disembark for the barrier was the local train station, or the tube.

The man was large and distinctive, and was easily spotted on CCTV. He had disembarked at Woolwich Arsenal tube, and the Oyster card he had swiped was registered to a Peter Kevin Sugden-Jones. His home address was listed, as was his email and other contact details.

It would now be down to the local police station to inform the next of kin.

CHAPTER 29: BY SELF-DEFENCE

The tension in the small drawing room could have been cut with a knife. Mrs Sugden sat with her sister, desperate to know where her husband was. Though there was no love lost between Mr Sugden and his sister-in-law, she would be the first to admit that he was reliable. For Mrs Sugden he had always been her rock. Steady, dependable and usually honest, it was not like him to lie about a business meeting and disappear for days on end.

The sisters had devoured enough tea to last a lifetime, and the conversation had been rehashed many times. There was nothing more to be said, so the sisters sat in silence.

Mrs Sugden didn't know how long she had been sat there when the doorbell shrieked out in the silence. It was a nasty piercing doorbell, but anything softer could never be heard in the back of the house. She looked up, an ashen expression on her face.