Denial of Murder (12 page)

Ainsclough watched as Shaftoe and Button gently pulled Cherry Quoshie's ankles apart, thus allowing Shaftoe to access Quoshie's genitalia.

‘Yes,' Shaftoe announced matter of factly, ‘I sensed that there might be something for us to find. The torture, you see, suggests that she was held at a remote place. She would most likely have suspected, or even known, that she was going to be killed and if she wasn't continually supervised, she would have found a way of leaving us a present … I just had the notion – intuition, if you like …' Shaftoe probed the vagina with two fingers and extracted a piece of paper which had been neatly folded. ‘And here we are.' Shaftoe took the piece of paper and laid it carefully on the surface of the bench which ran along the side of the pathology laboratory. ‘This is for the police, not for me,' he said. ‘Would you like to have a look at it, Mr Ainsclough?'

Once again Ainsclough walked silently across the industrial-grade linoleum which covered the floor of the pathology laboratory and stood beside Shaftoe as he carefully unfolded the piece of paper.

‘Now then,' Shaftoe said quietly as he looked at it, ‘is that or is that not a very useful piece of paper? One very useful gift indeed?'

‘It most certainly is,' Ainsclough agreed, staring at the eighty-pound gas bill.

‘As I said, she must have known that she was going to be murdered and yet still had the presence of mind to leave you gentlemen something by which you would know where she was being held, probably Mr Cogan as well. I will need to investigate further, but from what I can tell so far there are no signs of any sexual violence.' Shaftoe read the gas bill. ‘“Scythe Brook Cottage, Micheldever, Hampshire”. Do you know where that is, Mr Ainsclough?'

‘Can't say that I do, sir,' Ainsclough replied. ‘It's a new one on me.'

‘What about you, Billy?' Shaftoe turned warmly to Billy Button. ‘Do you know where Micheldever is … apart from it being in Hampshire, that is?'

‘Sorry, sir, I don't.' Billy Button shook his head apologetically. ‘I don't really know England outside of London, sir. Me and Mrs Button, we are not really ones for travelling, you see. Two weeks in Ramsgate is enough for us. We like to stay at home, you see, sir.'

‘All right, Billy,' Shaftoe replied. ‘Thanks anyway.'

‘My cousin Mabel is the traveller in our family,' Button added. ‘She even went to Scotland once and then …'

‘Yes. Thank you, Billy,' Shaftoe said firmly. ‘If you would be good enough to put the towel back in place and then get a production bag, please.' He turned to Ainsclough as Button handed him the self-sealing cellophane production bag. ‘The piece of paper has been folded up as you have seen and that might have preserved it from body fluids, which in turn might have preserved one or two useful fingerprints.'

‘Yes, sir, I am sure the boys in the forensic laboratory will give it a damn good try,' Ainsclough replied as he took the production bag containing the gas bill from Shaftoe. ‘But even if they can't isolate anything, the real gift is the address where she was being held against her will.'

‘So …' Shaftoe commented, ‘what is the betting that she met the same fate as Gordon Cogan? Bashed over the head a couple of times by someone using something long and heavy? What's the starting price …?'

‘About evens, I'd say,' Tom Ainsclough replied with a gentle grin, ‘though having said that, betting is not one of my vices.'

‘Well, evens is about it,' Shaftoe muttered a few moments later after he had removed the scalp from the skull of the deceased, ‘although in her case, she sustained three linear fractures rather than just two which were clearly thought sufficient to despatch the first victim. Two to the top of the skull and a third to the side of the skull, and each of sufficient force to cause death, as in the case of Mr Cogan. Somebody really wanted her dead.' Shaftoe once again turned to Ainsclough. ‘That will be the finding of this post-mortem, Mr Ainsclough. Death was caused by a blow or blows to the skull by some person using a long, linear object, and I will draw attention to the thermal injury sustained on the lower inside left leg, which is powerfully indicative of torture. I will also refer to the fact that she may have given some indication of where she was being held against her will.'

Tom Ainsclough looked upon the corpse of Cherry Quoshie. ‘And yet she seems to have been given so, so little in her life … a poor start, foster homes, institutional care … prison … heroin addiction … possibly racism … selling herself to eat and pay the rent. She was probably a very embittered and angry woman and yet, at the very end, she had the wherewithal to provide the police, whom she probably disliked, with a very useful bit of information to help us catch her murderers. She was clear-headed in a crisis. A lesser person would have panicked. Good for her, I say, good for her. I am going to attend her funeral.'

A silence descended upon the pathology laboratory as Shaftoe, Ainsclough and Button looked upon the corpse of Cherry Quoshie. It lasted for a few minutes, perhaps two, and was broken when Shaftoe remarked, ‘No restraint marks.'

‘Sir?' Ainsclough turned to Shaftoe. ‘Restraint marks?'

‘No restraint marks are in evidence,' Shaftoe observed. ‘She wasn't restrained by a rope or chain.'

‘There aren't, are there?' Ainsclough looked at the ankles and the wrists of Cherry Quoshie.

‘Which suggests that if she was kept against her will then it would have been within a locked room or similar,' Shaftoe mused. ‘She was a big woman and it would have taken an awful lot to overpower her, but once overpowered by at least two very large men, so I would have thought, she was kept in a room but not restrained or closely supervised, so she had ample time to move about and to pick up what she left for the police to find, and to leave it where she left it.'

‘The observations are noted, sir,' Ainsclough replied. ‘Thank you.'

‘Good. Well, they'll be in my report anyway. So let's wrap this up by seeing what she ate for her last meal.' Shaftoe took a scalpel and drove it across the stomach of the deceased. ‘I doubt that the stomach contents will have any bearing on the post-mortem findings but we'll look anyway, just for the sake of completeness.' Shaftoe took the scalpel and parted the flesh over the stomach, and then used the scalpel to pierce the stomach wall, turning his head to one side as he did so. Ainsclough heard a sharp hiss as the stomach gases escaped. ‘Not bad,' Shaftoe commented as he drew breath. ‘Oh …' he sighed.

‘Something, sir?' Ainsclough asked.

‘No …' Shaftoe replied quietly, ‘nothing. And that's just it. Nothing. As with the previous victim, Mr Cogan, her stomach is quite empty. She had had no food for at least forty-eight hours before she was murdered, which is again some further indication of torture … denial of food, to weaken the will, then she was burned with something red hot. As you mentioned, Mr Ainsclough, she had been given nothing in life, but for some reason someone, or some persons, were prepared to torture her before murdering her. She evidently knew something. She had information that someone wanted and who wanted it badly. Now she'll be buried in a pauper's grave with two other coffins. You deserved more in life, Cherry,' Shaftoe addressed the corpse, ‘and you deserve more in death than a shared plot without a headstone. God rest you and keep you, sweet child.'

‘Janet … my Janet?' The woman glanced up anxiously at Swannell and Brunnie who stood in her living room. ‘Police?' She then pointed to a framed photograph of a smiling young girl in a school uniform of a blue blazer and grey pleated skirt which stood prominently in a silver frame on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. ‘That is Janet when she started the secondary school … we'd just bought her uniform … she was so proud … she was my daughter.'

‘And my sister,' announced the younger woman who had let Swannell and Brunnie into the house after closely scrutinizing their warrant cards. The younger woman had a hard face, thought Swannell, and he was chilled by her cold, piercing green eyes, with which she glared at the older woman as she sat in the armchair opposite her.

‘She went off the rails,' the older woman stated, ‘poor girl.'

‘Pushed off, more like,' the younger woman said sharply. ‘She was pushed off.' She spoke in clear anger. ‘She was pushed off and you know it.'

‘So it was my fault!' The older woman leant forward towards her daughter and her response was equally angry. ‘Like always.'

‘Yes,' the younger woman replied, ‘frankly, yes, it was your fault. All of it was your fault. You were to blame. You still are.'

‘So go on, blame me for everything as usual.' The older woman sat back in her chair and looked indignantly away from her daughter. ‘As usual, blame me … if it has to be someone's fault, it may as well be mine.'

‘Ladies, ladies.' Victor Swannell held up his hand, pleading for calm, though he felt the urge to say ‘Girls! Girls! Quiet or you'll both go to your rooms for the rest of the day'. The two women were mother and daughter but he thought that they were more in keeping with two sisters who were endlessly squabbling.

‘I got married again,' the older woman explained after Swannell and Brunnie had accepted her belated invitation to take a seat, and then sat down side by side on the settee, which was covered with a fabric showing blue and red flowers with green stems and leaves against a cream background. The home itself, both officers noted, was neatly kept, and the room and entrance hall smelled strongly of a combination of air freshener and furniture polish.

‘Yes, yes you did get married again … to a rat.' The younger woman spat the words towards her mother. ‘Go on … tell the whole story … it's the police … tell them the whole story.'

‘He was all right with me,' the mother replied defensively. ‘He still is.'

‘Maybe he is still all right with her but he wasn't all right with me and Janet. He did all he could to drive us out of the house. He succeeded with Janet.' The younger woman raised her voice to near screaming pitch. ‘But not with me, I was too proud, wasn't I? If I was leaving home I was going to go on my own terms, not his … but Janet, my sister, she was always more sensitive … she was always more vulnerable. So she went to live in a squat in Acton, looking for peace, and what happened? She only got herself strangled. All she got was death at the age of seventeen. I dare say that that is a form of peace, but it wasn't exactly the sort of peace she had in mind; it was definitely not the sort of peace she was looking for.' The younger woman folded her arms and looked angrily at her mother. Both women were small, Brunnie observed, and very finely made.

‘My first husband was killed crossing the Heathway,' the older woman explained after a period of silence had descended on the room. ‘He worked for the Ford Motor Company, like an awful lot round here do. He was walking home one night when he was knocked down and run over, just opposite the Tube Station.'

‘He was about halfway home,' the younger woman added, seeming to have calmed herself. The older woman nodded and for a brief moment the two women seemed to the officers to be on the same side. ‘Hit and run. The driver didn't stop and the police never caught him.'

‘More than halfway home,' the older woman added. ‘He liked to walk home; he always used to say that it kept him fit.'

‘We are sorry to hear that,' Swannell said softly. ‘Such tragedies always leave a family permanently scarred, emotional scarring that never heals.'

‘Yes, permanent scarring,' the older woman echoed, ‘that's what it feels like … inside your head … a scar that won't heal.' She pointed to another photograph on the mantelpiece showing a soldier posing next to a tank. ‘That was him when he was in the army. He was a good man. I made the right choice. He was good to us.'

‘Our Janet made her room so cosy,' the daughter commented.

‘You visited your sister in Acton?' Brunnie asked. ‘Or do you mean her room here?'

‘Her room in Acton,' the daughter clarified. ‘She and I shared a bedroom here. But yes … I visited her in Acton a few times. It wasn't a squat; I don't know why I said it was a squat. She rented it, her room, and she made it so cosy.' The younger woman looked at Swannell and Brunnie. ‘It was a real eye-opener for me; I'd never been out of Dagenham before, not really. The house, that house in Acton, it was full of rough people, all young still but not going anywhere, none of them … and there was Janet, my little sister, living among that lot … but at least she was away from the mad Irishman.'

‘The mad Irishman?' Swannell queried, as a brilliantly clean red and white delivery van, glinting in the sun, drove slowly past the women's house on Fanshawe Crescent, which had revealed itself to be an angled rather than a curved crescent of refurbished small two- or three-bedroomed terraced houses, with small gardens to the front and also with small gardens to the rear.

‘Her second husband,' the younger woman explained with clear indignation. ‘The mad Irishman, that's her second husband. My dad wasn't cold in his grave, and she brings him, the mad Irishman, back from the pub one night.'

‘That's a lie!' The older woman shouted. ‘You bitch … you lying little bitch, that's a cheap lie. Your father was in his grave for a year – more than a year – before I met Sean, and we met at the Cruse Club. Not down the boozer.'

‘The Cruise Club,' Swannell asked, ‘as in a sea cruise … a sailing club?'

‘C.R.U.S.E.,' the younger woman explained smugly, ‘there's no letter “i” in the name. It's a social club for widowed and divorced people held in the church hall near here. I went once just to see what was going on. It was just a set of desperate old wrinklies trying to get off with each other. I tell you it really made me want to puke. I wanted to vomit all the way home.'