The Backs (2013) (24 page)

‘Hi, sir, I’m in your office because I’ve had a conversation with Jane Osborne that I want to make you aware of. I’m going to make a note of the basics and leave it on your desk . . . oh, and the forensics report is through . . . the one from Paul Marshall’s boat.’ He added a deliberate pause. ‘I’m really sorry if this is the wrong call but, as I know a bit about this one, I’m going to check whether there’s anything in the report that can’t wait.’

He hoped he’d sounded tentative and sincere, worthy of a bollocking but not a terminal one. The envelope had a rip cord style opening and he pulled this before sitting himself in the ageing swivel chair and writing out his note to Marks. He scrawled quickly, using bullet points to cover the details of his meeting with Jane. He was on the last item when his mobile buzzed.

It was Marks. ‘Are you still in my office, Gary?’

‘Just finishing that note, sir.’

‘And did you open the forensics report?’

‘I undid the envelope, but I haven’t read any of it. I decided to wait in the hope you’d ring.’

‘You have some conscience at least, which amounts to a lucky escape for you, Gary. Leave it as it is. I will be back in twenty minutes or so. And, in future, don’t.’

‘Sorry.’ He made a mental note not to apologize any further, or it would start sounding suspicious.

‘Tell me more about this conversation you had with Jane Osborne.’

‘She was pressing for news on her mother. There’s a bit more to it than that, though.’ Goodhew had already decided that he needed to tell Marks everything. ‘Can I tell you when you get here?’

‘You’ll need to as, after that, I’m going straight out to meet them. The positive ID came back an hour ago. Mary Osborne, just as we thought.’

Goodhew had planned to leave the DI’s room as soon as this call was over, but instead he rotated the chair 120 degrees to the left and stared across at one side of the University Arms Hotel. He tried to recall whether he’d said anything to Jane that might have raised her hopes regarding her mother. No, he didn’t think so.

But for him the final confirmation of any victim’s identity came with a jolt. Sometimes news of a death hit estranged relatives surprisingly hard. As someone who barely saw his own mother, he understood this – still picturing her almost ten years younger than her current age.

He spun the chair back as he heard someone enter the room. It was Kincaide.

‘After the boss’s job, Gary?’

Goodhew smiled. ‘I don’t think it would suit me.’

‘You’d struggle with the politics.’

‘And the staff.’

‘Is he around?’

‘Back in twenty minutes.’

‘And you’re just going to sit there?’

‘He might be early.’

‘He never is when he’s busy, Gary.’

Goodhew swung the chair in the direction of the window again. ‘I’ll be able to see him pull in from here.’

‘And scoot down to meet him like a happy spaniel? Anyway, I’ll come back later,’ Kincaide said, then added the word ‘Sad’ under his breath before leaving.

As soon as he’d gone, Goodhew checked his watch. He’d already easily lost the first five minutes of the twenty that Marks had inadvertently given him. But Kincaide was right: Marks often ran late.

Goodhew scooped up the envelope and slid it into his shirt, then moved three offices further down to a vacant meeting room. He locked the door and slid the contents of the envelope on to one of the tables, then, one page at a time, photographed everything using his phone.

And ten minutes later the file had been returned to Marks’s desk.

Goodhew sat back in the chair and again looked out across Parker’s Piece and the rooftops of Cambridge. He felt surprisingly alert for someone who’d managed to get so little sleep. Good old adrenalin.

He suddenly saw Marks reflected in the same window, and spun slowly toward him.

‘Kincaide told me you were enjoying my office.’

‘Enjoying the view, actually.’

Marks touched the envelope, lifted the open end and glanced at the ends of the very squarely collated set of printouts inside it. Goodhew was confident that they appeared untouched. Then Marks picked up the sheet of notes which Goodhew had written. ‘You actually saw her?’

‘She was outside my flat when we arrived back.’

‘Talk me through it.’

Goodhew explained while Marks listened in silence. He added some notes of his own to Goodhew’s bullet points. ‘So you’ve had practically no sleep?’

‘I feel fine.’

‘Go home.’ Marks glanced at his watch. ‘Come back at four and we’ll review it then.’

‘I won’t be able to sleep.’

‘You sound like my daughter – but when she was still in infants’ school.’

Goodhew sighed, defeated, then pointed at the envelope. ‘Aren’t you even going to open it?’

Marks picked it up. ‘As soon as I’ve seen the Osborne family; their situation is more pressing this morning. Everything’s in hand, Gary. Now just get some sleep.’

Stepping on to that boat now seemed like a month-old memory; meeting Carmel Marshall had slipped away even further. But when his phone finished its download, and the forensics reports appeared on his screen, it all came back fast enough.

Goodhew closed the curtains of his grandfather’s former library and spread out on his own battered-looking sofa, newly relocated from the flat he occupied above. His jukebox and the laptop provided the only two pools of light in an otherwise gloomy room. The report included pictures which he’d refused to study as he’d copied the file, but now he zoomed in on the photo-of-a-photo images. Some were poorer quality than others, but they all dragged him back inside that stifling cabin.

The first eighteen shots were for orientation, layout of the boat and to provide a record of all the evidence in situ. Later shots had been marked with lines and arrows and other notation that would tally with details given in the body of the text. He flicked through the early photos, which all corresponded with his memory, although he dwelt a little longer on the twelfth, which showed the back of the cabin door. The shape of the woman’s body and arms was less well defined than he had remembered. He skipped forward to the next shot, and then more quickly through the remaining ones.

The final, unmarked, photo had been taken at floor level from the doorway. Goodhew had moved on rapidly, and was halfway through the annotated shots, when he remembered the nausea he’d felt when he’d been at the same spot in the boat. He clicked back.

The nausea still threatened – or at least the memory of it.

The area had been brightly lit for the photographs, and items that had previously been obscured by shadows now stood out. The carpet tiles looked synthetic, trodden down in the middle of the central aisle but still bright, with a plasticky finish, further under the beds. Goodhew wiped his fingertips against his jeans as he remembered the dirt and clamminess of the floor. Except, under normal white light, it appeared fairly clean with none of the staining that the UV lamp had revealed. The dish he’d seen had been a stoneware dog bowl, with a discarded lead lying next to it. In the corner behind that was some crumpled fabric.

The cabin didn’t look as rancid here as it had felt then, but the feeling of queasiness still hung close. Some unknown element of crouching low on that floor left him wanting to puke. He jumped to the notated copy of the photograph, and found 18-1 marked on the floor, 18-2 on the fabric and 18-3 on the dog bowl. He jumped forward again, this time to the notes that accompanied it.

The report had the title
Carpet and Floor-Level Evidence within Cabin.

It ran for seventeen pages and the carpet, 18-1, described as
100 per cent polypropylene construction
, had given up enough information to fill fifteen of those pages. Thumbnail images had been inserted at various points, and most of these had a ruler shown on two of the four sides to demonstrate the size of each particular sample. The first appeared to be a semi-translucent carpet fibre; Goodhew read the accompanying paragraph to discover that it was a pubic hair. The report also listed head hair of several colours and lengths, further pubic hair samples, and a single eyelash. DNA sampling had been conducted on a cross-section of these, though it was far too soon to expect any results. Fingerprinting was always faster, and four distinct sets had been isolated, referred to as belonging to Persons A, B, C and D.

There were two broken fingernails, both fragments, and several bitten sections of nail. Also an earring mount and the broken tip of a kohl-eyeliner pencil. Traces of cocaine in multiple locations. No animal hair, but fibres from clothes and flakes of dirt brought in on people’s shoes.

All that before the techs had even started on the invisible-to-the-naked-eye stuff. Why people ever committed crimes on a carpet was a mystery.

Goodhew paused to disconnect the landline, turned his phone to silent and increased the volume on the jukebox, since he didn’t want any distraction from outside the room. He grabbed an apple and returned to the sofa.

The analysis of the stains took up the greatest number of pages, and they began with a diagram showing the shape and position of the marks involved. Although he would never have been able to draw from memory what he himself had seen under the UV light, Goodhew now recognized it immediately. He blinked slowly and a white hot version of the image glowed on the back of his eyelids.

There were tiny splatters with comet tails, dappled marks and smudges – like finger painting – and in the centre of the aisle, between the bed-settees and just before the end mattress, was the darkest of the marks he’d seen. It was longer than it was wide, almost oval apart from a small spur that had trickled at an acute angle. The overall shape reminded him of a child’s mitten.

The report concluded that the blood had come from a nosebleed sustained by someone who was lying on, or very close to, the floor. A person who also had little or no ability to move freely. Mucus appeared in the stain and more in the splatters. The trajectory of those splatters had required the head to be close to the floor, largely immobile and freely bleeding out on to the carpet. Spray had hit the side of one of the mattresses, and the forensics examiner had concluded that it was most likely that this had been the result of blood running back into the throat, a subsequent choking sensation, followed by a panic reflex that raised the head and expelled blood and mucus with force.

The ‘thumb’ of the ‘mitten’ included saliva and, along with several other smaller marks, indicated that more blood had been spat from the mouth.

Each item and stain had been carefully numbered. Fingerprints had been taken from the bulkhead, from the bed frame, doors, windows, everywhere, and the same four people showed up repeatedly: A, B, C, D. No one else at all. Every print had been catalogued and cross-referenced in relation to all the other evidence, providing a list which included semen, sweat and saliva. And, here again, there would be more results to follow.

He turned to the next page:
18-2 Fabric Items.
These had been photographed separately and consisted of three pairs of knickers and a bra. All of them black. The images ran in a column down the right-hand side of the page, the explanations down the left. The bra was described as a
32D in a balconette style
and the knickers as
G-string type thongs. Size 8.
It had never occurred to Goodhew that a G-string was a type of thong and not merely another word for the same thing.

This was the kind of detail that Bryn would know – not that Goodhew would be asking him.

The bra and one pair of knickers had been worn, the others had no sign of either use or having been washed. All four items were a brand called
Ingénue Lingerie.

The final page, describing photo 18, was entitled
18-3 Dog Bowl, Collar and Lead.

It has not yet been possible to identify the source of any of these items and they are likely to be several years old.

It repeated the previous finding, but this time showed it in bold:
Canine DNA was not present in any of the tests conducted.

The collar and lead are both leather, dark brown with chromed metal fittings, 41–51 cm/16–20 inches and intended to be suitable for a medium-sized dog. Human skin samples were recovered from both the collar and lead. Several partial fingerprints were also recovered.

The dog bowl is ceramic and measures 20 cm/8 inches in diameter, with a depth of 5 cm/2 inches and with the word ‘DOG’ embossed on the side. It has been used for containing cooked food, and saliva staining indicates that the food was eaten directly from the bowl. Human saliva was present from which DNA samples were recovered. The fingerprints on the bowl are clear matches and belong to Person A and Person B.

The words
Person B
had been circled with a line linking out to the handwritten memo
See notes for photo 12.

Photo 12 was the back of the cabin door. He flicked through the report to the relevant page. The photo had been enhanced and highlighted with a clearer outline, showing the same shape just as Goodhew remembered it. He scanned down the page.
Suspended by meat hook, or similar.
He stared at the silhouette left by her sweat.

A heavy ring is mounted to the wall, tested to sustain a weight of 100 kg. A partial fingerprint, possibly caused by a person reaching up whilst bound, was found on this ring and it is a match for Person B.

Goodhew reread the end of the sentence:
a match for Person B.

He tried calling her Victim B or Woman B, but neither was better.

All such terms sounded one step short of giving her a serial number, and he wasn’t that desensitized that he could let himself refer to her like that. The whole business was too degrading without then referring to her in such a depersonalized way.

There were just a few lines of text before the end of the page, mostly referring to the chronology of the various findings. A’s fingerprints had been found overlapping – or overlapped by – each of the others. The other three lay in just one date sequence: D, then C, then B.