Bones in the Nest (17 page)

No sooner had Lizzie got started on a fingertip search of AK News, than her phone buzzed in her pocket. Fully covered in protective gear, she decided it could wait. She was mapping the trajectory of petrol traces and collecting up sooty glass fragments: clear, green and brown. Window and bottle glass, she guessed, but a quick look under the microscope when she got back to the lab would confirm that. The shelves of alcohol behind the counter had been badly damaged but the newspaper section had come off worst, spirits accelerating the fire had caught the dry paper. Next to the till the lottery stand had melted and bent over, like a Dali clock. A few minutes later her phone buzzed again. She stepped out into the street and peeled off a glove. The fire officer was watching her as she unzipped her white suit. She turned her back on him and pulled the phone out of her trouser pocket.

The voicemail said to drop what she was doing and get to Halsworth Grange, where someone had kindly provided them with a fresh body. Dr Alf Huggins, the pathologist, had
a dry sense of humour, but there was an element of honesty in his delight: it was usually easier to gather evidence from a recent death than a crowd attack on a property.

She put in a call to Donald Chaplin to ask him to come and finish off here. He was a gentle, avuncular soul, who might bore the fire officer to death with the chemical properties of the reagents he was using, but he’d do a thorough job while he was at it. She slipped out of her over-suit and shoe covers, bagged them up and left them for Donald to dispose of, in case she caused cross-contamination with the next site. She started the car and cruised past the parade of shops. The name, ‘AK News’, was just visible, but ‘and Convenience Store’ had blistered and peeled into a blackened mess. The broken window was covered with a temporary screen. Most of these shops had heavy toughened glass and it would take more than a bottle to smash through a window like that.

‘Of course,’ she said and put her foot on the brake. She dialled Donald’s number.

‘Sorry to bother you, Don,’ she spoke to his voicemail, ‘but when you get to the scene, can you have a look to see if there’s something in there that shouldn’t be? A mark made by a pole or something else that you’d use to break strong glass?’

Lizzie set her satnav and let the voice of Elvis Presley guide her to Halsworth Grange. The satnav had been a Christmas present from her ex-boyfriend, who’d loaded the programme of celebrity voices and preselected the King. She kept expecting it to say,
Elvis has now left the motorway,
but it never did. She remembered the framed Elvis print at Sean Denton’s grandmother’s house, that night, a couple of years
back, the night she’d realised he fancied her. He’d changed a lot since then, grown up, she thought. She hoped he’d got a nice girlfriend now; he deserved one.

Lizzie didn’t think she would ever be nice girlfriend material. She’d tried to keep things going with Guy, the Doncaster Rovers marketing manager, when she moved to London, but she saw less and less of him and began to see more and more of someone else. The overlap was messy and she wasn’t proud of herself, but life was changing so quickly. She was seconded to a unit in Scotland Yard and briefly believed that this was the beginning of a new life, until she discovered the new boyfriend had a serious coke habit, which could have jeopardised her career. Breaking up with him felt like a physical injury. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t think straight. She was signed off sick and came home to her parents, who fussed and faffed and said:
I told you so.
Then her dad put the keys of the flat in Regent Square in her hand, put a good word in with his friend, Commander Laine, and suddenly she was a crime scene manager again. As Elvis guided her out through the villages she’d known all her life, an idea began to take shape. She could speak to Laine about Sean’s suspension. He’d listen to her, she was sure, and he could be made to see that it would be madness to lose such a promising young officer. She pulled into the car park of a pub and dialled his number.

The road to Halsworth Grange took her back to a family outing, years ago. Her mother thought it dingy and couldn’t understand why they didn’t do it up, but that was the point. The inside of the house had been left exactly as it was when the last Lady Halsworth died. The cracks in the walls and
ceilings were testament to how the family made their money from the coal seam underneath. Her dad told her and her brother, for the hundredth time, that their great-grandfather had mined that very seam and if it hadn’t been for the grammar school they’d be down there still, digging for coal in the darkness.

‘Except the pit’s shut now,’ her brother had pointed out.

‘And I’m a girl,’ Lizzie added, ‘and girls haven’t gone down the mines since Lord Shaftesbury banned it.’ And then they took their overeducated, smug little selves to play outside on the play equipment. God, she marvelled at how snooty they were.

At the bottom of the Halsworth Grange drive, she waved her ID at the constable manning the gate and drove up to the car park, where another constable flagged her down and showed her where to leave her car. The car park itself was cordoned off. As she passed it, she noticed a group of angry people remonstrating with a woman at the ticket office about when they could get their vehicles out.

‘When I’m good and ready,’ Lizzie said to herself.

It amazed her that people could be so lacking in public spirit. You would think it was in their interest to solve a crime, but they behaved like it was a deliberate attempt to personally inconvenience them. At the foot of a half-mown slope of grass, a small white tent had already been erected. The whole field was taped off in a wide strip from the car park to the edge of a wooden fence and there were groups of police and CSIs nervously clustered on either side.

A tall, thickset man was in conversation with one of the uniforms. He occasionally nodded or shook his head. Every
now and then he stole a glance at a woman cowering in the back seat of one of the police cars. Lizzie’s new deputy was coming towards her. Janet Wheeler, ex-hockey player for the Scottish national team, held out her hand and shook Lizzie’s with gusto.

‘Great. Good,’ Janet said. ‘Glad you got here so quickly. The pathologist is down there now. He wants us there
tout de suite
so we can get what we can before CID get their feet all over the scene.’

It was warm in the protective suit and once she was inside the tent, she realised they were going to have to work quickly. The smell told her that the body was fresh, but decomposing fast and they were competing with flies. She wished she hadn’t been so stubborn about waiting to check her phone in the shop. Janet was an excellent deputy, and everything was how it should be, but she should have been here sooner herself.

The photographer was covering every angle of the young woman, but Lizzie needed to stand back and make her own mental picture before they moved her. What she saw was almost a mirror image of the boy in the stairwell: a foetal position, the body left where it fell, except this victim’s wound was to her neck, a deep cut to her throat, which ended below her left ear. When they turned her, they’d be able to see where it started. Blood had soaked into the ground, spreading across grass and compacted leaf mould. The blood had sprayed out and spattered the victim’s top.

‘Left-handed killer,’ Lizzie said out loud.

‘Go on,’ said Dr Huggins, who was testing the body temperature with an ear thermometer.

‘That looks like the end of the wound, because the skin’s wide open as the blade exits,’ she said. ‘It’s commensurate with the perpetrator being behind her, so he’s slit her throat from right to left. Odd though, a messy exit as he’s pulled the knife away. Like it’s snagged and he’s had to yank the wound wide open.’

‘Any reason you’re using the masculine?’

‘Sir?’

‘It’s just that the prime suspect is female.’

‘That woman they’ve got sitting in the car? You’re joking.’

‘I wouldn’t joke about a thing like that,’ Dr Huggins said. ‘We need to be very clear about what’s in front of us, Lizzie. If you have the slightest shred of doubt that this is the work of a five-foot, six-inch female, who looks like she weighs in at less than eight stone, than you’ll need to be cast iron with the facts. Otherwise CID will throw the book at her and she doesn’t look like she’s got the strength to dodge it.’

‘Did she find the body?’

‘We don’t know. She’s not speaking. The big fellow called 999. Mr Coldacre. The young woman was mowing the grass and had come to a standstill. But Coldacre says she knew the victim, so it would be useful if she did decide to talk. There’s no ID on the body, no handbag, no wallet and no cars unaccounted for in the car park, but I’m sure the detective will fill you in.’

Lizzie squatted down by the victim’s feet. The pink sandals were marked with fresh grass stains and had picked up the crushed head of a clover flower. She bagged the flower and handed it to Janet.

‘OK, let’s start a fingertip of the field. Look for footsteps
in the long grass. And get someone to go through the cuttings from that lawnmower.’

‘Here,’ Huggins was pointing to a mark on the girl’s arm. ‘Someone gripped her hard. That mark is recent, discolouration is what I’d expect from the estimated time of death.’

‘Good, we’ll be able to get something off it, prints hopefully or maybe sweat. But first, my little beauties,’ Lizzie opened her kit box and took out a piece of sticky paper. She peeled off the backing and drew the paper carefully through the air where a couple of flies were trying their luck over the pool of coagulating blood. ‘Come to mama. Gotcha!’

‘Delightful,’ Huggins said dryly. ‘I’m pretty much done until we get her on the slab.’

‘Time of death?’

‘About five hours ago.’

‘We’ll see if the flies agree. Meanwhile, I’m OK for CID to come in now. Just need to swab this bruise.’

She brushed gently over the darkened skin and allowed herself, for a moment, to feel a wave of sorrow for this young woman who had either walked, or run, to her sudden and violent death in the undergrowth. She felt the ghost of a breeze as Huggins left the tent and heard the sound of low, male voices.

‘Miss Morrison,’ Khan nodded formally as he ducked into the tent, his eyes large and dark over a paper mask. She tried to set her face and her feelings to neutral. The way he’d treated Sean had lost Khan most of his remaining allies on the Doncaster team, but she had a job to do, so she tried to push that from her mind.

‘DCI Khan, you’re just in time to help me turn her over.’

‘Were you hoping for someone else? Another detective?’

She clearly hadn’t done the neutral face as well as she thought.

‘Not necessarily,’ she lied.

‘DI Houghton and DS Simkins are both on the Chasebridge estate today, following up the Asaf murder.’

‘Really?’ She was genuinely surprised. ‘I thought that was your case?’

‘I’ve been informed I am too emotionally involved,’ he said, with a completely level voice, not meeting her eye. ‘Apparently that’s not seen as a problem when attending the untimely death of this young woman.’

He stretched out a gloved hand and lifted a gold chain that hung loosely over the girl’s breastbone. On his fingertip lay a tiny gold pendant, spelling out a trio of Arabic letters. His lips moved silently.

‘Shall we?’ She indicated it was time to turn the body.

As she slid her latex-gloved hands beneath the girl’s back, she felt the bone of the shoulder blade under her fingers. It was just like the scapula of a living person, the part you feel when you throw your arm round a friend’s shoulder.

‘Clothes appear intact, no obvious sexual assault?’ His clipped tone indicated he was back on the job, the moment of sympathy had passed.

‘As far as we can see,’ Lizzie said.

The young woman lay on her back, but the rigor in her limbs kept her knees bent. If there wasn’t a huge gaping wound in her neck, you might think it was someone lying on the grass to watch the clouds go by. The skin beneath her
eyes was smudged where her mascara and eyeliner had run. Lizzie took a sample pot and swabbed the victim’s tear ducts and the skin beneath her lower lids.

‘It’s going to have a high sodium content,’ she said. ‘She’d been crying.’

She carefully picked a crushed purple rhododendron flower off the young woman’s thigh and lifted the thin cotton of her patterned smock to reveal that her calf-length trousers were done up, clean and undisturbed. ‘Huggins will do a proper check when we get her back. But you’re right. Her clothes show no sign of sexual assault. Nothing’s torn. Here, look, this stain’s too dark for grass. Algae maybe? On the lower inside of her trousers.’

‘What if she climbed over the wooden fence? Not dragged, at least I don’t think so, that would have made more mess.’

‘She definitely died here,’ Lizzie said. ‘Aside from the obvious fact she bled out where she fell, look at her knees.’ The fabric was slightly stained, not green, but yellowy brown and on one knee the body of a spider was pressed into the cotton.
‘Pisaura mirabilis.
It’s their favourite kind of habitat. The rhododendron roots, not the cotton, I mean.’

‘Are you saying that someone persuaded her to climb over the fence into this dank undergrowth and got her to kneel down, before slitting her throat like a butcher?’ Khan said.

‘It looks like it.’

‘So someone who knew her? Who she went with willingly?’

‘That’s not a forensic question, Detective Chief Inspector. Unless the body tells us there wasn’t a struggle.’

‘And unless we already have a suspect for you to forensically examine.’

‘The girl in the car? What’s the connection?’

‘Her name is Chloe Toms. She’s on probation. Bill Coldacre, the tall chap you’ll have passed in the car park, doesn’t know the details, but says she handed over a disclosure letter, which he passed on to his boss without reading. He also said the victim visited Chloe and gave her a lift home last Monday. Chloe left in the victim’s car, a little cream Fiat. Coldacre was quite precise about that. The remake, he said, of the Cinquecento, and in his opinion, an improvement.’ Khan’s eyes creased in a momentary smile. ‘Coldacre hasn’t seen this young woman since, not until he found her lying here, dead.’