Past Mortem (35 page)

‘I beg your pardon, Tanya? I didn’t hear that.’

‘I’m glad, she’s dead,’ Tanya repeated, still mumbling, but this time there was no doubt what she had said.

‘Why are you glad she’s dead?’ Natasha asked.

‘Because she was a bitch.’

Newson spoke. ‘Tanya, would you roll up the sleeves of your jumper for me, please?’

Tanya did not move. It was as if she was frozen.

‘I’d like you to show me your arms, please,’ Newson pressed.

Still Tanya did not move. ‘No,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist,’ Newson said.

‘Can’t make me.’

Natasha held up her hand to Newson so that she could speak. ‘Tanya,’ she said gently, ‘we don’t want to have to make you. You don’t have to be scared with us, but whatever has been happening to you needs to be brought out. This is a police investigation, Tanya. Please do as the inspector has asked.’

Slowly and still without lifting her head Tanya raised the sleeves of her jumper. The pale, thin arms revealed beneath were marked by a crisscrossing of scars.

‘Tanya,’ Newson asked. ‘Did you do this to yourself?’

The girl did not reply. After a few moments Newson repeated his question.

‘No,’ Tanya whispered.

‘Did Tiffany Mellors do it to you?’

But Tanya would say no more. As far as Newson was concerned, she did not need to.

After the girl had gone Newson sent for the secretary and asked her to send up the next pupil. He explained that he would be needing to speak to all the other members of the class, including the boys.

‘Why?’ asked Natasha when they were briefly alone in the room. ‘You’ve found your victim.’

‘If we stop now,’ Newson explained, ‘Nikki and her little gang of hellcats will presume that Tanya told us what we wanted to know and Tanya’s life won’t be worth living. If we speak to all the kids, then our friend Nikki will have no reason to suspect Tanya. We can’t just barge in here, turn that girl into an even bigger target than she already was and then bugger off again.’

‘No, of course. You’re right,’ Natasha replied, then she gave Newson a hug. ‘You’re a good bloke, Eddie Newson. I hope you know that. A very good bloke.’

Newson did not reply, intent as he was on absorbing every detail of her brief, sisterly embrace. The pressure of her arms around his shoulders, the slight contact between her chest and his, the nearness of her mouth to his ear, the smell of her hair and the tiniest tickle as it brushed briefly past his cheek. It was over in seconds, but by that time Newson had managed to keep a piece of it locked in his heart to treasure for ever.

Newson passed no further comment on the interview with Tanya Waddingham until he and Natasha had left the school and were sitting together in his car, which was parked in a nearby street.

He opened the glove compartment, took out the notebook in which he had made his list of victims and the victims’ victims, and added two new names to the bottom.
Tiffany Mellors
and
Tanya Waddingham
.

‘What are you doing, Ed?’ Natasha asked, and her voice shook with emotion. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that our killer has moved from the past to the present,’ Newson replied. ‘I don’t believe that Tiffany Mellors committed suicide. Tiffany Mellors was a bully and somebody killed her for it.’

THIRTY-TWO

M
ounds of flowers were stacked up on the pavement outside the Mellorses’ little terraced house. As Newson and Natasha walked from the car, a poorly dressed elderly lady in the process of leaving a little bunch of flowers stood up from the pavement and wiped away a tear.

Tiffany Mellors’ mother opened the door and allowed them in. She had obviously been crying and was not overjoyed at the prospect of speaking to the police. ‘I really don’t see what there is to talk about,’ she said, showing Newson and Natasha into her leather-furnished lounge. ‘What the police should be doing is getting into that school and finding whoever it was that drove my girl to do this terrible thing. Not sitting here talking to me.’

‘We’ll try to make this as brief as possible, Mrs Mellors,’ Newson told her. ‘And please rest assured that we’re as determined as you are to get to the bottom of what it was that caused this terrible tragedy.’

Mrs Mellors took a tissue from a flamboyantly embroidered box.

‘Tiffany died some time after returning from school,’ prompted Newson. ‘You discovered her body when you got home at six thirty. Is that right?’

‘Yes, yes, it is.’ Mrs Mellors was having trouble controlling her emotions. ‘I came home and called for her to help with the tea and when she didn’t reply I went upstairs and…and…’

‘Yes, Mrs Mellors, no need to go over that again. Just tell me: was it usual for Tiffany to be in the house alone after school?’

‘Yes, me and her father both work, see. I get home at six thirty and he’s back soon after that. Tiff had a key and unless there was sport or whatever at school or she was seeing a mate, she’d come home and let herself in.’

‘So she was a responsible girl? You trusted her?’

‘She was the best, that’s all, Inspector. The best.’

‘She’d get home, when? About four thirty?’

‘Yes. She’d normally got her homework done by the time I got in. She’d get a Diet Coke and go to her room, and…’

Mrs Mellors broke down. When she had recovered Newson asked if they could look at Tiffany’s bedroom. Reluctantly Mrs Mellors agreed.

‘He wants to move out,’ she said as they climbed the stairs, ‘but this was her home. I can’t just walk away from it.’

She opened the door on which there still hung a sign that said ‘Tiff’s place. No parents without permission.’ Newson could see that Mrs Mellors was swallowing back tears. Inside was very much the bedroom one would have expected to belong to a teenage girl. There were boy-band posters on the wall, stuffed toys on the shelves and piles of celebrity magazines. The dressing table was covered in any amount of make-up and jewellery, and the mirror had notes and cards wedged into the frame. The only obvious thing that could be gleaned about Tiffany from a superficial glance at her room was that she was a very neat girl. Her magazines were nicely stacked and the make-up was all laid out in good order.

‘Tiffany was proud of this room, I think?’ Newson enquired.

‘Yes, she was. She did it all herself and cleaned and vacuumed. I used to say it was the tidiest room in the house. She hated mess.’

‘And yet she — ’ Newson stopped himself. He’d been thinking out loud. In front of the dressing table a little padded matching chair stood on dust covers, which had been laid over the carpet.

‘We haven’t decided what to do about the floor yet,’ Mrs Mellors said, and she was crying now. ‘I want to keep her room exactly as it was, but the carpet’s all soaked in…soaked in — ’

‘We understand, Mrs Mellors,’ Natasha said gently. ‘Don’t feel you have to speak.’

‘Tiffany was sitting on the dressing chair when she died?’ Newson enquired.

‘Yes. She’d been looking at herself, I suppose, as she…’

Newson stepped forward on to the dust sheets and studied the little chair and table. ‘They’ve been cleaned, have they?’ he asked.

‘Yes, my sister-in-law gave them a wipe down when she come over to be with us. Tiff loved her aunt, she did.’

Newson got down on his knees and looked at the seat back and the legs of the chair. It was the kind of fanciful chair that a Disney princess might have sat upon, painted in a rich cream colour with a crimson cushioned seat.

‘She had that when she was eleven. I think she was beginning to think that she wanted something a bit different, a bit more grown-up.’

‘I’ll need to take this chair away with me if that’s all right, Mrs Mellors,’ Newson said.

‘What do you want with it?’ she said. ‘What good can looking at her stuff possibly do?’

‘I’m hoping that I may be able to shed some light on the causes of your daughter’s death, Mrs Mellors. I’m afraid I’ll have to insist that you let me borrow it for a day or two.’

‘Do what you have to do.’

‘There’s a coffee cup on the dressing table, Mrs Mellors. You mentioned that Tiffany drank Diet Coke.’

‘She had one every day when she got back from school. It was her treat.’—

‘Did she drink coffee?’

‘Not at home. Starbucks, yes, she loved all that, but not much at home. Occasionally…I suppose on that day everything was out of character, wasn’t it?’

Newson had seen all he needed to see. He put on his plastic gloves and picked up the vanity chair and the coffee cup and carried them downstairs. He assured Mrs Mellors once more that he expected shortly to have some explanations for her, and then he and Natasha left.

Newson let Natasha drive while he phoned ahead to the local morgue to ask them to expect him. Then he got hold of the pathologist who had attended the suicide and asked him to meet them at the morgue;

‘I don’t care if you’re busy!’ Newson snapped into the phone. ‘No, it can’t wait, and this is most definitely
not
a routine situation. You may have thought it was, Doctor, but I can only imagine that is because you are either blind or stupid…—I’ll take whatever tone I like with you, Doctor, and let me tell you that I have yet to decide whether to pursue you for gross incompetence. As it is I’ll be advising the local police to find someone else to do their forensics!’ He ended the call.

Natasha was surprised. ‘Shit, Ed. You don’t normally get angry like that.’

‘I don’t normally see unbelievable incompetence like this, Natasha. Because of this complete bloody idiot we’ve had Tiffany’s aunt sponging up the evidence in what I’m quite certain was a murder scene.’

Newson got back on his phone and made two more calls summoning the local coroner and a member of the local CID to the meeting at the morgue.

‘You never throw your weight around like this,’ said Natasha. ‘You should do it more often, it’s a good look on you.

They were the first to arrive and Newson asked immediately to be shown the body of the dead girl. The assistant wheeled out the corpse and pulled the sheet from it. Newson had never got used to being in the presence of dead children and teenagers, young and healthy people on the threshold of their lives. It was the worst aspect of his job.

He took out his eye glass and studied the girl’s wounded arms, the only parts of the body that were not pristine. He needed only the briefest of glances to confirm what he had suspected. ‘The man who declared this a suicide has definitely got to lose his job.’

At that point the offending doctor entered, accompanied by the local coroner and a detective constable from the local police station.

‘Are you Detective Inspector Newson?’ the doctor enquired.

‘Yes, I am. You would be Dr Forrest?’

‘That’s right, and I’d like to make it very clear that I do not appreciate being harangued over the phone by stroppy detectives who think that just because they come from Scotland Yard — ’

‘Doctor Forrest,’ Newson said, interrupting the doctor’s angry diatribe, ‘may I ask you when you last attended a teenage wrist-slashing in which the desperate and depressed adolescent in question had sufficient guts and anatomical knowledge to locate and to open
both
radial arteries?’

Dr Forrest was a large man. He had marched right up to Newson and was currently towering over him. Nonetheless Newson’s tone stopped him in his tracks. ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘It’s a simple question, Doctor, which I’ll expand on: when was the last time you saw a fourteen-year-old suicide who had the presence of mind and the steadiness of hand to strike lengthways,
down the arm
, proximally to distally instead of crossways, which is of course the way most people would slash their wrists, but which is, as I’m sure you’ll confirm, a far less effective manner of creating a fatal wound.’

Dr Forrest took a step back. ‘Yes, it is, but — ’

‘All the other wounds are crossways, are they not?’

‘Hesitancy incisions, Inspector. Very common in suicides.’

‘Yes, I know, and even more common in suicide
attempts
, which is what most wrist-slashings, particularly adolescent ones, turn out to be. The subject probes and jabs, making small attention-seeking wounds. These so-called ‘hesitancy incisions’ often do not develop into a genuinely traumatic wound, but when they do it will be a deeper version of what the person has so far attempted. A crossways cut, damaging only surface veins from which the blood will flow relatively sedately. In this case, however, an innocent, unsophisticated adolescent who has been pecking away with a knife up and down her arm in the usual cosmetic manner suddenly delved deeply into her wrist, located the main radial artery and parted the tough muscular tubing surrounding it, lengthways in a deep and traumatic cut. A cut from which her life’s blood will
pump
in great dramatic arcs and which will kill her in minutes. Fourteen-year-old Tiffany Mellors does this not once but
twice
. Don’t you find this surprising, Doctor?’

There was a pause. The big man’s face was red, his fists clenched. ‘Well, put like that I agree that this girl was unusually efficient. But there was a note and no sign of any struggle. I saw no reason to suspect foul play and I still don’t.’

‘I’ll tell you something else of which there was no sign, Doctor. Blood. Blood on the walls, on the bed, on the ceiling. Almost all the blood went on to the carpet beneath where the girl was sitting. You and I both know what happens when a radial artery is opened.

The blood is pumped as if through a hosepipe. When this kind of suicide is successful the whole room gets coated. The only way that all the blood would have sprayed in a single direction is if the girl’s arms had stayed in a single position, hanging by her sides.’

‘Which is how she was sitting when I attended the scene.’

‘What are the chances of a girl who has done this to herself sitting rigidly in one position while she dies? Not very great, I suggest. Besides which, having made the first cut, she would have had to move the knife from one hand to the other and locate the second artery. During that time the first cut would have
had
to be pumping sideways and an arc of blood would have been deposited on the wall.’

‘I did not attend the scene with a criminal investigation in mind, Inspector. What I saw was a suicide and I still believe that to be the case. There was a note which the mother confirmed was in the girl’s own hand — ’

‘You are a
forensic pathologist!
’ Newson almost shouted. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of duress? Where’s the knife?’

‘Well, I…I — ’

‘I read in your report that the girl supposedly killed herself with a knife taken from the family kitchen.’

‘Yes, that’s right. The mother identified it.’

‘Where is it?’

‘She asked me to take it away. I did so. I bagged it up and took it back to my office, and…I…I disposed of it in my sharps bucket…Inspector, the girl was alone in her bedroom. There was no struggle, there was a note…I just presumed — ’

‘Jesus!’ Newson exclaimed. ‘I’d have thought that the first,
the very first
principle of forensic medicine, even before disturbing nothing, is that you don’t ‘just presume’ anything.’

There was silence for a moment. Dr Forrest’s head was bowed in embarrassment. The coroner and the local detective clearly did not know what to say. Newson looked at the body of the girl. It seemed strange to be having this discussion in her presence. He pulled the sheet back to cover her nakedness.

‘What was the girl wearing when you found her?’

‘Her school uniform, except she’d taken off her tie and blouse. She was in her bra and skirt, socks and shoes.’

‘Where are these clothes?’

‘We have them,’ the morgue assistant replied.

Newson turned to the detective constable. ‘I want the socks taken to the lab. My guess is that you’ll find residual evidence of adhesive tape. If you study the vanity chair on which Tiffany was sitting when she died, you’ll see that on both legs tiny bits of paint have been pulled off, as if a strip of tape had been wrapped around them and removed. The chair is in the boot of my car along with a cup, which I believe once contained coffee which Tiffany made for her killer, though sadly I doubt he’ll have left us any prints or DNA. I also want Tiffany’s upper arms examined, because I think amongst the scarring we’ll find some evidence that she was restrained. Whoever did it didn’t use tape, because he knew that would show heavily on the skin. I’m presuming some kind of cord was used, so there should be bruising beneath the cuts. Also please inspect her tongue. I’m pretty certain that she would have been gagged, and since there doesn’t seem to be any tape marking on her face I presume that the gag was stuffed into her mouth.’