Where Death Delights (26 page)

She was not in bed, but was in a dressing gown when she opened the door.

‘What's this, Richard? Are you desperate enough to come knocking on a lady's door in the middle of the night?' she quipped.

He quickly told her about the phone call. ‘Do you want to come?' he asked. ‘Be like old times for you.'

She agreed readily. ‘Give me time to get some clothes on. I'll see you downstairs in five minutes.'

The Humber's headlights were soon carving a passage through the slight mist that filled the valley as they drove. There were few other cars on the road and at Ross, they turned east towards Gloucester. Some miles down the A40, Angela spotted the illuminated roof sign of a police car parked in a field gateway. They slowed to a crawl until the big Wolseley flashed its headlights at them and Richard pulled up alongside.

‘We'll go on a short way, Doctor and then turn left,' called the driver from his open window. They followed him for a couple of miles through a sleeping village called Dursley Cross and then along narrow roads with woods on either side.

Angela was looking at a folded road map by the light of a small torch. ‘There's a huge area of woodland here, must once have been part of the Forest of Dean.'

After another half mile the brake lights of the police car came on and he slowed to turn left into a bumpy track which went deep into the trees, seen dimly in the reflected light of their headlamps. A few hundred yards more brought them into a clearing, where two other police cars, two unmarked cars and a plain van were parked.

The other driver came across to them as they were retrieving their bags from the back seat.

‘We'll have to walk a little bit now, sir,' said the officer. ‘The way we came in isn't the direct way to the scene, but we didn't want to drive over any tyre marks.'

Another uniformed bobby was standing guard over the cars and took their names down on a clipboard.

‘I'll take you through, I've got a decent torch here,' said the police car driver, leading the way.

Walking through the forest was an eerie experience, as soon a glow appeared ahead where portable lights had been set up. A dense mist was hanging at head height between the trees and the dim light revealed only the straight black trunks of the larches on every side. The macabre effect was heightened when they overtook two men in black carrying a coffin through the ghostly scene, presumably the duty undertakers coming from the van parked in the clearing.

When they reached the lights, propped on tripods over car batteries, they saw a dark-coloured car at the end of a barely visible firebreak running through the wood.

Around it were half a dozen men, two of them in uniform. One of the others came to meet them as they approached.

‘Good of you to come, Doctor! And you, miss' he added to Angela, assuming she was his secretary.

‘She's a doctor too,' explained Richard with a grin. ‘Doctor Bray, formerly of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, until I stole her away!'

The superintendent introduced himself as Tom Spurrel, another large man, as most of Gloucester police seemed to be. Another officer approached them and Spurrel explained that he was Brian Lane, the DI who first attended.

‘The situation is this, Doctors,' the superintendent began. ‘There's a dead man in that car, shot through the neck. The gun's on the floor and it looks like a suicide – but maybe that's what it's supposed to look like.'

‘You already know who he is, you said?' asked Pryor.

‘Well, we know who the car belongs to and from the description we had over the phone from the Met, there seems little doubt that the chap is Harry Haines, a toerag from South London.'

‘Harry Haines? I've heard of him,' exclaimed Angela. ‘Wasn't he a villain from New Cross way, who got off on a murder charge a few years back? Some fight between rival gangs, that ended in a shooting. We had material from it in the Met Lab.'

Spurrel nodded in the gloom. ‘That's him, his mob ran protection rackets and a bit of prostitution and drugs.'

‘So what the hell's he doing in a Gloucestershire forest?' asked Richard.

The detective inspector, Brian Lane, answered. He was as tall as Spurrel, but leaner with a saturnine face.

‘We've heard that his mob have been trying get in on the nightclub and dog racing scene here, to extend their protection scams. Same as what's happening in Tyneside and Manchester, the London boys are wanting to muscle in on the local action.'

‘That's why we're cautious about accepting it as a suicide,' broke in Tom Spurrel. ‘Why would he come all the way down here to top himself?'

Both the detectives wore belted raincoats and wide-brimmed felt hats, more reminiscent of the forties – or American B-movies, thought film buff Richard.

‘Want to have a look now?' offered Spurrel. ‘The forensic lab in Bristol is sending someone over, they should be here soon. We called them a couple of hours ago.'

‘And there are officers coming down from the Met, to definitely identify this chap,' added the DI, as they walked to the car, sitting silently in the ring of lights. It was an almost new Rover P4/90.

Going round to the driver's side, Richard and Angela saw that the front door was wide open and a man sat there, his head lolling backwards against the top of the seat.

‘Is it alright to go nearer?' asked Pryor, looking down at the ground. It was covered with a spongy mat of pine needles and there seemed no chance of footprints being left.

‘Go ahead, Doc, we've got all the pictures. Just keep your fingers off anything but the body.'

Richard gingerly moved nearer and stood right against the door pillar, holding a large torch that Spurrel had handed to him. The man inside was dressed in a fawn check suit over a white shirt with no tie. He was thin and wiry, looking about forty years old, his brown hair cut short.

His mouth was open and blood ran from both corners, as it did from a wound in the front of his neck, just under the chin. There were runnels of dried blood on each side of the bristly skin of his neck. His hands lay on his lap and on the floor between his feet, there was a pistol.

Richard looked carefully at the corpse, his eyes running over every inch, from the crown of his head to the toes of his expensive brown shoes. Then he stepped back a pace and turned to the waiting onlookers.

‘You're right, it's no suicide!' he said. ‘And he wasn't shot here, either.'

The two senior detectives and three other officers who had gravitated to the group, looked at Pryor as if he was some Old Testament prophet.

‘That's quick work, Doc!' said Spurrel. ‘How d'you know?'

Richard grinned and winked at Angela. ‘I'm sure Doctor Bray here will tell you!'

She rose to the occasion easily, blood stains and sprays being one of her specialities.

‘Those dribbles of blood on the face and neck are going the wrong way for a chap sitting upright,' she explained, waving her own torch at the body. ‘Look, that blood coming from the corner of the mouth goes straight across towards the ear, the same as the one coming from the gunshot wound. He must have been lying on his back when those were leaking.'

Richard added his own bit of expertise. ‘And that post-mortem lividity, the blue staining of the skin on the back of his neck, could only have happened if he spent a few hours face-up after death, not sitting in a car seat.'

Richard knew that police always liked experts who would give them a dogmatic answer off the cuff, though it was a habit fraught with danger if it turned out to be wrong. Tom Spurrel rubbed his hands together and looked at his DI.

‘Right, Brian, pull out all the stops on this one!'

As they started snapping instructions to the inspector and two detective constables, Richard saw torches bobbing towards them from the parking area and a moment later, two other men arrived, one carrying a large case.

As soon as this new arrival saw them in the gloom, he called a greeting.

‘God God, Angie, what are you doing here? I needn't have come if I'd known the big chief from the Met was here already!'

The speaker was a moon-faced middle-aged man with wire-framed spectacles, short and rather plump. He dropped his bag well away from the car and advanced on Angela, giving her big bear hug.

‘I thought I'd better come and show you how to do the job properly,' she chaffed and introduced him to Richard as Archie Gorman, her biologist counterpart from the Bristol Forensic Science Laboratory. The man with him, a younger, slim version of Trevor Mitchell, introduced himself as Detective Inspector Morrison, the liaison officer from the Bristol laboratory. These were detectives seconded for a period from one of the local forces, to act as links between the investigating officers and the scientists.

When everyone knew who was who, they turned their attention back to the job in hand. After Gorman had looked at the body and agreed with Angela and Richard, Tom Spurrel asked the pathologist what he wanted to do next.

‘Very hard to do much with him stuck in that seat,' answered Richard. ‘Do you want to get him out soon?'

‘We've got all the photographs, so just tapings and whatever the lab wants,' answered the superintendent.

‘Then we'll haul him out for you.'

The two from the laboratory opened their case and began dabbing lengths of Sellotape across the clothing of the corpse, picking up stray hairs and particles. They stuck these on to sheets of clear celluloid for later examination under the microscope. Then a detective constable who was acting as exhibits officer, carefully retrieved the gun from the floor, pushing the safety catch on with the end of a pencil. Wearing rubber gloves and holding only the edges of the trigger guard to avoid spoiling any fingerprints, he slid it into a brown paper bag, filling in the exhibits label before putting it safely into his own large box.

Now it was Pryor's turn and he tested the stiffness of both arms to look for rigor mortis.

‘When was the body found?' he asked.

‘About nine o'clock,' said Brian Lane. ‘As usual, by a local chap walking his dog. It wasn't here at four this afternoon, as we've found two women who were riding horses up this firebreak then.'

Richard looked at his wristwatch. ‘Just half past one now. He's in full rigor, not that that helps a great deal, except to suggest he died more than a couple of hours ago and less than a couple of days.'

With a torch, he looked closely at the wound just above the Adam's apple. ‘No soot or powder burns, so it wasn't a contact or very close discharge. A lot depends on the weapon and the ammunition, of course. That's the lab's problem.'

He felt carefully at the back of the head, pushing against the stiffness of the neck. ‘No exit wound, though there'd be blood soiling on the upholstery if there had been.'

He felt the face and forehead with the back of his hand.

‘Doesn't feel warm, but I need to use the thermometer when we get him out. What's the air temperature, Angela?'

His partner had anticipated what he wanted and had taken a long chemical thermometer from his bag several minutes earlier, allowing time for the mercury to settle.

‘It's just fifty degrees here. Better check it inside the car as well, though the door's been open for a time.'

Richard held the thermometer near the body for a minute or two. ‘Just the same, fifty degrees,' he said, using the Fahrenheit scale.

The detective inspector and one of the DCs brought a large red rubber sheet and laid it out a few feet away from the car, then carefully hoisted the body out of the driving seat and laid it on the sheet. Due to the stiffness, the head remained bent back and the knees and hips stayed flexed.

Richard rolled the body over on to its side so that the two people from the laboratory could dab their sticky tape over its back and legs, then they carried on examining and taping the driving seat.

Pryor looked all down the back of the corpse and again noted the purple-red discoloration of the back of the neck from settling of the blood after death. He looked up at Spurrel, who was the officer in charge of the investigation.

‘I'd like to take a rectal temperature before he cools down any more,' he said. ‘Is it alright if I pull his trousers down for a moment?'

The superintendent nodded. ‘OK by me, if the lab's happy about it. We've no reason to think there was any sexual involvement.'

Archie interrupted his work inside the car to agree with the detective but as Richard and the liaison officer wrestled with the dead man's belt and trousers, Angela held a swab ready, a test tube with cotton wool wound round the end of a stick stuck in the cork.

‘Better use this first, just in case,' she murmured, as the corpse's buttocks were exposed. She did not want to appear as if she was interfering, as officially she was not there as a forensic scientist, except as the pathologist's assistant. Richard took the hint and as Angela held the glass tube, he pulled out the cork and prodded the swab into the victim's fundament. Replacing the swab in the tube, he put the thermometer in its place, two inches deep and waited until the mercury stabilized again.

‘Eighty-four degrees,' he announced. ‘There's still a bit of warmth to be felt on the backside.'

They hauled up the underpants and trousers and laid the corpse on its back again.

‘I can't do any more here, superintendent,' he said. ‘Are we taking it straight for a post-mortem?'

Tom Spurrel nodded. ‘I'd like to, Doctor, if you can. The mortuary in Gloucester is laid on.'

As the photographer moved in to take more shots of the inside of the car and the body on the ground, the senior detective asked the inevitable question.