Born in a Burial Gown (7 page)

Fluke tuned out as Sowerby directed the technician on where to photograph and what external swabs should be taken. At that point, they would only be taking samples of what was accessible: her head. They’d already taken them at the scene but were taking them again as a precaution.

Fluke’s mind went into screensaver mode as the routine part of the PM continued. He thought through what the priorities were going to be in the early stages of the investigation. Clearly identifying the body was going to be key, and Fluke hoped it would be easy. With an identification, a list of people to interview could be drawn up. And with a list of people to interview, a suspect list could be drawn up. The rest was normally a slam-dunk.

Normally.

Although Fluke still couldn’t rule out a domestic homicide, he knew that in reality he was looking for something different. It looked too professional to have been committed in the heat of the moment. While Fluke had been making arrangements to see Doctor Cooper after the post-mortem, Towler had received a phone call from Jo Skelton. She’d finished setting up the incident room and had got to work on the misper list. Early indications were that the victim wasn’t a Cumbrian. Skelton was widening the enquiry to cover the whole of the UK but it would take time. Fluke would get a photo of the victim’s head to help her as soon as he could.

The foundation hole was obviously a deposition site, and therefore the second priority was to find the murder scene.

Finding the person who wrote the note also needed to happen fast and Fluke expected a fingerprint match by the time the PM finished. It was inconceivable that a chaotic heroin addict would be unknown to the police.

After the photographs, Sowerby and the technician struggled to remove her from the golf bag. ‘Some
rigor mortis
is evident,’ Sowerby said. He paused and picked up some heavy-duty shears. ‘Sorry, Avison. I’m going to have to cut the bag to get her out.’

Fluke nodded. It was preferable to damaging any evidence on her body.

Five minutes later, she was laid out on the table and the golf bag was handed over to SOCO to process. As Sowerby had predicted, the bag had protected her from the mud of the building site and she was spotless.
Another break
, Fluke thought.

‘Don’t forget to check all the pockets that thing has,’ Towler told the SOCO. ‘I want to know as soon as you find anything.’ The SOCO man rolled his eyes. There was an unspoken ‘Well, d’uh’, that luckily for him, Towler missed.

Fluke looked at her lifeless face and fought the urge to reach out and remove the long hair that had fallen over her eyes. Gravity had emptied her lips of blood. Her eyes were milky and had flattened as they lost liquid. The waxy, almost translucent, skin that Fluke had observed at the site was exaggerated under the powerful lights.

Some detectives tried to keep things as impersonal as they could to maintain objectivity. For Fluke, it was the opposite. He worked at his best when he could make a personal connection with the victim, and looking down at her, Fluke could feel anger building in the pit of his stomach.

He tossed her like garbage.

Sowerby removed her clothing, cutting everything rather than undressing her. It was the best way to preserve evidence. She’d been dressed casually but smartly; trousers and matching jacket. Her shoes were black with small heels and she was wearing stockings. They all went to the SOCO team to process.

Looking down at her naked body, stiff with
rigor
and displayed like a laboratory rat, Fluke guessed she’d be in her mid-thirties. She’d clearly been good-looking, beautiful in fact.

The technician fingerprinted her before taking a series of X-rays. A printer whirred into life in an adjoining room. Although X-rays were digitally viewed during a coroner’s post-mortem, there were always hard copies made for the files.

Sowerby and the technician had to massage the body to counteract the
rigor
before they could start the external examination of her front. Fluke had always thought it looked obscene. He knew it had to be done but he decided to look away while they did it. He noticed Towler and Lucy were doing the same. It was a small gesture, but to Fluke it was important. Anything that could be done to preserve her dignity, even in death, was worthwhile. Sowerby started talking again and Fluke turned back round.

‘Slight tearing of the vagina, possible recent sexual activity. Can you take a deep swab, please?’ Sowerby asked the technician.

He continued with a close examination, speaking into the microphone.

He lifted up her left hand and studied it with a magnifying glass, then put it down. The nails were painted a vibrant turquoise and were beautifully manicured. He picked up the right and did the same. ‘Can you get me an evidence bag, please?’ Picking up a small scraping tool, he removed something from the underside of her long nails. He put it into a small plastic tube and handed it to Fluke.

Fluke held it up to the light to have a look. It was a tiny grain of something, dark brown. ‘Any idea?’

‘Not a clue, not for me to speculate either. That’s why we have a lab.’

He went back to the body and moved the big overhead light above her head. Fluke handed the tube to the SOCO man who put it into an evidence bag. Out the corner of his eye, Fluke noticed Lucy walk over and ask to see it.

‘It’s difficult to be sure, but it looks like there’s some slight haemorrhaging in the eyes,’ Sowerby said, looking at Fluke.

‘Strangled?’

‘Normally I’d say that’s as good a guess as anything right now but there’s nothing else to support that. No marks on the neck.’

‘What then?’ Towler asked.

‘Patience, boy. We’ve only just started. We won’t leave here until you and Avison have something,’ Sowerby said, not unkindly. Everyone in the room had the same goal.

‘Looks like she may have had cosmetic surgery at some point; nose correction, poor one by the look. If they’ve moved bone around, I’ll know more when I open her up. Nothing else of note on the anterior.’

As the body was carefully turned over, Sowerby commented, ‘She’s been moved after death occurred. No uniform lividity.’

Fluke knew that if a corpse lay undisturbed,
livor mortis,
where blood obeyed the laws of gravity and settled at the lowest point, set in. If someone died on their back then the blood drained from their front and settled underneath before clotting, causing a difference in colour. White on top, purple on the bottom, like cream on raspberries. If the body was moved before the process had finished then lividity was interrupted and
livor
wouldn’t be uniform. The victim on the table had purple and white patches competing with each other. She had been moved in the first few hours after her death. It didn’t really help; it only confirmed what they already suspected – that the building site wasn’t where she’d been killed.

Fluke noticed Lucy had finished looking at whatever had been found under the victim’s nails and was back observing. Earlier, he’d wondered if she’d ever attended a PM before. Now he knew.

She was obviously struggling with being in the proximity of a dead body, and he wondered whether she’d asked to see the sample just to take time out. Her eyes were red and glistening but she was yet to cry.

Wait until the bone saw buzzes into life and the top of the head comes off.

In those situations, people sometimes gave up and left. Fluke had experienced it, the embarrassed pause while the person walked out. It shouldn’t be, but it was a walk of shame. She appeared determined to stay, however. She was making notes, pages of them, by the look of it. Sowerby had let her have a look at the body before he started with the external examination, and she’d stated there were no signs of insect activity. Fluke would give her a call the next day, find out how she was and what ‘no insect activity’ meant in her world. He suspected it meant that the victim had been either stuffed in the bag immediately or it had been too cold. It was probably both.

Sowerby glanced up, saw where Fluke was looking and gave him a slight nod of approval.

He bent back down. ‘Gotcha,’ he said quietly. ‘Avison, come over here and have a look.’

Fluke bent over to see what he was pointing at.

‘Shit,’ he said. The room seemed to get colder.

The bullet hole was in the back of her skull; partially covered by hair but still visible. There was some surrounding blood on the wound which had clotted and was almost black.

‘There is a hole in the occipital bone,’ Sowerby said for the recorder. ‘Possible GSW. Photographs, please.’

The technician moved round with his camera.

Fluke knew Sowerby would say nothing definite until he had cold, hard facts to support it but they all knew; she’d been shot.

Execution style,
he thought.

A bullet hole ruled out someone covering up an accidental death. It had been a long shot anyway. FMIT officially had what Fluke had known since midday; a murder to investigate.

Fluke also knew that the bullet hole could reveal a lot more than simply the cause of death. It could reveal the manner by which it was inflicted. It was covered on the SIO course, one of those modules that was fascinating and disturbing at the same time.

Bullets entering from an angle leave an oval-shaped entrance wound. When the gun is held against the body, the wound will be round and have burn marks from the muzzle flame. Short-range shots will leave powder residue tattooed into the skin. Longer-range shots will leave no burns or powder but the hole will be smaller than the bullet calibre, due to the skin’s elastic properties. When a gun is pressed against bone and fired, the bone slows the gasses down, forcing them backwards against the skin leaving a star-shaped wound.

Despite the dry blood and hair, the bullet hole was clearly star-shaped.

It was also a small hole.

This wound meant only one thing
, Fluke thought. A small calibre gun pressed against the back of his victim’s head and fired. Not enough power to go straight through the head or they would have seen the exit wound. The bullet would have bounced round the inside of the skull, shredding the brain. Haemorrhaging the eyes.

A professional killer’s weapon.

A professional killer’s technique.

No noise, no mess, no chance of survival.

After Sowerby had carefully shaved the surrounding area and measured and photographed the wound, he shouted across to the technician, ‘Are those X-rays ready yet, boy?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get them on the damned light board, man. Stop wasting time.’

The technician ignored the fact he’d been shouted at unfairly and put up the slide of the head.

There was no bullet.

‘I don’t understand,’ Lucy said frowning and craning forward. ‘It must be in there.’

‘Bullets don’t follow straight lines. It could be anywhere. Get the next slide up,’ Sowerby said.

‘Saw someone shot in the knee in Somalia, once. Bullet came out his arse. Funny as fuck,’ Towler said to no one in particular.

‘Sergeant Towler,’ Fluke said.

‘Boss?’

‘Shut it.’

Towler grinned and winked at Lucy but didn’t say anything more.

They found it on the third plate. In the abdomen.

‘There you go, Lucy. Bullet’s probably bounced off the inside of the skull, through the roof of the mouth, down the oesophagus into the stomach and into the duodenum. We’ll get it later,’ Sowerby said.

Despite the spree killer Derek Bird skewing their statistics, Cumbria saw very little crime involving firearms. For Sowerby, who covered Manchester and Liverpool as well as Cumbria, it was routine. ‘Right, let’s get back to it,’ he said.

After the external examination was completed, it was time for the internal. The body was turned back over, the head raised by a body block. Sowerby was going against standard routine and starting at the head rather than the body cavity. He had a probable cause of death and would move quickly to confirm it. He knew Fluke could use the extra time the shortcut would give him.

Fluke was sure he knew what the COD and MOD would be. Cause of death would be the brain injury; manner of death would be a gunshot wound. It was more than they had that morning, although it raised more questions than it answered.

Sowerby picked up a scalpel and made an incision behind one ear, cutting across the top of the head to behind the other ear. As if the victim had been wearing a face mask, he peeled the skin away from the skull in two directions. The front was pulled down, exposing the top of the skull and the face, the other he pulled back, exposing the rear. The skull was bloody but bare.

Fluke knew that Sowerby would remove a wedge-shaped section of the skull to get access to the brain. He turned away not wanting to watch. Once was enough for anyone. He found he didn’t want to stay anymore.

There was going to be some routine procedures for the next hour. He’d nip out and see if Doctor Cooper was back so he could apologise for leaving so abruptly the day before.

‘Boss?’ Towler called after him.

‘I need to see someone,’ Fluke replied, without turning.

As the Stryker saw buzzed into life, Fluke knew that the pitch would turn into a sickening shriek as it bit into bone. He sped up and was out of earshot before it happened.

Before Fluke had even left the mortuary he’d changed his mind. He wasn’t going to be in a position to have more plasma until after the PM anyway. He decided to grab a brew from Costa Coffee in the main foyer rather than have a fight with his haematologist about his disappearing act the day before.

He was in the queue and just about to place his order, when his phone rang. It was Towler. Fluke had only been out of the mortuary for five minutes. ‘We’ve found something,’ Towler said.

‘In the brain?’

‘In the golf bag,’ Towler replied.

Fluke sighed, smiled ruefully at the waiting barista and headed back towards the mortuary.

The ‘something’ was a small notebook.

‘SOCO found it in an internal pocket of the bag. There’s some other stuff, electronics mainly: a phone, a tablet and a laptop. All smashed to bits and there’s no SIM in the phone. The notebook’s empty but it looks like the top page has been torn off,’ Towler said. ‘It could have been already there, I suppose, but despite it being covered in shit, the bag looks brand new to me. If the notebook was put there by the killer then it wasn’t meant to be found.’