Death and Deception (10 page)

She located the keys, looped her tongue through the key ring and tried to lift the keys free from the bag. She had had no idea how heavy keys could be. True, she had never tried to lift anything with her tongue before. The giggling was threatening again. On the third attempt, she pulled the bag over and got her teeth onto the key ring. At last.

Once the keys were out and on the floor, Claire picked them up with her bound hands. She had to bend almost double to open the blade and then sat back on her bottom, with her legs crossed in front of her. She was in danger of falling over backwards, so she twisted and wedged her back against the armchair, positioned the tiny blade in her fingers, and got to work. She sawed through the rope a bit at a time, fraying it with the blade rather than cutting it. Her ankles freed, she pushed herself upright by turning onto her knees, leaning on the chair seat to face the door. Almost defeated by the swaying of the room and the pain in her legs, she levered herself upright.

One thing she knew with certainty, she would never sit with her back to a door again.

Now, free her hands, or get out of the house and run? Claire made her way to the door, every sense on high alert. She could hear nothing. She had to have her hands loose, she was too vulnerable without them. She took the minutes necessary to free one hand, unable to concentrate as she strained every sense towards the door. She gasped with pain as the blade nicked the soft, white inside of her left wrist. She had missed the vein, but still it welled and dripped onto the floor. Stifling another overwhelming urge to sink down and sob, she took a huge gulp of air, slit the edge of her white work shirt and cut a strip wide enough to go round her wrist. She looked at the burn marks on her wrists made by the rope. The pain seemed far away at the moment, although the screaming pins and needles in her legs was coming through loud and clear as the blood surged back round the limbs. She held the strip of cloth with her teeth and tied it round her injured wrist, tucking the ends under with her free hand. At least it stopped the bleeding. Sighing, she pushed her hair out of her eyes and grasped the door knob.

It was then that she heard a noise outside the door, a groan or sigh. Was somebody there? She put her ear close to the door, but there was nothing else to hear. She couldn’t wait any longer, even if there was someone out there. The need to get out superseded all other worries. She shouldered her bag, dropping the keys into their compartment and grabbed the poker from beside the fireplace. The sound from outside the room came again.

Claire held her breath and prised the door open a crack. Jamie May was lying across the threshold, covered in a blanket. His arm, which had been resting against the door, fell onto the floor in front of her foot. He was asleep, lost in a mumbling, flailing dream. Reassured, she stepped over him and made for the front door, risking a glance back over her shoulder. The temptation to hit him with the poker was huge. He had hurt her, he had imprisoned her, he may well have killed Carly. Her hand tightened round the blackened metal. She held it out in front of her, like a sword.

She didn’t do it. He was just a kid, after all. Someone had to be the adult in all of this madness. He looked so young lying there, asleep.

Leaving the front door ajar, Claire limped as quickly as she could towards the gate and the relative safety of her car.

She felt his approach rather than heard it. Half turning, she saw Jamie bearing down on her, his face contorted into a grimace, his teeth chattering, his arms stretching out to grab her like some parody of a zombie in ‘Night of the Living Dead’. Claire did the only thing she could think of - she hit him as hard as she could in the solar plexus with the iron poker. Jamie stared at her for a second, his eyes wide with shock, then collapsed onto the path, winded. He lay rigid, panic freezing him as he waited for his lungs to recover enough for him to grab a breath.

Claire stared around her wildly, expecting attack on all sides. But the street was still deserted. Birds twittered. A striped cat slunk by, keeping to the protection of the low wall. It was all so normal. She felt the nervous energy which had propelled her out of the house begin to fail, her legs wobbled and a sob began to work its way up her throat.

She fumbled her car keys back out of the bag. She knew it was stupid. She had concussion. But it would be quicker to drive herself to the hospital than wait for a police car to come for her. And she needed to get away now, before Jamie came round.

Date: Tuesday 25
^th
April Time: 10:00 Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital

Carly Braithwaite lay on the examination table in the Pathology department. Her body was covered by a faded green surgical sheet that emphasized the pallor of her face and neck. Dan nodded at the others, Sally Ellis, Bill Larcombe, Campbell Fox and his three assistants. They were also gowned in green, linked to the dead girl and each other by a shade he guessed none of them would have chosen. The post-mortem room was small, without windows or decoration and lit by a powerful light which bleached all other colour from the watchers. Carly, both eyes closed now, lolling eyeball returned to its rightful socket, looked palely perfect apart from the faint bruising on her face and neck.

In silence, the assistants removed the girl’s clothing and passed it to Bill Larcombe, who, with methodical precision, bagged and labelled each item. Dan watched the items go into the bag. There was so little, jeans, tee-shirt, underwear. No coat. Now that was odd. She would have worn a coat, surely, in April? And the scarf they had found at the scene wasn’t there. Not hers then.

Fox spoke first, once he had started the recorder. ‘On my preliminary examination of the body yesterday I could find no obvious cause of death. Things are a bit clearer today as the bruising has come out. Can you see the faint marking at one side of her throat, and the finger marks on the right cheek?’ He gestured to an assistant. ‘Take a picture of those, will you?’

The young woman moved in close with her camera, and so did Dan and Sally, but there was little to see with the naked eye. Fox continued his walk around the girl’s body, lifting, moving and turning her until he was satisfied that he had recorded all that there was to see.

‘External examination shows that she has a tattoo on her left bicep, of a rose and a dagger, but no other distinguishing features.’

His assistant moved the covering over the girl’s body as Fox worked, exposing only the part he was examining. Fox glanced over at the police officers.

‘You may be thinking that I am preserving the wee girl’s modesty, and you would be right.’ He took a vaginal swab and handed it to an assistant who took it straight to the lab for analysis.

‘She was not a virgin,’ he said, ‘and she had intercourse very recently, but there are no signs of childbirth or disease.’

He paused the recording and looked round at Dan Hellier, as another assistant took scrapings from under the dead girl’s fingernails and went off to process them. Fox removed the onyx and silver ring from Carly’s shredded finger and passed it to Bill Larcombe to bag.

‘I’m not planning to do a full PM today as it is clear from medical records that she was in good health, unless you have a particular need to see the internal organs?’

Dan gave a quick shake of the head. ‘We just need cause and best estimate of time of death please, Doctor. Thanks for sending those samples off to be done straightaway, too.’

Fox nodded. ‘I hate to see a young girl at the start of her life lying on a slab in here. I’ve told my team to prioritise the case.’ He resumed the recording, ‘She has bruising to the front of her right shin.’ He moved up to her arms, gesturing at his assistant to hold a light closer to Carly’s right hand. ‘She has fragments of glass embedded in her palm and fingers. She was holding something that broke in her hand, or tried to pick up a broken object. Anything found at the scene?’

Dan shook his head. The copse where she had been found was a nightmare to analyse. Too many people used it. But as she wasn’t killed there, he couldn’t add anything useful.

‘I’ll carry on, then. There are bruises around the biceps above both elbows, indicative of her being held by the arms. A thumb and four fingers clear on each arm.’

Dan interrupted, ‘Was she being held from the front or the rear?’

‘From the front at this point. A bruise on her shin may be a kick from her assailant.’ He turned the body over, exposing a thin back and slim buttocks. ‘Interesting. She appears to have two almost circular bruises on either side of her ribs.’ He looked up again, peering over the lenses of rimless glasses. ‘What does that suggest, Inspector?’

Sally had seen the signs before. ‘She was in a fight. The assailant got her face down and knelt on her back. That’s how he managed to strangle her without making so many marks on her neck - she was probably finding it hard to breathe anyway.’

Dan nodded, it seemed plausible. ‘So the assailant should have some bruising or scratch marks, too.’

Fox completed his external examination. ‘I need to look at her trachea and thyroid area closely, so that is what we shall do now. I’ll make the first cut vertically down the centre of her neck.’

Dan swallowed. He was never very good at this sort of thing. He sneaked a quick look at Sally. She looked a bit green too, although it could have been the light reflecting off the gowns. Dr Fox was opening the girl’s neck and he watched, fascinated, as he used a scalpel to open the trachea. He swallowed again, and saw Sally concentrate on counting the number of individual bulbs in the arc light above their heads. Only Bill Larcombe seemed unaffected by the scene, as he bagged evidence in the corner.

Fox sliced through the neck cartilage and brought bloodied fingers out from her neck, lifting the trachea and thyroid glands onto a dish. The room was silent then, as Fox examined the trachea. He searched for the small, horseshoe-shaped hyoid bone.

‘In an adult this little bone would be broken in most types of strangulation, which makes the diagnosis simple. It’s harder to see in a teenager as the bone doesn’t fuse across the larynx until adulthood, but you never know, it could help.’ His assistant took photographs of the organ, as Fox dissected the individual rings of the trachea.

They waited. Dan could feel a terrible need to run around the room shouting. The quiet, the concentration, the waiting was killing him.

Eventually, Fox spoke again, ‘The condition of the trachea and larynx suggests that the victim was asphyxiated from behind. I have found damage to several sections of the thyroid cartilage and the hyoid bone.’

Dan nodded. It was what he expected. He saw Sally nod, too. It confirmed her idea that the girl had been turned over, or that she had been caught trying to run away. There was no doubt now, if anybody had harboured one, Carly Braithwaite had been murdered.

The doctor continued, ‘Her assailant was right handed. The damage to the thyroid cartilage is worse on the left side of the neck where he or she could exert most pressure. The hand imprint across her mouth was from the left hand. Likely the assailant was wearing something soft on his or her arms which lessened the imprint on the girl’s skin but maximised the area of suffocation.’

Dan interrupted, ‘Like a hoody or a fleece?’

‘That is a possibility. Something that would not leave much of an impression. In order for asphyxiation to occur, the assailant would either have needed to hold on for at least five minutes, which is a long time, or to have struck lucky and stopped blood flow through the carotid artery or the jugular vein at the same time as preventing air getting in through the throat. In those circumstances death can happen in seconds.’

‘Could it have been an accident?’ asked Sally.

‘Aye, that is also possible.’ The pathologist scratched his beard. ‘But the girl was killed from behind, rather than face to face, which would make it a rather unlikely accident.’

He washed the blood from his gloves in the porcelain sink and leant his bulk against it as he concluded his examination.

‘I estimate the time of death as somewhere between 4.00 pm and midnight. I’ll be able to tell you more when I have been able to study the results. Ye’ll have my report and the sample results by the end of the day if we can manage it.’

Dan thanked him. They left the pathologist to complete his work, they had what they needed for now. Bill Larcombe collected his evidence and followed them out of the room.

‘Coffee?’

Bill shook his head. ‘No thanks, sir, I’ll get this lot back and process it. See you later.’

Dan looked at his DS. She was paler than usual. They both needed a few minutes to catch their breath.

‘Sally?’

She nodded and they headed for the Costa Coffee shop at the entrance. ‘At least we only had to see the minor version of a Post-Mortem,’ he said as Sally downed half her coffee in one gulp and came up coughing because it was too hot.

‘Yes, not the best part of the job,’ she gasped.

‘How did the father cope with identifying the body yesterday?’

Sally sighed. ‘He was awful. Shouting and angry at everybody. But Foxy calmed him down. I think it’s his wonderful Scots accent that does it. He’s like a Glaswegian teddy bear.’ She laughed and then looked thoughtful. ‘It’s Jenna I’m worried about. She doesn’t really exist for her Dad at the moment. Losing a child is always terrible, but he can’t seem to comfort her and she doesn’t have anyone else to support her, as far as I can see. I’ll try to locate a gran or someone. Might even have a go at contacting the estranged mother, though that could be a waste of time after five years.’ She took a more careful sip of coffee. ‘How can a mother leave her kids like that? If Paul and I ever split up, I’d take the kids whatever happened. Poor little Jenna. And poor little Carly.’

Dan shook his head in sympathy. Grief took people in different ways, and it was hard to know what to do for the best when there was an awkward character like Alan Braithwaite to deal with, and no mother or close adult to offer support.