by L M Krier
She spoke aloud, both for the recording and for Steve’s benefit.
‘The body presents with a single, deep stab wound to the chest with what is likely to have been a steel kitchen knife, the same knife found in the mother which appears to have caused her fatal injury. I’m basing that assertion on there being no other apparent weapon at the scene, which I think you would confirm, Steve?’
‘Yes, Professor. There appeared to be only the one knife in evidence. Unless another one was used and removed, but we haven’t found it, despite searching the whole of the property, including the garden.’
She nodded, then continued, ‘The knife has apparently gone deep into the thoracic cavity, so it would have required some force behind the blow. Based on the wound’s location, and the likely depth of the injury, I would expect to find a penetrating wound to the heart. If that is the case, death would have been very rapid.
‘I’m expecting to find something very similar on the mother, although as I said, the bleed pattern will be different as the weapon was left in place in her case. I’m reserving judgement pending further investigation, but again, based only on initial examinations, I doubt she would have been able to pull it back out again herself, had she wanted to for any reason.’
‘Would the mother have been capable of inflicting a wound like that on her son, Professor?’ Steve asked her. ‘Given what you said about her being thin and lacking muscle?’
‘Physically? As we observed at the scene, it appeared that the poor boy was taken completely by surprise and made no attempt to defend himself. If the knife was sharp and the blow unexpected, then there’s no reason why she couldn’t have done it. Psychologically, though, that’s a different matter altogether. It’s relatively unusual for a mother to kill her child. Babies, sadly, sometimes, but less common at this age. To stab one to death like this is very rare indeed, in my experience.’
‘I’m curious, Steve. I imagine, in your line of work, unlike ours, you would need to show a motive for a crime like this. It’s extreme enough if the mother killed the boy, then took her own life once she realised what she’d done. But what would motivate a father to do something as twisted as killing his son, convincing his wife to kill herself, then setting her up to take the blame?’ James asked him.
Steve hesitated. This was the part where his theory really seemed off the wall. Especially when he had nothing at all, other than intuition, on which to base it.
‘Well, the family haven’t had an easy time of it. The boy apparently suffered some slight brain damage at birth and was prone to violent outbursts, but nothing physical. The mother has suffered from depressive illness since the birth. She had twins, but the daughter was severely affected and is in full-time care. That must take its toll.’
‘I could understand him suddenly snapping with the weight of all of that,’ James conceded. ‘But that’s not what we’re looking at here, if your theory is even partly correct. It would have taken cold, calculating pre-meditation to carry it off. Could there, perhaps, be a financial motive? Life insurance? Or would that not pay out in the event of a certified suicide?’
‘There’s a suicide clause in most insurance policies,’ Steve told him. ‘I’ve not officially looked into that idea yet because we have nothing on which to make the husband a suspect. But it did cross my mind as a possible motive so I checked up on the current situation. Depending on the insurer, they will only pay out after a period of either twelve or twenty-four months from the date a policy was taken out, in the event of death by suicide. And you can usually add a child to your own life insurance policy, so there could potentially be a payout on both of them. Of course if the husband could be found to be responsible for both deaths, he wouldn’t get anything. Other than a prison sentence, hopefully.’
‘It’s monstrous, if you’re right, Steve. How could someone come up with something like that? Was there any history of anything? Domestic violence, perhaps?’
‘Very possibly. You’d be surprised how much of it goes on, very often with no one outside the family unit being aware,’ Steve told him. ‘People might even say someone was a great bloke, they knew him well, he was kind and helped everyone. Then the police come along and find out the truth and it’s nothing like the rosy picture that was painted.
‘So many households have their dirty little secrets. That’s why it’s vital that you give us anything at all to prove or disprove the theory.’
His tone and his demeanour changed totally as he spoke. There was passion in his voice, almost desperation. Professor Nelson heard it and replied as gently as she could.
‘Steve, it’s important that you realise from the start that, even if you are absolutely right in your theory, there’s a strong likelihood that despite our best intentions, James and I might not be able to supply you with the balance of probability you would need for any kind of action against the father. As I explained to you at the scene, if you are thinking he might have administered something like GHB to the woman, the likelihood of us being able to detect it is slim at best.
‘I should be able to tell you, from my examination, if I find any evidence of significant brain damage in the boy. Even if I don’t find anything obvious, his medical records should confirm or disprove that. I would imagine that if he was prone to violent outbursts, it is remotely possible that that’s what happened and that his poor mother, perhaps afraid for her own life, picked up a knife to defend herself, with tragic consequences.
‘I said I don’t like to speculate and I don’t. But on this occasion I will say that I’m fully expecting not to be able to give you any concrete answers today, let alone the ones you would like to hear. The prints on the knife should be pivotal but with the probability of contamination, I wouldn’t set your hopes too much on them giving you enough to make the husband an official suspect. That would then mean waiting for a coroner’s inquest before you could proceed further. And if pressed, I would have to say, unless we suddenly find something totally unexpected, the probable outcome of that would be a murder-suicide verdict, so case closed as far as further police action was concerned.’
There was a palpable buzz of anticipation about the team at the end of the day when they got together in the larger room downstairs once more. Ted went down to join them, glad of the excuse to escape from behind his desk where he seemed to have spent much of the day pushing papers.
‘Boss, a significant development on the Sandstone Street flats case,’ Mike told him. ‘We’ve finally found an eye witness. Nick spoke to him today and he says he saw pretty much what happened. He definitely saw the partner holding the woman by the throat against the handrail.’
Ted frowned.
‘And he’s only just now come forward, more than two weeks after it happened? Did he see her fall?’
‘I actually felt sorry for the poor bloke,’ Nick Cross put in. ‘I’d been knocking at his flat most days but not getting an answer. The neighbours didn’t know where he was. They don’t know him well. Poor bugger has been absolutely flattened by bad flu, in bed the whole time, only just about able to make himself the odd cup of tea then crawl back to his pit. He looks shocking. His clothes are hanging off him so he’s clearly lost some weight.’
‘Didn’t he have someone he could call? Is his story genuine, do you think?’
‘I would say so. If not, he should get an Oscar for his acting. And no, no one to call. He’s new to the area. The flat’s a temporary stop-gap. He’d left work early the day of the death because he had a splitting headache and was getting the hot and cold sweats. He lives two floors up from our crime scene and when he heard it all kick off, he went outside intending to ask whoever it was to shut up because he felt so rough.’
‘He could see it was getting heated but he was having trouble staying upright himself so he went back inside and pretty much crashed out. He’d no idea it had ended in a fatality and he’s mortified that he didn’t do anything.’
‘But he’d testify now? Even though it doesn’t necessari
ly show him in a particularly good light?’
‘He will. He’s given me an initial statement. He’s happy to ID our suspect and to do anything he can to make it right, as far as he’s able.’
‘As ill as he was, how reliable will his testimony be, though?’ Ted asked. ‘Would he have had a clear enough view from where he was?’
‘Bird’s eye. Literally. Two floors up, on the other side, so looking directly at where it happened.’
‘Pity he didn’t do anything,’ Maurice grumbled. ‘He could maybe have saved the woman’s life.’
‘Maurice, mate, he doesn’t need the guilts from any of us,’ Nick Cross told him. ‘He went out to ask them to keep the noise down but didn’t have enough voice to do even that. And he was two floors up. There were neighbours much closer who told us they heard what was going on, and not for the first time, but none of them went out to take a look, even, let alone do anything.’
‘I’ve been going through the drugs purchases compared to our suspect’s shift patterns,’ Virgil put in. ‘Every single one now confirmed as having been made while he wasn’t at work. As Steve pointed out before, that doesn’t necessarily mean he was at home. But have we at least got enough now to requisition his phone, boss, to check his movements, and if a code was needed for each purchase, in case he’s not yet deleted the history?’
Jezza was looking like the cat who got the cream.
‘We’ve got two eyewitnesses now, boss. The boy’s started to talk. He’s now been told his mother’s dead and he keeps asking his carers whether That Man killed her. They’ve been skilfully avoiding a direct answer because they don’t want to risk putting words into his mouth before we talked to him again, so they’ve simply been telling him she had a fall and died.
‘As soon as we got there he rushed up to Maurice, with another thing he wanted him to fix, and while he was doing that he asked him outright if That Man killed his mum when he pushed her down the stairs.
‘We asked him very carefully, with the approval of his safeguarder, if he’d seen what had happened and he said he had. He was watching from just inside the door to the flat, he said.
‘The room we see him in at the home has soft toys about for the younger children who go in there. Again, having made sure it was all right to ask him questions, I asked if he could show me what had happened.
‘There’s a big teddy bear there. It must be nearly the size of some of the little ones. He went and got that to show us. He got hold of the bear’s throat with one hand then lifted up one of its legs with the other. We were sitting at a table and he made a show of hefting it up then pushing it over backwards so it fell to the floor.
‘While he was doing that he was using some really foul language. Shouting it right in the bear’s face. Now, my brother Tommy will often say words like that if he hears them, because he has no real social filter sometimes. But I wouldn’t normally expect a boy of this one’s age to use words like that in front of adults, especially ones he doesn’t know well. It added a lot of weight to what he was saying.
‘So have we got him now, boss? With two seemingly reliable eye witnesses, plus the evidence of the drugs purchase? Have we got enough to charge him with unlawful killing?’
Chapter Twenty-two
Once they’d finished, Ted hurried back upstairs to get his things. He hadn’t said anything to Trev for fear of getting his hopes up, but he was planning to get to the dojo in time for both the self-defence club and his own judo session. He’d had excellent feedback from the ACC about his alert system idea and he was anxious to tell the young members how much he’d appreciated their input.
He also wanted to try, at least, to spend some quality time with Trev before the coming weekend, when his partner was going down to London to talk to other victims of the abuse he’d experienced as a boy. It was going to be doubly tough for him as he would be staying at the family flat which he hadn’t visited in years and which was bound to awaken old memories and wounds.
Ted knew there would be no chance of him getting to karate the following evening, because of the operation in Manchester, and he’d no way of knowing what time he would finally get home after that. Trev was going straight from work on Friday to get the train to London, leaving his bike safely locked in the workshop. Ted hoped it would be a pleasant surprise for him if he made the effort to get to the dojo.
He heard footsteps on the stairs behind him, then Steve’s hesitant voice saying, ‘Sir? Have you got a minute?’ and realised he may have been optimistic in his plans for an early getaway.
‘Yes, Steve, of course. Come up to my office.’
He led the way, sat down at his desk and indicated for Steve to do the same. When the DC hesitated before speaking, he prompted him gently, hoping he wasn’t in for a long session.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘Sir, would we be able to get a warrant to search the car, at Damson Drive? Only, we haven’t found anything at all out of the ordinary searching the house and garden, so that’s the next most likely place for anything to have been hidden.’
Ted hesitated, weighing up his reply carefully. The last thing he wanted to do was to quash Steve’s enthusiasm for his work. But nor could he afford to indulge the DC’s theories without something more solid to go on.
‘At the moment, we have absolutely nothing on which to base even applying for one. Both deaths happened in the house, and so far there appears to be nothing at all to back up your theory of the husband’s involvement.’
He saw Steve open his mouth to say more but interrupted him.
‘I know it’s frustrating, but unless and until the post-mortem results throw up something solid to allow us to take it any further, there’s nothing much we can do.
‘You know I’m not swayed by such things but I also have to consider that if we made such an open move against a grieving husband and father and got it completely wrong, the consequences could be disastrous. It could leave us open to legal action by him. There would need to be an inquiry, and the whole thing could seriously damage public confidence in the police in general.
‘You may be absolutely right in your intuition. It’s perfectly possible, although extremely unusual. All I can do is promise you that if there’s the slightest doubt, the smallest loophole, in the reports which come back from the lab, we’ll do whatever we can to see that justice is done.’
‘But what if I’m right, sir? What if he’s some sort of a sick monster who’s plotted the whole thing? What if he’s killed his own son in cold blood then callously set up the entire scene to frame his wife? And if he then walks away? He maybe does it with a load of cash from life insurance, and he gets away with the whole thing scot-free? Just because we didn’t search his car.’
‘Not didn’t, Steve,’ Ted told him, keeping his tone as quiet and patient as he could. ‘Couldn’t. We can’t randomly request search warrants with no basis for doing so. You know the procedure as well as I do. We have the apparent weapon for both deaths. What we don’t have, at this stage, is any indication of an unlawful substance having been used. We have no signs at all of third-party involvement. No indication of a break-in.
‘More than that, we have two police witnesses to say it wasn’t possible to break into the property without a lot of force.
‘All I can do is to promise you that if anything at all shows up from the lab results, I’ll get us a warrant as soon as humanly possible.’
‘But it might be too late by then!’ Steve’s voice was rising, his frustration apparent from his tone and expression. ‘He might reclaim the car in the meantime and dispose of anything in it.’
Ted paused for a moment before replying, aware that his response could potentially sound like a patronising brush-off.
‘Steve, sometimes, even though we’re sure we have the right person in our sights, we simply can’t make a case against them. Or something gets in the way and we don’t get the result we want. It’s no reflection on us.
‘Occasionally, whateve
r we do, we can’t bring a case to its conclusion. Outside influences prevent it – force majeure. Tomorrow Drugs are having another crack at bringing Data in. You know that our op to get him was properly planned and well executed but we still lost him. It was no one’s fault. Especially not yours.
‘Why not talk to Bill this evening? Take him for a pint, maybe. He can tell you of the number of past cases which have slipped through our fingers at the last minute. Ones where we were sure we knew the guilty party, but we couldn’t make any kind of a case against them. Others which got all the way to court and then collapsed. It happens.
‘All we can do now is wait for the results and hope they give us some slim chance of going after the husband. But make sure you prepare yourself for the possibility that there’s absolutely nothing we can do and we just have to accept the case as what it appears to be at first sight – a tragic murder-suicide.’
‘Hey, you, this is a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting you.’
Trev was coming out of the changing rooms when Ted arrived. He was glad he’d put his kitbag in the car before he’d left home that morning. Having had to stop to talk to Steve would have made it tight to get there on time if he’d had to call at the house to collect it on his way. As it was, he was on the last minute.
‘I didn’t say anything, in case I couldn’t make it after all. I’ll definitely be late tomorrow, though. No karate.’
‘That’s fine, you’re here now and that means a lot. I’ll go and get started while you change.’
Ted had his usual magnetic effect on young Flip. As soon as he appeared in the main hall of the building where they trained, Flip lost all interest in what Trev was saying and rushed over to his hero, a beaming smile on his face.
‘Wow, your boss, he were the Assistant Chief Constable, weren’t he? That’s nearly the top job. I looked up his uniform online. A wreath and them crossed staff things. What do you have to do to be an ACC?’
