by Carl Goodman
‘So what’s the problem?’
Moresby stuffed his hands into his uniform pocket for a moment and looked as though he was trying to convey some nuance. ‘It’s just dealing with them,’ he said after a moment. ‘This isn’t like anywhere else you’ll come across in the UK. The whole place is more like an offshore tax haven than a private estate. Everyone here is as rich as Croesus, lawyered up to the hilt and able to slip in and out of the country as they please. I half expect my lads to have to show their passports to get in. Don’t expect them to behave like us mere mortals. High-handed doesn’t even come close to it.’
Eva appreciated the warning. ‘I get it,’ she told Moresby. ‘Thanks for the heads-up. But nevertheless, we’ve got a homicide?’
‘We have,’ Moresby agreed. Not so much a frown as a scowl now, accompanied by a shake of the head. ‘Not a nice one either. Trouble is,’ he said as he led her back towards the house, ‘I think we’ve seen this bastard before.’
* * *
A room wreathed in white polythene.
Moresby led her into the house past the constable standing guard on the front door. ‘The forensics officer is Judy Wren,’ he told her over his shoulder as he led the way. He lowered his voice. ‘She’ll have every last speck of dust tagged by now.’
A compliment, Eva decided. When she reflected on the past fifteen minutes or so she came to consider how quickly organised the crime scene response had been. By the time she had arrived SOCOs were combing the grounds, attentive constables had marked the perimeter and the Operations Room at the station had been fully informed, even though they had not had time to divulge much to her. Moresby’s doing, she realised. Professional without being overbearing; she found she liked that. Eva did not like what came next, though.
The room stank of death. The stench that hit her as she entered was the malodour of corpses that had given up whatever fluids were left in them. She winced as the acrid fetor caused her eyes to water. When she saw the source of the smell she almost gagged.
Jesus Christ. She could tell it was a woman because the corpse was naked and tied to a chair. Nylon straps bound her ankles and wrists. Jaw slack, head tilted back. No, Eva thought as she forced herself to look, head tied back by another nylon strap, wrapped around her forehead and secured behind her. White skin, unnaturally white, almost mummified or so it seemed. The chair sat in a puddle of the corpse’s own making. Urine and faeces had mixed together to form a sludge that ran down the legs and seeped into the dark-umber carpet. It was not that, though. It was not the state of the skin or miasma of death that slapped her in the face. It was the eyes. Gaping sockets where they should have been. Two almost cavernous openings in the front of the skull. Someone had sliced both upper and lower eyelids off and cut out the eyes.
‘Somebody told me it’s your first day,’ a voice, muffled by a surgical mask. ‘Possibly not the start you might have been hoping for.’
Judy Wren, Eva assumed. A wiry woman, fifty-something by the wrinkles that crinkled around her eyes. She stood over the corpse holding a penlight and shone it into the woman’s vacuous sockets.
‘I haven’t had breakfast if that’s what you mean,’ Eva said as she stepped carefully towards the body.
‘Probably just as well,’ Wren conceded. After a moment she stood up straight. ‘Please meet Irina Stepanov, forty-three years old and lady of the house. Discovered a little after nine-thirty this morning by her housekeeper when she returned from the weekly shop. The housekeeper is currently under sedation,’ Wren added.
‘I’m not surprised.’ Eva peered at the body. Something about it, some unnatural pallor she did not understand. ‘What in God’s name has been done to her?’
‘I’m just about to establish that,’ Wren said. From a tray of implements set on a trestle table she picked up a scalpel. ‘Swan and Morton non-sterile blade number 10-A,’ she muttered into a tiny microphone clipped to her polythene suit. ‘Making a twenty-centimetre incision on the inside of the left forearm.’ Before Eva could look away Wren rotated the arm, still strapped to the chair and pushed the blade against it. Then she sliced, shoved the scalpel into the flesh and drew down in one long, steady cut. The skin of the arm parted. Eva saw the striations of muscles and tendons as the wound widened, could even see the severed tubes of veins and arteries as Wren’s scalpel sundered them. What she could not see was any trace of blood. ‘That’s confirmed,’ Wren told her microphone. ‘The victim has been exsanguinated.’
It took a moment for the words to sink in. ‘I’m coming in halfway through,’ Eva said to Wren. ‘Can you tell me what you’ve found here so far, please?’
Wren stepped away from the body and pulled her mask off. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘but do you mind stepping outside? I need some air.’
No, she did not mind at all. So did Eva. They stopped just by the front door, under a porch that shielded them from the September sun and sheltered them from the northerly breeze. Wren pulled the hood of her polythene suit down to reveal a tangle of iron-grey hair. ‘I’m not going to say it’s not bizarre,’ Wren told her, ‘because it is. You saw the eyes. She was tied naked to a chair and somebody, somebody with quite a degree of skill I should say, carefully cut off her eyelids and then removed her eyes. Before they did that though they decided to exsanguinate her. Before they did that,’ Wren emphasised, ‘I suspect they sedated her. And I have a suspicion before that they stunned her too.’
Eva blinked. ‘Not an impulsive murder, then.’
Wren barked a laugh. ‘Not by any means. I can’t confirm this quite yet, but I think the victim may have been stunned by a surface-contact stun gun. The sort with electrodes, not the kind that shoots needles on wires, I mean. There are marks on her sternum,’ Wren pointed at her own breastbone, ‘that could correspond with that. Muscle flaccidity suggests a non-topical sedative; it was injected, not sprayed on. And here’s where it starts to get interesting.’ Eva waited while the Forensic Officer gathered her thoughts. ‘I can only find one puncture wound, and that’s in her neck.’
She waited while Eva absorbed the information. Wren’s face revealed nothing. A test then, Eva assumed, but not an exam. Wren wanted to see if Eva would come to whatever conclusion was already forming in her own mind, based on the information she had just given her. A puzzle, albeit a small one. That was an exercise Eva could draw a moment’s comfort from after her gruelling introduction to Irina Stepanov.
‘Exsanguination,’ she said to Wren after a few seconds thought, ‘is the removal of all eight pints of blood from the human body, right? It’s a term commonly associated with bleeding out. The liquid has got to come out somewhere and I didn’t see any gaping wounds on the victim apart from the one you just made.’ She let the facts tumble around inside her head for a moment until they arranged themselves into a logical solution. ‘Oh, shit.’
‘Yeah,’ Wren grimaced, finally giving up her feelings. ‘It’s so damned cold, isn’t it?’
‘I take it there was no trace of sexual assault, despite the fact she’s butt-naked and strapped to a chair?’ Wren shook her head. ‘And one puncture wound, in the neck. So the killer what… used some sort of catheter?’
‘It’s my guess. A needle into the carotid artery anyway, linked to a tube that took the blood away. Note that there was no trace of blood at all around the victim so it too was removed with care.’
Eva turned and paced. ‘And no sign of an entry wound where the sedative was administered? Which means he probably injected it in the same location. Which also suggests that for some reason, what – the killer wanted to conceal the nature of the sedative?’
‘They removed the blood and tried to hide the entry wound. It’s a working hypothesis. If there’s any residue in the body, it’ll have been absorbed into interstitial tissues and contaminated by autolysis. Once cells are oxygen-deprived their acidity increases, which would affect any foreign substances left in the tissue, probably rendering them unidentifiable. Also, it’s actually quite hard to get
all of the blood out of a body, but in this case hydrostatic pressure from the height of the catheter would have aided the process. It’s like draining the water from a fish tank through a narrow hose. It’ll keep going so long as there’s a differential.’
Eva scowled. ‘It’s really not like draining a fish tank.’
‘It’s an analogy,’ Wren said. ‘I don’t know why you’d want to hide what the sedative used was, though. I don’t know what that buys you.’
Eva closed her eyes for a moment. ‘We don’t need to know what the reason is right now. We just need to know how. Eight pints is about four and a half litres. What do you do with four and a half litres of blood?’
‘Well you don’t pour it down the sink, not unless you’re in a hurry. Too many places for droplets to get caught, in the u-bend or in overflows. It’s too risky if you really want to hide something. I suppose you could flush it down the toilet, but then you have the question of what do you do with the container?’
‘Wash it out?’
‘See a container?’
Good point. Eva thought about the problem again. ‘Did he take it with him?’
Wren stroked her chin with a sceptical finger. ‘I can’t think of any benefit in removing the blood apart from concealing something that’s been put into it. I mean it’s not like it’s got any intrinsic value, right? If you wanted to do something weird with DNA you’d only need a small sample, not eight pints, and there’s nothing else about a bucket full of bog-standard O-positive that’s going to make it worth hanging onto. I got her blood type from her GP,’ she added when she saw Eva’s raised eyebrow.
‘He probably took the eyes away. Why not the blood?’
Wren seemed content to play the part of devil’s advocate. ‘Well, eyes are organs, they’re unique; you could hide a pair of eyes in your coat pocket. Maybe they’ve got a reason for taking them, trophy hunting or whatever, but blood’s just blood. What’s your excuse for carrying around eight pints of sloshing red liquid in case somebody asks? It just seems like an encumbrance. Everything else has been thought through. Why leave yourself the inconvenience of carting it around when there must be a dozen places you could get rid of it closer to the crime scene?’
The logic seemed straightforward enough Eva thought, and hard to refute. She had to ignore the fact that in her own mind she wasn’t supposed to be here. What did she know that she might be able to use? It needed Occam’s razor she decided after a moment. Lex parsimoniae, the rule of simplicity. When presented with competing hypothetical solutions, select the answer that makes the fewest assumptions.
‘The container,’ she told Wren after a moment, ‘whatever he used to drain the blood into. It’s still here. It has to be. We just haven’t looked for it yet.’
Chapter Two
Eva searched the grounds until she found Moresby again, who was continuing his rounds. He had reached the back of the house by this point. The hulking sergeant stood in discussion with one of his constables but both stopped and turned towards her when she approached.
‘Can I interrupt your sweep for a few minutes? I’ve just spoken with Wren and we think there’s something specific we should be looking for.’ Moresby nodded; a minute gesture but one that told her she would get whatever she needed. ‘The victim had her blood drained from her through a tube in her neck. Question is where did the blood go? There’s no trace of it in the room and no indication that they disposed of it inside the house, so far anyway. I think there’s a possibility it’s still here. We’re looking for something that would hold between four and five litres of liquid.’
Moresby turned slowly to look at the constable standing with them, whose eyes had suddenly narrowed. ‘Does that sound like something you’ve come across?’
‘It does a bit, Sarge,’ the constable told them, switching his gaze between Moresby and Eva as he spoke. ‘When we did the first pass of the grounds the scene of crime team turned up a couple of random odds and sods that didn’t seem to fit anywhere, but they didn’t strike them as actual evidence. One of them might be what you’re talking about.’
Moresby nodded agreement. ‘We should take another look at least. If it is then it’s in the first part of the garden we searched.’
He led them around the side of the house towards another garden terrace, where climbing roses scaled ageing wooden trellis. She questioned Moresby as they walked.
‘What did you mean when you said you thought you’d seen this character before?’
Moresby grimaced. His expression conveyed pain. ‘About four years ago now, a series of killings with some fairly brutal mutilations associated with them. Three women, all killed and carved up. The details of the murders were kept quiet for obvious reasons. We never caught the killer.’
‘He just stopped?’
Moresby shrugged. ‘Yeah. Well, we never caught him anyway. As I said, mutilation was a key factor, particularly with the eyes. Some bright spark said it looked like a black-and-white French film from the 1920s.’
The reference struck a chord with her for some reason she did not immediately understand; then she realised why. A memory from her student days suddenly resurfaced without any prompting and she recalled a name.
‘Un Chien Andalou?’ she asked Moresby. ‘It was an early surrealist film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.’ She had obviously guessed correctly. Eva saw the quizzical look on the sergeant’s face and shrugged. ‘I did computer science at uni but I did a media studies module as well for extra points. It was a really famous movie for filmmakers. An Andalusian Dog wasn’t supposed to make sense; it was just meant to shock.’ Eva thought back to the first time she had seen the twenty-minute film. ‘It still does, to this day. I guess you’re referring to the close-up shot of the girl in it? The bit where the man carves her eye in half with a cut-throat razor?’
Moresby snorted. ‘I’m not referring to anything but I guess that’s the one. The French title didn’t exactly trip off the tongue, so the killer wound up with another name, in the nick at least. We didn’t dare let the press get hold of it, though.’
‘Which was?’
‘Eye-slicer.’
Eva scowled but said nothing.
When they reached the rose garden the constable trotted ahead. ‘As I said, the SOCOs thought it was a bit odd,’ he told them, ‘but it wasn’t out of place enough to tag it as evidence.’ Around by a bush he pulled back the tangled braids of a climbing rose, handling them with care so the thorns didn’t scratch his skin. Under the bush Eva saw plastic. A five-litre mineral water bottle with the logo of a local supermarket emblazoned on it, hidden beneath the greenery. She sensed his discomfort. ‘I did think it was a bit unusual, ma’am, because the house has a water softener. This is a hard-water area. Lots of places have them, so why bother buying mineral water? It didn’t seem to mean anything, though.’
She decided to let him off the hook. ‘It still might not, but I’d like forensics to take a look anyway.’
Moresby called Wren, who appeared barely two minutes later. ‘It’s been washed out today,’ she pronounced after only a few moments, ‘there’s still a small quantity of water in the bottom.’ Then Wren peered more closely at the plastic around the neck of the bottle and grinned. ‘However, there’s still a minuscule amount of darker liquid trapped in the screw thread of the lid. I can’t say for certain that it’s blood right now but it’s just about enough to analyse.’ She looked up at Eva, Moresby and the constable. ‘Nicely done,’ she told them.
Eva kept scowling. ‘So where’s the blood? Did he pour it down an outside drain?’
Wren stood up, the sample from the mineral water bottle now in a polythene bag that she held in her hand. ‘Blood is filled with nutrients. So many little compounds that all sorts of things would love to feed on.’
Eva rocked her head to one side. ‘Oh, fuck.’
‘Yes.’ Wren grimaced. ‘I’ll run a check, but right now I think the worms are very happy.’
Wren knelt on a board a
nd poked with a narrow blade at the soil around the base of rose bushes, which were covered with cadmium-yellow blooms that almost glowed in the sharp September sunlight. Eva unbuttoned her coat but kept it on. This goddamn wind, she thought as she watched Wren dig. Cold and dry, it whipped up fallen leaves and specks of dust, scratched her eyes and blew what for all she knew might be vital evidence across the crime scene. For no reason she could make sense of, it infuriated her. That, and the preternatural feeling that had haunted her all morning, the sense that somehow she was missing something.
‘How did the killer get into the estate?’ Eva didn’t direct the words at Moresby but she expected him to respond.
He did. ‘We’re working on him being disguised as a delivery driver. White van, some nondescript uniform and an Amazon parcel with the victim’s name and address on it. Guard on the gate let him through.’
‘Is that usual?’
‘Absolutely. There’re over four hundred houses in here, it’s not like you can keep the place in lockdown. Part of the reason for putting security gates up in the first place was just to stop non-resident locals taking shortcuts.’
‘Okay.’ Eva tried to arrange the facts into some sort of Venn diagram inside her head. ‘Did the guard on the gate get a number plate?’
‘Yes, it was fake. A clever touch; the number was registered to the same make and colour of a van owned by a driver in Slough.’
‘How do you know it’s not that vehicle?’
‘Luck. The real van ran a speed camera on the M4 this morning.’
