Fatal Act

by Leigh Russell

  Chapter 32

  THERE WAS A BUZZ of anticipation around the major incident room where they had all gathered in the afternoon. Everyone sensed that something new had come up, although no one seemed to know what it was. In the meantime, they speculated as they waited for Reg who had summoned them, only to keep them waiting. Geraldine wondered if that was a deliberate strategy to assert his authority. She wouldn’t have put it past him. Outwardly brash, with apparent confidence to consult his colleagues, she found it irritating that he made a point of allowing her to voice her opinion, but never seemed to take her views seriously. It would be less patronising not to invite her opinion at all.

  ‘I don’t know why we had to drop everything and rush here just to hang around waiting,’ Sam muttered.

  Sam was disgruntled, but Geraldine knew the sergeant wasn’t really put out. As for Geraldine, she welcomed the demands her job made on her time. What could be more important than protecting the public, possibly saving lives? Work gave her life meaning and purpose. With no love life, and a strained relationship with her sister, there was no one who cared deeply about her. If Geraldine’s life ended prematurely, Celia’s grief would be fleeting. Geraldine’s adoptive mother was dead, and for all she knew, her birth mother was dead too. As an adult Geraldine had been devastated to learn about her history, and shocked that her adoptive mother had never told her the truth. The social worker attached to the case had warned her from the start that her birth mother didn’t want to meet her. Whichever way she turned, she met with rejection. If it was hard not to care, it was harder still to care. Even if her birth mother was alive, and Geraldine succeeded in tracking her down, there was no guarantee Milly Blake would change her mind and agree to meet her.

  ‘He could at least have been on time,’ Sam was saying.

  Geraldine turned to the young sergeant and smiled. Sam gave a resigned grin and ran her hands through blonde hair which stuck up in spiky tufts. Before she could say anything else, the detective chief inspector entered the room. He strode purposefully to the white board where he displayed a picture of a girl’s face. It was difficult to be sure, but Geraldine thought she looked about twenty. Her features were regular and well-proportioned. She would have been pretty, but her skin was tinged with blue, her lips looked black, and her eyes were red and puffy. Geraldine had a feeling she had seen her before, but she couldn’t remember where.

  ‘A girl has been found.’

  Reg didn’t need to add that the girl was dead.

  ‘She was discovered last night on Holborn Viaduct, on the A40, where it crosses Farringdon Road.’

  He turned and pointed to a red weal on the dead girl’s throat.

  ‘You can see the ligature marks where she was strangled.’

  ‘The bridge is in Holborn Viaduct,’ a constable pointed out. ‘Why is this coming to us?’

  ‘We’re already working on a case,’ someone else agreed.

  ‘As if we haven’t got enough to do,’ another voice added.

  ‘It may be nothing to do with the case we’re working on, but this victim, Bethany Marsden, recently graduated from the drama school where Anna Porter trained.’ He tapped the board as he said the name. ‘It’s a close community. She would have known Anna. They were in the same year at the drama school. Bethany also worked with Piers Trevelyan, our main suspect.’

  ‘Of course,’ Geraldine muttered.

  ‘What’s that?’ Reg asked sharply, as though he thought Geraldine was challenging him for naming Piers as a suspect.

  ‘It’s just that I thought I recognised her. When you said her name, I remembered I’d seen her photo on the drama school website.’

  ‘I would expect a detective of your rank to be able to recognise faces,’ Reg snapped.

  ‘She looked a little different on the website,’ Geraldine retorted, stung by the contempt in his voice. ‘Her face wasn’t black and blue, for a start, and she’d combed her hair for the photograph.’

  She stopped talking abruptly, careful to keep her expression blank. Inside, she was seething at the harshness of his rebuke. It would have irritated her if he had addressed her like that in private. In front of her colleagues it was humiliating.

  Reg turned his attention back to the image of the dead girl with her messed up face. Geraldine swallowed her pride and focused her attention on the victim’s face, as though staring at the photograph would somehow reveal her killer’s identity. She wondered if everyone else on the team was thinking the same as her. Piers had been living with Anna, who was now dead. He was known to have a penchant for pretty young girls. Bethany had been very attractive, before her face had turned blue and bloated.

  ‘The body was discovered by a group of girls out on a hen night.’

  ‘Great!’ Sam muttered. ‘I’m sure they were all sober and observant witnesses.’

  ‘Fortunately one of them’s a nurse,’ Reg replied. ‘The officers who arrived first on the scene managed to get a reasonably sensible statement out of her, although they were all drunk. The other girls were too hysterical to make much sense at the time, but we’ll need to speak to all of them, in case any of them noticed anything.’

  He pulled another image onto the screen, of a tabloid newspaper report. ‘In Bed with Suspected Killer’ the headline screamed. Reg read aloud: ‘When glamour model and actress, Bethany Marsden (22), was seduced by an older man, she had no idea he would soon be helping the police with an enquiry into the death of another one of his conquests. Blonde bombshell Bethany said, “I was shocked when I heard the police wanted to talk to him. I had no idea Piers was two timing me.”’

  He glared around the room.

  ‘It seems the tabloids knew more about Piers’ affairs than we managed to discover.’

  ‘Perhaps because we can’t just make things up,’ someone muttered.

  ‘It can’t be coincidence that she was sleeping with Piers as well,’ Reg went on.

  Even Geraldine didn’t challenge the implied accusation. They were all chastened by the revelation that Piers had allegedly been conducting an affair they knew nothing about, an affair with a second young actress who had been killed.

  With work to be done, and tasks to be allocated, the mood in the incident room grew frenetic. Geraldine and Sam were sent to check out the crime scene, after which they were going to speak to the victim’s family. The witnesses who had discovered the body had already been questioned. Walking to the car, they discussed the value of speaking to them again. On balance they decided it might be worth finding out what the nurse could tell them. The other witnesses were probably going to be a waste of time. Neither of them mentioned Reg’s rebuke as they drove to the crime scene. The detective chief inspector’s manner no longer seemed important as they went to view the corpse of a dead woman for the second time in eight days.

  Chapter 33

  THE A40 WAS CLOSED off at either end of the bridge. They slowed down at the cordon and Geraldine held up her warrant card. A uniformed constable waved them through and they drove up onto the bridge where a white forensic tent was in place. For the second time in eight days they put on white forensic suits and blue plastic overshoes. Geraldine gave Sam a sympathetic grimace. At least Bethany had only been dead for a matter of hours, during which time she had been lying out in the fresh air, so the smell was damp rather than putrid as they entered the tent. Even so, Geraldine was aware of the strain in her colleague’s eyes and the tension in her shoulders, as she prepared to view the young woman’s corpse.

  The images that had been sent through to the station did little to prepare them for the ghastly sight on the ground in front of them. The dead girl’s clothes had been neatly cut open all the way down her front to allow the pathologist to conduct a preliminary examination on site. Geraldine had worked with the pathologist before and knew better than to press him for information before he was ready to give his report. Miles was smart but young, and he could be irritatingly immature. The more urgently she questioned him, the more evasive
his answers were likely to be. Forcing herself to wait patiently, she watched his deft slim fingers moving rapidly, his face puckered in concentration as he probed and measured. At last he looked up from his work and shook his head.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s dead, inspector,’ he announced solemnly, his blue eyes sparkling with amusement.

  ‘Show some respect, for Christ’s sake,’ Sam mumbled under her breath.

  Geraldine grinned at the pathologist kneeling beside the body. She didn’t object to his light hearted tone. Everyone developed their own way of dealing with the horrors they faced. She had no doubt he would adopt an appropriate tone if the victim’s family were present. In the meantime, he had developed personal mechanisms for coping.

  ‘Very useful,’ she replied. ‘Can you tell us anything else?’

  ‘She was in her late teens, early twenties –’

  ‘Twenty-two,’ Sam interjected.

  ‘Good muscle tone,’ Miles continued, with a nod at Sam for her interruption. ‘I’m guessing she was a dancer or something like that. Not a gymnast or a ballet dancer, but she was fit.’ He tapped the dead girl’s flat stomach. ‘All muscle. If she wasn’t a dancer of some sort, she was certainly an exercise junkie.’

  His hand moved up the torso and came to rest lightly on the dead girl’s chest.

  ‘She had fake breasts.’

  He poked at one of them and grimaced.

  ‘Might as well be made of rubber. She wasn’t malnourished, but was probably under weight, like so many of these young women are these days. Not anorexic exactly, but probably suffering from a subclinical eating disorder.’

  He paused. When Geraldine didn’t answer, he pulled at the girl’s hair, separating it out on her crown.

  ‘Her hair wasn’t naturally blonde.’

  Miles heaved himself up onto his feet and dusted his knees with the backs of his hands.

  ‘I’ve finished here,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘You can take her away now. I’ll do a full post mortem first thing in the morning.’

  Two men stepped forward to remove the body.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Geraldine stopped him. ‘Is there evidence of any other injuries, apart from the neck wound which presumably killed her?’

  Miles frowned at the question.

  ‘Cause of death was strangulation. You can see the ligature wounds for yourself. Something like a thin leather strap was placed around her neck and pulled or twisted so tightly that –’ He broke off with a slight shrug. ‘Well, you can see the results for yourselves. As far as I can tell, there were no other significant injuries. The knees have minor bruising, probably caused by her fall, and there are scrape marks on her palms where she might have put her hands out as she went down. Apart from that, there are no obvious signs of sexual assault, or any other injuries occurring before she was strangled. It doesn’t look as though she was sexually active before she died, but I’ll be able to tell you more about that when I’ve got her back to the mortuary. There’s a limit to what I can do out here.’

  ‘Of course.’

  They were all silent, contemplating the body. Even the faint hum of traffic in the distance seemed to stop for a moment. Geraldine stood perfectly still, transported to another place and time in her mind. If it hadn’t been for her fake breasts, the dead woman could have resembled a child as she lay flat on her back, her limbs outstretched. For a crazy instant, Geraldine imagined she was standing watch over a sleeping child. No longer part of an investigation in a forensic tent, she was back in her flat and Chloe had come to stay. Only the figure on the ground wasn’t a child, and she wasn’t sleeping. Until a few hours ago she had been a living, breathing woman, younger than Geraldine, looking forward to a long life. Now her future had been savagely snatched away.

  There was a gust of cold air, accompanied by the sounds of footsteps and muted voices. The scene of crime officers stopped what they were doing and watched in silence as the body was lifted up and carried outside to a waiting van. A faint sigh seemed to flutter around the forensic tent before they settled back to work, with quietly determined faces. Geraldine stood on for a few minutes, studying the scene and gazing at the ground around the site where the body had lain. It was pointless. There was nothing there that the scene of crime officers wouldn’t spot in their close scrutiny of the area. Meanwhile the forensic pathologist was calmly packing his instruments into a large bag. Geraldine turned to Sam and gave her a nod. Together they walked across to the exit, and slipped out onto the bridge.

  Geraldine stood still for a few seconds, gazing down at the street below.

  ‘What are we waiting for?’ Sam asked impatiently. ‘I thought we were leaving.’

  ‘We are.’

  But Geraldine knew she would be taking the image of a blue-faced young woman with her in her mind, knew too that the memory would haunt her until they found her killer. Bethany had clearly taken so much trouble over her appearance while she was alive, it was almost unbearably sad to remember her with distorted features and discoloured complexion.

  Chapter 34

  SAM CLAIMED THE SIGHT of one carved up young woman was enough for her in one week. She made a joke of it, but Geraldine couldn’t help worrying about her young sergeant. Sam would have to toughen up if she wanted to stick with a career in homicide. It might even be better for her to work in fraud, but Geraldine was reluctant to suggest a move that would mean losing her. In the meantime, there was no reason why Sam should have to view every post mortem. It meant Geraldine couldn’t discuss the medical findings in the car with her colleague on the way back to the station, but it could be useful to mull over what she had seen by herself. It was an uncomfortable thought that her own leniency might not actually be helpful to Sam in the long run. Nevertheless, she had assured Sam it was fine for her to stay behind while Geraldine went to the mortuary alone.

  Miles reported his conclusions rapidly.

  ‘It’s pretty straightforward this time. My guess is that someone came up behind her, grabbed hold of a leather strap she was wearing round her neck, and –’

  He drew his hand swiftly across his own throat to indicate the victim had been strangled, rolling his eyes as he did so. Geraldine suppressed a smile at his comical expression.

  ‘Did you say she was wearing a leather strap round her neck?’

  The pathologist held up a bag containing a black leather cord.

  ‘This was inside her shirt.’

  Geraldine had seen such necklaces before.

  ‘Do you think she was wearing it before she was attacked?’

  ‘Probably, because it wouldn’t have been easy for someone to come up behind her and throw the cord round her neck without her noticing what was going on. If that happened, I would expect to find some evidence of defence wounds from where she tried to stop her attacker getting the cord in place round her neck. On the other hand, if she was already wearing the necklace, it would have been relatively easy for someone to sneak up behind her, seize hold of it and tighten it quickly enough for his victim to lose consciousness before she had a chance to react. There are no defence injuries on her arms or hands, and little sign of a struggle, which suggests she was taken by surprise and it was all over very quickly.’

  He looked down at the body. Once again Geraldine was struck by how young the dead girl looked. With her beautiful blue face, she resembled a cartoon character, a fantasy princess from a different world.

  ‘She doesn’t appear to have put up much resistance, if any. There’s no sign of a struggle. My guess is she was taken completely by surprise, by a very efficient killer.’

  ‘You seem to be doing a lot of guesswork,’ Geraldine grumbled.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry. I’ll try to be there to film it next time.’

  Riled, he ran quickly through the injuries.

  ‘The cause of death is exactly how it looks. Asphyxiation by strangulation with a cord round her neck.’

  ‘Why is she so blue?’

  ‘The blue tinge is caused
by cyanosis. Severe hypoxia – lack of oxygen – induces this blue discolouration of the skin. It happens with asphyxiation. There is some evidence that she tried to prevent the cord being tightened, but it was already too late. There are scratch marks on her neck, and I found flakes of skin under her finger nails. We’ll need to run DNA tests, but I’m guessing – that is, the likelihood is – that it’s her own skin under her nails, scraped away when she tried to prevent the cord from tightening round her neck.’

  Miles confirmed that the dead girl had not been subjected to a sexual assault. Geraldine felt relieved, although it made no difference to Bethany now.

  ‘Let’s hope that some of the traces of skin cells under her nails belonged to someone else,’ he said.

  Geraldine left, instructing him to contact her if he had any further information for her. He could call her at any time.

  Back at the station Reg was talking to Sam and the team of constables who had been watching CCTV footage.

  ‘Well, look again.’ Reg sounded annoyed. ‘People don’t just disappear into thin air. Whoever killed her must be there on the film somewhere. Find him.’

  ‘Still banging on about Anna’s missing killer?’ Geraldine muttered.

  ‘No,’ Sam answered in an undertone so no one else could hear, least of all Reg. ‘He’s not talking about Anna. This is Bethany’s killer he’s on about.’

  ‘Don’t tell me her killer vanished without trace as well,’ Geraldine said. ‘This isn’t Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty.’

  She was joking, but Sam looked serious.

  Reg scowled at Geraldine who dropped her eyes. He must have heard her quip. It wasn’t even funny. Sam explained to Geraldine that a couple of constables had been studying CCTV film along the Holborn Viaduct in both directions. More officers had been studying film of the stairs leading from Holborn Viaduct to the street below, trying to gain sight of the killer leaving the scene. So far none of them had seen anyone leaving the bridge on foot, and no car had stopped on or near the bridge. Bethany’s killer seemed to have vanished from the bridge as mysteriously as Anna’s had from the car crash.