Careless Love

by Robinson, Peter

  The pub was almost empty, as usual. The landlord didn’t serve food, which discouraged the tourist trade, so the place survived on a clientele of serious drinkers and hospital shift workers, and sometimes the one was inseparable from the other. Truant pupils from Eastvale Comprehensive School down the road sneaked in now and then, and The Unicorn was well known as the pub where many an underage drinker had his or her first alcoholic drink.

  The Unicorn certainly wasn’t the Queen’s Arms, being a rather shabby and rundown Victorian street corner pub, but at least it served a decent pint of Timothy Taylor’s, which was what Banks was drinking. As he sat in his corner and shivered, he also realised that another technique the landlord used to drive prospective customers away was keeping the heat turned low.

  Winsome arrived and came over with her Britvic orange, keeping her fleece jacket on. She wasn’t drinking alcohol at all these days – not that she ever had drunk much – and Banks wondered whether that had any connection with her marrying Terry Gilchrist last March. If Winsome had an announcement to make, he was sure she would make it in her own time. Marriage seemed so far to have agreed with her. It had given her more confidence and encouraged her to speak her mind more freely. Before, she had often kept her own counsel, and Banks had had to coax ideas out of her, but now she tended to say what was on her mind. She had also lost much of her prudish aura and sometimes surprised him with a bawdy comment or even, God forbid, by swearing. Terry, the ex-soldier’s, influence, no doubt.

  ‘Anything on the mobile, guv?’ she asked as she sat down beside him at the corner table. It had been there so long it was still scarred with cigarette burns from the days when smoking was permitted in pubs.

  ‘Not as far as I can tell,’ said Banks. ‘Just the usual personal and college stuff. Nothing stands out. We’ll get the phone number from her call log and contacts checked.’

  ‘So what’s the doc’s verdict?’

  ‘That it seems very much as if Adrienne took enough sleeping pills to kill her.’ Banks remembered vividly the moment when Dr Glendenning had opened Adrienne Munro’s stomach. He took a gulp of beer to stem the rise of bile at the memory. The whole thing, her pale, beautiful, naked body on the stainless-steel slab, seemed a travesty of what her life should have been. On the one hand, she was nothing but an empty shell with no more personality or allure than a life-size doll, but on the other, she should have been pulsing with vitality and hopes and dreams and music. He thought of the beautiful melody of ‘Après un rêve’. ‘But, as it happens,’ he told Winsome, ‘she did a Jimi Hendrix before the sleeping pills could kill her, as Dr Burns suspected at the scene. Choked on her own vomit, too drugged to wake up. Jazz Singh is going to get to work on the toxicology.’

  Winsome pulled a face. ‘What a horrible way to go,’ she said. ‘Though I suppose she would have been unaware of what was happening.’

  ‘Yes. And it could hardly have been an accident. She took a far larger dose than anyone might take for recreational purposes. And on an empty stomach.’

  ‘Suicide, then?’

  ‘Looks that way. Or she just didn’t understand what powerful stuff she was playing with.’ Banks shook his head slowly. ‘Where was she, and what did she see or experience that scared her so much she killed herself?’

  ‘We don’t know that she did it because she was scared, guv,’ said Winsome.

  ‘No, you’re right. She may have been depressed or unhinged.’

  ‘There was no vomit in the car, was there?’

  ‘No. Meaning?’

  ‘Maybe someone cleaned her up.’

  ‘Good point. We’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘Anything else of interest?’ Winsome asked. ‘Body art, birthmarks, distinguishing features?’

  ‘No tats or piercings. Small birthmark high on her right arm.’

  ‘Maybe someone could have forced her to take the pills?’

  ‘I suppose so. But that’s pushing it a bit, isn’t it? Besides, the doc went over every inch of her skin, and he found nothing suspicious. Not a bruise, not a needle mark, nothing. In addition, he couldn’t find any of the physical or medical problems that might have pushed Adrienne towards taking her own life. She wasn’t pregnant, was in general good health, no eating disorders, no signs of a heart attack, aneurysm, incurable cancer, debilitating nervous system disease, cerebral haemorrhage, stroke, seizure or anything like that. As far as mental-health problems go, we just don’t know yet. Or whether she had any problems with her love life.’

  ‘Every girl her age has some problems, guv, believe me,’ said Winsome. ‘Even if they’re not immediately apparent.’

  Banks gave her a sharp glance. ‘Aren’t we the cynical one?’

  ‘Not cynical, just realistic. Put it down to experience. Late teens can be a tough time for girls.’

  Banks nodded. ‘Sorry. You’re right, of course. Boys, too, if I remember correctly. I had no idea where my life was heading at that age, what I wanted to do. I was in business college, but I spent most of my time hanging around with the art and music students, going to rock festivals. I certainly never saw a police career in my future. But Adrienne had everything going for her – looks, education, brains, the lot.’

  ‘There’s always something. Even when it appears good from the outside. The things we think are so wonderful are often superficial.’

  ‘So you think she reached some sort of crisis point?’

  ‘Just that it’s possible, that’s all.’

  ‘What do you think would suddenly drive an otherwise normal girl like Adrienne Munro to commit suicide, if that’s what happened?’

  Winsome shrugged. ‘Love? Loss of love? Clinical depression? Despair? Loss of faith? I don’t know, guv. We don’t even know that it was sudden.’

  ‘What do you mean? That something was happening to her that she couldn’t live with any more? Something ongoing?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Like what? Rape? Sexual abuse?’

  ‘But there’s no evidence of anything like that, is there?’ said Winsome.

  ‘Not in the post-mortem, no. No rape, anyway. Or physical abuse. But if it happened some time ago, and she was keeping it all inside, not confiding in anyone or seeing a counsellor . . . Who knows? It’s just another thing to consider when we’re questioning her friends. The doc says Adrienne wasn’t a virgin, but there were no signs of recent sexual activity or rough sex of any kind. And no signs of sexually transmitted disease. What about blackmail? That can be harder to pin down.’

  ‘But what could she possibly have been blackmailed over?’ Winsome asked.

  ‘Who knows? Maybe it was because of something she did.’

  ‘Somebody must know what happened.’

  ‘Well, the only way we’ll find out is by digging deeper into her life,’ said Banks. ‘By talking to people who knew her. What about your inquiries? Any forensics on the car?’

  ‘Just what you’d expect,’ said Winsome. ‘Plenty of fingerprints, inside and out. None of them on file. And none were the deceased’s. Hair. Coffee stains. Fast-food wrappers. Still no sign of any of Adrienne’s possessions.’

  ‘So she was in the car but she didn’t touch it?’

  ‘So it appears. If she’d opened the door herself, we’d have found her prints somewhere. She wasn’t wearing gloves. And if someone had wiped it down, the other prints would be gone, too.

  ‘The doc also says the pills were washed down with alcohol, whisky by the smell of it, and you say forensics didn’t find anything interesting around the car. I assume that includes an empty whisky bottle?’

  ‘Right,’ said Winsome. ‘There was no sign of a bottle or any trace of alcohol. But someone could have removed them. Could Dr Glendenning tell whether she died in the car or before she got there?’

  ‘She didn’t die in the car. He says there was no way she could have walked the ten miles from her bedsit to Belderfell Pass, but I think we already knew that. He also said that, according to the post-mortem livi
dity, it seems very much as if Adrienne died elsewhere and her body was moved. She was sitting up when we found her, but the lividity showed she’d been lying on her back for a while after death. At least, that was where some of the blood had settled after her heart stopped beating. But the evidence is contradictory.’ The problem was, Dr Glendenning had pointed out, that liver mortis, or hypostasis, begins twenty to thirty minutes after death, but the purplish red discolouration is not observable by the human eye until about two hours later. It increases over the next three to six hours and it reaches its maximum in eight to twelve hours. ‘He thinks she may have been moved quite soon after death, not left lying down long enough for liver mortis to take place completely, and the rest of the time she was in a sitting position. As he can’t accurately pinpoint time of death, given the amount of time that’s gone by, it’s a bit of a quandary.’

  ‘There was no trace of another vehicle at the scene.’

  ‘We’ll check with the taxi companies, but it’s looking very much as if someone took her there. Maybe someone she knew. The way it appears is that she died somewhere else, lying down, then maybe an hour or two later someone drove her to Belderfell and dumped her in the Ford Focus. All we need to know now is who and from where.’

  ‘Maybe an ex-boyfriend?’ Winsome suggested. ‘I mean, if they’d been having problems and she killed herself because of him, perhaps even at his house or flat, then he wouldn’t want to get involved, but he’d probably feel guilty enough to want her body found quickly.’

  ‘We’ll certainly be talking to any boyfriends. Past and present.’

  ‘I still can’t get over what a curious place it is for someone to dump a body,’ Winsome said. ‘I suppose it’s possible that she committed suicide in a place that was very inconvenient for someone, so they had to move her. We know she didn’t do it in her bedsit.’

  ‘We know it doesn’t seem like she did,’ Banks said. ‘The CSIs might find traces of drugs or vomit someone thought they’d cleaned up.’ Banks paused. ‘The doc also said something about Adrienne possibly having been in water some time before or after death. Apparently, there were traces of certain substances on her skin.’

  ‘There was no water in her lungs though?’

  ‘No. She didn’t drown.’

  ‘A bath, perhaps?’

  ‘Possibly. But there’s no bath in her bedsit, remember. Just a walk-in shower.’

  ‘Would that be enough to produce the effect Dr Glendenning noticed?’

  ‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t commit himself as to how or where, just to the indication of her having been in water. She could have just taken a shower before she went out, for example.’

  ‘Dumping her where she was found would certainly guarantee she’d be discovered fairly quickly, so whatever the reason, it can’t have been to hide the body. More to put it in plain view. And POLICE AWARE? I mean, was that meant to be some sort of sick joke?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Was it some kind of message from a killer? You know, rubbing it in our faces, like saying, “Be aware of this, then.” What are we supposed to be aware of? That Adrienne committed suicide? Of something she did? Is her death an example of something we’re aware of and ignoring, supposed to be doing something about? I mean, why tell us that?’

  ‘You’ve got a point there,’ Banks admitted. ‘Maybe it is supposed to mean something and we haven’t figured it out yet. I don’t know. Maybe we’re just reading too much into it, grasping at shadows. But we’ll keep it in mind.’

  Winsome glanced at her watch and knocked back the remainder of her orange juice. ‘Come on, guv, sup up. Time to go and visit the parents. Maybe they’ll be able to enlighten us.’

  There had been no other vehicles parked in the moors car park from which Annie and Gerry had just walked except the walking club’s minivan and the police patrol car, and Annie doubted very much that the dead man had walked all the way from Eastvale, or even Helmthorpe. The surface of the car park was tarmac, and if any other cars had pulled up there recently, no traces would remain, especially after the weekend’s rain and today’s wind. Unless, of course, the driver/killer had flicked a cigarette end out of his window, which had become caught in the weeds and would lead to an immediate DNA match. Dream on, Annie told herself. That only happened on television and in books. Besides, not even killers smoke these days.

  Annie gestured towards the body. ‘Anyone recognise him?’ she asked, conscious that her words were almost ripped away from her lips by the wind before she uttered them.

  The members of the walking club mumbled and turned away or shook their heads.

  There wasn’t much else to do but question the walkers one by one as they all waited for the mountain rescue team to lift the body out of the gully. That would not be done, of course, until Peter Darby had arrived and extensively photographed and videoed the scene, then Dr Burns would have to pronounce death before the body was released to the coroner.

  The preliminary questioning of the walkers didn’t take long, so as she waited, Annie took a few snaps of her own with her smartphone. It wouldn’t be long before Peter Darby was made redundant, she thought sadly. These days it seemed anyone could be a photographer, even a crime-scene photographer.

  When the experts started to dribble in, Annie arranged for the walkers to be escorted out of the wind and back to their minivan by the uniformed officers. In the relative comfort of the nearest police station, in Helmthorpe, they could give their official statements and leave their names and addresses.

  As Annie stood at the edge of the moors and watched the green van drive away, she looked at the valley spread out below her. She could pick out Banks’s isolated cottage easily enough, just a couple of miles to the north, next to the terraced falls of Gratly Beck, and below that the square tower of Helmthorpe church, with its odd turret attached. Beyond lay the meandering River Swain, then slowly, the dale side rose on the other side, a patchwork of drystone walls marking fields where sheep grazed, all the way to the sheer limestone curve of Crow Scar, like a grinning skeleton in the winter light.

  Annie fastened her coat high around her neck and made her way back to the scene.

  Peter Darby did his work, even going so far as to scramble down the gully from a nearby access point to get pictures he claimed he couldn’t get with his telephoto lens. The drop was only about fifteen or twenty feet, Annie reckoned, but certainly enough to break a man’s neck and crack open his skull if he fell at the wrong angle. On the other hand, it would have been quite possible for someone to survive the fall with only a broken leg and lie there screaming for help until some came, or until he died of exposure.

  When Peter Darby had finished, Annie gave the signal for the rescue team, who had been fixing up their winches and slings, to bring the body up to the surface, which they did quickly and smoothly in as fine a coordinated and choreographed operation as Annie had ever witnessed.

  Now the body lay on a stretcher at their feet, ready for Dr Burns’s examination before being shipped to the mortuary. The man was of average height, Annie noted, and definitely overweight, though somewhat short of obese. He was in his mid-sixties, with thinning grey hair, a grey Van Dyck beard, wrinkles and a few liver spots on his wrists and the backs of his hands.

  Dr Burns knelt before the broken figure, touching the skin here and there, checking front and back, taking the body temperature, making calculations and recording observations on his notepad. After a while, he stood up with some difficulty and massaged his knees.

  ‘Getting old,’ he said, with a fleeting grin.

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ Annie agreed.

  ‘You two speak for yourselves,’ Gerry chipped in.

  Annie rolled her eyes. ‘Ah, yes, the mere child.’

  Gerry gave her a look. ‘Well . . .’ she said. ‘Don’t count me in as a member of your old fogeys’ club. Not yet.’

  Annie smiled and turned to Dr Burns. ‘So, what have you got for us, old fogey?’

  �
��Not a lot, I’m afraid. Probably not much more than you could see for yourself. Neck’s broken at C five.’

  ‘Would that cause paralysis?’

  ‘More than likely. There certainly wasn’t much chance of his crawling out of there once he’d gone in.’

  ‘Is that what killed him?’

  Dr Burns shook his head. ‘No. I’d say it was the blow to the back of the head, and the blood loss it caused.’

  ‘From the fall?’

  ‘Almost certainly. No doubt in his post-mortem Dr Glendenning will be able to match the wound more closely with the rock it hit, but the impact certainly fractured the skull, and it would have caused definite brain damage and severe bleeding, as you can see for yourself.’

  ‘He bled out?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Would he have been conscious?’

  ‘Unlikely. Not for long, at any rate.’

  ‘Thank heaven for small mercies,’ said Annie with a shudder, imagining what it must be like being trapped all alone at the bottom of a gully where no one was likely to venture for some time, with a broken neck, paralysed, aware of your life’s blood leaking away. ‘Now for the question you hate most of all.’

  ‘Time of death?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Going by body temperature, rigor and the extent of damage done by the local fauna, I’d say at least three days, no longer than four. That’s allowing for the low temperatures we’ve had since the storm last week. Probably sometime last weekend, in fact. But don’t quote me on that.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Annie asked, mostly of herself. ‘He wanders up here in his Burton’s best, for whatever reason, trips over a heather root, tumbles down the gully, breaks his neck and smashes his skull and dies.’

  ‘Something like that,’ the doctor agreed. ‘From what I could see, the blood has gathered where you expect it to be if he fell and died in the position he was found in. When Dr Glendenning gets him stripped off on the table, he should be able to give you an even better idea whether your man died here or was transported from elsewhere and dumped, but I’d say it happened here. Dr Glendenning will also be able to tell you whether a stroke or a heart attack or drug overdose was involved. But unless you want me to strip him right down here and now and open him up, I’ve told you all I can for the moment.’