Like everyone else, he’d been taught that rigor mortis in a dead body was complete by twelve hours and gone by thirty-six. But later he’d discovered that there were as many differences of opinion as there were experts, and too many factors involved. Time of death should be based on witness reports, not physical evidence. But he hadn’t heard a hint of any witnesses yet.
‘Surely we can send FSU home?’ said Hitchens. ‘Whoever did the shooting will be long gone.’
‘Not until we’ve completed a sweep of the area and done door-to-door in the village,’ said Kessen. ‘For all we know, he might be holed up somewhere nearby.’
‘Yes, understood. It just seems to be making the residents a bit jittery, seeing armed police officers on the street. They’re not used to it around here.’
Kessen shrugged. ‘Point of entry, Wayne?’ he said. ‘On the face of it, this open window looks like the way the assailant came into the house.’
‘Perhaps. But it wasn’t forced — there are no tool marks on the frame. We lifted several latents, though. I should get results on those within the hour.’
‘The first officers to arrive came in through a side window,’ said Hitchens. ‘But they had to smash it themselves, which set off the intruder alarms — Control got a call from a monitoring room somewhere, but we were already on the scene by then. The alarms were still going like crazy when I got here.’
‘Our officers set off the alarms? They weren’t activated by the assailant?’
‘No, sir.’
Kessen walked out on to the landing and looked down the stairs. A SOCO was crouched over something in the hallway.
‘What have you got there?’
‘A video intercom system. It must be connected to the unit on the front gate.’
Hitchens came over to look. ‘I don’t even have a gate at my house, let alone an intercom. I live on one of those open-plan estates. Any bugger can run across my front lawn, or up my drive.’
‘They call that community living,’ said Abbott.
‘I know what I’d call it. So how does that thing work?’
The SOCO picked up the handset. ‘When someone presses the button at the gate, there’s a tiny camera in the unit on the gatepost that shows their image on the screen here.’
‘So the householder can see the postman in the flesh, and know he’s not an impostor.’
‘That’s it.’
Cooper looked down at the body again as the exchange went backwards and forwards around him. Voices echoed strangely in the house, as if it wasn’t fully furnished. Actually, the furniture was fairly sparse. Nothing unnecessary or frivolous cluttered the rooms that he’d seen. It made him think of his flat in Welbeck Street when he’d first viewed it. Furnished, but empty. Empty because no one lived there.
He felt uncomfortable for the victim, lying there on the floor. He knew nothing about Rose Shepherd, but he was sure she’d have hated anyone to see her like this. Her grey hair was dishevelled and fell in loose strands across her face. Her mouth had fallen open, and a trail of saliva had dried on her lips. Crime-scene photographs would show up a small rip in the victim’s nightdress and the white, crinkled flesh on the back of her thighs. The flash would cruelly expose the crow’s feet around her eyes, the loose skin at her neck, the beginning of liver spots on the back of her hand where it clutched the rug. Death did nothing for the appearance. But this was the way Miss Shepherd would be immortalized.
Kessen walked back to the bedroom and looked out on to the garden. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said, ‘but there’s quite a bit of money tied up here, isn’t there?’
Abbott nodded. ‘A few hundred pounds for that intercom unit alone, I’d say. Probably double that for the installation of the gates.’
‘So it looks as though the victim really needed to know who was calling on her, doesn’t it?’
‘We’ve got house-to-house under way. But so far, everyone we’ve talked to is in agreement on one thing: Miss Shepherd never got any visitors. Apart from the postman — and even he didn’t get past the gates.’
‘No visitors at all?’
‘So they say.’
‘No. We just haven’t talked to the right people, yet,’ said Kessen.
‘Why?’
‘Well, that can’t be true, can it, Paul? You’re a property owner. What about all those folk who come to your address? The refuse men to collect your wheelie bin, the tanker driver to deliver your central heating fuel, the man who reads your electricity meter? No one can build a moat around their property and keep everyone out. It isn’t possible these days. Life has a way of intruding in all sorts of ways.’
‘Rose Shepherd does seem to have been a very solitary person, though. She lived on her own, and she didn’t mix with the neighbours, by all accounts. No one in Pinfold Lane knows who Miss Shepherd’s next of kin could be, or whether she had a family at all. We found an address book near the phone downstairs, but we can’t see any obvious relatives listed. In fact, the entries seem to be all routine stuff — doctor, dentist, a local garage.’
‘There must be something in the house to give us names. A diary, letters …?’
‘Well, we’re still looking. But it seems odd. There ought to be somewhere obvious for her to keep information like that. Why make us hunt for it?’
‘Try a phone bill. See what numbers she called most often, who was on her Family and Friends list.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How long had she lived here? Do we know that?’
‘The neighbours say about a year. Miss Shepherd moved in on her own, with no sign of a husband or anything. No secret lover sneaking in through the back door either.’
‘If the lover was secret, no one would know about him, surely?’
‘This is a village,’ said Hitchens, as if that explained everything.
‘You know, this is a large house for one woman living on her own.’
‘She doesn’t seem to have employed anyone, not even a gardener or cleaner. The lady at the next property down the lane says Miss Shepherd did some gardening herself now and then. She used to see her from her bedroom window, pottering about on the other side of the hedge.’ He looked up at Kessen. ‘See what I mean about a village? Who needs surveillance?’
‘But the house?’ Kessen brushed at a cobweb. ‘It looks as though it could have done with the attention of a cleaner now and then, to be honest.’
‘Presumably Miss Shepherd was less keen on housework than gardening.’
Kessen turned back to Abbott. ‘What about security? We know she had an intruder alarm.’
‘A top-of-the-range monitored system, too. She wanted to be sure that there would be a police response if she had an intruder. Motion sensors — so possibly an audio connection or a CCTV camera somewhere. We can check with the monitoring centre whether she ever had any alerts. This is more than a DIY job, or a bells-only system.’
‘Doors and windows?’
‘Five-lever mortice deadlocks, and hinge bolts.’ Abbott tapped the fanlight. ‘Laminated glass — almost impossible to break in the normal way. Oh, and there’s a restrictor on the inside of the letter box to stop anyone reaching through to release locks and bolts. She didn’t use the letter box on the door, though. There’s one on the gates.’
‘Probably the gates came later.’
Abbott moved around the room. ‘We’ve got double glazing, key-operated window locks. Venetian blinds, so she could stop people looking in without blocking the light. Outside, I noticed there were bulkhead lights as well as the floodlights fitted with motion detectors.’
‘She seems to have had good advice on security.’
‘There’s even a shredder next to the desk here. She wasn’t taking any chances.’
‘She knew about bin raiding, then. Not everyone has that sort of nous. I wonder where she learned about the risk of identity theft.’
‘What about that Notts exercise a while ago? Wasn’t that in the local papers?’
&nbs
p; ‘Could have been.’
Cooper remembered that, too. Nottinghamshire Police had decided to take the contents of hundreds of household bins and analyse them to see what people were throwing away. A messy job, but interesting results. They found nearly ninety per cent of domestic rubbish contained information that would be helpful to fraudsters. Most of the bins had the full name and address of someone in the household, and many had details of bank account numbers and sort codes. Some had the full set. Helpful? That was more like making someone a Christmas present of your bank account. PC Judson would be horrified.
‘The one thing we’ve found is her passport,’ said Hitchens.
‘A UK passport?’
‘Yes. Rose Ann Shepherd, British citizen, born 1944 in London …’ He flicked through the pages. ‘No stamps.’
‘What about an address?’
‘Your address doesn’t appear in your passport.’
‘No, but most people give a next of kin. A friend or relative, anyway — maybe two.’
‘You’re right.’ Hitchens turned to the back page again. ‘Nope, not in Miss Shepherd’s case.’
‘No one she wanted informed in the event of an accident?’
‘I guess not. You know, this passport looks almost unused to me. Mine has got a bit creased at the spine and started to turn up at one corner.’
‘Well, that would explain why there are no stamps.’
‘Not necessarily. It just means she hasn’t been outside Europe with it. Or rather, outside the Schengen area. You don’t get stamped moving between Schengen countries.’
In her passport photograph, Miss Shepherd was smartly turned out. Her hair was a darker shade of grey, swept back in a business-like manner to match a white blouse, discreet ear studs and a hint of make-up. She had sharp blue eyes and a direct gaze, with the faintest of smiles at the camera.
Hitchens took a call on his mobile. ‘OK, that’s great. Thanks.’ He turned to Kessen. ‘There was a Vauxhall Astra seen in the village in the early hours of Sunday morning. It doesn’t belong to any of the residents, so far as we can tell. One witness is almost sure she’s seen it in the village before — and the previous occasion was late at night, too.’
‘Any details?’
‘Blue.’
‘Dark blue? Could have been black in the dark?’
‘Nope. Light blue, seen under the streetlight near the phone box. No reg, but it probably started with an X, so it wasn’t a new model.’
‘You know, we need the media to come on board early in this one, Paul. There are no obvious leads from the house. We’ve got to get appeals out to locate the driver of that Astra, and anyone who had contact with Rose Shepherd in the last forty-eight hours. No — the last two weeks. God, I don’t know — any contact with her, full stop.’
Cooper looked up, surprised to hear the DCI getting even a little bit rattled in public.
But he could see what was bothering Kessen. The first twenty-four hours were the vital period after any murder. If you didn’t have a strong lead within that time, you were destined for a long drawn-out enquiry — and the odds were against bringing the case to a successful conclusion. This murder might be forty hours old already, according to the ME, and there wasn’t a single lead in sight.
But why didn’t someone miss Rose Shepherd? That was the question the DCI had asked earlier. And it was a good question.
‘You know, there’s absolutely no sign of an intruder being in the house,’ said Kessen. ‘Apart from this open window, which shows no traces of having been forced. No tool marks, no damage. Right, Wayne?’
Abbott had his phone to his ear. ‘And no fingerprints either,’ he said. ‘I just got an update. The only prints we found on the window are a match for the victim’s — and they were on the inside.’
‘And every other window in the house is locked down tight. Why wouldn’t this one be locked, too? Can anyone suggest an answer to that?’
‘Yes,’ said Hitchens, looking anxious. ‘Because someone used this window to get out of the house. I don’t know how he got in — I can only guess the victim let him in through the front door. But he must have gone out this way.’
‘We’re on the first floor. Did he clamber down the drainpipe?’
‘Probably.’ Hitchens looked out of the window. ‘Actually, there isn’t a drainpipe. Not within reach.’
‘A nice dense ivy, then? Russian vine?’
‘Nothing. It’s a blank wall …’ Hitchens hesitated. ‘He must have jumped.’
‘From this height?’
‘Er, yeah.’
‘In that case, Paul, I expect you’ll find the intruder’s prints on the window frame, perhaps some fibres from his clothes on the stone ledge. There’ll be some pretty deep footwear impressions in the ground down below, where he landed. Oh, and you’ll be looking for a suspect who ran away with two broken legs and a cracked spine.’
Hitchens sighed. ‘So what’s the alternative?’
Kessen joined him at the window. ‘There’s only one other possibility. That there never was an intruder in this house. The victim was shot from outside.’
Hitchens stared. ‘From the garden?’
‘No, look — the angle is completely wrong. The shots must have come from the field.’
‘But the window — why was it open?’
‘Wayne said there were no prints on the outside. What about the inside?’
‘Just the victim’s.’
‘So that’s pretty clear, isn’t it?’ said Kessen. ‘The victim opened the bedroom window herself. And someone waiting in the field shot her.’
‘Jesus,’ said Hitchens.
Kessen turned back and addressed the room in general. ‘Close off that road up there, seal the gateway, and get the SOCOs and the search teams into the field. That’s where our gunman was.’
Before the action moved outside, Cooper took a chance to study the interior of the house. One of the first things that had struck him was the amount of dust. Of course, there had been no cleaner. And Miss Shepherd had only done the minimum amount of housework herself, by the looks of it. A bit of attention to the sitting room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and her bedroom.
But there were other rooms that seemed to have lain untouched. Opening the door into a guest bedroom set balls of dust rolling across the carpet, spiders scurrying away from the movement. The curtains were closed in here, so Cooper switched on the light. Fine particles of dust hung in the air, swirling in the draught from the landing.
Most people had no idea where the dust in their homes came from. As far as the average householder was concerned, it might as well come from the Moon, floating down from the sky every night and settling on available surfaces like drifting snow. An inconvenience, perhaps, but something natural and inert that was just part of the atmosphere, like oxygen.
But Cooper knew different. It was one of those facts that he’d learned as a teenager and never forgot. He knew that all human beings in the world shed thousands of dead skin cells every hour, an entire layer of skin over three days. That was what hung in the air and danced in a shaft of sunlight from the window. That was what lay on the shelves and gathered in restless clumps under the bed, or shrouded the junk in the attic. Ninety per cent of the dust in any house consisted of dead human skin.
Also, the decor in the sitting room struck him as odd. Off-white and charcoal grey, almost no colour. It seemed a bit modern for a house of this age, let alone for the sort of woman that Rose Shepherd seemed to have been. As far as anyone could tell, anyway.
Hitchens stuck his head round the door. ‘Ben, we’ve brought the postman back to the scene. Go and get a statement from him, will you? He’s fretting about getting back on his rounds.’
‘Right, sir.’
Cooper took a last look at the charcoal grey wallpaper around the fireplace. It showed up the dust badly, and it was undisturbed by finger marks. And then he remembered another fact he’d learned about house dust. Each speck of it carried tens of
thousands of dust mites. Right at this moment, they were busy feeding on those dead skin cells.
6
‘Years ago, I used to work on a delivery round out Leek way,’ said Bernie Wilding when Cooper found him sitting in his red mail van. ‘I saw those wallabies out there about as often as I saw Miss Shepherd in Foxlow.’
‘The wallabies?’
Cooper laughed. Most rumours of exotic animals surviving in unlikely parts of the country were rubbish. But sometimes the creatures turned out to be real, like the scorpions on the London Underground — or the wallabies of the Roaches.
‘Did you really see the wallabies?’ he asked.
‘Only as an odd shape in the distance once or twice. I was never quite sure whether I was looking at a wallaby or a hare, really. But I always told everybody I’d seen the wallabies. Well, you do, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I would too.’
It was one of Cooper’s genuine regrets that he’d never seen a wallaby, despite his thirty years in the Peak District. No one who lived or worked on the western fringes of the national park doubted they existed. Plenty of drivers had seen them, and a few had run one over at night on some remote road. The original animals had escaped from a private zoo during the Second World War, and bred on the moors. According to the stories, a yak escaped at the same time. But the last yak sighting was back in the fifties. Pity, really.
‘Too late now, I reckon,’ said Wilding.
‘So they say. Too many people and dogs invading their habitat.’
‘Oh, aye. And too much traffic. People have killed them off, when the bad winters couldn’t.’
Cooper thought he’d probably passed the test. Some of his colleagues would have had no idea what Bernie was talking about. But he’d proved his credentials as a local.
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