“Could be suicide,” I said quietly to Stephen. One of the biggest killers of men in the UK was mental illness, and I’d seen the proof through my police work, and heard the laments of other officers who’d had to tell the families or coaxed someone away from the edge of one of York’s many bridges.
“Could be.” Stephen made a noise of acknowledgement in his throat.
I took a step closer. “Did someone remove his shoes?”
A member of the forensics team kneeling nearby looked up.
“We didn’t,” she said, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the rain and the noise of the river. “He was found like that.”
“That’s odd.” I crouched down by the man’s feet, thinking it unlikely that a suicidal person would care to remove their shoes and socks, and he would have hardly had the time if he’d fallen in by accident. We’d have to wait for the toxicology report to see if there had been drugs or alcohol in his system to affect his actions.
Still crouching low to the wet ground, the rain pattering on the hood of my coat, I flicked my torch over the man’s body.
“Mitchell, there you are,” Gaskell’s voice said above me, but I didn’t look up.
I acknowledge him with an absent, “Sir,” my torch beam focused on the man’s right foot. I leaned closer. I turned to the forensics woman beside me.
“Have you got any gloves?”
She pursed her lips at my interruption of her work, but pulled a spare pair out of her pocket and handed them over. I nodded in thanks and slipped them on. Stephen bent down at my shoulder.
“Have you found something?” he asked.
“There looks like there’s a cut on his foot.” I cocked my head at the left foot, too. “Both feet,” I corrected myself.
Raindrops splattered onto my plastic gloves as I carefully lifted the dead man’s foot, limp and heavy in my hand, and pressed my thumb against the side of the long, straight gash that ran from the ball of the man’s foot right to the heel. His foot was pale and bloodless, making the mark hard to see. I gently pulled apart the edges with my gloved fingers and grimaced at the sight of muscle and, deeper, bone. It was a deep cut and perfectly straight.
I moved to the side so that Stephen and the forensics woman could both have a look.
“That’s definitely strange,” Stephen muttered, taking a good look.
“What is it?” Gaskell said from behind me. I’d forgotten he was there and startled.
I stood up, grimacing at the ache in my legs. I’d stretched after my run, but I had pushed myself hard, and they were reminding me of that now.
“Vertical cuts down the sole of both feet, sir,” I said. “Completely straight and very deep.” I paused. “Almost surgical.”
Gaskell didn’t speak or say a word, but I could sense the tension in his rigid stillness and glanced sideways. The white torchlights made everyone look pale, but Gaskell looked almost as washed out as the dead man, and I looked at him in concern. There was a stiffness to his expression, and I couldn’t read it.
“Turn him over,” he said after several minutes. Surprised, I didn’t immediately react, and Stephen and the forensics officer didn’t seem to hear him. “Turn him over!” Gaskell snapped loud enough to make Stephen jump.
Stephen and I shared a look as I crouched down to roll the body carefully onto his side. We didn’t lay him face down, not wanting to scratch his face or otherwise mar any evidence that may be on his front. Gaskell took a couple of quick steps around to the man’s back and stiffly lowered himself down by the legs. He shone his torch at the back of the knees, and my eyebrows rose at what I saw there.
The man’s trousers had been slashed across the back of the knees. Unlike the feet, the cut was ragged and uneven. Stephen, wearing gloves, pulled the fabric back, and we all looked at the skin there, which had been messily torn open, exposing tendons. Both knees were the same. If the man had been alive, the injury would have likely left him unable to walk.
But I was just as interested in how Gaskell had known to turn the body over, and I studied his expression, finding his lips pressed tightly together and thick brows furrowed. He was usually a stern but amiable fellow, with the build and ruddy cheeks of a farmer, but he looked old and grim now. He seemed deeply troubled but not shocked, as he’d been when I’d told him about the cuts to the feet. He’d been expecting to find something behind the knees, almost like he recognised it.
“Sir?” I ventured cautiously.
He turned sharply, pulled out of whatever thoughts he’d been having. He stood up abruptly.
“Get this wrapped up,” he told me before striding away before I could stop him.
I shared a baffled look with Stephen, who continued to hold the body on its side while the woman from forensics got to work taking pictures of the cuts at the knee. When she was done, Stephen came to join me at my side.
“Gaskell-” he started.
“Looked like he knew something,” I finished with a nod, frowning after Gaskell, who was talking to one of the senior forensics team. I looked down at the woman taking pictures of the dead man’s feet, and the bottoms of my own feet tingled unpleasantly at the sight of those deep, clinical cuts.
“Was there any ID on the body?” I asked her. She shook her head without stopping what she was doing. “Phone?”
She turned to look at me. “You’ll get the full report sent to you after the postmortem.”
“Alright, thanks.” I winced inwardly at the pointed tone of her voice.
She went back to taking photos, and I stepped away, leaving her to it. They would take the man to the Leeds forensic pathology unit for the postmortem, not to the small lab at Hewford station where Sam worked. There was a unit in York, but it was smaller and currently too busy to take on this new case.
Standing there in the rain, the mutilated dead man lying on the riverbank, I sighed at the thought of the evening that Sam and I had missed out on. I could’ve been relaxing on the sofa with her, comfortably warm and full of pizza, if this hadn’t come up. But it had, so we had to get on with it.
“Did someone interview the dog walker?”
Stephen shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
I looked around for Gaskell, intending to ask him since he seemed to be the first senior officer on the scene, but I couldn’t see him.
“Where’s Gaskell?”
Stephen copied me, searching the area for him, but none of the forensics team or police officers moving around were Gaskell.
“He’s usually the first to arrive, last to leave,” I said, puzzled.
The rain was coming down heavier, and I saw that the river water level had risen a good way since I’d last looked.
I moved over to the dead man. “That body needs moving,” I instructed, and so began the next hour of activity. We shifted the body carefully further up the bank, allowing forensics to finish up, and then the body was loaded up to take off to Leeds. The one benefit of the cold and wet was that bad smells from the body were hugely reduced, as compared to the summer when the stench got up your nose and wouldn’t leave for love nor money.
I talked to as many people on the scene as I could, gathering preliminary information about how, when, where, and by whom the body had been found. The dog walker had given her details, I was told, but she’d long gone home by now, and we’d have to interview her later. Admittedly, it was getting on for nine o’clock, and I was absolutely starving, so it was no skin off my nose to wait to speak to the woman.
Stephen was yawning by the time I was done, my stomach was rumbling miserably, and the rest of the team was beginning to leave in dribs and drabs, packing up the lights and equipment. Stephen patted me on the shoulder as we finally headed off.
“See you tomorrow.”
“Aye, bright and early,” I grumbled, and he chuckled, heading off towards his car.
I was particularly grateful that I didn’t live far from York’s centre as I drove home, feeling physically and mentally exhausted. I knew tha
t if I didn’t get to bed soon, I’d get overtired and restless for the rest of the night, turning the memories of the dead man’s injuries over and over in my head.
Already, I was starting to think around the problem, coming up with theories and dismissing them. But my mind felt clumsy and stumbling, like an elephant with its legs tied, and I was able to turn my thoughts to Sam and my bed without too much of a struggle.
I climbed the stairs up to my flat with leaden legs and kicked off my wet boots, draping my soaked coat over one of the kitchen chairs. Sam was lying on the sofa, curled up, and when I approached her, I realised that she’d fallen fast asleep despite the noise and light of the TV in the background. I quietly switched the screen off and came back towards her, wondering whether to cover her with a blanket or wake her to come to bed. She’d get an awful crick in her neck, lying as she was.
I left her for the time being while I chewed a wedge of the pizza that Sam had left me on the side. It was cold but still delicious, and I ate the rest of the leftovers hungrily. I scrubbed my teeth in the bathroom, shrugged out of my wet jeans and socks, and came back to Sam on the sofa.
This time she heard me approach and stirred.
“Darren?” Sam murmured sleepily.
I leaned down next to her and kissed her forehead gently. Her lips twitched into a smile, eyes still closed, and I couldn’t bear to disturb her.
“I’m going to pick you up, okay?” I told her softly.
She made a drowsy noise in the back of her throat. I gently eased my hands under her back and knees and lifted her up carefully, cradling her to my chest. She was almost as tall as me, and dense with muscle from how fit she kept herself, but there was no weight I would have carried more carefully.
She curled into me as I walked her through to the bedroom and tucked her in. Switching the bedside light off, I crawled in beside her, pressing close to feel her now-familiar warmth. Coming back to the flat after a night like I’d just had was so much easier when I had someone to come back to. She fell back into a deep sleep almost as soon as I’d settled down beside her, and I felt her relaxation leaking into me, bleeding the tension out of my shoulders.
For once, it was no struggle to let the exhaustion overtake my busy mind and bear me down into sleep.
Two
Wednesday rolled in, as grey and wet as I’d come to expect. Standard British Dismal, I’d heard Stephen describe this gunmetal sky and ongoing, spitting drizzle.
Sam was up before me in the morning and brought me in a cup of strong coffee. I hadn’t had a particularly late night in simple terms, but the events of the evening had drained me, and I slept like a log throughout the night.
I left early to run into work, taking it easy on my sore legs, and felt pleasantly loosened up and awake by the time I arrived.
My hair wet from the showers, I settled in at my desk to start on the most important task of the day: identifying who the dead man was.
“Morning,” Stephen greeted me as he swept in, his coat dripping from the worsening rain outside. “Any breakthroughs?”
“Nothing yet.” I was trawling through our missing person reports in the hope of a lucky find, but I hadn’t had any success so far. “The PM’s this afternoon.”
Stephen dropped into his chair with a sigh. “Hopefully, that’ll turn something up.”
We’d have to go over to Leeds for the postmortem which would take a couple of hours out of our day. I was tempted to ask that they set up a video call so that we wouldn’t have to waste time travelling, but I’d decided that it would be worth it to be there in person. There were details you couldn’t see on a video camera, and always the risk that the internet connection would flake out.
“Are we releasing a picture to the press?”
“That’s the plan, once the artist has done a sketch.” I looked away from my computer and nodded. “Hopefully, someone in the area will recognise him, and we can get started properly.”
There were steps we could make at the beginning of an investigation when we still didn’t have an ID on a body, but it was like working blindfolded.
“There’s no point checking riverside cameras, either,” I thought aloud as I went back to scrolling through recent missing persons reports. “He could have been dumped at any point upstream, especially with the floodwaters so high.”
“Yeah.” Stephen made a noise of acknowledgement in his throat. “The speed of those waters, the body could have travelled miles.” He put up a finger. “But he wasn’t in the water for long. That’s what forensics were saying.”
“Aye. We’ll find out a closer guess at the PM, but he looked surprisingly intact to me. I’d say he wasn’t in there for more than a day, even, as a guess.”
Stephen was quiet for a few minutes as he checked his emails and then stepped away to fetch himself a cup of tea.
“Those cuts on his feet…” he started when he came back.
“They suggest foul play,” I grunted.
“I don’t suppose they could’ve been caused by debris in the river?”
“They were far too straight,” I shook my head, “and the cuts behind the knee were absolutely deliberate.”
“So, has Gaskell made this a murder enquiry?” Stephen hummed.
I glanced over to Gaskell’s office door. “I haven’t heard anything from him, but if it isn’t a murder investigation already, it should be. I can’t believe anyone could cut their own feet like that, nor the backs of their knees.”
“Unless they had anaesthetic,” Stephen mused.
“Highly unlikely. I think someone did it to him, to torture him or stop him running away, or both.”
“Troubling.” Stephen frowned, looking grim.
I opened my mouth to respond but was distracted by Gaskell arriving, disappearing straight into his office. I clearly remembered how shocked and pale he’d looked last night when we’d found the cuts on the dead man’s feet. He’d known to look for the slashed tendons at the back of the knees, too, and then he’d left before I could ask him about it. It bothered me, this feeling like Gaskell knew something that he wasn’t sharing.
Working in silence, we got back to work on the case, digging into the scant evidence we had at this early stage. We’d need to head over to Leeds after lunch, and I wanted to get some research in before then. I kept an eye on Gaskell’s door as I worked, hoping to catch him as he came out so that I could speak to him, but he never left his office. In the meantime, the artist sent me their sketch of the dead man’s face, copied from a photo. I sent it out to the local press and posted it on Hewford station’s own social media pages, along with a description of the clothes he’d been wearing and an approximate age. We obviously didn’t have any pictures of the man from when he’d been alive, so this sketch was the best we had, considering we could hardly send out the crime scene photographs.
When it was time to leave, we picked up a rushed lunch from the shops over the road and set off for Leeds with me at the steering wheel, navigating the traffic and city roads, while Stephen tucked into his egg mayo sandwich. The radio burbled away in the background with the news full of the latest political troubles and the flooding across the country.
It was raining in Leeds by the time we arrived, the car’s window wipers working noisily to keep the screen clear. I tugged up my hood with a shiver as we climbed out of the car and strode quickly towards the Leeds forensic pathology unit to get out of the rain.
We were shown to a balcony area where we could overlook the postmortem taking place a short way below, behind a sheet of polished glass. The body of the John Doe lay grey and naked on the table, and I chewed my lip in thought as we waited for the pathologists to get underway. I leaned towards Stephen as we were waiting.
“Look at his knees,” I pointed out.
Stephen hummed. “They’re badly grazed.”
“Like he was dragged, or he struggled.”
We fell silent as the postmortem got underway, listening as the scientists talked throug
h the man’s approximate age, the time of death, and the cause of it. I paid special attention when they moved to examine the deep gashes to the corpse’s feet and knees.
“The incision in the foot is precise,” the pathologist who’d introduced himself as Dr Richards said, “in contrast to the cuts to the back of the knee which are ragged. I strongly suspect that the cuts to the foot were done when the victim was unconscious.” He moved away, pulling a measuring tape out of a drawer, and I watched as he lined it up against the neat cuts on the soles of the victim’s feet.
“Both incisions are the same length, ten inches exactly,” he said. Straightening up again, he wound the tape up as he continued. “I assume that the cuts to the knees were done when he was awake. Nevertheless, they were made with a very sharp instrument, likely a scalpel.”
I took copious notes even though we’d be emailed a report, in case some small detail mentioned here was missed from the write-up. It had been known to happen. In addition to the abrasions on the knees, the pathologists found deep grazing on the man’s elbows and hands.
“He may have tried to move away from the perpetrator,” Dr Richards said, clear and clinical. “With the damage done to his tendons, he wouldn’t have been able to walk.”
I pressed the microphone button, which was on a stand at hip-height. “Was he alive when the killer put him into the river?” Dr Richards sent me a quelling look.
“I’m getting there, DCI Mitchell.” He went on with what he’d been saying, detailing the exact damage done to the victim’s body and using a number of Latin terms I didn’t understand, before he got to my question.
The chest cavity was brutally but carefully opened up. I’d been to enough postmortems in my time to know what to expect, though I was glad to be spared the smells of it. Still, the crack of the ribs being broken always made me inwardly grimace.
Dr Richards looked at the lung tissue under the microscope before saying with certainty that the John Doe had been dead when he hit the river and hadn’t drowned.
Snakes in the Grass (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 5) Page 2
