A Long Time Dead (The Dead Trilogy)

by Andrew Barrett

  He finished the exterior photographs without hindrance from anyone. And then he took shelter, leaning into the back of the van while he scribbled notes with shaking hands that would help him compile his CID6 and statement later.

  Dull, lifeless water dripped from the Mamiya’s lens cover and then sparkled as the headlights of a large white van approached. The Major Incident Vehicle slid on ice at the end of the street before an officer waved it through. It pulled up alongside the flaying barrier tape, a Supervisor at its wheel. “Roger,” Chris Hutchinson shouted as he closed the van door.

  Roger clicked the film carrier onto the Mamiya and wound to frame ‘1’. “Hey, how did the Supervisors’ meeting go? Anything juicy happening?”

  Chris eventually replied, “Nothing that concerns you.”

  “What, nothing at all?”

  “You done out here?”

  Roger let it go, wasn’t worth it. He grabbed the camera and began walking. “I’ve taken the exterior shots.”

  “Then I don’t need to tell you we should go in now.” Chris was soon at Roger’s side. “You know the drill.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait until—”

  “Wait until what?” Chris said, pulling Roger to a halt, circling around him, getting into his face. “Do you have a problem taking my instructions?”

  Roger looked at Chris, unsure if he was having a laugh. But Chris’s expression remained as cold as the weather. “What’s wrong?” Roger dropped the flash bag and gave him his full attention, trying hard to smile. “Bell been on your back? Look, we might be rivals for the same job, but I know a thing or two… if I can help with anything.”

  “Back off, Roger. Save your helping hand for the newcomers, okay? You’re my competition. I’m your competition.”

  Roger stared through the snow at Chris. “Hang on; we’re friends first, aren’t we? No matter who gets the job, we’ll always—”

  “Whoever gets the promotion will be top dog. The one who comes second is the loser, the also-ran, the one everybody forgets. He’ll still be just a SOCO. Nothing more.”

  “It’s only a fucking job; why are you so hostile over this?”

  He offered Roger a thin smile. “I learned something recently; that I can do this new job of mine. I can really do it. I’m motivated and I believe in myself.”

  Roger laughed. “That’s amazing; you’re still dreaming. You drove all the way here in your damned sleep!”

  “Not funny.” Chris turned away. “Let’s get busy. I want out of this pissing weather.”

  “Just waiting for the word to go, boss.” Roger wiped his glasses again, blinked snow from his eyelashes and smiled at Chris.

  “Who’s SIO?”

  “Shelby,” Roger pointed. “He’s deputising.”

  Chris wandered off into the sodden night looking for Shelby, leaving Roger shaking his head. He called back, “Get the stepping plates ready.”

  * * *

  Roger took the interior photographs; shots of the body in situ, shots of blood spatter patterns on the wall unit and floor, with and without scales; photographs of any item deemed foreign to the scene, though he found it difficult to discern what belonged and what didn’t.

  Under Chris’s barked instructions, Roger photographed condoms, spectacles, pornographic literature, underwear, foil wraps, burnt spoons and the like, and acting under further instructions, bagged them and sealed them ready for Lenny Firth. He photographed anything that could assist the investigation, including the partial footwear impressions in blood on the lounge floor. No significant tread pattern though. There was also a photograph of the deceased girl holding a young child – it had a smudged footwear mark across it, and Roger seized it for future examination.

  “What about trying some reagent on the footwear marks in blood?” Roger suggested. “We might be able to pick out more detail.”

  “Waste of time. We’ll concentrate on the body.”

  “If I’d said let’s concentrate on the body, you’d have wanted to do the footwear. Argumentative git.” Roger got busy and carried on taking photographs, did his best to ignore Chris.

  At 4.30am, Shelby escorted the Forensic Pathologist, Bellington Wainwright, into the scene. Chris joined them in standing around the body, arms folded, silent in contemplation. “If it was summer,” Shelby said, “she’d be a sloppy mush by now, and you wouldn’t be able to see her for the maggots and bluebottles.”

  Wainwright nodded his agreement. “Friday, you say?”

  “Last seen about 4.30pm.” Shelby glanced at his watch. “Back soon,” he said.

  The girl, a twenty-one year-old bleached-blonde, lay on her back among mounds of litter. Seeping blood had formed in a thick and lumpy pool around her head, reddening her hair as it escaped the gash in her throat.

  Roger padded around the house, looking, and feeling. Absorbing. He checked out the bedrooms. They were a shambles; clothes and soiled bed linen scattered over the floors, inch-thick dust on rotten chipboard furniture, graffiti on holed doors and smashed windows covered by sheets of damp wood.

  There was only one half-decent room in the whole house – and that was home to a well-worn double bed. The bedroom smelled of lavender massage oil, it smelled of perfume – cheap stuff but a welcome change from the rest of the house. On a dusty bedside stand, among cider bottles and ashtrays, were packets of condoms and tubes of KY Jelly. The carpet was sticky underfoot.

  The bathroom, stained with black mould around the sink and bath, smelled of excrement and, strangely, of laundry. In the bath, a pair of pink jeans was soaking in some pre-wash solution. Back downstairs in the kitchen, it was the same filthy story; washing-up piled high in the sink, fat splattered across the wall near the cooker and a black bin bag overflowing with rubbish festering in the corner. After a while, Roger got used to the stench, and almost stopped feeling sorry for her.

  Roger arrived back in the lounge. While the pathologist deliberated, Roger looked around at the nicotine-stained ceiling, at the furniture unfit for the tip. He recalled the ashtrays full of cigarette ends, and the foil wraps and needles hidden behind cushions on the sofa, and the empty lager cans under the chair. All were now in evidence bags leaning against the wall unit, ready for logging and removal.

  No one mentioned the sad piece of tinsel, naked in places, hanging across the chimneybreast, nor that Twelfth Night was a week ago. No one mentioned the two Christmas cards on the mantelpiece. No one mentioned them because inside they were blank.

  Clipboard in hand, Wainwright inspected the corpse, scribbled notes about the girl and her immediate surroundings.

  Roger asked, “What do you want me to do, Chris?”

  Chris dabbed a length of adhesive tape across the dead girl’s exposed flesh and secured it onto a thin acetate sheet for later laboratory examination. “Bag her, please. Start with her head.” He didn’t look up.

  Roger saluted.

  Beneath the mask, he grimaced as he guided a plastic bag over her head, watching clots of blood slide away like cold prunes off a spoon. He pulled it down over her neck, watching it drag bloody hair over her face, watching it flatten her petite nose and squash her blue lips. In order to preserve whatever evidence might be in her hair or on her face, he tied string around the bag, well below the wound, and loosely so as not to leave a ligature mark on her throat. His gloved hands glistened red. He hated this.

  “Van keys, Roger?” demanded Chris.

  “What?”

  “Where are your van keys? I need more acetates.”

  “I’ll get them. I don’t mind.”

  “Just tell me where they are, for Christ’s sake.”

  They stared at each other. “Jacket pocket.”

  “Where’s your jacket?”

  “Hallway. Slung over the exhibits case.”

  “In the hall? Christ, Roger, you should know better than to leave your bloody jacket in a murder scene! Nothing,” he shouted, “gets dumped in a major scene!”

  Everyone looked at Roger
.

  He shook his head, made sure Roger saw him too. “Anyway, you’ll be itching like hell the next time you wear it. Haven’t you seen the fleas in here?”

  “No,” Roger said. “Guess I missed them. Looks like it’s going home for washing, again.”

  “Prat! Don’t do it again.” Chris left.

  Roger and Wainwright exchanged glances. “Where was I supposed to leave it? It’s fucking snowing outside.” Roger puffed beneath the mask, tried to pretend that the air in here was odour-free, and tried to pretend that Chris’s conduct didn’t bother him.

  “I don’t think he appreciates the value of a little etiquette.”

  Roger changed his gloves and looked at the pathologist, at his smiling eyes.

  Wainwright lowered his gaze back to his clipboard. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “Don’t be, you have a fair point.”

  “Is he under some kind of pressure perhaps?”

  Roger bagged her right hand, the one easiest to get to. “It’s no excuse for losing it like that.”

  * * *

  Shelby accompanied Chris back into the scene, a fine powdering of snow already melting on their heads. Chris threw the van keys onto Roger’s jacket and dropped the acetates onto a redundant stepping plate.

  Roger looked up in time to see Weston peering into the lounge, curious like a rubber-necker watching the aftermath of a road accident. He was staring at the exhibit bags. Then he was gone.

  They gathered again in the lounge, and discovered that, apart from the obvious neck wound, the girl had suffered an abdominal puncture, caused by a single-edged blade. Her off-white blouse hid it, and the blood spatter from the throat injury masked it, until Roger moved the body in order to get a plastic bag over her left hand. Then watery blood began seeping into the fabric like crimson ink into blotting paper, also highlighting the stab wound in the blouse itself.

  “Could it be a post mortem wound?” Shelby asked.

  Wainwright cleared his throat. “It’s not easy to speculate—”

  “No,” Roger interrupted. “Sorry, but I think it’s ante mortem; she’s on her knees by the time he stabs her in the neck. Look at the blood distribution on the floor.”

  Shelby nodded and looked at Wainwright. “Well?”

  “That’s a fair point.”

  “I think our murderer’s new to this,” Roger said. “I think he stabbed her in the gut but she doesn’t die. Now she’s screaming like hell. The murderer wants to shut her up and goes for the throat.”

  Chris was quiet, listening, watching Roger with interest. So was Shelby.

  “When you pull the knife out of the stomach,” Roger said, “the skin acts like a squeegee, sealing itself up, which explains the lack of blood. But there’s lots of pain.”

  Shelby nodded. “Makes sense. Bellington?”

  “A distinct possibility,” he said, almost whispered. “It’s true that a stomach wound sometimes won’t bleed unless aggravated in some way; but it is hugely painful.” And then he turned to Shelby. “I’d like to inspect both wounds more carefully before I commit myself. See how much blood is in the abdomen.”

  “I need a coffee.” Roger strode past Wainwright and Shelby, wanting to be free of the house and the damned carcass for a while.

  Chris sighed and said to Shelby, “He’s right. I need a break too. Want a coffee?”

  “No, you go on.”

  When Roger stepped back into the street, the snow had already stopped but the wind was ever persistent. Part of him felt cheated that there was no white covering, and the other part just felt glad he wouldn’t end up on his backside. When he pulled off the latex gloves, his clammy hands discovered that the MIV door handle was carved from ice. He tossed the gloves and mask somewhere near a battered cardboard box on which someone had scrawled, ‘bin’.

  Shivering, Roger opened the side door and sighed into a bench seat behind a small foldaway desk; and from a green cool-box by his feet, he lifted out a flask and two beakers. Chris slumped into the seat at Roger’s side, cursing the weather as he closed the door. “Well?”

  “Yes, I am, thanks for asking.” Roger poured the coffees.

  Chris rubbed his hands with a disinfectant wipe. “What’s wrong?”

  Roger looked out of the rain-dappled window, tapping his beaker. “What a way to go. Very undignified.”

  “Seems to me she didn’t give a shit about being dignified.”

  Roger just looked at him.

  He slurped his coffee and mumbled something that sounded like, “Anyway, she’s only a fucking whore.”

  Roger said nothing, watched the rain droplets on the window dance in the wind.

  “Now drink up; we’ll bag the stiff and get the body snatchers in. Shelby wants us out so he can search.”

  * * *

  The undertakers, also wearing white scene suits, stood in the doorway and watched as Chris and Roger prepared the plastic-wrapped body for transit. Weston gazed over their shoulders. Minutes before, he had been enquiring of Firth what evidence they had found.

  “Right, lads,” Roger said, “she’s all yours.” Stifling a yawn, he turned to DS Firth. “How’s your ankle, Lenny?”

  “Oh, that’s it,” Firth said, “laugh at a cripple, why don’t you?”

  Chris asked, “You locking it down now?”

  “Might as well, can’t do anything more here tonight. We’re leaving a guard front and back.”

  The foldaway gurney punched a splinter of wood from the doorframe and dented the front door’s metal skin. It was Sally’s final trip out of her house.

  “Anyway, PM’s arranged for six,” Firth added, following the body.

  “Who’s SIO?” Chris unzipped his scene suit and buttoned his cardigan up to the neck.

  “Detective Superintendent Chamberlain. We’ve informed him, but he’s in no rush to come out at this hour. Apparently, he has great faith in Inspector Shelby.”

  Chris patted Roger on the back. “So, old chum, you and I will do the PM together. When the day crew comes on, they can do the fingerprinting here. What do you say?”

  Roger shrugged, “Fine.”

  “And if you’re not tired by the time we’ve finished at the mortuary, it’ll be time for a hearty English breakfast. I’m buying.”

  — Two —

  Beaver lay on his back, hands under his head, tattooed elbows out like butterfly’s wings. In the darkness, the bunk below him rocked as Pinhead tossed himself stupid, grunting every now and then. Beaver listened for a while, sick at the thought of what was happening three feet away. He kicked the bunk’s frame, “Pack it in, will ya; some of us are trying to sleep!”

  “I thought you’d be asleep already. Lights went out hours ago.”

  “Yeah, well I’m not, so pack it in or I’ll make you pack it in.”

  “Bet you can’t wait for tomorrow, eh?” Pinhead’s high voice rattled around the cell.

  From further down the landing, Beaver could hear one of the new intake crying. He cried, it seemed, as often as Pinhead masturbated – and Pinhead always masturbated. “Today, you mean,” Beaver’s luminous watch told him it was after two in the morning of the day of his release. “Fuckin snowing. Just my luck.” Condensation dulled the cell’s window and diffused the bright light of the spot-lamps across the exercise yard, made them appear almost mellow for a change.

  “You’re lucky; I’ve got another year to do.”

  “Do you think your dick will last that long?”

  “It’s my wrist I’m worried about,” he laughed. “I still think you’re a lucky bastard.”

  And he was. Until seven days ago, Beaver looked forward to nothing. He envisioned traipsing out of this shithole the same way he entered it: broke and without hope; the pockets of his torn jeans rattling with just enough change for a bus ride to hell and then what, back to burgling the same tired shithole estate that he lived on, and a poke in the ribs from a stuck-up parole officer once a week. O joy.

  All his mates we
re in here; none on the outside to speak of. None he could trust, anyway. In here, he’d met a bloke called Jess. Jess had become his best buddy; they had got along fine for the last eight months of Beaver’s three year stay. And in the final week before Beaver’s release, Jess had spoken the magic words: “I got a job for you”.

  Jess had sparked him up, made release something to look forward to. “It’ll be piss easy,” he’d continued. “One quick job, take you half a day, maybe, and then you’re in the crew, guaran-fuckin-teed! We’ll fix you up with a place to kip – won’t be no Hilton though – and then you’ll get regular work; shitty to begin with, but once he trusts you,” Jess had nodded, “things’ll get better.”

  “Once who trusts me?”

  “Never mind just yet. You’ll find out when he wants you to know.” Jess had winked.

  But it was that phrase, things’ll get better, that drew him in like water down a drain. A life, things to do, things to look forward to, a guaran-fuckin-teed crewmember. Money, a car maybe… Hope.

  The new kid down the corridor still cried.

  “Like I said, I’ve got another year to do.”

  “What you got planned when you get out?” Beaver’s indifferent voice echoed.

  Pinhead was silent for a long time before he answered the question with another, “What’s the chances of you recommending me? I mean, I could do it, Beaver, whatever they asked, I could, I’ve thought it all through, every job they could possibly throw at me: burglary, assault, robbery… You name it, I’m your man.”

  Beaver said nothing.

  “Beaver? Well? What do you say?”

  “Fuck off, Pinhead. You’re just a wanker.”

  “You’ve got me in stitches, Beaver.”

  “You’re full o’ shit. You’re hot air. They want someone with guts, someone who’ll do what he’s told.” Beaver thought of the gun. But he kept his mouth shut. The fewer people knew the better, is what Jess had told him. “When I threaten something, I always see it through. Always.”

  Beaver slept for an hour. He dreamed of the crew, of having genuine comradeship for the first time in his life, looking forward to regularly seeing a friendly face that didn’t belong to a stuck-up parole officer. Beaver, as they say, was made up.