Detective Sergeant Voss put his head round his chief’s door, carefully avoiding Deacon’s gaze. “Superintendent Fuller says, would you please stop diverting your phonecalls to his office?”
Deacon grimaced. It was the promotion: he couldn’t get used to it. When someone came on his phone and said “Superintendent” he’d transferred them before they could finish the sentence. He did it when the Assistant Chief Constable phoned to congratulate him. He also did it when Brodie phoned to congratulate him, with the result that she’d offered to bring the station’s senior officer breakfast in bed before she realised what had happened. Superintendent Fuller was so flustered he accepted.
Now he’d done it again. “Who was it this time?”
“Dr Roy. Apparently he’s found something odd.”
“On Serena Daws?” The Forensic Medical Examiner undoubtedly had a full caseload, any of which could be currently perplexing him, but the only one Deacon was interested in was Serena. And it had been obvious from the start how she died, which was why he hadn’t pressed for a full report before this.
“Apparently,” said Voss. He was a young man with the freckles and look of permanent mild surprise that tend to go with red hair. “Don’t call him back: he wants us to go round there. And take Exhibit A with us.”
Exhibit A was a kitchen knife with a serrated blade a hundred and fifty millimetres long and twenty millimetres across the widest point. It had a stag-horn handle and a Sheffield steel blade, and it still had Serena Daws’ blood on it. Deacon checked it out of the evidence cupboard—which was not a cupboard but a room, manned by a strong-minded constable who surrendered nothing, not even the time of day, without the proper paperwork—and he and Voss headed for Dimmock General Hospital where Dr Hari Roy had his small, smelly domain in the basement.
He was a large young Asian man who wore good suits and flamboyant ties when he wasn’t wearing scrubs, and he nodded approval at the evidence bag in DS Voss’s hand. “You brought it.”
Deacon frowned. “I don’t understand. There can’t be any question that this is the murder weapon. We found it on the floor beside her. That’s her blood.”
Dr Roy nodded. “I have no doubt Mrs Daws was stabbed with this knife. I have mapped the wounds and they match for depth, width and profile. This knife was plunged into Mrs Daws’s body thirteen times, causing the injuries from which she died.”
Deacon breathed heavily at him. “You’ve brought us across town to tell us this? You could have used the phone.”
Hari Roy gave the slow, handsome smile that had nurses reaching for the sal volatile all over the hospital. “Curiously enough. Superintendent Deacon, every time I try to phone you I find myself transferred to Superintendent Fuller’s office. You should have a word with your switchboard.”
“I will,” muttered Deacon, avoiding Voss’s gaze. He was pretty sure Roy knew, but said nothing just in case.
“And anyway,” continued the FME smoothly, “I have something for you to see. I’m afraid it means going into my office.” He meant the mortuary.
He pulled a green plastic apron over his suit and led the way to the dissecting table.
None of the sights or smells associated with this place were unfamiliar to his visitors. Even the pungent formaldehyde unsettled them no more than it did him. It was the smell of an important job being done, of questions being answered, reassuring and hopeful rather than upsetting.
In the same way, there was nothing distressing about the body of the woman on the table. It was sad, because nine days and a loss of temper ago she’d been full of strength and vitality, and even knowing that her favourite way of working off excess energy was hurting those closest to her it was still a sorrowful thing to see her lying so quiet and waxy-pale, immune to the outrage of strangers’ eyes on her. But there was nothing repellent about it. Her deep wounds no longer bled and death had smoothed the pain from her brow. She couldn’t be hurt any more. But she could be satisfied, and that was the task of these three men. To establish beyond doubt what had happened to her, and to bring her killer to justice.
“It’s a little hard to demonstrate.” Dr Roy had a fine steel probe with a ball-tip. He used it two different ways: to emphasise his words, like a drum-majorette twirling a very small baton, and to map the extent and shape of incised wounds. Drawing aside the sheet that covered Serena Daws he slid it into a wound in her leg and pushed until it would go no further. He cast his visitors a significant look. “You see the problem?”
Deacon looked at the probe, at Roy, even at Voss in case he found some inspiration there. Then he shook his head. “No.”
Roy sighed. He extracted the probe, marking the depth of the incision with his fingertips. “You have the knife?”
Voss held it up, still in its plastic bag. Roy held the probe against it. There was a discrepancy of perhaps three centimetres.
Deacon shrugged. “So the knife didn’t go all the way in. He stabbed her thirteen times, I don’t suppose he was paying that much attention to just how deeply.”
“But it did go all the way in,” said the FME. “See? The wound is the width of the knife at its widest point, close to the hilt end. If it had only gone in a hundred and sixteen millimetres it would have been narrower. Plus, there’s something else.” He put the probe into the same wound at a different angle and it buried itself in Serena Daws without resistance.
Deacon looked again at the knife but it was a perfectly normal shape. “How come?”
Having finished with his model, Dr Roy tucked the sheet round her again as if putting her to bed. Then he reached for a notepad and a pen, sketching what he could feel so that those with less educated fingers could picture it too. What he produced was the outline of the murder weapon but with a smaller appendix running off the lower aspect of the blade.
Deacon struggled with the implications. “You mean, all the other wounds were made with this knife, but this one was made with something else?”
“Yes,” agreed Dr Roy, “and no. At its widest point this incision is half as wide again as the entry wound. An implement capable of inflicting this damage could not have entered the body through that wound.”
Deacon was growing impatient. He knew Hari Roy was a clever man: there was no need for him to keep proving it. This was a murder investigation: the idea was to make matters clearer for him, not more obscure. “That isn’t possible.”
But Charlie Voss was a clever man too, even though he often found it politic to hide the fact, and he could see the ghost of an answer. “You mean, that injury wasn’t made by one knife. It was made by two.”
Dr Roy gave him a smile of approval. “Quite so. One hole, two weapons.”
“Or the same weapon twice,” hazarded Deacon. “Could he have pushed it in part way, partly withdrawn it and then driven it home at a different angle?”
“Good thinking. Superintendent,” nodded the FME, “but no. What we shall call the secondary wound was created by a knife with a narrower tip than Exhibit A. It was a smaller knife.”
“He was stabbing her with two different knives?” Deacon shook his head in angry confusion. “Why, for heaven’s sake? He was doing a perfectly good job with one.”
“Can you tell which knife he used first?” asked Voss.
If he impressed Dr Roy any more today he’d be handed a sweetie. The FME beamed. “No, I can’t. You’ll have to ask Mr Daws when you find him.”
Voss was driving. He concentrated on the road and waited for Deacon to open the debate. He’d already put his head on the block by being a swot and a teacher’s pet: he didn’t need to annoy his chief any more by offering unsought opinions.
At first Deacon just muttered indignantly. “It’s nonsense! What possible reason could the man have? He’s got a nice big knife that he’s skewering his wife with, and she’s bleeding all over the place and weakening fast—so he goes back to the kitchen for another, smaller knife which he proceeds to stick into some of the holes he’s already made? Like hell he does!”
“We didn’t actually ask that,” Voss remembered suddenly. “Whether there were any more double wounds. Sorry, sir, I should have done.”
Deacon got Roy on the phone. The answer was inconclusive. “He didn’t find any more, but that might be because of where she was stabbed. It might not have been apparent where the knives went into squishy bits: lungs, stomach, intestines. But where they went into the firm tissue of her thigh they left a footprint.”
“He had two knives,” mused Voss. “And he stabbed her thirteen times with the big one, and at least once with the little one. Then he fled, leaving Exhibit A at the scene. What happened to Exhibit B?”
“He must have taken it with him.”
“Why? Why leave the one that did most of the damage and keep the other one?”
“He wasn’t worried about incriminating himself,” said Deacon. Now they were working the evidence he’d forgotten his bad temper, was only interested in teasing the truth out of this unexpected development, as troubling as bits left on the bench when you’ve finished reassembling your carburettor. “He knew we’d know who did it, so why try to hide what he did it with?”
Voss was trying to picture the scene. “The guy’s in a panic. He’s a quiet, mild-mannered man who’s just murdered his wife: the last thing he’s thinking about is disposing of the murder weapon. Weapons. He may have shoved the knife in his pocket without much idea what he was doing. It probably gave him a hell of a shock when he found it again.”
It was entirely feasible. It’s only in crime fiction that every action has a purpose. In crime things are messier, less well-ordered, not as well thought through. Panic could be the answer.
“But it doesn’t explain why he used a second knife—at all, let alone in that way,” said Deacon. “And he wasn’t panicking then. He was steady enough to withdraw one blade from the wound and insert another so carefully that he didn’t enlarge the incision. If he was calm enough to do that, why did he do it? It did nothing to hasten her end, and nothing to throw us off his scent. But it wasn’t a random act. It meant something to him.”
But neither man was able to hazard a guess at what.
Chapter Eight
Brodie didn’t like horses. They were big, unreliable at both ends, and mostly they moved too slowly but occasionally they moved too fast. In her experience, many of the same drawbacks applied to their owners.
There was a huge white one, about the size of a Transit van, leaving the farmyard as she drove in. It looked down its nose at her; so did the man on top. “Are you looking for someone? Can I help?”
He wasn’t a nineteen-year-old farm labourer with the body of a Greek god so she doubted it. But she stopped the car and got out. “I’m looking for Nicky Speers.”
The man nodded. “He’s up in the woods doing a bit of path clearance. He’ll be back before long, if you want to wait. In fact, I’ll head up that way now and let him know you’re here. Miss… ?”
“Brodie Farrell,” she said. “But the name won’t mean anything to him.”
“Then, can I tell him what it’s about?”
“Probably better not.”
“This is about Mrs Daws,” the rider said quietly. Brodie rather suspected she’d misjudged him. He was certainly a big man, and he sat the horse without unnecessary movement, but in fact his broad intelligent face and whole demeanour spoke of reliability. “I thought the police had finished questioning him.”
“I’m not from the police,” said Brodie. “I’m trying to trace Mrs Daws’s sister. To look after the girls. I’m hoping Nicky might know something helpful.”
The man pursed his lips. “I’m not sure they talked much about their respective families.”
Brodie tried not to smile. “I don’t expect they did. Mr… ?”
“Poole,” he said. “Philip Poole.” He reached down a hand.
With an uneasy glance at the horse she moved close enough to shake it briefly. “And this is Blossom.” The mare regarded her solemnly with a dark liquid eye.
“As in Poole Lane?”
The man nodded. “The farm’s been in the family since Tudor times.”
“I know it’s a long shot,” said Brodie. “But it is urgent, and she just may have said something to Nicky that would put me on the right track.”
Philip Poole nodded. “Of course. I'll head up to the wood and find him for you. Park by the house and tell my secretary to make you some tea. He’ll be down in ten minutes.” He clucked to the mountainous Blossom and they left the yard at a lumbering trot.
She did as he said, except she didn’t ask for tea. She waited in the farm office while Poole’s secretary answered phone-calls using words she didn’t understand but Paddy, who thought the sun shone out of a tractor power-take-off, might have done. Then the throaty rumble of an engine outside heralded a new arrival. “That’s Nicky now,” said the girl. “I can make myself scarce if you want to see him in here.”
Brodie thought he’d be more at ease outside. “I’ll catch him in the yard. We won’t be five minutes.”
Even with his clothes on she had no difficulty recognising Nicky Speers, and not for his fine physique or handsome young face so much as the look in his eyes which was exactly the one Serena Daws had captured on canvas. He looked at Brodie as he had looked at his artist lover: warily, uncertain of her motives, unsure what she would say or do next, vulnerable in the face of her authority.
She had to put him at his ease if they were to make any progress. The way he was eyeing her, she doubted he could remember his own address let alone Constance Ward’s. She chuckled. “Don’t look so worried. This isn’t official. I’ve been asked to find Serena’s sister so I’m talking to everyone she knew. I’m sorry if this is a bit embarrassing but it’s no secret that you spent time together. I thought she might have mentioned something about Constance’s whereabouts.”
“She didn’t.” In spite of his height—he overtopped Brodie by three inches—there remained the hint of a teenage whine in his voice.
“No?” Experience had taught her never to accept anyone’s first offer as final. People who had no interest in lying, who had nothing to hide, still forgot vitally important details. If she kept them talking for a few minutes they started to remember. “You never met Constance then?”
“Never.”
“Did Serena ever talk about her? I don’t know—things they did when they were girls? Apparently they had ponies -did she talk about that?”
Nicky was looking increasingly uneasy. “No. I mean, you don’t, do you? It wasn’t a social thing. It wasn’t us and the vicar and a plate of sandwiches. She wanted to paint me. Most of the time I was stood in her cottage with no kit on. And the rest of the time … And we didn’t talk much then, either. Not about her sister, and not about when she was a kid.”
“I suppose not.” Brodie went on regarding him amiably. Her lack of embarrassment only made his worse. “I don’t suppose it’s been easy for you. What happened. People blaming you.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” The wound was still raw, the nerves still jumped. He was still trying to convince himself. “I shouldn’t have got involved, I know that. But I didn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to. And I didn’t kill her.”
“Of course not,” said Brodie, so smoothly it meant nothing. “We know who stabbed her, don’t we? Sooner or later the police will find him and then it’ll be history. Except for the girls, of course. They’ll live with the consequences for years—especially if I can’t find Constance. Are you sure you can’t tell me anything about her? Did Serena ever get letters or phone-calls from her? Did she never come here?”
The boy tried to remember. His brow furrowed, and Brodie thought that if he’d come up with anything he’d have told her. “I really don’t think so. I’m sorry about the girls, but there’s nothing I can tell you.”
“OK.” Brodie smiled brightly “Well, thanks for your time. And would you thank Mr Poole for me, too?”
He nodded. Throug
h the lank curtain of his fringe she could see the relief in his eyes that she was done. “I don’t suppose he was much help either. He used to know them pretty well, but that’s years ago.”
Brodie froze in the act of reaching for her car door. “Philip Poole knew the Ward sisters?”
“Yes.” The worry flooded back into his eyes. “Didn’t he say?”
“I didn’t, think to ask.” She frowned. “How did he know them? If Constance didn’t visit.”
“I’m talking years back, when they were kids. The Wards lived at Peyton Parvo, on the far side of Cheyne Wood. They all had horses. They used to hunt together.”
In the privacy of her own mind Brodie kicked herself. She’d known the Wards were a local family, that Serena hadn’t blown in from outside when she married Robert Daws -she should have asked Poole if he knew Constance. But he knew her reason for calling, so probably he’d have said if he knew where she was now. All the same, she thought she’d talk to him again. Experience had also taught her that if you ignore the little clues that chance throws in your path, one of them will turn out to be crucial. “Maybe I should wait for him. Do you know how long he’ll be?”
Nicky shrugged. “Could be an hour or two. Once he gets up on the downs on the great white whale he goes for miles.”
Brodie grinned. “I take it you’re not a riding man yourself?”
“Sure I am.” He waved a long arm at a gleaming black and silver motorbike propped beside the house and, in the place of the lusty young man whose rampant sex-drive had thrust him into a situation he was ill-equipped to handle, Brodie saw an excited child on Christmas morning. “Seven-fifty cc,” he confided with proprietorial pride. “Open it up and it sounds like a Spitfire.”
When Brodie had gone Daniel summoned the girls to the school-room. He looked from one to the other of them, his pale grey eyes severe. “That was an unedifying spectacle.”
They may not have known the word but they understood his meaning well enough. They glanced at one another and quickly away Johnny made ringlets of her hair around one finger. Em stared so hard at the table-top that tears came to her eyes.
Reflections Page 6
