Denial of Murder

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘She has a lot of previous for being in possession of a controlled substance and for soliciting, and also for a string of petty offences like shoplifting,’ Ainsclough advised.

  ‘The controlled substance in question would be heroin,’ Shaftoe observed. Then he added solemnly, ‘Just thirty-seven, I would have thought her to be older. She looks an awful lot older but that’s what heroin does to a person.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know the details,’ Ainsclough stammered. ‘I had a quick glance at the computer printout before leaving Scotland Yard to attend the post-mortem.’

  ‘Well, she has plenty of track marks up and down her forearms …’ Shaftoe ran his latex gloved hands along the arms of the deceased. ‘Really quite a lot, in fact. This suggests she was a long-term, heavy user. Quite a few puncture points are noted … but this here is interesting. Come and have a look at this, if you would.’ Shaftoe pointed to a red, circular area, about three inches in diameter, on the inside of the lower left leg of the deceased, close to the ankle. He then turned to Billy Button. ‘Can you photograph this thermal injury here, please, Billy?’

  Tom Ainsclough stepped silently forward, dressed in the required green paper disposable coveralls, and stood reverentially beside Shaftoe.

  ‘That,’ Shaftoe spoke quietly, addressing Ainsclough, ‘is a thermal injury. Extreme heat caused that injury. Something metal, heated until it was red hot, was pressed against her leg.’

  Ainsclough winced as he noted the angry-looking red circle on the leg of the deceased.

  Billy Button gingerly approached the table holding a thirty-five millimetre camera with a flash attachment. Shaftoe and Ainsclough stepped aside to allow the trembling pathology laboratory assistant access to the body. Button made a low wailing sound as he placed a metal ruler by the side of the injury so as to give the photograph scale.

  ‘Calm down, Billy,’ Shaftoe spoke reassuringly. ‘I’ve told you many times that our patients, like this lady here, are not feeling anything.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Shaftoe,’ Billy Button murmured meekly, ‘but … but the pain of it when she was alive …’

  ‘Just take the photograph, Billy.’ Shaftoe spoke softly but firmly. ‘Just take the photograph.’

  Billy Button mustered sufficient self-control to hold the camera steady for a few seconds while he activated the shutter. The camera flashed and Button then retired speedily to the edge of the post-mortem laboratory and stood beside the instrument trolley.

  ‘The thermal injury is perimortem, and is undoubtedly indicative of torture,’ Shaftoe pronounced, ‘especially as it is on the inside of the leg. This lady did not accidentally brush up against something very hot, or fall against something very hot which might have been the case had this injury been on the outside of her leg. This injury was deliberately occasioned to her.’ Shaftoe turned to Ainsclough. ‘Do you know if she has any known next of kin?’

  ‘None that we know of, sir,’ Ainsclough replied. ‘It seems that the wretched woman lived alone and that she was alone in the world. She served time in Holloway Prison and on the prison records, which have been copied into the police file, the next-of-kin box has been marked “none given”.’

  ‘That …’ Shaftoe remarked, ‘is quite shameful. Quite, quite shameful. But so many are like our friend here, people who have no relatives at all, and many end up here.’ He tapped the stainless steel table. ‘They are found in derelict buildings or washed up on the riverbank at low tide, often in a state of decomposition. They have died and have not been missed.’

  ‘Indeed, sir,’ Ainsclough replied. He too felt the tragedy that was the apparent life of Cherry Quoshie. ‘She had had a hard life, going by her file. She grew up in a series of foster homes and care homes. She was listed as a chronic truant and she grew to be a juvenile offender. She has been known to the police since she was thirteen years of age and went on to commit a series of recordable offences … notably serious assault and possession of a controlled substance with intent to supply.’

  ‘Ah … so you’ll have her DNA on file?’ Shaftoe smiled.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. I’ll extract a blood sample so that we can determine her DNA profile just to belt and bracer her identity,’ Shaftoe announced. ‘But the fingerprints have clinched it.’ He looked at the corpse, ‘So … Cherry Quoshie … what can you tell us about your life and, more importantly, what can you tell us about your horrible and untimely death?’

  ‘There is a photograph of her in the file, sir,’ Ainsclough added. ‘It’s her all right … and her dental records are also in the file. But the fingerprints have determined her identity, as you say.’

  ‘I see.’ Shaftoe paused. ‘You know, I think that that makes it worse somehow, that she’s all alone in the world, yet from the outset there is no doubt as to her identity.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ainsclough mumbled, ‘that does seem to make it a bit worse, as you say. Somehow.’

  ‘But we mustn’t let her situation reach us on an emotional level. We have, of course, to remain detached,’ Shaftoe advised. ‘We couldn’t do the job otherwise.’ He forced open the mouth of the deceased. ‘Rigor is beginning to establish itself,’ he announced. ‘Summer of the year,’ he glanced at his watch, ‘one thirty p.m. Allowing for the chill of the laboratory, I would say that death most likely occurred sometime after midnight. But I won’t be tied to that, it’s not the job of the pathologist to determine the when of death, just the how of it. As I keep saying to your Mr Vicary, and doubtless will continue to say it, quite frankly the most accurate determination of the time of death is that it occurred sometime between when the person in question was last seen alive by a reliable witness, and the time that their body was found. There are just too many variables in the field of forensic pathology to enable us to be any more accurate.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ainsclough responded.

  ‘In the tropics, for example, a dead body will actually heat up for a few hours after death, so in such cases the rate of cooling is meaningless,’ Shaftoe added. ‘But as I said, I just cannot commit myself on paper as to the exact time of Ms Quoshie’s death. But, off paper, I think she died sometime after midnight, in the early hours of this day. Really the issue of time of death is muddy waters and no pathologist – no self-respecting pathologist, anyway – will step into it … not on paper.’

  ‘Understood, sir,’ Ainsclough replied. He added with a grin, ‘Not on paper, anyway.’

  Shaftoe peered into the mouth of the deceased. ‘Well, we have some dental work but nothing recent. It is likely that the dental work here dates from the time that she was a guest of Her Majesty but once at liberty it appears to me that she took no care of her teeth … no care at all.’

  ‘She was last released from prison about five years ago, sir,’ Ainsclough advised, ‘so I read.’

  ‘Yes, that would appear to tie in with the state of her teeth and the build-up of plaque … I would say that there is about five years’ worth of the stuff here … and advanced gum disease. She would have had very bad breath. Halitosis just wouldn’t be the word in her case. But she hasn’t left us any gifts in her mouth. Let’s see if she left us any presents anywhere else. There are, of course, two places where a man can leave something for us to find, but a woman has three.’ Shaftoe took the starched white towel which had been draped over the genitalia of the deceased and placed it neatly at her feet. He then took hold of the right ankle and asked Billy Button to take hold of the left ankle. ‘All right, gently does it, Billy … slowly pull the ankles apart … there will be some resistance due to rigor but rigor has not fully established itself … so as I said, gently, gently does it.’

  Ainsclough watched as Shaftoe and Button gently pulled Cherry Quoshie’s ankles apart, thus allowing Shaftoe to access Quoshie’s genitalia.

  ‘Yes,’ Shaftoe announced matter of factly, ‘I sensed that there might be something for us to find. The torture, you see, suggests that she was held at a remote place. She would most likely have
suspected, or even known, that she was going to be killed and if she wasn’t continually supervised, she would have found a way of leaving us a present … I just had the notion – intuition, if you like …’ Shaftoe probed the vagina with two fingers and extracted a piece of paper which had been neatly folded. ‘And here we are.’ Shaftoe took the piece of paper and laid it carefully on the surface of the bench which ran along the side of the pathology laboratory. ‘This is for the police, not for me,’ he said. ‘Would you like to have a look at it, Mr Ainsclough?’

  Once again Ainsclough walked silently across the industrial-grade linoleum which covered the floor of the pathology laboratory and stood beside Shaftoe as he carefully unfolded the piece of paper.

  ‘Now then,’ Shaftoe said quietly as he looked at it, ‘is that or is that not a very useful piece of paper? One very useful gift indeed?’

  ‘It most certainly is,’ Ainsclough agreed, staring at the eighty-pound gas bill.

  ‘As I said, she must have known that she was going to be murdered and yet still had the presence of mind to leave you gentlemen something by which you would know where she was being held, probably Mr Cogan as well. I will need to investigate further, but from what I can tell so far there are no signs of any sexual violence.’ Shaftoe read the gas bill. ‘“Scythe Brook Cottage, Micheldever, Hampshire”. Do you know where that is, Mr Ainsclough?’

  ‘Can’t say that I do, sir,’ Ainsclough replied. ‘It’s a new one on me.’

  ‘What about you, Billy?’ Shaftoe turned warmly to Billy Button. ‘Do you know where Micheldever is … apart from it being in Hampshire, that is?’

  ‘Sorry, sir, I don’t.’ Billy Button shook his head apologetically. ‘I don’t really know England outside of London, sir. Me and Mrs Button, we are not really ones for travelling, you see. Two weeks in Ramsgate is enough for us. We like to stay at home, you see, sir.’

  ‘All right, Billy,’ Shaftoe replied. ‘Thanks anyway.’

  ‘My cousin Mabel is the traveller in our family,’ Button added. ‘She even went to Scotland once and then …’

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Billy,’ Shaftoe said firmly. ‘If you would be good enough to put the towel back in place and then get a production bag, please.’ He turned to Ainsclough as Button handed him the self-sealing cellophane production bag. ‘The piece of paper has been folded up as you have seen and that might have preserved it from body fluids, which in turn might have preserved one or two useful fingerprints.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I am sure the boys in the forensic laboratory will give it a damn good try,’ Ainsclough replied as he took the production bag containing the gas bill from Shaftoe. ‘But even if they can’t isolate anything, the real gift is the address where she was being held against her will.’

  ‘So …’ Shaftoe commented, ‘what is the betting that she met the same fate as Gordon Cogan? Bashed over the head a couple of times by someone using something long and heavy? What’s the starting price …?’

  ‘About evens, I’d say,’ Tom Ainsclough replied with a gentle grin, ‘though having said that, betting is not one of my vices.’

  ‘Well, evens is about it,’ Shaftoe muttered a few moments later after he had removed the scalp from the skull of the deceased, ‘although in her case, she sustained three linear fractures rather than just two which were clearly thought sufficient to despatch the first victim. Two to the top of the skull and a third to the side of the skull, and each of sufficient force to cause death, as in the case of Mr Cogan. Somebody really wanted her dead.’ Shaftoe once again turned to Ainsclough. ‘That will be the finding of this post-mortem, Mr Ainsclough. Death was caused by a blow or blows to the skull by some person using a long, linear object, and I will draw attention to the thermal injury sustained on the lower inside left leg, which is powerfully indicative of torture. I will also refer to the fact that she may have given some indication of where she was being held against her will.’

  Tom Ainsclough looked upon the corpse of Cherry Quoshie. ‘And yet she seems to have been given so, so little in her life … a poor start, foster homes, institutional care … prison … heroin addiction … possibly racism … selling herself to eat and pay the rent. She was probably a very embittered and angry woman and yet, at the very end, she had the wherewithal to provide the police, whom she probably disliked, with a very useful bit of information to help us catch her murderers. She was clear-headed in a crisis. A lesser person would have panicked. Good for her, I say, good for her. I am going to attend her funeral.’

  A silence descended upon the pathology laboratory as Shaftoe, Ainsclough and Button looked upon the corpse of Cherry Quoshie. It lasted for a few minutes, perhaps two, and was broken when Shaftoe remarked, ‘No restraint marks.’

  ‘Sir?’ Ainsclough turned to Shaftoe. ‘Restraint marks?’

  ‘No restraint marks are in evidence,’ Shaftoe observed. ‘She wasn’t restrained by a rope or chain.’

  ‘There aren’t, are there?’ Ainsclough looked at the ankles and the wrists of Cherry Quoshie.

  ‘Which suggests that if she was kept against her will then it would have been within a locked room or similar,’ Shaftoe mused. ‘She was a big woman and it would have taken an awful lot to overpower her, but once overpowered by at least two very large men, so I would have thought, she was kept in a room but not restrained or closely supervised, so she had ample time to move about and to pick up what she left for the police to find, and to leave it where she left it.’

  ‘The observations are noted, sir,’ Ainsclough replied. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Good. Well, they’ll be in my report anyway. So let’s wrap this up by seeing what she ate for her last meal.’ Shaftoe took a scalpel and drove it across the stomach of the deceased. ‘I doubt that the stomach contents will have any bearing on the post-mortem findings but we’ll look anyway, just for the sake of completeness.’ Shaftoe took the scalpel and parted the flesh over the stomach, and then used the scalpel to pierce the stomach wall, turning his head to one side as he did so. Ainsclough heard a sharp hiss as the stomach gases escaped. ‘Not bad,’ Shaftoe commented as he drew breath. ‘Oh …’ he sighed.

  ‘Something, sir?’ Ainsclough asked.

  ‘No …’ Shaftoe replied quietly, ‘nothing. And that’s just it. Nothing. As with the previous victim, Mr Cogan, her stomach is quite empty. She had had no food for at least forty-eight hours before she was murdered, which is again some further indication of torture … denial of food, to weaken the will, then she was burned with something red hot. As you mentioned, Mr Ainsclough, she had been given nothing in life, but for some reason someone, or some persons, were prepared to torture her before murdering her. She evidently knew something. She had information that someone wanted and who wanted it badly. Now she’ll be buried in a pauper’s grave with two other coffins. You deserved more in life, Cherry,’ Shaftoe addressed the corpse, ‘and you deserve more in death than a shared plot without a headstone. God rest you and keep you, sweet child.’

  ‘Janet … my Janet?’ The woman glanced up anxiously at Swannell and Brunnie who stood in her living room. ‘Police?’ She then pointed to a framed photograph of a smiling young girl in a school uniform of a blue blazer and grey pleated skirt which stood prominently in a silver frame on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. ‘That is Janet when she started the secondary school … we’d just bought her uniform … she was so proud … she was my daughter.’

  ‘And my sister,’ announced the younger woman who had let Swannell and Brunnie into the house after closely scrutinizing their warrant cards. The younger woman had a hard face, thought Swannell, and he was chilled by her cold, piercing green eyes, with which she glared at the older woman as she sat in the armchair opposite her.

  ‘She went off the rails,’ the older woman stated, ‘poor girl.’

  ‘Pushed off, more like,’ the younger woman said sharply. ‘She was pushed off.’ She spoke in clear anger. ‘She was pushed off and you know it.’

  ‘So it was my fault!’ Th
e older woman leant forward towards her daughter and her response was equally angry. ‘Like always.’

  ‘Yes,’ the younger woman replied, ‘frankly, yes, it was your fault. All of it was your fault. You were to blame. You still are.’

  ‘So go on, blame me for everything as usual.’ The older woman sat back in her chair and looked indignantly away from her daughter. ‘As usual, blame me … if it has to be someone’s fault, it may as well be mine.’

  ‘Ladies, ladies.’ Victor Swannell held up his hand, pleading for calm, though he felt the urge to say ‘Girls! Girls! Quiet or you’ll both go to your rooms for the rest of the day’. The two women were mother and daughter but he thought that they were more in keeping with two sisters who were endlessly squabbling.

  ‘I got married again,’ the older woman explained after Swannell and Brunnie had accepted her belated invitation to take a seat, and then sat down side by side on the settee, which was covered with a fabric showing blue and red flowers with green stems and leaves against a cream background. The home itself, both officers noted, was neatly kept, and the room and entrance hall smelled strongly of a combination of air freshener and furniture polish.

  ‘Yes, yes you did get married again … to a rat.’ The younger woman spat the words towards her mother. ‘Go on … tell the whole story … it’s the police … tell them the whole story.’

  ‘He was all right with me,’ the mother replied defensively. ‘He still is.’

  ‘Maybe he is still all right with her but he wasn’t all right with me and Janet. He did all he could to drive us out of the house. He succeeded with Janet.’ The younger woman raised her voice to near screaming pitch. ‘But not with me, I was too proud, wasn’t I? If I was leaving home I was going to go on my own terms, not his … but Janet, my sister, she was always more sensitive … she was always more vulnerable. So she went to live in a squat in Acton, looking for peace, and what happened? She only got herself strangled. All she got was death at the age of seventeen. I dare say that that is a form of peace, but it wasn’t exactly the sort of peace she had in mind; it was definitely not the sort of peace she was looking for.’ The younger woman folded her arms and looked angrily at her mother. Both women were small, Brunnie observed, and very finely made.