Born in a Burial Gown

by Mike Craven

  She looked at him. The anger was there now, bubbling under the surface, ready to erupt at the slightest provocation. Perhaps she wanted one final argument. Perhaps she was angry he’d taken it so calmly, that he hadn’t wanted to fight for her. ‘Will you fuck,’ she snarled. ‘You think I want you in this house after you humiliated Ian like that? I want you out now.’

  Fluke nearly replied that Ian had humiliated himself but instead reached for his coat and left without another word. It dawned on him that he hadn’t noticed Ian leave and wondered if it was the real reason why she was so keen to get him out.

  ‘And when were you ever here after I woke up?’ she screamed at his retreating back, before slamming the door.

  Fluke had a dilemma. He’d drunk too much to drive and lived too far away for a taxi. He had no choice but to sleep in his car. He fumbled in his coat for his keys.

  ‘I hope you’re not planning to drive, Inspector?’

  Fluke turned round. The woman from the dinner party was leaning against the bonnet of her car, smoking a cigarette and blowing thick plumes into the freezing night air. She was smiling.

  ‘Just getting something out the car,’ he replied.

  She obviously recognised that as the lie it was. She raised her eyebrows. ‘And that was Michelle shouting, “Hurry back” before she slammed the door on you, was it?’

  ‘She’s just in a bad mood is all. She gets like this sometimes,’ he mumbled, embarrassed.

  ‘What, you thought you were just going to say sorry and make up did you? Have you not met her before?’ she asked.

  For some reason he felt he should stick up for her. ‘She’s right, I was wrong. They’re her friends and I’m always rude to them. She’ll be all right in a couple of days.’

  ‘She won’t, Avison, you must know that. This was a make or break dinner for you tonight, and you, my grumpy friend, broke it.’ She was still smiling as she talked. ‘I wonder why you don’t seem too bothered. Is it because, apart from you and I, everyone in there tonight was an absolute arsehole?’ She held up her hand as Fluke started to protest. ‘Michelle’s the worst one. Anyone could see you were dead on your feet and upset about something. They deserved everything you gave them.’

  ‘Yeah, well, what’s happened has happened,’ he said, as if that was any sort of explanation. ‘Who are you, anyway? You don’t seem Michelle’s usual type of friend.’

  ‘I’m the person giving you a lift home tonight.’

  Chapter 7

  Fluke was woken early by his hangover. He was drained but raring to go on the first full day of the investigation. Moving day, he called it. By the evening he hoped to have a sense of where they were going, whether they were in for the long haul, whether he’d need more resources or whether he could release some.

  He brushed his teeth, rinsed and spat. He looked down into the sink. There was even more blood than usual. Probably due to excessive alcohol intake of the night before. The MedicAlert bracelet that Doctor Cooper had given him, and which he never wore, sat next to his toothpaste, mocking him. He checked the back of his hand and saw what he expected. It was heavily bruised where the cannula had been.

  If his blood was that thin, he’d best avoid taking aspirin as well. He was going to have tough out his hangover.

  He started his coffee machine then quickly showered. By the time he was out, the coffee was ready and Fluke poured himself a large cup, black. He took it back into the bathroom so he could drink while he shaved.

  The late night and early start meant that the face he saw in the mirror was even more haggard looking than usual. He was only forty but his dark hair was already salted with grey. He rubbed his dark stubble before smothering his face with shaving gel.

  He picked up his razor, looked at it and put it back down. He couldn’t risk getting a nick – it would take hours to heal. Perhaps he should have stayed for the plasma after all. He clearly needed it. He reached for facecloth and removed the gel. He picked up his electric shaver and pushed the on button. It buzzed into life and he looked into the mirror as he ran the whirring blades over his chin.

  His most striking feature stared back in the reflection. Normal to him, fascinating to others.

  Fluke had heterochromia. His eyes were different colours. One was a vivid blue; the other was multi-coloured, dark green from any distance over five feet. Sometimes he could see people looking at him uneasily, aware something wasn’t quite right but not able to put their finger on it. Subliminal unease, he called it.

  Fluke was occasionally able to use it to good effect in interviews but most of the time he simply forgot about it. At school, an older boy, trying to impress some girls, called him ‘lighthouse’ once. Fluke had broken his nose and the nickname hadn’t stuck although ‘flat face’ had for the bully.

  As he shaved he thought about the surreal ride home with the mystery woman. He’d accepted the lift readily, a night on the backseat of his car hadn’t appealed to him. Despite asking her, he still didn’t know her name although she seemed to know all about him. They didn’t discuss Michelle again or what had happened at the dinner party. Instead, they’d fallen into an easy conversation about their jobs. She was a solicitor specialising in international law and they both understood crime, albeit they approached it from different perspectives. Fluke’s job was to catch criminals and hers was to get them off, except her criminals tended to be countries. Although his head had been a little fuzzy, he couldn’t recall having had such a challenging and stimulating conversation for a long time.

  It was only when they were about two miles from his house that he realised he hadn’t given her any directions. She seemed to know roughly where he lived and only asked for help when the small road they were on turned into a succession of dirt tracks.

  ‘Every time you see a smaller track, take it,’ he’d told her.

  Eventually, Fluke had been able to point her in the direction of his own road and she’d pulled up next to his house.

  He’d got out of the car but before he could ask her in for a nightcap, she’d smiled enigmatically, waved once and drove off. When her car got to the end of his track, she honked the horn and drove away. He stood and stared, bemused, wondering if he’d ever see her again. He watched the retreating headlights until they disappeared, then pulled out his phone and rang Towler to arrange a lift into town to collect his car first thing.

  He finished shaving and drained his coffee. Finding something to wear that didn’t have mud on, he got dressed. Using his bedroom mirror, he fastened a cheap tie. Even he thought he looked unkempt. It wasn’t that he dressed badly, it was just that anything he wore immediately looked scruffy. Losing so much weight so quickly hadn’t helped. Towler used to call him a typical fat marine. He hadn’t been, of course, he’d been on the right side of stocky. As an ex-marine, an elite force trained to march huge distances with heavy loads, he’d been extremely fit. Now his clothes hung from him like he was a child playing dress-up.

  Back in his kitchen, he filled his travel mug with the rest of the coffee, remembering to turn off the machine. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d forgotten and come back to a solid, coffee-smelling mess on the bottom of another ruined jug. He went through five or six a year. He was debating whether or not he had time to sit on his porch and drink it when he heard a car pulling up.

  Towler. They had a post-mortem to attend.

  For the second time in two days, Fluke found himself at the Cumberland Infirmary. He decided he’d go and see Doctor Cooper after the PM; he didn’t feel as though he could fob her off twice in two days. He stuck his head round the door in the ward to tell a nurse he’d be with her in a couple of hours. She promised to pass on the message.

  Fluke walked down the stairs. The mortuary was in the basement of the hospital as most are. He flashed his badge at the elderly man in the office and was waved through. He’d been there enough times for all the staff to know him. Carlisle didn’t have a dedicated forensic mortuary – there wasn’t the
demand for full-time specialist facilities like that in Cumbria – so one of post-mortem suites had to be adapted every time the coroner requested a forensic examination. It didn’t have the glass viewing rooms some did, so he would have to be in the same room as Sowerby.

  The suite Sowerby was using was typical of all mortuaries. Fluke shivered. He could feel the air conditioning and hear the hum of the huge fridges that stored the cadavers. They were permanently turned on. Fluke knew bodies could be stored indefinitely at minus 20ºC, and as the only hospital for forty miles, it was never short of business.

  The room had an unpleasant personality all of its own. It smelled of chemicals and detergents. There were large sinks, drains and sluices, a room that had to dispose of large amounts of liquid; liquid from disassembled bodies.

  White-tiled floor and white-tiled walls; easy to keep clean and sterile, easy to hose down. Laminated notices on the walls detailed actions to be taken in the event of biohazards being discovered. Fluke knew that the PM would take roughly four hours, and by the end, he’d be staring at the posters wondering if bio-emergencies had ever happened here.

  It was a room where preserving the dignity of the dead took second place to uncovering their secrets. Fluke hated them.

  In the middle, under huge halogen lights, was the dissection table. The body of their victim was already on it, still in the golf bag.

  Towler had gone ahead and was there, gowned and with protective coverings on his feet, laughing with Lucy. Fluke didn’t want to know about what. Sowerby was discussing something with the mortuary technician. Alan Vaughn was there to act as the exhibits officer, and a SOCO officer Fluke didn’t recognise was preparing sample swabs and tubes. Everyone looked ready.

  Fluke finished putting on his gown and foot covers, and entered the suite.

  ‘We ready to go then?’ Sowerby asked everyone as he walked towards the body.

  Sowerby was one of those pathologists who said everything out loud. Instructions, comments and observations were all recorded on the built-in digital system. After some standard introductions of who was present, what the time was and which hospital they were in, he began.

  ‘The body was recovered today at a building site adjacent to West Cumberland Hospital, in what I am told, was a foundation hole. Preliminary police enquiries suggest that the body had been in situ for no more than twelve hours. It is still in the golf bag it was recovered in. It is covered in mud, consistent with where it was found. Hopefully, whoever had put her in it inadvertently left the victim cleaner than she would have been than if she’d simply been interred without it. The golf bag was too big to go into a cadaver bag. I have observed the head only. The body appears to be female. Until I have had a chance to remove the body from the bag, I would not like to estimate age or make a statement on ethnicity.’

  Fluke tuned out as Sowerby directed the technician on where to photograph and what external swabs should be taken. At that point, they would only be taking samples of what was accessible: her head. They’d already taken them at the scene but were taking them again as a precaution.

  Fluke’s mind went into screensaver mode as the routine part of the PM continued. He thought through what the priorities were going to be in the early stages of the investigation. Clearly identifying the body was going to be key, and Fluke hoped it would be easy. With an identification, a list of people to interview could be drawn up. And with a list of people to interview, a suspect list could be drawn up. The rest was normally a slam-dunk.

  Normally.

  Although Fluke still couldn’t rule out a domestic homicide, he knew that in reality he was looking for something different. It looked too professional to have been committed in the heat of the moment. While Fluke had been making arrangements to see Doctor Cooper after the post-mortem, Towler had received a phone call from Jo Skelton. She’d finished setting up the incident room and had got to work on the misper list. Early indications were that the victim wasn’t a Cumbrian. Skelton was widening the enquiry to cover the whole of the UK but it would take time. Fluke would get a photo of the victim’s head to help her as soon as he could.

  The foundation hole was obviously a deposition site, and therefore the second priority was to find the murder scene.

  Finding the person who wrote the note also needed to happen fast and Fluke expected a fingerprint match by the time the PM finished. It was inconceivable that a chaotic heroin addict would be unknown to the police.

  After the photographs, Sowerby and the technician struggled to remove her from the golf bag. ‘Some rigor mortis is evident,’ Sowerby said. He paused and picked up some heavy-duty shears. ‘Sorry, Avison. I’m going to have to cut the bag to get her out.’

  Fluke nodded. It was preferable to damaging any evidence on her body.

  Five minutes later, she was laid out on the table and the golf bag was handed over to SOCO to process. As Sowerby had predicted, the bag had protected her from the mud of the building site and she was spotless. Another break, Fluke thought.

  ‘Don’t forget to check all the pockets that thing has,’ Towler told the SOCO. ‘I want to know as soon as you find anything.’ The SOCO man rolled his eyes. There was an unspoken ‘Well, d’uh’, that luckily for him, Towler missed.

  Fluke looked at her lifeless face and fought the urge to reach out and remove the long hair that had fallen over her eyes. Gravity had emptied her lips of blood. Her eyes were milky and had flattened as they lost liquid. The waxy, almost translucent, skin that Fluke had observed at the site was exaggerated under the powerful lights.

  Some detectives tried to keep things as impersonal as they could to maintain objectivity. For Fluke, it was the opposite. He worked at his best when he could make a personal connection with the victim, and looking down at her, Fluke could feel anger building in the pit of his stomach.

  He tossed her like garbage.

  Sowerby removed her clothing, cutting everything rather than undressing her. It was the best way to preserve evidence. She’d been dressed casually but smartly; trousers and matching jacket. Her shoes were black with small heels and she was wearing stockings. They all went to the SOCO team to process.

  Looking down at her naked body, stiff with rigor and displayed like a laboratory rat, Fluke guessed she’d be in her mid-thirties. She’d clearly been good-looking, beautiful in fact.

  The technician fingerprinted her before taking a series of X-rays. A printer whirred into life in an adjoining room. Although X-rays were digitally viewed during a coroner’s post-mortem, there were always hard copies made for the files.

  Sowerby and the technician had to massage the body to counteract the rigor before they could start the external examination of her front. Fluke had always thought it looked obscene. He knew it had to be done but he decided to look away while they did it. He noticed Towler and Lucy were doing the same. It was a small gesture, but to Fluke it was important. Anything that could be done to preserve her dignity, even in death, was worthwhile. Sowerby started talking again and Fluke turned back round.

  ‘Slight tearing of the vagina, possible recent sexual activity. Can you take a deep swab, please?’ Sowerby asked the technician.

  He continued with a close examination, speaking into the microphone.

  He lifted up her left hand and studied it with a magnifying glass, then put it down. The nails were painted a vibrant turquoise and were beautifully manicured. He picked up the right and did the same. ‘Can you get me an evidence bag, please?’ Picking up a small scraping tool, he removed something from the underside of her long nails. He put it into a small plastic tube and handed it to Fluke.

  Fluke held it up to the light to have a look. It was a tiny grain of something, dark brown. ‘Any idea?’

  ‘Not a clue, not for me to speculate either. That’s why we have a lab.’

  He went back to the body and moved the big overhead light above her head. Fluke handed the tube to the SOCO man who put it into an evidence bag. Out the corner of his eye, Fluke noticed
Lucy walk over and ask to see it.

  ‘It’s difficult to be sure, but it looks like there’s some slight haemorrhaging in the eyes,’ Sowerby said, looking at Fluke.

  ‘Strangled?’

  ‘Normally I’d say that’s as good a guess as anything right now but there’s nothing else to support that. No marks on the neck.’

  ‘What then?’ Towler asked.

  ‘Patience, boy. We’ve only just started. We won’t leave here until you and Avison have something,’ Sowerby said, not unkindly. Everyone in the room had the same goal.

  ‘Looks like she may have had cosmetic surgery at some point; nose correction, poor one by the look. If they’ve moved bone around, I’ll know more when I open her up. Nothing else of note on the anterior.’

  As the body was carefully turned over, Sowerby commented, ‘She’s been moved after death occurred. No uniform lividity.’

  Fluke knew that if a corpse lay undisturbed, livor mortis, where blood obeyed the laws of gravity and settled at the lowest point, set in. If someone died on their back then the blood drained from their front and settled underneath before clotting, causing a difference in colour. White on top, purple on the bottom, like cream on raspberries. If the body was moved before the process had finished then lividity was interrupted and livor wouldn’t be uniform. The victim on the table had purple and white patches competing with each other. She had been moved in the first few hours after her death. It didn’t really help; it only confirmed what they already suspected – that the building site wasn’t where she’d been killed.

  Fluke noticed Lucy had finished looking at whatever had been found under the victim’s nails and was back observing. Earlier, he’d wondered if she’d ever attended a PM before. Now he knew.

  She was obviously struggling with being in the proximity of a dead body, and he wondered whether she’d asked to see the sample just to take time out. Her eyes were red and glistening but she was yet to cry.