Too Much of Water

by J M Gregson

  ‘Then she’s definitely an adult, you see. Students are classed as adults at eighteen, as you know. Clare’s much older than that, and definitely in charge of her own life. We shouldn’t interfere with the actions and decisions of students. It’s not part of our remit as tutors to do so.’ Harry smiled weakly as he repeated this useful mantra, and tried not to sound too satisfied with it. He failed dismally.

  ‘You think we should do nothing?’

  Shadwell pursed his lips and steepled his fingers on the untidy desk in front of him, seeing the opportunity to pass the buck back whence it had come. ‘As her friend and flatmate, you must make your own decisions, Anne. I really think it’s not our province as tutors to interfere.’

  ‘Even when she’s missed three days of lectures and a personal tutorial?’

  ‘Students do miss classes. It may be regrettable, but we have to allow them a certain degree of latitude.’

  ‘Clare hasn’t missed them before. She’s very conscious of the opportunity that’s been offered to her. Most mature students are.’ Anne Jackson was surprised at her boldness. It wasn’t characteristic of her, but she was annoyed by the inertia of this balding figure with the thick-rimmed glasses and the hunted air.

  And Shadwell in turn was irritated by her persistence. It irked him all the more because she seemed to have a valid point. ‘Clare may have gone home to see her parents for the weekend, as you suggest. She may have found sickness or some other crisis there which needed her attention. If she has, I don’t think she would welcome our interference. She is, as you have pointed out, a mature young woman of twenty-five, with her own concerns and her own decisions to make.’

  It was as dismissive as he could get. He stirred the papers vaguely on his desk to indicate his multitudinous other concerns. Anne Jackson wanted to go on arguing with him, but she saw that she was going to achieve nothing. She stood up and said, ‘I thought you would feel that the disruption of Clare’s studies warranted your attention. My own feeling is that something is wrong.’

  Shadwell stood up also, glad to indicate that this tiresome interlude was at an end. He sought for some compromise on which to end the exchange, sensing that he ought to give the girl something if she was not to go away and grumble to her peers. ‘It does seem that Clare is a conscientious student, and that this is a disruption of the normal pattern of her life. If she has not returned to her work and her residence by the end of this week, I suggest that you should report her absence to the relevant authorities.’

  Anne thought that she had just done that. It seemed not. The problem was back with her. She wondered when she had left the tutor’s office just who these mysterious ‘relevant authorities’ might be. The police, perhaps.

  Like most law-abiding people, Anne Jackson shrank from the thought of informing the police. There was surely some rational explanation for her flatmate’s absence. She decided that she had better leave matters as they were for a little longer.

  Hadn’t her personal tutor just told her that this was the right thing to do?

  Detective Sergeant Bert Hook wondered why he had volunteered himself for the post-mortem examination. It might be more than usually harrowing. No one knew how long the corpse had been in the water when the walkers discovered it in the Severn.

  He smiled to himself as he went into the laboratory and caught the familiar scent of the formaldehyde. This was the one area where he was better than John Lambert, whose stomach had remained sensitive through a quarter of a century of CID work and experiences like this. Bert knew he wouldn’t throw up, would remain professionally inquisitive and alert throughout the pathologist’s dismemberment of the corpse. He was too old a hand now to be shocked by the innards of a human body and whatever they might reveal about the life that was gone.

  He began his notes on the information which the Home Office pathologist spoke tersely into the microphone at his lips as he proceeded. Oldford CID would have the full report in due course, but Hook could save time by noting anything of interest now. The doctor had the microphone attached to his neck by an adjustable collar, so that he had both hands free for his work. Those hands now moved with swift efficiency into actions which laymen found gruesome but the pathologist had long since learned to regard as purely scientific.

  Bert Hook, watching unobtrusively as the police representative beside the table where the scientist worked, tried hard to see the thing beneath those expert hands as merely material for intelligent work and scientific conclusions. But despite considerable and various experience in such situations, he remained a policeman, not a medic. What lay on the bench might now be meat and bone which could be dismembered for its revelations, but Bert Hook’s reactions were dictated not by what this material was but by what it had so recently been.

  The corpse which had brought him here today remained to Hook a young woman, a life which had been abruptly arrested for ever in its prime.

  For that much already had been made evident. The pathologist had told his recorder before he made the first cut on the body that this was a young woman, probably between the ages of twenty and thirty, who had no external evidence of serious disease. Now, in less than a minute, he removed the breastplate to look at the heart and lungs. The quiet, unemotional voice told its microphone that the heart had been healthy; that it was still in its pericardial sack and not enlarged; that it had no apparent abnormalities. It weighed three hundred and forty-seven grams. The pathologist drew a sample of blood from the heart to send for toxicology. You could be much more certain of your conclusions with a corpse than with a living being.

  The lungs contained only a little river water and had been darkened by the sucking in of blood, the pathologist announced in calm, deliberately matter-of-fact tones. DS Hook knew well enough what this meant. This woman hadn’t died by drowning. She had been dead when she was put into the river. The ‘suspicious death’ of the police jargon had in this moment been translated into a coroner’s court verdict of ‘murder, by person or persons unknown’.

  And now, without any alteration in tone, the pathologist announced calmly, ‘The cause of death is almost certainly strangulation. There is severe bruising about the throat and the carotid artery has been crushed.’ It was what Hook expected. There was other, more superficial damage to the young skin, cuts and abrasions which could have occurred during the body’s journey down the river, but the blackness around the throat had always suggested a strangling.

  Body odours are what any attendant at a post-mortem examination remembers most vividly. Bert Hook was not going to retch and run for the lavatory bowl, as many novices in these things did. But he had to steel himself and his nostrils all the same as they reached the fourth part of the examination, the stomach and its contents, when the scents of the investigation prevailed over even the smell of the formaldehyde, which had originally seemed all-pervading.

  The average stomach stretches to accommodate two to four pints after a meal. This one was no exception. Within two to three hours of eating, food moves out of the stomach and into the small intestine. Because the process stops at death, this is one of the most valuable areas for detectives investigating foul play, often enabling them to assess the time of a particular death. This woman had eaten a meal of fish and chips some three hours before she died, in the pathologist’s opinion. He set the stomach contents carefully on one side in a sealed container for further investigation. Hook wondered if this anonymous woman had ever had such detailed attention paid to her diet when she was alive.

  Meanwhile, the pathologist was preparing to examine the tissues of the brain, that most intricate and subtle of computers, which had now been stilled for ever. It was the noisiest part of the autopsy, as he followed the incision he had made from ear to ear at the back of the skull with the electric saw to remove the skullcap. Hook flinched a little despite his experience: the clinical brutality of this assault to reveal the most complex part of human existence, the brain, which elevates man above the other living things on the planet, st
ill took him a little by surprise.

  He was glad when he was out in the dazzling light of a high summer noon, blinking with the shock of the sunlight after the white, artificial illumination of the Chepstow pathology lab.

  They had a murder victim all right. A young woman, as yet anonymous, stone dead before she was ever thrust into the wide, concealing waters of the Severn. Now they had to decide where to begin the investigation.

  Four

  This crime was not going to be easy.

  A Scenes of Crime team had examined the reach of the Severn and the bank beside it where the corpse had been discovered. The civilian head of the team was apologetic about the paucity of their findings. They had discovered a little detritus to bag and take away for examination. A battered comb, a ballpoint pen, a few fibres of some man-made fabric, a couple of hairs which were almost certainly human rather than canine. But these probably derived from walkers along the riverside path rather than from the corpse or anyone who had been in contact with it.

  Superintendent Lambert nodded resignedly and told himself he had expected nothing. You had to conduct these examinations, in case something helpful turned up unexpectedly. But the Severn was tidal here: its twice-daily rise and fall and its fast-running waters would quickly remove anything not securely attached to the corpse. More importantly, this was not the spot where the murder had been committed. This woman had been dead when she was consigned to the river, might have been killed many miles from the water. They did not even know the spot where she had been dumped into the river, which would have been much more significant than the location where the body was eventually found.

  Indeed, it was the absence of a real Scenes of Crime investigation which was one of the greatest problems of the case. In cases of serious assault and murder, the crime team comb the scene of the incident for any tiny detail of the ‘exchange’ which takes place between a criminal and his victim. Even experienced criminals usually leave behind some scrap of themselves: a fibre from clothing, a hair, a trace of saliva, sweat or semen. A SOCO investigation is normally the starting point for any investigation. Because of increasingly sophisticated DNA and other forensic techniques, it is also in effect the finishing point in a surprising number of cases, since the material gathered at the scene is more often than not the key evidence in securing a court conviction.

  Lambert’s team did not know the scene of this crime, and they might never know it. As yet, they did not even know the identity of the victim. The pathologist’s view was that the body had probably been in the water for between two and four days before being discovered. As the riverside walkers had come upon the corpse at Lydney on Wednesday morning, that indicated that it had probably been consigned to the Severn at some time during the preceding weekend.

  DI Rushton’s trawl of the Missing Persons register had so far produced no obvious candidate as the victim.

  House-to-house enquiries were being instituted in villages and towns within five miles of the Severn, but unless and until the CID had a clearer idea where the victim had been deposited in its waters, it was far too wide an area for Lambert to be confident of success. It was a way of using the manpower resources immediately afforded to a murder enquiry, but not, the chief superintendent feared, a very productive way.

  The team’s first break came in unlikely clothing. The diffident and unprepossessing man who presented himself at the reception desk of Oldford police station was embarrassed to be there at all. He had never been in a police station before, and his fragile confidence drained away as he spoke to the duty sergeant. His assertion that ‘It’s probably nothing really!’ meant that he was left waiting on a bench for twenty minutes whilst a shoplifter was processed and the details of a missing dog were entered in the register.

  It was only when he went up to the desk again and said that he thought he might be able to throw some light upon the identity of the Lydney corpse that he was ushered briskly through to the CID section. There Chris Rushton listened to his first halting sentences and decided that John Lambert would want to hear what this uncertain figure with the clean but frayed shirt collar had to say.

  Once he was invited to speak, the words tumbled from him like a fall of scree. ‘My name is Harry Shadwell. I’m a tutor at the university. I thought you should hear what one of my personal students told me yesterday morning. We each take a personal responsibility for three or four students in each year, you see. They can come to us with personal as well as academic problems. I thought at first that it was probably nothing, but on reflection—’

  ‘On reflection, you thought we ought to know about it. Your second reaction is the right one, Mr Shadwell. It’s a pity that it took twenty-four hours for you to decide to come here, but better late than never.’

  Curiously, the rebuke emboldened Harry Shadwell rather than checked him. He was not the most efficient of teachers, and he was used to being chivvied in his academic work. He plucked the cuffs of his shabby leather jacket straight, fastened onto the idea that his information was to be welcomed rather than derided, and became more precise. ‘This concerns one of my personal students. A young woman called Clare Mills. She seems to have gone missing.’

  Lambert made a note of the name. ‘Missing since when, Mr Shadwell?’

  ‘Only since the weekend. And there’s probably a perfectly good explanation for it. It’s just that I thought—’

  ‘Thought that you should act as a good citizen and give us the information. Quite right, Mr Shadwell. If she proves to be alive and well and merely embarrassed, so much the better!’

  Yet Lambert knew that a part of him was hoping that she wouldn’t be alive, that this was the body which had been cut up to reveal its secrets on the previous afternoon. He tried to conceal his growing excitement as he asked, ‘How normal would it be for a student to disappear from her studies for a few days like this?’

  ‘For many students, quite normal, I’m afraid. But not for Clare Mills.’

  ‘And why is she an exception?’

  ‘Clare’s a mature student. Twenty-five years old, and determined to make the most of the opportunity she’s been given to read for a degree. They’re often the best, you know, the students who come to higher education a little later. Better sense of perspective, better attitude to work, better—’

  ‘They also often have other responsibilities. You don’t think that it might be some other concern, some family matter for instance, which has required this student’s attention?’

  Harry Shadwell smiled in spite of himself: this was so near to his own initial reaction that it gave him confidence. He looked over the top of his glasses at his questioner and spoke as if outlining a difficult idea to a student. ‘That was exactly my initial reaction when her flatmate came to me yesterday, Mr Lambert. I thought the girl was probably busy with some other concern. But another twenty-four hours have gone past and there is still no news of her. Moreover, I have given some thought to the matter, as I indicated earlier. For Clare Mills, this is atypical behaviour. She does not miss lectures and tutorials: she is a most conscientious student. If she had needed to miss them – if she were ill or she had some family concern which needed her immediate attention – Clare would have been sure to let her tutors know that she was going to be absent.’

  Lambert reflected that all this had been so twenty-four hours earlier, when Shadwell had first been made aware of the situation. The tutor had wasted a full day, when days were precious; it was a statistic of CID life that the further away you got from the date of the murder, the less likely you were to solve it. But that was history: at least the man was here now, pinning down a possible victim for them. ‘Was this lady married?’

  ‘No. Well, I don’t think so.’ Harry Shadwell felt a familiar panic at his own inefficiency. He should know the backgrounds of his personal students, but he could remember little about Clare except that she had been an able and diligent student, and thus no trouble to him. ‘She was sharing a flat with another girl.’

  L
ambert smiled at the man’s naivety. ‘She could be separated from a spouse. She could be divorced. These things are highly relevant, if she’s disappeared. As is the whole of her family background, and any friends and enemies she may have made whilst on her course at university.’

  ‘Yes, I see that. Well, I can check her file and—’

  ‘We’ll need to have that file, Mr Shadwell. And if she does prove to be a murder victim, we’ll need to talk to her friends and her tutors at the university. Does anyone else know that you have come here today?’

  ‘No. It was my own initiative.’ Harry Shadwell seemed suddenly rather proud of himself.

  ‘Then please tell no one of it. The fewer people who know about this, the better. If the girl is alive and well, there is no need to stir up a hornets’ nest. If she isn’t, people will know soon enough what we are about.’

  One of the host of people who had surrounded Clare Mills in the teeming buildings of a modern university might have strangled her. There was no reason to let him or her know that the hunt had begun.

  They called him Denis.

  It had seemed a strange name to him at first, and people had laughed as they said it, but he had got used to it now. In the early days, he had failed to react to it a couple of times, and there had been much laughter. Denis had grinned sheepishly at his error, but he hadn’t been laughing inside.

  He knew that not responding to his new name could be dangerous for him. So he didn’t make that mistake any longer.

  He had been here for six weeks now, picking the strawberry crop under ten-foot-high polythene tunnels in Herefordshire. It was stifling work, toiling for long hours in oppressive conditions in the hottest part of the year. You could see why the British did not want to do it, when they could get other work. You could see why the farmer had to assemble a polyglot workforce, the desperate and the defeated from all parts of Europe.