Out of Sight

by Paul Gitsham

  ‘A bit chewed up, since it’s the widest point that’ll let two vehicles pass, and the weather hasn’t been ideal,’ said Warren, glancing at the scene report, ‘but there are some recent-looking tyre prints that Andy’s looking at. There are also some shoeprints on the riverbank that may be usable.’

  ‘There are houses either end of that road,’ said Ruskin. ‘If the body was dumped late at night, maybe somebody remembers a vehicle?’

  Warren nodded his agreement. ‘Hutch, can you organise some door-knockers?’

  With nothing else pressing, Warren looked at his watch. ‘OK, folks, this is far from ideal. We don’t know who the victim is, nor do we know when the body was dumped. But we can probably assume that our golden twenty-four hours are long past, and our killer has a significant head start. The forecast is for more rain, so any evidence that we haven’t secured yet is at risk. We’re against both the clock and the weather. Let’s get going.’

  Monday 28th November

  Chapter 3

  The body lay on a metal trolley. Beside Warren stood Moray Ruskin. As usual, the young detective constable appeared to be more fascinated than repulsed by the sight in front of them. Warren wished he felt the same way; he really hated autopsies.

  ‘The victim was an early-middle-aged male of what appears to be South Asian heritage, 174 centimetres in height. He was a little overweight, weighing eighty-nine kilogrammes, with moderate muscle mass.’

  The speaker was Professor Ryan Jordan, the American-born Home Office Pathologist who covered the part of eastern England where Middlesbury was located. With rain threatening to flood the shallow brook and compromise the scene still further, the body had been transported to Jordan’s morgue late the previous night, ready for the post-mortem first thing that morning, and Warren had driven Ruskin to the Lister Hospital in Stevenage to witness the procedure.

  ‘Lividity from blood-pooling is fixed and indicates that he spent some hours lying more or less flat on his back before being moved to his current position.’

  ‘So he wasn’t killed where we found him?’ asked Ruskin.

  Jordan rocked a hand from side-to-side. ‘All I can say at the moment is that the positioning of his body was changed after death. He was mutilated post-mortem; that might account for the change in posture.’

  He carefully lifted the right hand. ‘All of the fingerprints have been sliced off with a very sharp blade. I’ll take nail clippings as best I can, but I’m not promising.’

  ‘Any indication what they might have used?’ asked Ruskin, his mask rustling against his beard as he spoke.

  ‘Hard to tell. It could have been a scalpel or a box-cutter; you know, one of those Stanley knives that crafts people or woodworkers use. The lack of blood indicates that they were sliced off after death.’

  ‘Organised crime?’ asked Ruskin.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Warren, fervently hoping not – it was fair to say that his working relationship with the Serious Organised Crime department had had its ups and downs over the years.

  Warren moved to the head of the trolley. ‘I take it dental records won’t be much use?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. You need teeth and an intact jaw for that. Whoever did this put a lot of effort into making sure that wasn’t an option.’

  ‘Any idea what was used?’

  ‘From the shape of the impact marks, I’d say a blunt instrument with a round head, approximately three centimetres in diameter. Could be a hammer, or similar.’

  Warren had seen a lot of deaths over the years, but it was rare to see this degree of mutilation. ‘Post-mortem again?’

  ‘Yes. The killer was probably covered in blood clots and bits of flesh, but it won’t have been spraying everywhere.’

  ‘So, what did kill him?’ asked Ruskin.

  ‘I don’t know yet, there’s no other obvious serious trauma. I’ve sent off for blood toxicology. I did find this though,’ Jordan picked up a tablet computer. He flicked to a high-resolution photograph of the back of the man’s head. The victim had been bald on top, with jet-black hair covering the sides and the top of the neck. An ugly-looking gash was visible just above the hairline. The flesh around it was raised and swollen.

  ‘From the bruising, this was definitely pre-mortem. That was a hell of a smack to the head. I’d be willing to accept that it would have knocked him senseless, but my gut feeling is it wouldn’t have been enough to kill him. I’ll know more when I’ve examined the brain. A brain haemorrhage might have finished him off, but I haven’t seen any other indications of that yet.

  ‘What about these scars?’ asked Ruskin, leaning forward. The man’s upper arms and thighs were criss-crossed with lines and scratches, some of them purple against the bloodless beige of the man’s skin.

  ‘They’re several years old, possibly even dating back to childhood or adolescence,’ said Jordan. ‘Probably self-inflicted. From the depth and angle of the cuts, I’d suggest self-harm, rather than serious attempts at suicide. They don’t extend beyond the middle of the forearm, and wouldn’t be visible if our victim chose not to wear short-sleeved shirts or shorts.’

  ‘Private trauma, rather than public display,’ said Warren quietly. The way that the man had been dumped and then mutilated, like a problem that needed to be solved rather than a living human being, had felt callous and uncaring. Had the man’s death been the tragic culmination of a life full of sadness and pain, or had he at least found some peace and contentment? Had he loved and been loved? Warren pushed away those thoughts, returning his attention to Jordan.

  ‘Well, we can’t use fingerprints, and I doubt a photograph will be much help in identifying him, so it looks like it’s DNA,’ he said. ‘We might get lucky and find he’s been arrested previously.’

  ‘Even if he isn’t listed, it might not matter,’ said Jordan. ‘Our victim was fitted with a pacemaker. If it was done on the NHS, then the serial number should lead us right back to him.’

  Warren slumped behind his desk, a sudden feeling of weariness banishing the excitement and adrenaline that had driven him for the past twenty hours. It had been well after midnight the previous evening when he’d finally caught a taxi home, Susan having driven him straight to CID in the hire van. She was in bed when he returned and he’d slept in the guest room so as not to disturb her, his hope that he could use the weekend in Coventry as a catalyst to discuss their own future plans scuppered. He resolved to get on the web and order a brochure first thing – one of them needed to take action to break the unspoken deadlock between them.

  As always, the first few hours of the investigation had been a whirlwind of activity. Andy Harrison’s team had worked the scene through the night, but even with powerful lamps to assist them, there was little the officers combing the nearby fields for evidence could do after sundown. They’d resumed at first light.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the CID unit had swung into action. In the vast majority of cases, the killer was known to the victim; the clues to why the person was killed and who was responsible were there to be found within the victim’s day-to-day existence. Not knowing the victim’s identity put the team at a disadvantage from the start.

  Despite Jordan’s hopes that the victim’s pacemaker might provide a clue to his identity, Warren knew that would take time. Every hour that passed was another hour that the killer had to cover their tracks. Fast-track DNA matching would potentially yield results within the next twenty-four hours, but only if their victim was on the database.

  Ruskin had been working with the Missing Persons Unit since the previous afternoon and had compiled a list of men matching their victim’s rough description. But it was lengthy, and aside from the scars – which may well have remained hidden from view – the deceased had no distinguishing marks. Patient records weren’t routinely recorded on the database, meaning that they couldn’t even use the man’s heart condition to whittle down the candidates. And again, that assumed he was even on the system; depending on how recently he vanished and the
closeness of his personal relationships, it might be that no one had yet noticed his absence. And if his closest acquaintances had a role in his death …

  Warren fought down a feeling of impatience. Every member of his rapidly expanding team was busy doing their job, but until they started feeding back to him, there was nothing much he could do.

  Well, not quite nothing.

  He eyed his in-tray. The end of year was fast approaching, and the mounting paperwork for appraisals was causing the wire mesh tray to lean at a precarious angle. The sensible thing to do would be to make a start on it – to make the most of the temporary lull before the investigation took over everything. And before the tray toppled onto the floor.

  The door pushed open.

  ‘It didn’t look as though you’ve had much time for coffee, Boss.’ DI Tony Sutton placed a steaming mug on his desk.

  ‘In on your day off and bringing me coffee. Somebody’s just scored full marks on his appraisal,’ joked Warren.

  ‘Thought never crossed my mind,’ said Sutton, sitting down. ‘How did it go yesterday?’

  Warren shrugged. ‘Pretty much how I thought it would. My cousin donated most of the remaining furniture to the British Heart Foundation. Just a few last boxes of photos and keepsakes left – less than I thought to be honest; we probably could have saved ourselves some money and loaded the car instead of hiring a van. But then Susan loves minibuses, so any excuse. She reckons it’s nice to drive one without a dozen puking and screaming kids in the back.’

  Sutton snorted. ‘Yeah, I remember those days from when I used to take Josh and his teammates on football tours.’ He took a swig of his own drink. He’d known Warren long enough to recognise when he wanted to steer clear of something. ‘How do you think this one is going to play out?’ he asked, changing the subject. ‘I’ve been looking at the photos of the body. Somebody really didn’t want us to identify him. Organised Crime?’

  Warren let out a sigh. ‘Christ, I hope not. Hopefully, whoever disposed of the body has just watched a lot of gangster movies or true crime documentaries.’

  ‘Well, hopefully not too many, it makes our job a lot more difficult when the buggers know what they’re doing.’

  ‘Fingers crossed.’

  The first real breakthrough came shortly after lunch.

  DS Rachel Pymm phoned Warren in his office to tell him, ‘Just got a shout from the search teams at Carrington Farm.’ He hastened over to her desk, Sutton following.

  As ‘officer in the case’, it was Pymm’s job to manage the team of analysts that kept the sprawling HOLMES2 case management system up-to-date. Situated in the corner of the office, her workstation boasted three large monitors arranged in a horseshoe. To the side of her, the table housing her colour laser printer was already accumulating stacks of paper.

  Pymm had joined Middlesbury’s CID team two years ago when the tragic events of the previous summer had left them in need of a new case manager. An experienced detective sergeant, Pymm had been forced to retrain and take on a more deskbound job after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis had started to impact her mobility. These days, Warren found it hard to remember a time when she hadn’t been a part of his team and he had come to rely on her instincts.

  ‘What have they found?’ he asked.

  Pymm spun her ergonomic chair to face him, pushing her red plastic glasses back on her nose. ‘A hammer and a Stanley knife, wrapped in a towel and hidden under a tree stump, two-hundred metres from where the body was found. It looks as though they’re covered in blood.’

  ‘Bingo,’ said Sutton. ‘Now we’re cooking.’

  Chapter 4

  Mid-afternoon on the second day and so far they weren’t even certain how long the victim had been dead or who he was.

  Warren was reminded of a course he had attended back in his early days as a detective constable. The distinguished pathologist giving the lecture had been disdainful of TV coroners who were able to insert a thermometer into a dead body, then pronounce that the deceased had died between 11.35 p.m. and 12.10 a.m. ‘Total bollocks,’ the man had proclaimed. ‘If you ask me how long a person has been dead, I can tell you with great confidence that they died sometime between now and when they were last seen alive.’

  Of course, he was exaggerating. But with the cold weather slowing decomposition, all Prof. Jordan could say with certainty was that the man had been moved after death, and that he had died enough hours prior to the discovery for his body to reach ambient temperature. Given the weather conditions, and assuming the body hadn’t been kept in cold storage, he could have been killed anywhere from the night before he was found, to as much as a week earlier. In the meantime, all the team had to go on was the scene analysis.

  ‘We found his fingertips,’ said Andy Harrison over the conference phone. Warren had invited him to address the afternoon briefing directly and he’d been happy to join the discussion from his base at the force’s headquarters in Welwyn Garden City.

  ‘Dare I ask …’ said Warren.

  ‘Not good,’ said Harrison. ‘They’d been discarded a bit further downstream from the body. Looks as though they made a tasty lunch for some of the local critters. No chance in hell of printing him.’

  Warren looked around the table; the various expressions of his team told him he wasn’t the only person unwilling to linger on that image. He moved the conversation on.

  ‘What else have you got from the scene?’

  ‘Well, the good news is that we’ve found some pretty clear tyre tracks that I’m fairly confident come from the vehicle used to dump the body. If you could show everyone the first slide, Sir.’

  Warren turned to the wall screen that displayed the presentation that Harrison had emailed over before the briefing started. The first image was a top-down sketch of the dumping site.

  ‘The stream is on the right-hand side of a narrow road if you travel in a westerly direction away from the A506. There is a verge on that side of the road that is used for passing vehicles. We’ve isolated clear tyre tracks from there that we believe are likely to be those from the vehicle of interest.’

  ‘How can you be sure that they aren’t from an unrelated vehicle using it to pass another car?’ asked Hutchinson.

  ‘Next slide, please,’ instructed Harrison. The image changed to that of a tyre track on the muddy verge. ‘If you look at the pattern of the indentations surrounding those small stones and the way that the grass is flattened, it’s clear that the vehicle that made them was also travelling in a westerly direction, which means that it would have been on the left-hand side of the road. Passing cars that use the right-hand verge would be travelling in an easterly direction.

  ‘In addition, as you can see on the following slide, the tyres took some mud with them as they exited the verge, which then tracks back to the left-hand side of the road. Unless the driver had a complete brain-fart and forgot which side of the road we drive on in this country, I’m pretty sure it’s the car we’re looking for.’

  ‘How good are the impressions?’ asked Sutton.

  ‘The ones on the verge are OK. But there are better ones 200 metres up the road, where the same vehicle used the entrance to a field to do a three-point-turn.’ This time the image was a lot clearer. ‘The bad news is that they are fifteen-inch Goodyears; they fit loads of small to medium-sized vehicles. The good news is that the tyres have plenty of wear on them; find me a suspect vehicle and I’ll match them for you.’

  ‘What else have you got?’

  ‘Staying with impressions, we’ve isolated two different pairs of men’s footwear on the embankment. The water level in the stream is just a few centimetres, and we have several clear imprints from each shoe on the mud underneath the bridge, plus lots of partials surrounding the body. The prints were clear enough to run through the database. Nobody we know unfortunately, but again I have make and size, so find me a suspect and I’ll tell you if their shoes match.’

  ‘That’s brilliant, Andy,’ said Warren, before
the CSI hung up.

  ‘Well, that gives us something to work with if we get a suspect,’ said Sutton.

  ‘I’d be happy just to know who the victim is at the moment,’ said Warren. ‘How is the search going for his clothes and belongings, Hutch? I’m willing to settle for house and car keys, wallet with photo driving licence and an unlocked smart phone.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint,’ said Hutchinson. ‘The search team are making the most of the last of the daylight. They did a fingertip search – no pun intended – along the verge this morning, that’s how they found the hammer and knife. Tomorrow, teams with waders will do the rest of the stream and we’ve got a load more warm bodies coming up from Welwyn, plus dogs, to start on the fields. At least this time of year, there aren’t loads of crops, but if the killer decided to bury them … well it’s a big, rural area.’

  Warren took his point. He’d already spoken to DSI Grayson regarding the logistics for such a large search. They’d agreed to throw everything available at the search for forty-eight hours, before reviewing that decision. The days of blank cheques authorising hundreds of hours of overtime on an SIO’s say-so were long gone.

  ‘It’s early days,’ he said, ‘but let’s start thinking about motives. We’re already considering an organised crime angle, due to the mutilation.’

  ‘No wallet or phone,’ said Hutchinson, ‘so normally I’d think robbery, but the teeth and fingertips seem extreme, and where does the bed sheet come in?’

  ‘It feels pre-meditated,’ said Warren. ‘Or at least the disposal of the body does.’

  ‘Stripped naked could indicate a sexual motive,’ said Ruskin, ‘but Prof. Jordan hasn’t found any indications of rape or torture.’

  ‘The man’s of South Asian heritage,’ said Sutton, ‘so we should consider that it could have been racially motivated.’

  ‘Or even a so-called honour killing,’ said Richardson.

  ‘We definitely need to look into that angle,’ said Warren, ‘but at the moment we’re speculating.’