by Anna Legat
Within an hour, Dr Almond is ready to carry out the autopsy. Gillian isn’t interested in every minute detail – she will have that in the post-mortem report, if she needs it. But she listens intently when the pathologist describes the wounds to the skull. ‘A single blow to the back of the head. It didn’t kill him, but it rendered him unconscious. The weapon was a blunt, cylindrical object with a ragged surface, going by the shape of the indentation.’ He squints and picks up a pair of tweezers and pokes them gently into the wound to retrieve some microscopic object. He puts it under a microscope, adjusts the zoom, and delivers his verdict. ‘Bark. Looks like bark. It was a tree branch that he was hit with.’
‘Another confirmation that it wasn’t premeditated: a random murder weapon.’ Gillian observes.
‘Looks like it. Plenty of tree branches in a wood. The murder weapon may still be there, blending in with the background.’ Almond returns to the body. He resumes his examination of the skull. ‘Now, the blows to the side of the face: those were much more violent. Repeated and frenzied, I’d say... The blow to the left temple finished him off, but there were several blows delivered post mortem. The skull is crushed in four places, the cheekbone fractured. Take a look at the X-ray.’
Gillian follows him and gazes, a bit distracted, at the X-ray whilst Dr Almond luxuriates in a detailed exposition. ‘I’d say there were two assailants.’ This statement captures her attention.
‘Two?’
‘You see, the blow to the back of the head was executed by a left-handed individual whilst the cluster of blows to the side of the face would indicate someone right-handed. Those blows were delivered from the front, by someone who was facing the victim. They’re located in this area,’ he circles his finger around the victim’s left temple.
‘So that’d be someone right handed. Even if they held the branch with both hands, they’d swing it this way,’ Gillian demonstrates, holding an imaginary branch in her hands and taking a swing at the corpse.
‘Yes, exactly. Whilst the blow to the back of the head caught the skull from this side,’ Almond turns the head to show Gillian the wound.
‘A left-hander,’ Gillian concludes. ‘Two different people... Same branch?’
‘Probably. Though there could be two branches. Interestingly, though, the left-handed assailant hit the victim just once. It is the right-hander who went berserk.’
‘OK. Thanks, Michael.’ Gillian now has something to go on.
‘Don’t go away yet. There’s something you need to know: about the victim’s state of undress.’
‘The missing trousers?’
‘His trousers and shoes are missing, yes. I think the underpants were there, buried with him. Sort of – tangled around his ankles. The intriguing thing is that he was caught... hmm,’ Almond smirks under his enormous moustache, ‘In the act.’
‘You mean he was having sex when he was attacked?’
‘Right in the middle of it, I’d say.’
‘Consensual?’
‘On his part, yes. A decent erection by any man’s standards.’
‘Any defensive wounds to indicate -’
‘A few scratches around the neck area. I’ve sent samples for DNA testing. We’ll see what comes back.’
XXX
Even though Gillian doesn’t like being ordered around and told what to do, she has to agree with Philip Weston-Jones that the homeless people in Sexton’s Wood are the most likely candidates for suspects. It looks like a group effort: at least two of them acted in cohort. There is a colourful assembly of misfits to choose from in the camp, so Gillian heads for the wood to carry out a reconnaissance. Erin comes along.
Reluctant to pay yet another visit at the Weston Estate, which is just a short distance walk from the wood, they park their car in a lay-by on the Sexton’s Canning side, and go on foot, taking the much longer but pleasant footpath favoured by dog walkers and bird watchers. By a wooden bench dedicated to the memory of Gloria Proust, beloved mother and wife, they swerve off the path and head towards Sexton’s Wood which looms before them forbidding and motionless a few hundred yards away. It is only four thirty, but this close to the winter solstice, the night has already begun its descent. The greyness of the landscape thickens with every minute.
‘We’ll have to tread carefully,’ Gillian instructs Erin. ‘We don’t want to scare them off. You know how they are: here today, gone tomorrow. If any of them have something to hide, they’ll up and go in a blink of an eye, and we won’t track them down. They leave no traces behind, the homeless: no paper trail, no forwarding address -zilch.’
‘How much should we tell them?’
‘Only that we found a body, whose body it is, that it’s been in the ground for a week or so... We’ll ask if anyone saw anything, heard anything, came across any strangers in the wood. Treat them politely, Erin, and make them feel more like witnesses than potential suspects. That’s all they are at the moment.’
‘They won’t be inclined to cooperate with the police in whatever capacity. Even if they saw something-’
‘I know. Even if they know something, they won’t be telling us in a hurry.’
‘It’s a bit of a wild goose chase, isn’t it?’
‘Not quite. I want to get the general vibe, you see what I mean?’
Erin frowns.
‘Well, I’m relying on their... how should I put it? Their sense of community. If one of them has done the deed, then others would know. And they’d be in on it – you know, helping their mate. They would’ve helped bury the body. There’ll be something in the air – a sense of something...’
‘What?’
‘I’ll tell you when I find it.’
‘If you find it.’
‘It’s perfectly possible this whole thing has nothing to do with them. We can’t point fingers just because they’re homeless, they smell, and have bad dress sense.’
‘But they do have a motive. Weston-Jones was doing his best to get them evicted.’
‘Yes, and we can’t ignore facts. They have the motive, the means and the opportunity – the crime was committed right on their doorstep... But we don’t yet have the evidence that any of them was involved.’
‘Shouldn’t we wait for it?’
‘And let them all disperse into the night? They must know by now that we’ve found the body. This is why we must talk to them now – to get the vibe.’
Erin smiles under her breath at Gillian’s strictly textbook detection methods. ‘The vibe, yes.’
Gillian doesn’t pick on the sarcasm in Erin’s tone. ‘We go in, we chat to them nicely and ask for witnesses... They’ll tell us they saw and heard nothing. We’ll go away, and that’s when they may lower their guard. They’ll be thinking: the cops’ve been, sniffed around, found nothing, they got nothing on us – we’re off the hook. They’re lulled into a false sense of security, and that’s when we’ve got them where we want them.’
‘Where does that lead us though?’
‘Hopefully Forensics will come up with foreign DNA on the body. We’ll go back and ask them for samples for elimination purposes, and all that. That’s when they’ll start panicking, but it’ll be too late to run by then.’
The vibe isn’t there. A jolly and carefree motley crew of familiar faces is going about their business of being idle and not giving a toss about the world at large. There isn’t a welcoming committee on hand either – the police detectives’ arrival is hardly noticed. The fire in the centre is crackling merrily, keeping the inhabitants’ bones dry and warm. It is almost an idyllic scene. Six of them are there – it seems the whole lot of them are having a little get together – a veritable afternoon tea with scones, cream, and strawberry jam. If not a cream tea then at least beer cans are circulating, and for some a mug of steaming coffee, it appears. The stocky, happy woman is there, next to her scruffy companion who last time mocked Gillian about the livestock missing from the estate. The skin-and-bone bloke is puffing on a joint, and the short, wiry one in his fur-trimmed gilet
, his hood over his head, is blowing steam off his tin mug; the lofty Izzie is there of course, as well as the man with his own vernacular, which is filled with words so convoluted in some obscure regional dialect that Gillian has no hope of interviewing him without an interpreter. When it comes to it. If it comes to it.
Gillian squats in front of the fire, next to Izzie. She has come to regard Izzie as almost a friend after their brief conversation on the hill two weeks ago. Erin wanders around the camp, unhindered and unchallenged. No-one cares. No-one has anything to hide. The vibe of guilt and reckoning isn’t here at all.
‘So what’s the fuss all about?’ Izzie asks.
‘We found a body.’
‘Told ya, Ron!’ the stocky woman prods the skinny man with her beer can, ‘Told ya it were a stiff in da! Ye owe me a fiver.’
The skinny man sniggers. ‘Search me!’
‘So who is it?’ Izzie inquires.
‘Joshua Weston-Jones. Your neighbour.’ Gillian watches Izzie’s reaction to that, but there isn’t much to go on.
She shrugs. ‘Can’t say I’m sorry to hear it. He was a pig of a man.’
‘Fuckin’ bastard, he were!’ the stocky woman concurs.
‘Still, he was murdered, buried in a shallow grave, and we need to find out who did it,’ Gillian points out, amiably.
‘Search me!’ the man called Ron repeats both the phrase and his toothless snigger.
The one with the indecipherable accent adds something, which makes them all laugh. Ron salutes with his beer can, ‘Chin-chin!’
‘What’s yer friend sniffing for? She got a warrant, or some’in?’ the stocky woman demands to know all of a sudden. Still, Gillian knows, the woman’s unease does not amount to an admission of guilt.
‘She’s just looking around,’ she says.
‘Ye tell her not to touch anythin’ what’s not hers.’
‘We’re hoping you could help us with our inquiries. You know this wood inside out – you’d notice anything odd, any strangers wandering about...’
‘Yes, we would, but haven’t. You’d better ask them on the Estate. They’ve got many more visitors than we do,’ Izzie says exactly what Gillian expected to hear.
‘We will.’
‘Good. Ye ain’t hangin’ this one on us!’
‘I never said -’
‘But ye was thinkin’ just that!’
The fire is dying, but no one gets up to add any logs. The dark and the cold creep in to fill the vacuum. Gillian shivers. Erin is also back by the fire. She shakes her head – she’s found nothing of interest.
‘We’d better be going,’ Gillian gets up.
‘Good riddance!’ Ron sniggers.
‘If you think of anything...’
‘We still have your number handy,’ Izzie tells her. ‘By the way, put your torch on – we’ve set up snares in the undergrowth. Rabbit traps, mainly. Better watch where you step.’
Gillian and Erin thank her for the tip, and take off, torches blazing.
They are halfway back to the car, the bench in memory of Gloria Proust within sight, when it hits Gillian: the man in the fur-trimmed gilet! Yes, he was familiar. Yes she knows him. She recognised the gilet, though perhaps without the oversized cargo trousers and the backpack, without seeing his face, which he hid behind the steaming mug, without looking into those narrow, hooded eyes – she didn’t realise it was HIM.
Could it be?
She stops. Erin looks at her, baffled. ‘What is it?’
Gillian can’t be certain, but she can’t take any chances. What if it is HIM? What if she has just let him slip away for the second time?
‘That man, drinking coffee, with a hood on...’
‘What about him?’
‘He didn’t say a word.’
‘OK... so he didn’t. Does that make him a suspect?’
‘I think I know him. I think he’s the bomber... I just need to look him in the eye. We need to go back, before he disappears into thin air...’
‘Are you sure?’
‘That’s what I’m saying – I am not! But I must go back.’ Gillian has to think fast. He didn’t expect to run into her – the only person alive who knows his face. The clever bastard, he hid in plain sight: amongst the homeless, sitting there by the fire, with not a twitch of a muscle. The bastard has nerves of steel. But now, she knows, he will be on his way. She knows he will take no chance of facing her by day. ‘Call for backup. Call for Armed Response officers. Now, Erin! Back to the car... Get on the radio... no mobile signal here.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Going back. I’m keeping an eye on him till they get here... I want to be sure it’s him.’
‘You can’t go alone!’
‘I’m not confronting him, for God’s sake! Go and call for fucking backup, DC Macfadyen! Don’t just stand there!’
Haji knows letting the woman go was a mistake. It was the gravest mistake he has made, and it may cost him his life. But she is so much like his beloved Svetlana! Fair and petite – one to take care of, to protect. He couldn’t hurt a single hair on her head. He still can’t.
She didn’t recognise him, but she will come back, in broad daylight, and she will know him. She will come back because Haji has made another fatal mistake: saving Izzie from that man, the rapist. He should’ve known better. This is not Afghanistan where bodies rot away unclaimed and forgotten, where there is nobody to look for them, to bury them, to seek revenge – because everybody is dead, every father, every son, every relative. Whole villages are dead and no one is left to pursue justice. Here, it’s a different world. Here, even a rapist and a scoundrel gets to be avenged, so the policewoman will come back and she will bring others with her.
Haji has to make a move before she does.
‘I will be going,’ he tells his companions.
‘What? Goin’ where?’ Sally blinks at him, baffled.
‘You don’t want to know. Thank you for your hospitality. All of you.’
Ron salutes him with his beer can, ‘Pity, man. Good knowin’ ya.’ Twitch shakes his head, but then, on second thoughts, he takes a puff of his joint and looks away, gazing blankly into space. Tomorrow, he will swear he’s never known anyone called Sandman.
‘You’ve got nowhere to go,’ Izzie tells Haji. She already knows him too well. The more reason for Haji to leave now.
‘I’m not going anywhere. I am just going away from here. It’s better for you. The police – I don’t like the police.’
‘Who does! Pigs!’ Ron chucks an empty can into the fire. The remnants of alcohol burst into a bright blue flame as they spill out of it.
‘OK, you’re right,’ Izzie agrees. ‘They’ll be back. They won’t give up. Let’s go – I’ll take you somewhere where you can lie low for a while, until the dust settles. We both need to go.’
She is right. He wouldn’t want her to tag along with him, not ordinarily, but this is her turf – she knows her way around here. Haji is feeling in the dark like a blind man. He will let her lead him. If there is anyone he can trust, it is Izzie. She, too, has to run. They’ll run together.
‘We must go now,’ he says. ‘We get our things and go.’ He gets up. His few precious belongings are in the den, buried under his sleeping mat.
‘The police are on their way. You aren’t going anywhere. It’s over.’ The voice of the policewoman comes from the darkness, outside the reach of the campfire light. Haji freezes, and waits. The policewoman enters the circle of light. She is talking slowly and softly, lulling him into resignation, and then surrender. He knows precisely what she is doing. She is buying time, enough time for her backup to arrive. But they are not here yet, and she is not armed. Not like the last time. She has nothing to bargain with. But Haji does.
Fast as a desert snake, he pulls out his knife, grabs Ron by the scruff of his neck and lifts his scrawny person up, like a shield. He presses the blade of his knife to Ron’s throat. Ron curses and tries to wriggle out of Haji’s gr
asp, only hurting himself in the process. ‘Fuck! I’m bleeding,’ he squeals. ‘What ya doin’, Sandman!’
‘Stay still,’ Haji tightens his grip on Ron and presses the blade harder against his skin. ‘Come here slowly,’ he instructs the policewoman, ‘Lie down on the ground, face down. Or he dies, and I come for you.’
Ron squirms and whimpers, ‘I don’t wanna die!’ He cries like a baby.
Twitch springs to his feet and charges at Haji across the smouldering fire – a raging bull. He hurtles towards him, shouting unintelligible insults, or threats. Haji has no choice. In fact, no conscious thought enters his mind. He simply removes the knife from Ron’s throat, points it at Twitch and lets the man impale himself on it. Twitch’s eyes bulge in disbelief as his face levels with Haji’s and blood gurgles out of his mouth. Haji twists the knife for good measure, and pulls it out of Twitch’s chest, letting the man slump to the ground. Twitch falls backwards, into the campfire, sending sparks and a firework of ashes into the air; the fire feeds on the newly received fuel.
Haji swiftly returns the blade of his knife to Ron’s throat and nods to the policewoman to take no more chances. He means what he says – she should know that by now. He let her go once. He won’t make that mistake again. He wants her to lie down, face to the ground so he won’t have to look into her eyes when he is killing her – he won’t have to look into her eyes and see Svetlana. ‘Get down!’
The clink of the skewer being pulled out of the spit-roast right behind him doesn’t have the time to penetrate his mind, but the skewer takes only a second to penetrate his back and travel through his heart, emerging on the other side – just the tip of it, the sharp end protruding out of his chest as he gapes at it without comprehension. He can feel Izzie’s closeness behind him and can smell her scent briefly, before he drops to his knees. She catches him just in time and lowers him gently to the ground. Her hands are bathed in his blood. She is crying, saying something to him, something he can no longer hear, but he knows – she is saying sorry.
He shouldn’t have killed Twitch. He shouldn’t have put a knife to Ron’s throat. Mistakes have piled up – he can’t unravel them. Not enough time before he dies.
