Death of an Expert Witness (6 page)

It was ten thirty-five and Brenda Pridmore, at the reception desk at the rear of the main hall of Hoggatt's Laboratory, watched wide-eyed while Inspector Blakelock drew towards him the first labelled bag of exhibits from the clunch pit murder. She put out a finger and tentatively slid it over the thin plastic through which the knickers, crumpled and stained round the crotch, were clearly visible. The detective constable who had brought in the exhibits had said that the girl had been to a dance. Funny, thought Brenda, that she hadn't bothered to put on clean underclothes. Perhaps she wasn't fastidious.

Or perhaps she had been in too much of a hurry to change. And now the intimate clothes which she had put on so unthinkingly on the day of her death would be smoothed out by strange hands, scrutinized under ultra-violet light, perhaps be handed up, neatly docketed, to the judge and jury in the Crown Court.

Brenda knew that she would never again be able to wear her own panties, their prettiness contaminated for ever by the memory of this dead unknown girl. Perhaps they had even bought them together in the same store, on the same day. She could recall the excitement of spending for the first time money she had actually earned. It had been a Saturday afternoon and there had been a crush round the lingerie counter, eager hands rummaging among the panties. She had liked the pair with the sprays of pink machine-embroidered flowers across the front. So, too, had this unknown girl. Perhaps their hands had touched. She cried:

"Inspector. Isn't death terrible?"

"Murder is. Death isn't; at least, no more than birth is. You couldn't have one without the other or there'd be no room for us all. I reckon I won't worry overmuch when my time comes."

"But that policeman who brought in the exhibits said that she was only eighteen. That's my age."

He was making out the folder for the new case, meticulously transferring details from the police form to the file. And his head, with the cropped dry hair which reminded her so of corn stubble, was bent low over the page so that she could not see his face. Suddenly she remembered being told that he had lost an only daughter, killed by a hit-and-run driver, and she wished the words unsaid. Her face flared and she turned her eyes away. But when he replied his voice was perfectly steady.

"Aye, poor lass. Led him on, I daresay. They never learn. What's that you've got?"

"It's the bag of male clothes, suit, shoes and underwear. Do you think these belong to the chief suspect?"

"They'll be the husband's, likely as not'

"But what can they prove? She was strangled, wasn't she?"

"No telling for certain until we get Dr. Kerrison's report. But they usually examine the chief suspect's clothes. There might be a trace of blood, a grain of sand or earth, paint, minute fibres from the victim's clothes, a trace of her saliva even. Or she could have been raped. All that bundle will go into the Biology Search Room with the victim's clothes."

"But the policeman didn't say anything about rape! I thought you said this bundle belongs to the husband."

"You don't want to let it worry you. You have to learn to be like a doctor or a nurse, detached, isn't it?"

"Is that how forensic scientists feel?"

"Likely as not. It's their job. They don't think about victims or suspects. That's for the police.

They're only concerned with scientific facts."

He was right, thought Brenda. She remembered the time only three days previously when the Senior Scientific Officer of the instrument section had let her look into the giant scanning electron microscope and watch the image of a minute pill of putty burst instantaneously into an exotic incandescent flower. He had explained.

"It's a coccolith, magnified six thousand times."

"A what?"

"The skeleton of a micro-organism which lived in the ancient seas from which the chalk in the putty was deposited. They're different, depending on where the chalk was quarried. That's how you can differentiate one sample of putty from another."

She had exclaimed: "But it's so lovely!"

He had taken her place at the eyepiece of the instrument. "Yes, nice, isn't it?"

But she had known that, while she looked back in wonder across a million years, his mind was on the minute scrape of putty from the heel of the suspect's shoe, the trace which might prove a man was a rapist or a murderer. And yet, she had thought, he doesn't really mind. All he cares about is getting the answer right. It would have been no use asking him whether he thought there was a unifying purpose in life, whether it could really be chance that an animal so small that it couldn't be seen by the naked eye could die millions of years ago in the depths of the sea and be resurrected by science to prove a man innocent or guilty.

It was odd, she thought, that scientists so often weren't religious when their work revealed a world so variously marvelous and yet so mysteriously unified and at one. Dr. Lorrimer seemed to be the only member of Hoggatt's who was known to go regularly to church. She wondered if she dared ask him about the coccolith and God. He had been very kind this morning about the murder. He had arrived at the Laboratory over an hour late, at ten o'clock, looking terribly tired because he had been up that night at the scene of crime, and had come over to the reception desk to collect his personal post. He had said:

"You'll be getting exhibits from your first murder case this morning.

Don't let them worry you, Brenda. There's only one death we need to be frightened of, and that's our own."

It was a strange thing to have said, an odd way to reassure her. But he was right. She was suddenly glad that Inspector Blakelock had done the documentation on the clunch pit murder. Now, with care, the owner of those stained panties would remain, for her, unknown, anonymous, a number in the biology series on a manila folder. Inspector Blakelock's voice broke into her thoughts:

"Have you got those court reports we checked yesterday ready for the post?"

"Yes, they've been entered in the book. I meant to ask you.

Why do all the court statements have "Criminal Justice Act 1967 sections 2 and 9' printed on them?"

"That's the statutory authority for written evidence to be tendered at committal proceedings and the Crown Court. You can look up the sections in the library. Before the 1967 Act the labs had a hard time of it, I can tell you, when all scientific evidence had to be given orally. Mind you, the court-going officers still have to spend a fair amount of time attending trials. The defence doesn't always accept the scientific findings. That's the difficult part of the job, not the analysis but standing alone in the witness box to defend it under cross-examination. If a man's no good in the box, then all the careful work he does here goes for nothing."

Brenda suddenly remembered something else that Mrs. Mallett had told her, that the motorist who had killed his daughter had been acquitted because the scientist had crumbled under the cross-examination; something to do with the analysis of chips of paint found on the road which matched the suspect's car. It must be terrible to lose an only child; to lose any child. Perhaps that was the worst thing that could happen to a human being.

No wonder Inspector Blakelock was often so quiet; that when the police officers came in with their hearty banter he answered only with that slow, gentle smile.

She glanced across at the Laboratory clock. Ten forty-rive. Any minute now the scene-of-crime course would be arriving for their lecture on the collection and preservation of scientific evidence, and this brief spell of quiet would be over. She wondered what Colonel Hoggatt would think if he could visit his Laboratory now. Her eyes were drawn, as they so often were, to his portrait hanging just outside the Director's office. Even from her place at the desk she could read the gold lettering on the frame.

Colonel William Makepeace Hoggatt

VC. Chief Constable 1894-1912

Founder of Hoggatt's Forensic Science Laboratory.

He was standing in the room which was still used as a library, his ruddy face stern and bewhiskered under the sprouting plumes of his hat, his braided, bemedalled tunic fastened with a row of gilt buttons. One proprietorial hand was laid, light as a priestly blessing, on an oldfashioned microscope in gleaming brass. But the minatory eyes weren't fixed on this latest scientific wonder; they were fixed on Brenda. Under his accusing gaze, recalled to duty, she bent again to her work.

By twelve o'clock the meeting of senior scientists in the Director's office to discuss the furniture and equipment for the new Laboratory was over, and Howarth rang for his secretary to clear the conference table. He watched her as she emptied and polished the ashtray (he didn't smoke and the smell of ash offended him), collected together the copies of the Laboratory plans and gathered up the strewn discarded papers. Even from his desk, Howarth could see Middlemass's complex geometrical doodles, and the crumpled agenda, ringed with coffee stains, of the Senior Vehicle Examiner, Bill Morgan.

He watched the girl as she moved with quiet competence about the table wondering, as always, what, if anything, was going on behind that extraordinarily wide brow, those slanted enigmatic eyes. He missed his old personal assistant, Marjory Faraker, more than he had expected. It had, he thought ruefully, been good for his self conceit to find that her devotion didn't, after all, extend to leaving London where, surprisingly, she had been discovered to have a life of her own, to join him in the fens. Like all good secretaries she had acquired, or at least known how to simulate, some of the idealized attributes of wife, mother, mistress, confidante, servant and friend without being, or indeed expecting to be, any of these. She had flattered his self-esteem, protected him from the minor irritations of life, preserved his privacy with maternal pugnacity, had ensured, with infinite tact, that he knew all he needed to know about what was going on in his Laboratory.

He couldn't complain about Angela Foley. She was a more than competent shorthand typist and an efficient secretary. Nothing was left undone.

It was just that for her he felt that he hardly existed, that his authority, meekly deferred to, was nevertheless a charade. The fact that she was Lorrimer's cousin was irrelevant. He had never heard her mention his name. He wondered from time to time what sort of a life she led in that remote cottage with her writer friend, how far it had satisfied her. But she told him nothing, not even about the Laboratory. He knew that Hoggatt's had a heartbeat--all institutions did-but the pulse eluded him. He said:

"The Foreign and Commonwealth Office want us to take a Danish biologist for two or three days next month. He's visiting England to look at the service. Fit him in, will you, when I'm free to give him some time. You'd better consult Dr. Lorrimer about his diary commitments. Then let the F.C.O. know what days we can offer."

"Yes, Dr. Howarth."

At least the autopsy was over. It had been worse than he had expected, but he had seen it through and without disgrace. He hadn't expected that the colours of the human body would be so vivid, so exotically beautiful. Now he saw again Kerrison's gloved fingers, sleek as eels, busying themselves at the body's orifices. Explaining, demonstrating, discarding. Presumably he had become as immune to disgust as he obviously was to the sweet-sour smell of his mortuary. And to all the experts in violent death, faced daily with the final disintegration of the personality, pity would be as irrelevant as disgust.

Aliss Foley was ready to go now and had come up to the desk to clear his out-tray. He said:

"Has Inspector Blakelock worked out last month's average turn-round figures yet?"

"Yes, sir. The average for all exhibits is down to twelve days, and the blood alcohol has fallen to 1.2 days. But the figure for crimes against the person is up again. I'm just typing the figures now."

"Let me have them as soon as they're ready, please." There were memories which, he suspected, would be even more insistent than Kerrison marking out with his cartilage knife on the milk white body the long line of the primary incision.

Doyle, that great black bull, grinning at him in the washroom afterwards as, side by side, they washed their hands. And why, he wondered, had he felt it necessary to wash? His hands hadn't been contaminated.

"The performance was well up to standard. Neat, quick and thorough, that's Doc Kerrison. Sorry we shan't be able to call for you when we're ready to make the arrest. Not allowed. You'll have to imagine that bit. But there'll be the trial to attend, with any luck."

Angela Foley was standing in front of the desk, looking at him strangely, he thought.

"Yes?"

"Scobie has had to go home, Dr. Howarth. He's not at all well.

He thinks it may be this two-day 'flu that's going about. And he says that the incinerator has broken down."

"Presumably he telephoned for the mechanic before he left."

"Yes, sir. He says it was all right yesterday morning when Inspector Doyle came with the court orders authorizing the destruction of the cannabis exhibits. It was working then."

Howarth was irritated. This was one of those minor administrative details which Miss Faraker would never have dreamed of troubling him with. Miss Foley was, he guessed, expecting him to say something sympathetic about Scobie, to inquire whether the old man had been fit to cycle home. Dr. MacIntyre had, no doubt, bleated like an anxious sheep when any of the staff were ill.