Mistress Murder (8 page)

After cleaning as much of the mud off as they could, they carried the box to the van and took it to the mortuary of Oldfield Hospital.

Sergeant Burrell took the surveyor home and then went back to the station to wait for the Yard men and the pathologist. They arrived at eight o'clock, together with a liaison officer from the Yard Forensic Laboratory and, by half past eight, Dr Eustace Soames was starting his examination.

The little mortuary of the district hospital was packed out with the detectives, doctor, mortuary assistant, and the police photographers who lurked in the background with their apparatus.

Again the coffin plaque was checked for continuity of evidence. Then the lid was unscrewed.

Benbow, from experience of previous exhumations, stepped back as the seal was broken, but in this case there was no semi-explosive escape of foul gas. The body had only been down a couple of days and the weather was cold.

The body was photographed before being disturbed, then Burrell, who had seen it before burial, formally identified it to the pathologist. Soames, in rubber boots, long gown, and rubber apron, waited impatiently while the shroud was removed and the body placed on the porcelain slab.

‘Come on, come on, I'm playing golf at twelve,' he fretted.

The tubby mortuary attendant, on double time for a Saturday morning and with the prospect of a good tip as well, fussed about arranging instruments.

When Soames was ready to start, the police arranged themselves as close to the white-tiled walls as possible, to be out of range of the splashes for which Soames was notorious.

The bare remains of the girl from Newman Street lay on the dish-shaped slab. The pathologist stood with his gloved hands on his hips, staring intently at every part of it.

There was a pregnant silence.

‘Don't expect any miracles from me, Benbow,' he warned. ‘She's been washed, her clothes have gone, and she's been dead for nearly a week. The undertakers have pulled her about, buried her, and now dug her up! So I hope you'll appreciate that I'm starting at a disadvantage.'

Benbow looked at the battered corpse lying so still on the white table. He kept telling himself how lucky he was to have such a strong stomach, but his self-persuasion kept slipping. He forced himself to speak.

‘The main thing is, doctor, can you find anything to confirm our suspicions that she was deliberately crashed in that Sunbeam? If not, we can all go home and forget it.'

The burly pathologist wagged his florid face.

‘If she was, she must have been drunk, dead or unconscious. She wouldn't have sat there otherwise, would she?'

He bent over the body and began examining the outside in minute detail. Bray had been deputed to write down any dictated notes, and this helped to keep the young man's mind off the feelings of nausea which kept coming in waves from somewhere beneath his belt.

‘Rigor mortis absent from all limbs … lividity well marked on the back.'

Soames droned on as his fingers probed the pale flesh. The other police officers from the County looked on silently, each busy with their own thoughts or fighting their own particular brand of revulsion.

Every now and then Soames would ask for a photograph and the policemen from the photographic department would trundle up their tripod and scarify the mortuary with electronic flashes.

The doctor from London spent a long time probing around the head of the woman. He shaved off a wide area of the black hair and stepped back to let the camera team do their stuff again.

‘Any joy, doctor?' asked Benbow cautiously. He had a lot of respect for the man's opinion, but knew from experience that he couldn't be stampeded into an opinion.

Eustace Soames rubbed his itching nose on his shoulder, his gloves already being fouled up.

‘I don't like the look of it, Mr Benbow … I'd like to have a look at the car afterwards.' He paused and pointed to the shaved area of the girl's head. ‘There's a skin wound and a depressed fracture there. I can't tell much until I look under the skin, but it's most unlike a motor injury unless there's some unusual projection inside the car that would cause a deep narrow wound like that.'

Benbow's eyes glistened in his lumpy face. He forgot his stomach.

‘It could be a blow from a weapon, you mean?'

Soames pursed his lips. ‘Or a door handle or a window winder … no, it's the wrong shape for those, too long.' As he spoke, he bent down so close to the week-old corpse that his big nose almost touched its left ear. Then he took fine-pointed forceps and carefully picked something from the edge of the head wound.

‘Better have this, Inspector Hooper … bit of fibre, may be a contact trace, unless it's something the undertakers left behind.'

The Yard laboratory officer stepped forward with a plastic envelope and delicately took the little yellow thread.

Soames turned his attention to the rest of the body and looked at the fractures of the right arm and both legs. Then he began studying the inside of the forearms with greater care.

‘See those marks there,' he said to Benbow, pointing to the insides of the elbows and arms. ‘Needle marks. That one in the crook of the left elbow is direct into the vein. Looks much more recent than the others too.'

Archie Benbow had been too long in London's West End not to realise at once, the significance of the marks. ‘So she was on the hook?' he said.

Soames nodded. ‘Could explain why she was unconscious, I suppose, especially as that last one is intravenous instead of just under the skin like the others. Still, we're trying to run before we crawl, eh?'

The photographers moved away again and the bloody part of the business began.

For forty minutes the pathologist went through the organs, one by one. They were beginning to decay, but still good enough to show any abnormalities. He put several of them into big glass jars supplied by the laboratory officer and also took specimens of blood, urine, and stomach contents into bottles.

‘Want some hair and fingernail clippings?' he asked the liaison officer.

‘Aye, better have them, just for the record,' said Hooper. ‘If she was put out forcibly by somebody, she may just have had the chance to run her nails down the skin of his face. God knows they're long enough!'

He collected the tips of Rita's scarlet nails into another bottle in the faint hope that enough flesh might be trapped under them to provide blood group identification.

Benbow noticed the doctor sniffed like a beagle when he came to slit open the stomach.

‘Anything definite?'

‘Pooh! Booze, plus-plus!' answered Eustace Soames, wrinkling his long nose. ‘I don't know about drugs, but she's got enough alcohol in her belly to lay out an elephant!'

The examination finished about ten thirty, much to Bray's relief. Soames took the top of the skull away in a plastic bag, in case it was needed as an exhibit in the event of a court case. As he sat in the anteroom of the mortuary, he gave Benbow and Bray a summary of his findings.

‘I think you've got a case, Mr Benbow. She's got gross injuries consistent with a motor crash: open fractures of both thighs, busted arm, her chest crushed from the steering wheel and a dislocated neck … but I think she was dead before they occurred.'

The detective chief inspector bobbed his head gravely. Soames went on as he washed his hands and arms.

‘She has a deep localised fracture on the left side of the skull … most unlike a normal traffic injury, especially as the steering wheel has pinned her back so that her head couldn't ram the windscreen. Unless there's some odd projection inside the car to cause it, I don't see how the crash can be responsible.'

‘You think it's a deliberate blow, then?'

Soames back-pedalled slightly.

‘Ah well, the first thing a pathologist learns is never to say anything is impossible. But my opinion, for what it's worth, is that it's a blow. In court, any defence counsel worth his fee would tear me to shreds if I said that without any corroborating evidence.'

‘Have we got any?' asked Benbow.

‘Those leg injuries are very bad indeed – both main arteries torn across. Yet the sergeant here tells me that there wasn't much blood at the scene of the crash and certainly her kidneys and heart show not the slightest sign of severe haemorrhage. So I wouldn't be surprised if her circulation wasn't going when she hit the bridge – dead already, in fact.'

He made a final run-through with his comb in front of the tiny mirror. ‘And the last things, of course, are the alcohol and suspicion of drugs.'

Soames picked up his black instrument bag and made for the door.

‘Let's have a look at this car then, shall we?'

The whole posse drove the mile to the police station and went round the back to where the wrecked Sunbeam was garaged.

As they walked across the yard, Benbow raised the question of the yellow thread. ‘What's the significance of that?'

The forensic expert shrugged. ‘Maybe nothing at all, but it was driven down from the surface into the scalp wound. It may be a contact trace for the thing that hit her, unless we find lots more of it in the car – upholstery fibre or some such thing.'

They reached the Sunbeam and clustered around it. Soames squinted inside and looked around the windscreen area.

‘Nothing there – no fancy mirrors or spotlights sticking out. Anyway, it was too heavy a smack for anything flimsy like that to have caused the wound.'

‘Any idea what it could have been?' hazarded Bray.

‘Almost anything heavy – up to about an inch wide. Seems to have been a regular shape, but I can't say any more than that. There's more bullshine talked about the shape of blunt instruments than anything else in this game!'

Bray had wandered around to the back of the Alpine and was peering into the open boot. The crash had so distorted the bodywork that the lid was jammed wide open.

‘What about this?' he called.

The others joined him and he pointed to a wheel brace lying loose in the back.

Soames shook his head. ‘Too big and too round … it would have punched a bigger hole than we've got … but that might do.'

He indicated the long, slim starting handle clipped into supports near the spare wheel.

Hooper bent down to look more closely at it.

‘Nothing to see but you never know … I'll take it and the brace, just for the laughs.' He slid the two metal tools into large plastic bags, taking care not to disturb any prints or foreign material on the shafts.

The party soon broke up, Eustace Soames to his Saturday golf and the police to their homes.

On the way back to London, the keen young Bray challenged his boss. ‘Well, sir, have we or have we not got a murder on our hands?'

Soames sat regally back in the police Wolseley, his podgy hands folded in his lap. ‘I think so, lad, I feel it in me bones. But a lot will depend on you, Jimmy.' He turned his head to Hooper, sitting alongside him. ‘If you find blood on those tools, or if you find enough booze or drugs in her blood to make it obvious that she was too far gone to have been able to drive, then we're away.'

‘When will we know that?'

Jimmy Hooper scratched his nose thoughtfully.

‘Weekend now … I expect someone will do the stains and fibres part of it for you, but the analysis will have to wait till Monday. We're working flat out as it is, but this lot will get priority.'

‘And until then, Bray me boy, I think we'll have a gentle little snoop around Soho … tomorrow morning as soon as the pubs open will be about right, I think.'

Chapter Seven

About ten thirty that night, when Conrad Draper and Irish entered the Nineties Club, Snigger was perspiring behind his bar, dealing with the peak of the Saturday night rush.

He had no particular reason to take any notice of the pair; they were both members and so far, nothing had cropped up to tie them in with the tape recorder affair which Paul had eventually confided to Snigger.

The two men parked themselves at the end of the bar and began drinking. When the rush eased off an hour later, Snigger had time to take more notice of the clients.

The first cabaret had finished and the late one was due at midnight. His eye passed over the line of faces at the bar and only paused fleetingly on Irish.

He wondered idly whether the man had really given up the drug game or whether he was still an undisclosed competitor. He had only been a small-time dealer – a ‘ten deck man' – and the barman had not heard that he was active lately.

Snigger had already got rid of about fifty parcels of heroin and cocaine that evening. He kept a special stock of cigarettes in a separate glass cupboard behind the bar, which the two barmaids were forbidden to touch. In each of the packets he had a little polythene envelope of drugs hidden beneath the silver foil.

When one of his regular customers came up and asked for twenty cigarettes – ‘You know, my usual brand' – they got one from the private stock. In exchange, they passed over a pound note and even the closest observer would fail to see that Snigger dropped only a few small coins back in their palms as an apology for change. Some of his regulars, who were on big doses, passed over fivers and got special packets handed back with correspondingly large drug packets.

Snigger's only mental comment as his eye roved on to Conrad was that it was about time he had a decent win on the horses. He had poured hundreds of pounds into Draper's pockets and in spite of his experience as an ex-jockey, had had very little in return.

I'll bet I've bought him half a dozen like that, he thought grudgingly, eyeing the expensive but flashily-cut suit that hung from Draper's wide shoulders.

Conrad Draper suddenly looked up and caught the barman's eye. He raised a massive finger and crooked it in an imperious summons.

Snigger walked slowly down the bar, rapidly totting up his recent gambling losses. By the time he got to the far end he had calculated that he should be free of any debts with Draper, so this must be about something else.