‘Except the pit’s shut now,’ her brother had pointed out.
‘And I’m a girl,’ Lizzie added, ‘and girls haven’t gone down the mines since Lord Shaftesbury banned it.’ And then they took their overeducated, smug little selves to play outside on the play equipment. God, she marvelled at how snooty they were.
At the bottom of the Halsworth Grange drive, she waved her ID at the constable manning the gate and drove up to the car park, where another constable flagged her down and showed her where to leave her car. The car park itself was cordoned off. As she passed it, she noticed a group of angry people remonstrating with a woman at the ticket office about when they could get their vehicles out.
‘When I’m good and ready,’ Lizzie said to herself.
It amazed her that people could be so lacking in public spirit. You would think it was in their interest to solve a crime, but they behaved like it was a deliberate attempt to personally inconvenience them. At the foot of a half-mown slope of grass, a small white tent had already been erected. The whole field was taped off in a wide strip from the car park to the edge of a wooden fence and there were groups of police and CSIs nervously clustered on either side.
A tall, thickset man was in conversation with one of the uniforms. He occasionally nodded or shook his head. Every now and then he stole a glance at a woman cowering in the back seat of one of the police cars. Lizzie’s new deputy was coming towards her. Janet Wheeler, ex-hockey player for the Scottish national team, held out her hand and shook Lizzie’s with gusto.
‘Great. Good,’ Janet said. ‘Glad you got here so quickly. The pathologist is down there now. He wants us there tout de suite so we can get what we can before CID get their feet all over the scene.’
It was warm in the protective suit and once she was inside the tent, she realised they were going to have to work quickly. The smell told her that the body was fresh, but decomposing fast and they were competing with flies. She wished she hadn’t been so stubborn about waiting to check her phone in the shop. Janet was an excellent deputy, and everything was how it should be, but she should have been here sooner herself.
The photographer was covering every angle of the young woman, but Lizzie needed to stand back and make her own mental picture before they moved her. What she saw was almost a mirror image of the boy in the stairwelclass="underline" a foetal position, the body left where it fell, except this victim’s wound was to her neck, a deep cut to her throat, which ended below her left ear. When they turned her, they’d be able to see where it started. Blood had soaked into the ground, spreading across grass and compacted leaf mould. The blood had sprayed out and spattered the victim’s top.
‘Left-handed killer,’ Lizzie said out loud.
‘Go on,’ said Dr Huggins, who was testing the body temperature with an ear thermometer.
‘That looks like the end of the wound, because the skin’s wide open as the blade exits,’ she said. ‘It’s commensurate with the perpetrator being behind her, so he’s slit her throat from right to left. Odd though, a messy exit as he’s pulled the knife away. Like it’s snagged and he’s had to yank the wound wide open.’
‘Any reason you’re using the masculine?’
‘Sir?’
‘It’s just that the prime suspect is female.’
‘That woman they’ve got sitting in the car? You’re joking.’
‘I wouldn’t joke about a thing like that,’ Dr Huggins said. ‘We need to be very clear about what’s in front of us, Lizzie. If you have the slightest shred of doubt that this is the work of a five-foot, six-inch female, who looks like she weighs in at less than eight stone, than you’ll need to be cast iron with the facts. Otherwise CID will throw the book at her and she doesn’t look like she’s got the strength to dodge it.’
‘Did she find the body?’
‘We don’t know. She’s not speaking. The big fellow called 999. Mr Coldacre. The young woman was mowing the grass and had come to a standstill. But Coldacre says she knew the victim, so it would be useful if she did decide to talk. There’s no ID on the body, no handbag, no wallet and no cars unaccounted for in the car park, but I’m sure the detective will fill you in.’
Lizzie squatted down by the victim’s feet. The pink sandals were marked with fresh grass stains and had picked up the crushed head of a clover flower. She bagged the flower and handed it to Janet.
‘OK, let’s start a fingertip of the field. Look for footsteps in the long grass. And get someone to go through the cuttings from that lawnmower.’
‘Here,’ Huggins was pointing to a mark on the girl’s arm. ‘Someone gripped her hard. That mark is recent, discolouration is what I’d expect from the estimated time of death.’
‘Good, we’ll be able to get something off it, prints hopefully or maybe sweat. But first, my little beauties,’ Lizzie opened her kit box and took out a piece of sticky paper. She peeled off the backing and drew the paper carefully through the air where a couple of flies were trying their luck over the pool of coagulating blood. ‘Come to mama. Gotcha!’
‘Delightful,’ Huggins said dryly. ‘I’m pretty much done until we get her on the slab.’
‘Time of death?’
‘About five hours ago.’
‘We’ll see if the flies agree. Meanwhile, I’m OK for CID to come in now. Just need to swab this bruise.’
She brushed gently over the darkened skin and allowed herself, for a moment, to feel a wave of sorrow for this young woman who had either walked, or run, to her sudden and violent death in the undergrowth. She felt the ghost of a breeze as Huggins left the tent and heard the sound of low, male voices.
‘Miss Morrison,’ Khan nodded formally as he ducked into the tent, his eyes large and dark over a paper mask. She tried to set her face and her feelings to neutral. The way he’d treated Sean had lost Khan most of his remaining allies on the Doncaster team, but she had a job to do, so she tried to push that from her mind.
‘DCI Khan, you’re just in time to help me turn her over.’
‘Were you hoping for someone else? Another detective?’
She clearly hadn’t done the neutral face as well as she thought.
‘Not necessarily,’ she lied.
‘DI Houghton and DS Simkins are both on the Chasebridge estate today, following up the Asaf murder.’
‘Really?’ She was genuinely surprised. ‘I thought that was your case?’
‘I’ve been informed I am too emotionally involved,’ he said, with a completely level voice, not meeting her eye. ‘Apparently that’s not seen as a problem when attending the untimely death of this young woman.’
He stretched out a gloved hand and lifted a gold chain that hung loosely over the girl’s breastbone. On his fingertip lay a tiny gold pendant, spelling out a trio of Arabic letters. His lips moved silently.
‘Shall we?’ She indicated it was time to turn the body.
As she slid her latex-gloved hands beneath the girl’s back, she felt the bone of the shoulder blade under her fingers. It was just like the scapula of a living person, the part you feel when you throw your arm round a friend’s shoulder.
‘Clothes appear intact, no obvious sexual assault?’ His clipped tone indicated he was back on the job, the moment of sympathy had passed.
‘As far as we can see,’ Lizzie said.
The young woman lay on her back, but the rigor in her limbs kept her knees bent. If there wasn’t a huge gaping wound in her neck, you might think it was someone lying on the grass to watch the clouds go by. The skin beneath her eyes was smudged where her mascara and eyeliner had run. Lizzie took a sample pot and swabbed the victim’s tear ducts and the skin beneath her lower lids.
‘It’s going to have a high sodium content,’ she said. ‘She’d been crying.’
She carefully picked a crushed purple rhododendron flower off the young woman’s thigh and lifted the thin cotton of her patterned smock to reveal that her calf-length trousers were done up, clean and undisturbed. ‘Huggins will do a proper check when we get her back. But you’re right. Her clothes show no sign of sexual assault. Nothing’s torn. Here, look, this stain’s too dark for grass. Algae maybe? On the lower inside of her trousers.’