‘What if she climbed over the wooden fence? Not dragged, at least I don’t think so, that would have made more mess.’
‘She definitely died here,’ Lizzie said. ‘Aside from the obvious fact she bled out where she fell, look at her knees.’ The fabric was slightly stained, not green, but yellowy brown and on one knee the body of a spider was pressed into the cotton. ‘Pisaura mirabilis. It’s their favourite kind of habitat. The rhododendron roots, not the cotton, I mean.’
‘Are you saying that someone persuaded her to climb over the fence into this dank undergrowth and got her to kneel down, before slitting her throat like a butcher?’ Khan said.
‘It looks like it.’
‘So someone who knew her? Who she went with willingly?’
‘That’s not a forensic question, Detective Chief Inspector. Unless the body tells us there wasn’t a struggle.’
‘And unless we already have a suspect for you to forensically examine.’
‘The girl in the car? What’s the connection?’
‘Her name is Chloe Toms. She’s on probation. Bill Coldacre, the tall chap you’ll have passed in the car park, doesn’t know the details, but says she handed over a disclosure letter, which he passed on to his boss without reading. He also said the victim visited Chloe and gave her a lift home last Monday. Chloe left in the victim’s car, a little cream Fiat. Coldacre was quite precise about that. The remake, he said, of the Cinquecento, and in his opinion, an improvement.’ Khan’s eyes creased in a momentary smile. ‘Coldacre hasn’t seen this young woman since, not until he found her lying here, dead.’
‘Does she have a name?’ Lizzie said.
‘Chloe isn’t speaking and Coldacre says he can’t remember if he was told, but he thinks it was a foreign name.’
‘Handy,’ Lizzie shook her head.
She looked again at the mark on the victim’s arm and held her own hand above it, trying to match the bruising with the spaces between her own fingers. ‘Let’s see if Chloe Toms has got bigger hands than me.’
The tent opened and Janet stuck her head in.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ Janet said, ‘but Dr Huggins is keen to get her bagged up, says the heat’s going to make his job harder when he gets her on the slab. And Lizzie, we’ve found two pink sequins in the grass mowings.’
‘Damn.’
Khan looked up, frowning.
‘Well, it means she walked across that bit before it was mown,’ Lizzie said, ‘making footprints or any other DNA much harder to find. Janet, bag up all the grass cuttings, just in case.’
‘A handy way to cover one’s traces,’ Khan said. ‘Use an industrial lawnmower to obliterate your footprints.’
Khan stood up, as much as the low tent would allow, and offered her a hand. She pretended not to notice and sprung up from her squat with a quick abdominal contraction.
‘She’s all yours, detective.’
The air outside was warm and dry, but degrees cooler than the tent. She felt her blouse unstick from her back as she stretched. On a branch of the rhododendron, which had been pushed aside to fit the tent over the body, something caught her eye: a long black hair, hooked to the broken stem of a leaf. She reached up for it and held it for a moment, before tucking it away in an evidence bag.
Chloe Toms was sitting in the back seat of the police car. Lizzie needed the young woman’s clothes, but there was nowhere obvious for her to change. Lizzie spotted a low brick shed.
‘What’s in there?’ she asked a female officer.
‘Potting shed, ma’am. Where the gardening team has its base.’
‘Can you ask the girl to come with me?’
The officer opened the car door. She reached to her belt for her handcuffs, but Lizzie stopped her.
‘It’s not my decision, of course, but do you think that’s really necessary? She’s not under arrest yet, as far as I know.’
The girl didn’t look like she had the strength to run. She got out of the car and stood still, waiting to be told what to do. Her face was pale and drawn, her limp, blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. A patch of sweat had made a map of Africa through her olive green vest. Her limbs were spindly, shoulders pressing through the skin, but Lizzie could see she had strong, tight muscles roping up and down her arms. She clutched a baseball cap in her hands and as they started to walk towards the potting shed, she put it on, tugging the brim low.
In the cool, earthy stillness of the shed it took Lizzie a moment to become accustomed to the lack of light. The girl stared at the floor.
‘I’m a forensic specialist, Chloe. I’m not a police officer; I’m a scientist. I need to check your clothes for evidence, to see who’s been near the victim.’
The bony shoulders gave a barely perceptible shrug.
‘I need you to get undressed and put this plastic suit on. We’ll need your shoes too.’
She wished she didn’t have to put this young woman through the indignity of taking off her bra, but she’d learnt that the cleavage was a surprisingly useful place for catching particles. The girl didn’t care, she pulled off her vest top and held it out for Lizzie to catch in an evidence bag, unsnapped her bra and did likewise. Then she kicked off her shoes, peeled off her socks and let Lizzie pick them up while she dropped her trousers and offered them up for bagging. She stood naked except for her knickers. Lizzie was reminded of the pictures of liberated concentration camp victims. This girl might be muscular, but she didn’t look like she’d had a proper meal for weeks.
‘I’m sorry, but I need your knickers too.’
The female officer was watching and not watching at the same time, struggling to show Chloe Toms some dignity. She need not have bothered. Lizzie thought about what Khan had said. If she’d already served a sentence, she must have undressed in front of people in uniform many times over.
Lizzie handed her the forensic suit.
‘I’m going to swab your mouth and your fingers. And then the skin around your neck and chest.’
Lizzie couldn’t see any blood on Chloe’s clothes or skin. If she’d killed the victim as soon as she arrived at Halsworth Grange that morning, she would have needed access to a shower and a full change of clothes. Close up, Lizzie could smell she hadn’t been near a shower for a while.
When she was done, she sent Chloe Toms back to the car with the police officer. She hesitated in the cool quiet of the potting shed. Coldacre kept the place very neat and tidy. Brooms and rakes hung from wooden racks in the ceiling. A drawer in an old dresser revealed pairs of stiffened gardening gloves in large, medium and small sizes. Lizzie bagged them up. A cupboard was labelled ‘Hand Tools’. She pulled open the double doors and was confronted with an Aladdin’s Cave of axes, secateurs, trowels and saws, all dangling from leather loops on their handles from rows of horizontal pegs driven into the back of the cupboard. Her eyes scanned the gently swinging objects until they came to rest on a wooden-handled blade, which scooped round and ended in a sharp point.
‘That could do it,’ she said aloud in the silent, dusty shed and reached for it, barely noticing as the metal sliced across the fingertip of her latex glove.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Doncaster
Sean wandered slowly up towards the Eagle Mount flats. His dad would surely be awake by now, and, if he’d remembered anything at all about Sean staying there, he might be wondering where he was. Sean couldn’t face the stinking lift and took the stairs instead, his footsteps echoing off the concrete. He reached the first floor and heard the clunk of the lift arriving at the same level. He opened the door to the landing slowly, waiting to see who would step out of the lift. The metal doors jerked apart, but whoever was in there was moving with an equal degree of caution. Sean stayed on the stairs, letting the door close on the tip of his shoe, and levelled his eye up to the open crack as the slight figure of Saleem Asaf stepped out. The boy stood for a moment, listening, then approached Jack Denton’s door. He put his ear to the door and listened again. Saleem obviously didn’t like what he heard and pulled back.