Collaton shook his head. “Not really. It’s handy for the M1,” he said, “but a bit off the beaten track. If they were taking him somewhere, and he got troublesome…”
“Any witnesses?”
“Nobody saw or heard a thing. It’s out Husbands Bosworth way, toward the motorway, and at this time of year there’s nobody around. More in summer, tourist season, like.”
Banks nodded. Same as Eastvale. “Any physical evidence?”
“Tire tracks. That’s about all.”
“Anything interesting or unusual on his person?”
“Just the usual. Except his wallet was missing.”
“I doubt robbery was the motive,” Banks mused. “Maybe a London mugger might blow away someone with a shotgun, but not in some leafy Midlands lane.”
“My thoughts exactly,” said Collaton. “I thought maybe they’d taken it to help keep his identity unknown a bit longer. Maybe they didn’t know he’d got form and we’d find out that way.”
“Possibly.”
“Had he been up to anything lately?”
“We don’t know yet,” said Banks. “Rumor has it he’s been going straight. Had a job as a night watchman. We know he made five cash deposits of two hundred quid each over the past month, though, and I doubt that he came by the money honestly.”
Their food arrived. Collaton was right about the game pie. Annie nibbled at her cheese and pickled onion. Collaton kept looking at her out of the corner of his eye, when he thought no one noticed. At first Banks thought he was simply puzzled by her, as people often were, then he realized the dirty old bugger fancied her. And him old enough to be her father.
Suddenly, Banks felt himself struck almost as physically as by a blow by the memory of Emily Riddle in his hotel room. Not so much by her white and slender nakedness, the spider tattoo or the feel of her body pressing against his as by her torn dress, her fear, the little question mark of blood, and Barry Clough. Why on earth hadn’t he followed up on that? The next morning he had simply gone out to Oxford Street as soon as the shops opened and, not being skilled at shopping for women’s clothing, bought her a tracksuit because it seemed easiest. Though he had questioned her about the previous night, she had given away nothing, maintaining a surly silence all the way home. Did she even remember how she got to his hotel room and her awkward attempt at seducing him?
When he had driven her home from the station and left her with her parents, she had given him a look he found hard to interpret. Sad, yes, partly, and perhaps also a little let-down; defeated, a little hurt, but not completely without affection, a sort of complicit recognition that they had shared something together, been through an adventure. Banks had decided on the way that he had no reason to tell Riddle what happened down there. If Emily wanted to do so, that was fine, but his part of the bargain was over; she was Riddle’s problem now.
Still, it had gnawed at him over the past few weeks – Clough especially. Perhaps, if he had time over the next couple of days, he could make a few discreet inquiries of old friends on the Met, see if Clough had form, find out what his particular line of work was. Dirty Dick Burgess ought to know; he had been working with one of the top-level criminal intelligence departments for a while now. But Riddle had asked Banks to be discreet, and sometimes, when you set things in motion, you couldn’t always stop them as easily as you wanted to, and you didn’t know in which direction they would spin. That was Banks’s problem, as Riddle had told him more than once: he had never learned when to leave well enough alone.
“Sir?”
Banks snapped back from a long distance when he felt Annie’s elbow in his ribs. “Sorry. Miles away.”
“DI Collaton asked if we wanted to have a look at the scene after lunch.”
Banks looked at Collaton, who showed concern in his eyes, whether for Banks’s health or the lapse in attention wasn’t clear. “Yes,” he said, pushing his empty plate aside. “Yes, by all means let’s go have a look at poor old Charlie’s final resting place.”
After viewing the spot where Charlie Courage’s body had been discovered, just off a muddy track in some woods near Husbands Bosworth, they attended the postmortem in Market Harborough Hospital.
Courage’s body had already been photographed, finger-printed, weighed, measured and X-rayed the previous day. Now, the Home Office pathologist, Dr. Lindsey, and his assistants, worked methodically and patiently through a routine they must have carried out many times. Lindsey began with a close external examination, paying special attention to the gunshot pattern.
“Definitely a shotgun wound,” he said. “Twelve-bore, by the looks of it. Range about two or three yards.” He pointed out the central entrance opening over the heart and the numerous single small holes around it from the scattered shot. “Any closer and it would have been practically circular. Much farther away and the shot would have spread out more into smaller groups. There’s still some wadding embedded in the wounds, too. Look.” He held up a piece. “Depends whether they used a sawn-off, of course, as the shot patterns don’t hold as far. Even so, it was pretty close range. And judging by the angle of the main wounds, it looks as if either his killer was very tall or the victim was on his knees at the time.”
Banks guessed that if he was right in assuming Charlie had been taken for the long ride, then his killer would have used a sawn-off shotgun. The legal length for shotgun barrels was twenty-four inches, not including the stock, and no villain is going to walk or drive around with something that big.
“Then there’s this bruising,” Dr. Lindsey went on, pointing out the discoloration around Courage’s stomach and kidneys. “It looks as if he was beaten either with fists or some hard object before he was killed. Enough to make him piss blood for a week at least.”
“Perhaps somebody wanted him to tell them something?” Collaton said.
“From what I knew of Charlie, he’d give up his grandmother if you so much as waved your fist in his face. They might have wanted him to tell them something, but my bet is that he did, and then they carried on beating him up just for the fun of it.”
Next, Dr. Lindsey began his dissection with the Y-incision. He took blood samples, then removed and inspected the inner organs, working from the trachea, esophagus and what was left of the heart, down to the bladder and spleen.
As all this was going on, Banks kept a close eye on Annie. He didn’t know how good she was at postmortems on fairly fresh corpses, as the last one they had been to was of a skeleton disinterred after fifty years. Though she paled a little when Dr. Lindsey opened up the body cavity and swallowed rather loudly as he squished out the various organs as if he were shucking oysters, she stood her ground.
Until, that is, the power saw started ripping into the front quadrant of the skull. At that, Annie swayed, put her hand to her mouth and, making a gurgling sound, dashed out of the room. Dr. Lindsey rolled his eyes and Collaton glanced at Banks, who just shrugged.
Dr. Lindsey pulled out the brain, looked it over, tossed it from hand to hand as if it were a grapefruit, then put it aside for weighing and sectioning.
“Well,” he said, “until we get the tests back on the blood and tissue samples, we won’t know whether he was poisoned before he was shot. I doubt it, myself. Judging by the blood, I’d say the gunshot wound was the cause of death. It blew his heart open. And going by the lividity, I’d also say he was killed at the same spot he was found.”
“Did you determine time of death?” Banks asked, though he knew it was the question all pathologists hated the most.
Dr. Lindsey frowned and searched through a pile of notes on the lab bench. “I made some rough calculations at the scene. Only rough, of course. I’ve got them somewhere. Now, where… ah here it is. Rigor, temperature… allowing for the chilly weather and the rain… he was found on Tuesday, that’s yesterday, at about four P.M., and I surmised he’d been dead at least twenty-four hours, perhaps longer.”