"No thanks, Bob," said Detective Superintendent Frank Cheever, wiping his lips with a handkerchief. He was older than the other two policemen, a fine-boned, rather studious-looking man with gray hair and pale blue eyes which he fixed unnervingly on the person he was talking to. He was something of a dandy and caused much amusement amongst his officers over what they considered his fetish for silk. He wore silk bow ties, tucked matching silk handkerchiefs into his jacket breast pocket, and kept his expensive silk socks at permanent stretch by the use of sock suspenders. Rumor had it that he also wore silk underwear "But don't mind us," he murmured, looking unhappily at the empty coffee mug on the desk. "You go ahead."
"I will." The doctor stuck his head round the door, waved the mug in the air, and asked his secretary to bring him a black coffee. "It takes the taste away," he said insensitively as he settled himself behind his desk and waved them towards some empty chairs, "Now, let's see what we've got." He consulted some typed notes in front of him. "I won't bore you with the life history of Calliphora erythrocephalus, which is the bluebottle we're dealing with here, but in essence the time lapse in warm weather between the laying of the eggs and the pupal stage is some ten to eleven days. We found no pupa cases, and the larvae at the time of the discovery were on the way to being mature third-stage maggots, which would suggest the eggs were laid some eight or nine days before." He tapped a calendar. "Yesterday was the twenty-third, so we're looking at the fourteenth or fifteenth as likely dates for laying. Add another day or two for Calliphora erythrocephalus to find the bodies, and my estimate for when death occurred would be the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth, with Monday the thirteenth as my first choice." He beamed at his secretary, who came in with his coffee and a plate of chocolate biscuits. "Sure you won't join me, gentlemen?"
They became visibly paler. It occurred to Detective Inspector Maddocks, a tall heavyset man in his mid-forties with a permanent scowl on his face, that Bob Clarke was doing this on purpose, a kind of trial of strength between the hard man of pathology and the hard men of CID. He'd always suspected the little bugger-Clarke was a miserable five feet six inches-of having a chip on his shoulder. Now he was sure. God, how he loathed arrogant little men! There was a horrible similarity between this cocky little scientist and the math teacher who was the cause of his pending third divorce.
"All right, Jenny. Thank you." Clarke dunked a biscuit into the cup and munched on it with pleasure. "Their hands and feet were tied, as you know, so we've got two people quite unable to defend themselves. Cause of death was ferocious bludgeoning with a blunt instrument." He pushed some X-ray photographs in Superintendent Cheever's direction with the flick of a finger. "We took these before we put them in the bath. You see how both skulls have been fractured in several places. This one, in particular, shows a clear rounded depression in the woman's parietal bone. A long-handled club or sledgehammer would be my bet, certainly something very substantial. Notice the break in the man's right clavicle, which would imply a missed shot"-he made a downward swing with his hand-"possibly glanced off the side of his head and landed with the force of a two-ton truck on the poor wretch's shoulder." He shook his head. "What we're looking at is two people on their knees with hands tied behind their backs and a maniac using them for target practice with something very heavy indeed. I think we can assume the first blows were delivered from behind because those are downward sweeps, and the blows that shattered the jaws and cheekbones were done after the bodies had toppled onto their sides. Imagine our maniac holding his hammer like a golf club and driving at both faces when they were on the ground. That should give you a good idea of what probably occurred."
Cheever dabbed at his lips again as he examined the photographs. "Where do you think it happened? In the ditch itself, or at the top of the bank?"
"My guess would be on the bank. The sort of blows I envisage would have been harder to achieve in a confined space. No, I see him killing them at the top of the slope, then pushing the bodies over. It's not very pleasant to dwell on"-he dunked another biscuit in his coffee-"but the golf-swing blows may have been his method of driving the corpses into a roll. Not that it would have worked very well," he said thoughtfully. "He'd have had to lay them out straight and give them a heave around their middles to really get them going."
"What about those slide marks we found five yards down?"
Bob Clarke sorted out another photograph. "Very interesting," he said. "Clearly made with a thin, hard heel. See here, quite deeply scored as if the wearer was sliding on one side with the heel digging in as a brake. But it's no more than an inch wide, so I'd suggest it was a woman's shoe."
"The female corpse was wearing running shoes," said Chee-ver.
"Yes. She couldn't have made marks like this, and neither could our male corpse. His heels are a good four inches wide. They weren't done all that recently, either-you can see where the grass has started to sprout again in places-so the chances are, there was either a woman present while the murder took place or someone else, who didn't report it, found the bodies before your old lady did."
"If that's true," said Cheever pensively, "then it's conceivable they may be our wallet thief. The logical assumption is that the murderer removed anything that could identify them, but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone else did the business." He glanced towards his colleagues. "What do you think?"
Gareth Maddocks gave a noncommittal shrug, his narrowed eyes, sunk in folds of thick flesh, watching the pathologist's biscuit-dunking routine with disgust. "You said it meant a woman might have been present during the murder," he reminded him. "Does that mean a woman could have delivered blows like this, or was she there only as a witness to a man delivering them?"
Apparently oblivious of the other man's distaste, Clarke rubbed biscuit crumbs from his fingers and started in on his coffee. "Assuming she had two people, incapacitated, on their knees in front of her and assuming a sledge or club hammer with a reasonable length handle, then any woman with the strength to swing the thing several times could inflict this sort of damage. But it's an unlikely modus operandi for a woman acting alone."
"Not impossible, though?"
"Nothing's impossible, but frankly, statistics and psychology are against you. It was a very physical crime, requiring energy and extreme savagery, neither of which are typical of female murderers. That's not to say there aren't some extremely savage and dangerous women about, but in my experience, they prefer to conduct their murders within the four walls of a house, using a pillow over the face, poison, guns and knives even. I'd plump for a man or men, if I were you, with the possibility of a woman in tow who witnessed the whole event. It really is a pity there's been so little rain recently. A nice piece of soggy ground, and I could have told you how many people were there, what they weighed and probably how tall they were." He paused briefly. "Of course you realize there'll have been a great deal of blood, and that's a brute to clean off, as you know. Your killer will probably have left bloodstains in the car he drove away in. I certainly feel those are areas worth concentrating on."
"Tell us about the victims," said Frank Cheever. "We've got height, build, and coloring. Anything else? What do their clothes say?"
"Ah, well, Jerry's having a field day with them." Clarke pulled out another set of notes. "It'll be a while before he can give you a full analysis, but this is what he's come up with so far. These people weren't poor, quite the reverse in fact-Jerry says look at the wealthier end of the market. The woman first. Not much help from the jeans, which are stone-washed, men's Levi 501s, but the T-shirt is American, made by a company called Arizona, and imported into this country by the Birmingham-based Interwear. Preliminary talks with them indicate that these T-shirts retail at fifty-five pounds from only ten stores throughout the country, all of which are centered in either London, Birmingham, or Glasgow. We're expecting a faxed list this afternoon, and Jerry will send it through to you as soon as it arrives, with precise details of the size, color code, and style that she was wearing." He followed the notes with his finger. "Her running shoes are a Nike brand, retailing at eighty-five pounds, and her underwear, again not too helpful, is top-of-the-range Marks and Spencers. The point is, nothing that she was wearing was what you or I would call cheap, considering all her clothes are of the casual type.