‘Dr Rothwell — ’ Ainsclough indicated the slightly built young man — ‘the duty police surgeon.’
‘Ah.’ Vicary extended his hand. ‘DS Vicary.’
‘Nice to meet you, sir.’ Rothwell shook Vicary’s hand warmly. ‘Well, I have confirmed life extinct.’ He spoke with a distinct West Country accent. ‘And I think it is suspicious. Contusions to the neck, open eyes. . petechial haemorrhaging. . but that is for the next box, so to speak.’
‘Understood.’ Vicary glanced at Ainsclough. ‘SOCO? Home Office pathologist?’
‘Both requested, sir.’
‘Well, no need for me to remain.’ Rothwell closed his Gladstone bag. ‘I have another call to make. It’s going to be one of those nights. No rest for the wicked.’ Rothwell stepped lightly out of the room and exited the house.
‘Brunnie?’ Vicary asked.
‘Here, sir.’ Brunnie entered the room. ‘Just taken a quick sweep of the house — all the attic rooms seem to have been used for storage. . furniture in the main. So, just three other residents, all taken in for questioning. Detailed search has not yet been done.’
‘I see.’
‘The deceased is believed to be called Gaynor Davies, from Wales. One resident said she was a teenage runaway.’
‘Teenage?’ Vicary glanced at the slight figure. ‘She’d pass for eleven or twelve.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Brunnie spoke softly. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘She was brought back by Michael Dalkeith and she lived here, coming and going as she pleased when he was away, which was for days at a time.’
‘He had a family in Palmers Green, sir,’ Ainsclough said. ‘Wife and two stepchildren. . but kept the rental on this place. . in which he also lived with the deceased.’
‘Sounds like he would have had some explaining to do if he hadn’t lain down in the snow. Two addresses, a female in each address, one of whom is now deceased, and deceased in suspicious circumstances.’
There came a knock on the front door. They stopped talking and glanced towards the door of the room as the constable stepped to one side and said, ‘In here, sir.’
Moments later the squat figure of John Shaftoe bumbled into the room. He smiled and said, ‘Hello, boys.’
‘Sir,’ Vicary replied.
Shaftoe smiled at Vicary. ‘Didn’t think I’d see thee again today, Mr Vicary. No rest for the wicked, eh?’
‘Funny you should say that,’ Vicary said with a wry grin.
‘Oh?’
‘Nothing. . nothing, sir.’ Vicary replied. ‘It just struck a private chord. . The deceased. . female. . life was pronounced extinct.’
Ainsclough checked his notepad, ‘At seventeen fifty-eight hours, sir.’
‘Seventeen fifty-eight,’ Vicary repeated.
‘I see.’ Shaftoe looked at the body. ‘You’re too young to be a customer of mine, pet, far too young. She doesn’t look much older than twelve.’
‘We’re told she is a teenager, sir.’
‘Yes, she could be a finely built thirteen or fourteen, but I’d be surprised if she was much older than that.’ He paused. ‘Strangulation, it seems.’
‘Yes, sir. The police surgeon who has just left said much the same thing.’
‘Have you photographed the corpse?’
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘I see. . so can’t be moved yet?’
‘No, sir, not overmuch.’
‘If you can turn her over, I can take a rectal temperature. It might help determine the time of death, although time of death is an inexact science at best, really no more accurate than sometime between when she was last seen alive and when the corpse was discovered, but the Home Office like thoroughness. So, I’ll take a rectal temperature and a room temperature, then, frankly, nothing I can do until I get her to the London Hospital. So I’ll do that, undertake the post-mortem tomorrow. Leave you to await the scene of crime officers, and their cameras and fingerprinting kit and whatever.’
‘Very good, sir.’
Vicary despatched Ainsclough and Brunnie to New Scotland Yard. They had reports to write and statements to take from Billy Kemp, Sonya Clements and Josie Pinder. He remained at the scene with three constables and a sergeant.
John Shaftoe, who did not drive, was conveyed to the London Hospital by his driver in a small black car. He went to his office and opened a medical file on the as yet unnamed female found deceased, possibly strangled, in the house on Claremont Road, Kilburn. He locked his medical bag in a secure cabinet and then, pulling on a donkey jacket and a flat cap, he left the hospital by an obscure side entrance and walked into the enveloping darkness of London’s East End. An observer would have seen a low-skilled manual worker, short and stocky, ambling homeward after a good day’s graft, which was exactly the image that John Shaftoe, MD, MRCP, FRCPath, wanted to portray.
He walked by the walls of the buildings, this being a practice he had acquired during his youth in south Yorkshire, where ‘hard’ men who wanted a fight walked close to the kerb, and feeling disinclined to battle his way through what he always thought to be the oddly ill-named rush hour, he called in at a pub and stood at the bar with his foot on the brass rail, enjoying a pint of IPA. Eventually, as often happened, one of the locals came and stood alongside him. The two men nodded at each other. Shaftoe read the man as being an East End villain and even though, at just 5' 4" tall, Shaftoe was as least cop-like as can be, he still had to be checked out.
‘Doing OK, mate?’ the East End villain asked with a smile.
‘So, so,’ Shaftoe replied, avoiding eye contact.
‘Not seen you in here before?’
‘Not been in here before.’ Shaftoe pronounced here as ‘ere’ and before as ‘a-for’.
‘North country?’ the villain explored, pronouncing north as ‘nawf’ and country as ‘can-ry’.
‘Sheffield.’
‘Holiday?’
‘This time of year?’ Shaftoe smiled and allowed himself brief eye contact with his interrogator. He glanced at the TV screen above the bar which showed a cartoon film with the sound blessedly turned off. What sound there was in the pub came from piped music and conversation. It was, observed Shaftoe, already crowded for an early midweek evening. ‘No, visiting me sister, she’s been taken badly. . but she’ll be alright. Just came in for a wander, to have a look at London,’ pronouncing have as ‘av’ and London as ‘Lundun’.
‘Alright,’ the wide-boy replied, pronouncing it as ‘or-white’. He then walked back to his mates and said loudly. ‘He’s alright, down from the north,’ and then added pointedly, ‘He won’t be staying long.’ And John Shaftoe, taking the hint, finished his drink and left the pub. Sometimes it was like that. He felt he had to avoid becoming a regular in one particular pub near the London Hospital, because if he did so, his occupation would eventually be discovered and he would no longer be allowed to blend with the other patrons, which was all he wanted to do. He and his wife sometimes just needed to be ‘working class’. So it was that sometimes he walked into a welcoming pub and sometimes he stumbled into a thieves’ den, which was hostile to anyone they did not know. That night he had clearly entered the latter type of pub. He would take note and avoid it in future.
By the time he left the bar of the not so jolly Jolly Boatman, dark had fallen and the rush hour, while still on, had also begun to ease. He took the Metropolitan line from Whitechapel tube station to King’s Cross, and then took an overground train bound for Welwyn. He left the train at Brookmans Park, exited the station via the footbridge and, with his hands thrust into the pockets of his donkey jacket, looking like a coal miner returning home from a shift at the pit, he walked into the leafy suburbs and up Brookmans Lane, which was softly illuminated by street lamps. Large, fully detached houses were situated on either side of the road, many with U-shaped driveways; thus the homeowners avoided having to reverse their cars into the lane. The houses all had generous back gardens, and those to his left backed on to the golf course and thereby afforded even more open space to survey when standing at the rear windows of said houses. He felt himself thinking, aren’t we smug, as he walked. But the smug occupants of these houses were also his neighbours, because although he and his wife liked to drink in working-class pubs ‘to touch base’, they were both disinclined to live on a sink estate and had bought what property they could manage to afford on his salary as a learned Home Office pathologist, and so, working class or not, they had eventually fetched up in ‘smug, self-satisfied’ Brookmans Park, Hertfordshire.