‘Oh my lord,’ the doctor sobbed. Henry detected that he had suddenly become sober.
‘You all right?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ he assured Henry. ‘It’s just, I knew her. Not well, but I knew her,’ He lowered himself down and shone his torch on to Cathy’s disfigured face. ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,’ he repeated. Henry knew that normal, run-of-the-mill doctors had very little contact with violent death and it could affect them as badly as any member of the public. Even more so when they’d had a drink or two.
‘Oh hell!’ Henry heard from behind as Singleton got his first view of the body. He guessed there was a difference in seeing butchered animals as opposed to human beings.
Dr Lott did a swift visual examination of the body, not touching it.
‘Just confirm the time and date you pronounced life extinct,’ Henry told him, ‘though any observations you might have could be useful.’
‘Yeah, um,’ the doctor nodded, clearly shaken. ‘I can confirm death at…’ He consulted his watch, read out the time and added the date. ‘Massive head trauma,’ he added, ‘consistent with a shotgun wound, I’d say.’
‘Thanks for that,’ Henry said. ‘If you can back off, I’ll do some photography.’
He moved everyone out of the way and started to take numerous shots of the body, the surrounding scene and the approach. The camera was twelve megapixels, of good quality, and the flash bright, but he was unimpressed by his results as he checked the screen. Not that they weren’t adequate, but he was no crime scene photographer.
And the snow still fell, the wind continued to blow.
‘What’s the plan for moving her and where is she going to be kept? Is there an undertaker’s in the village? Are they on the way?’ Flynn fired the questions like a Gatling gun.
‘In answer to the last part, there is no undertaker, but I’ve sorted out the next best thing and my plan for moving her is that.’ He pointed at the huge bucket affixed to the hydraulic lifting gear on the front of the John Deere.
Flynn’s eyes followed Henry’s finger. ‘You must be joking.’
Next to Cathy’s body, Henry laid out one of the tarpaulin sheets that had been folded up in the tractor bucket. The four men lifted her carefully, Henry gently taking her head and neck, and placed her on the sheet. She was light and easy to move.
‘She’s as stiff as a board,’ Singleton commented. ‘Rigor mortis?’
‘Frozen solid,’ Lott answered.
Henry took more photographs of her, then the sheet was folded over her. Between them they carried her down to the tractor and put her in the bucket. It was just a little too short for her and her legs stuck out.
All four men took a moment to consider their handiwork.
‘Talk about respect for the dead,’ Flynn commented.
Henry made a ‘Harrumph!’ noise, then walked back up to the scene. With Singleton’s assistance he unravelled a second sheet of tarpaulin which was about twenty feet square. They laid it over the spot where the body had been, and secured it using stones and chunks of rock.
Henry weighed up the job and shook his head in frustration. It was a far cry from what he would have preferred to do: erecting a crime scene tent, special lighting, the scientific teams, police search personnel, securing the scene… bringing in the circus, as Flynn had so disparagingly referred to the constituent parts of a murder squad. The professional approach, not this half-baked cockamamie crap. He prayed silently that what he’d done would not turn into an alligator ripping his arse to shreds sometime in the future. And the mantra, also sneered at by Flynn, ‘You don’t get a second chance at a crime scene,’ kept looping through his mind — because it was a good mantra.
‘It’s the best you’re going to do,’ Flynn said, picking up on his thoughts.
‘It’s rubbish,’ Henry said, ‘and goes completely against my professional instincts.’
‘You and your professionalism, eh?’
‘Yeah, bummer. Fancy wanting to get the job done right.’ The atmosphere between the two grew colder by a few degrees. ‘But you wouldn’t know about that, would you, Steve?’
A strong gust of snow-laden wind suddenly pushed both men off balance. They staggered against each other, almost into an embrace, in order to stay upright. They broke off the clinch with much facial distaste and bodily quivers of disgust.
‘Are we going, or what?’ Don Singleton shouted as he and Dr Lott climbed into the tractor cab.
‘OK if I use the Shogun?’
‘Yeah, sure, but don’t forget it could be part of the crime scene. Having said that, I suppose we can always eliminate your prints.’
‘Except that, as you know, my prints aren’t in the system, because, guess what? I don’t have any convictions. You’d have to take them specially.’
‘Yeah — bullet well dodged.’ Henry could have got in the Shogun with Flynn, but could not bring himself to do so. He hauled himself back into the tractor cab. Singleton reversed out of the forest, then headed back to the village. Flynn followed in the Shogun.
As Henry had noticed earlier when he’d driven into the village using Flynn’s car, there was only a handful of shops, one being a butcher’s. This was the one that had given him the idea. The fact that it belonged to Singleton was a bonus and made the facilitation of the matter that much easier.
Singleton slowed the John Deere down outside his shop, then expertly turned right into a narrow ginnel running down the gable-end of the shop, just wide enough for the tractor. From the way he handled the machine, even though he was well under alcoholic influence, Henry assumed he must have driven down the alley many times. Either that or the alcohol just made him blase.
Behind the shop he wheeled into a small customer car park and stopped.
‘Back entrance,’ he said. ‘Those double doors open into the cold storage room.’
Henry jumped down from the cab. Singleton and Lott followed. The butcher/farmer let himself in through the back door and a few moments later the double steel doors opened on what was simply a huge walk-in freezer, big enough to live in. Singleton pushed the doors wide, the strip lighting flickering on behind him. Slabs of meat swung from rows of ceiling hooks, lamb, beef, pork, venison and a long line of big fat turkeys. An icy mist seemed to surround everything spookily.
‘Wow,’ Henry said.
‘Health and safety nightmare, this,’ Singleton said. ‘A dead human.’
‘Needs must.’
Flynn pulled into the car park in the Shogun and trotted over to them. ‘The new public mortuary, eh?’
Henry gave him a sour look. ‘Help us,’ he said.
The four men went to the tractor bucket and lifted Cathy’s tarpaulin-swathed body out of it, carried it into the freezer and at Singleton’s direction, laid her on a steel slab in one corner that had previously been cleaned and disinfected ready for the following day’s business. They took a step back as Henry unfolded the sheet and revealed her.
He blew out his cheeks. Under the bright lights of the room, it was possible to see her injuries in much more detail. The head wound was horrific, much of her face having been blasted away at close range.
‘She would have been face to face with her killer,’ Henry said.
‘I agree,’ Lott said.
‘Talking to him or her?’ Henry asked himself, glancing down at the rest of her, noting she was dressed in jeans, a warm zip-up anorak over a tracksuit top, walking boots on her feet.
‘She looked prepared for the weather,’ Flynn observed. Henry glanced at him, seeing his face strained.
‘You OK?’
Flynn nodded.
‘What’s your plan, Superintendent?’ the doctor asked, no longer slurring his words in his new-found sobriety.
‘I need to take some more photographs,’ he said, his mind working things out. ‘Then I’d like this place to be secured?’ It was a question aimed at Singleton, who nodded, said it wouldn’t be a problem. ‘Then I need to report all this in, start a murder book and see if we can find Tom James.’ He turned to Flynn. ‘From what you said, he told you she stormed out after a domestic, so he could possibly have been the last person to see her alive…’