“Anything for us yet, Doc?”
“Not much, I’m afraid. She’s been dead for an hour or two, and the cause is most likely exsanguination, as you can see. Whoever did this is a very sick bastard. The woman was seriously disabled, by the looks of it. Probably couldn’t even lift a bloody finger to defend herself.”
“Weapon?”
“Some sort of very thin, very sharp blade, like a straight-blade razor, or even a surgical instrument. The pathologist will no doubt be able to tell you more later. Anyway, it was a clean, smooth cut, no sawing or signs of serrations.”
“Right- or left-handed?”
“It’s often impossible to say with slash wounds, especially if there are no hesitation cuts, but I’d say probably left to right, from behind.”
“Which makes the killer right-handed?”
“Unless he was faking it. Only probably, mind you. Don’t quote me on it.”
Annie smiled. “As if I would.” She turned to Naylor. “Who found the body?”
Naylor pointed to a bench about two hundred yards away. “Bloke over there. Name’s Gilbert Downie. Walking his dog.”
“Poor sod,” said Annie. “Probably put him right off his roast beef and Yorkshire pud. Anyone know who she is?”
“Not yet, ma’am,” said DC Baker. “No handbag, purse or anything.” Helen Baker was a broad, barrel-shaped woman, built like a brick shit house, as the saying went, but she was remarkably nimble and spry for someone of her shape and build. And she had flaming-red spiky hair. Among her friends and colleagues she was known affectionately as “Ginger” Baker. She glanced around. “Not even a wristband, like they sometimes wear. This is a pretty isolated spot, mind you, especially at this time of year. The nearest village is four miles south and half a mile inland. About the only place in any way close is that residential care home about a mile to the south. Mapston Hall.”
“Residential care home for what?”
“Don’t know.” Ginger glanced at the wheelchair. “For people with problems like hers, I’d hazard a guess.”
“But there’s no way she could have made it all the way here by herself, is there?”
“Doubt it,” Naylor chipped in. “Unless she was doing an Andy.”
Annie couldn’t help but smile. She was a big fan of Little Britain. Banks, too. They had watched it together a couple of times after a long day at work over an Indian takeaway and a bottle of red. But she didn’t want to let herself think of Banks right now. From the corner of her eyes, she saw the SOCO van turn onto the grass verge. “Good work, Tommy and Ginger,” she said. “We’d better get out of the way and let the SOCOs do their stuff. Let’s sit in the car and get out of this bloody wind.”
They walked over to Annie’s Astra, stopping for a brief chat on the way with the crime scene coordinator DS Liam McCullough, and sat in the car with the windows open an inch or two to let in some air, Ginger in the back. Annie’s head throbbed and she had to force herself to pay attention to the matter at hand. “Who’d want to murder some defenseless old woman confined to a wheelchair?” she asked out loud.
“Not that old,” said Naylor. “I reckon that sort of injury ages a person prematurely, but if you can see past the hair and the pasty complexion, you’ll see she’s not more than forty or so. Maybe late thirties. And she was probably quite a looker. Good cheekbones, a nice mouth.”
Forty, Annie thought. My age. Dear God. Not old at all.
“Anyway,” Naylor added, “it takes all sorts.”
“Oh, Tommy, don’t come the world-weary cynic with me. It might suit your rumpled appearance, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. You saw her, the chair, halo brace and all, and you heard what the doc said. She probably couldn’t move at all. Maybe even couldn’t talk, either. What kind of a threat could she have posed to anyone?”
“I’ll bet she wasn’t always in a wheelchair,” said Ginger from the backseat.
“Good point,” said Annie, turning her head. “Very good point. And as soon as we find out who she was we’ll start digging into her past. What do you think of the bloke who found her, Tommy?”
“If he did it, he’s a damn good actor. I think he’s telling us the truth.” Tommy Naylor was a solid veteran in his early fifties with no interest in the greasy poles of ambition and promotion. In the short while they had been working together, Annie had come to respect his opinions. She didn’t know much about him, or about his private life, except rumor had it that his wife was dying of cancer. He was taciturn and undemonstrative, a man of few words, and she didn’t know whether he approved of her or not, but he got the job done without question, and he showed initiative when it was called for. And she trusted his judgment. That was as much as she could ask.
“So someone took her walkies out there, cut her throat and just left her to bleed to death?” she said.
“Looks that way,” said Naylor.
Annie mulled that over for a moment, then said, “Right. Ginger, you go see about setting up the murder room. We’ll need a manned mobile unit out here, too. And, Tommy, let’s you and me get down to Mapston Hall and see if we can find out if that’s where she came from. Maybe if we’re lucky they’ll even offer us a cup of tea.”
While detective Superintendent Gervaise went to the station to set up the mechanics of the murder investigation and deal with the press, the various experts performed their specialist tasks, and Detective Sergeant Hatchley organized a canvassing of the town-center pubs, Banks decided to pay a visit to Joseph Randall, the leather-shop owner who had discovered Hayley Daniels’s body.
Hyacinth Walk was an unremarkable street of run-down prewar redbrick terraces just off King Street, about halfway down the hill between the market square and the more modern Leaview Estate, a good fifteen- or twenty-minute walk from the Maze. Inside, Joseph Randall’s house was starkly furnished and neat, with plain coral wallpaper. A large TV set, turned off at the moment, held center stage in the living room.
Randall seemed still dazed by his experience, as well he might be, Banks thought. It’s not every day you stumble across the partially clad body of a young girl. While everyone else was no doubt eating their Sunday lunch, Randall didn’t seem to have anything cooking. Radio 2 was playing in the background: Parkinson interviewing some empty-headed celebrity on his Sunday Supplement program. Banks couldn’t make out who it was, or what was being said.
“Sit down, please,” said Randall, pushing his thick-lensed glasses up on the bridge of his long thin nose. Behind them, his gray eyes looked bloodshot. His wispy gray hair was uncombed, flattened to the skull in some places and sticking up in others. Along with the shabby beige cardigan he wore over his round shoulders, it made him appear older than his fifty-five years. And maybe this morning’s trauma had something to do with that, too.
Banks sat on a brown leather armchair which proved to be more comfortable than it seemed. A gilt-edge mirror hung at an angle over the fireplace, and he could see himself reflected in it. He found the image distracting. He tried to ignore it as best he could while he spoke to Randall.
“I’d just like to get a bit of clarification,” he began. “You said you discovered the body when you went round to the storage building to pick up some samples. Is that correct?”