Who are you? Who killed you?
Vivien knew that for the families of missing persons, the worst thing was the anguish of not knowing. Someone
one night‚ one day
left home and never came back. And in the absence of a body, his loved ones spent their whole lives wondering what, where and why. Never giving up a hope that only time could gradually extinguish.
She pulled herself together and resumed her inspection.
When she aimed her torch at the ground she discovered, next to the feet of the corpse, an object covered in dust that looked at first glance like a kind of large wallet. She asked for a pair of latex gloves, slid into the opening, and bent to pick it up. Then she straightened up and signalled to the crime scene team and the medical examiner.
‘OK, gentleman, it’s your turn.’
As the team got to work, she examined the object she had in her hand.
She blew on it gently to remove the layer of dust. The material was imitation leather, and must once have been black or brown. She could see now that it wasn’t in fact a wallet, but a document holder. She opened it carefully. There were two hard plastic sheets inside, stuck together, which made a slight tearing noise as she pulled then apart.
Inside were two photographs.
She parted the plastic and gently slipped her fingers in to extract them without ruining them. She examined them by the light of the torch. In the first, a young man in a helmet and combat uniform was leaning on a tank and looking gravely at the camera. Around him there was vegetation that suggested a tropical country. She turned the photograph over. There was something written on it, faded by time, with some of the letters almost erased, but not enough to make them illegible.
Cu Chi District 1971
The second photograph, which was much better preserved, surprised her. The subject was the same young man who had been looking thoughtfully at the camera in the previous photograph. Here, he was in civilian clothes, a psychedelic T-shirt and work pants. In this image he had long hair and was smiling and holding a big black cat out to the camera. She studied the man and the animal closely. At first she thought it was a deformation caused by the angle, but then she realized that her first impression had been correct.
The cat had only three legs.
There was nothing written on the back of this photograph.
She asked the other officer, Bowman, for two plastic bags, and slipped the document holder and the photographs inside them. She went up to Frank Ritter, the head of the crime-scene team and handed them over to him.
‘I’d like you to analyse this material. Look for fingerprints, if there are any. Examine the victim’s clothes. Plus, I’d like these photographs to be enlarged.’
‘We’ll see what we can do. But if I were you I wouldn’t hold out too much hope. Everything looks pretty old to me.’
The ME walked around the stretcher and came and joined Vivien. They limited the introductions to the absolute minimum.
‘Jack Borman.’
‘Vivien Light.’
They both knew who they were, where they were and what they were doing. Right now, any other consideration faded into the background.
‘Any idea yet of the cause of death?’
‘In layman’s terms, I’d hazard a guess, from the position of the head, that someone broke his collar bone. With what I don’t know. I’ll know more after the post mortem.’
‘How long do you think he’s been here?’
‘From the body’s state of preservation, I’d say around fifteen years. But the state of the hiding place also has to be taken into account. An analysis of the fibres should get us there. And I think forensic tests on the material of the clothes will come in useful, too.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
As the medical examiner walked away, Vivien realized that everything that could be done had been done. She gave the order to remove the body, said goodbye to the men, and left them to their tasks. At this point, she considered it pointless to talk to the worker who had found the body. She had given Bowman the job of taking down the details of all the people who might be useful to their investigation. She would talk to them later, including Mr Charles Brokens, who woke up every morning with that woman in his bed.
In a case of homicide like this, the most important leads usually came from the technical data rather than from witness statements. They’d have to wait for the test results before deciding on a plan of action.
She went back the way she had come, until she reached the site entrance. The workers watched her with a mixture of admiration and awe. She set off for the precinct house to pick up her car. She needed to think.
Bellew hadn’t assigned her to an easy case. He presumably considered her capable of solving it, but what he was asking her to do was equivalent to pulling chestnuts from the fire. And from the facts that had emerged so far, these chestnuts had been in the fire for at least fifteen years and had been burned to a cinder.
She passed a bar and instinctively looked through the window. Sitting at a table, talking to a girl with long blond hair, was Richard. The way they were looking at each other suggested they were more than just friends. She felt like a voyeur, and hurried away before he could see her, although he seemed to have eyes only for his companion. She was not surprised to find him there. He lived nearby and they’d been there together several times.
Maybe a few more times would have been better.
She’d had a relationship with Richard that had lasted a year, full of laughter, food and wine, and tender, gentle sex. A relationship that had been one step away from being love.
But, what with her work and the situation of Sundance and her sister, she had found it more and more difficult to devote herself to the two of them. In the end, the affair had ended.
As she walked, she realized that she had the same problem as all the people moving on that street and in that city. They all assumed they would live and knew they would die.