Most people assumed that the white-suited forensic photographers and videographers seen on the TV news photographing and recording crime scenes were members of the police force. And sometimes they were – but sometimes they weren’t. The Metropolitan Police, and the other forces throughout the country, also used independent companies. Like us.
The forensic division of Private London had a contract with the Metropolitan Police, purely in the photographic area. Forensic pathologists themselves were still under the direction of the Forensic Science Service, which was an agency of the Home Office working with the police.
Adrian’s boss Wendy Lee had been a popular and highly respected pathologist at the FSS before I recruited her to head up Private’s forensic unit. Some cases required independent forensic analysis before they came to court – and the resources that Private offered Dr Lee tempted her away almost as much as the far higher salary I dangled under her nose. We gave her access to the kind of superior technology that the Met could only dream about.
The detective in charge at the scene, DI Ken Harman, nodded to me as Adrian and I walked up. We’d worked together before.
‘Dan.’
‘Ken.’
We shook hands briefly. And he held up the tape for us to cross under.
POLICE – DO NOT CROSS THE LINE
Somebody had crossed the line, though, I thought ironically as I straightened up again on the other side of it. As ever, it was the smell that hit me first.
Someone had crossed the line big time.
Chapter 15
Scene-of-crime officers stood to one side, ready to start processing the site once it had been thoroughly photographed.
Bright lights had been mounted on tall stands, illuminating the area as if it were a film set. Adrian fired up the light on his hand-held HD video camera and started shooting.
I looked down at the body, wrapped in translucent plastic. The features just about discernible as a woman’s. Maybe.
‘Who found her?’ I asked.
The detective grunted in what could have been ironic amusement, could have been something stuck in his throat. ‘Little toerag by the name of Jason Kendrick. Fourteen-year-old one-man sodding crime wave. Raped and stabbed a teenage prostitute just two streets or so across. Scuttled here just like a rat when he heard the blues-and-twos. Then ran back out again as soon as he saw this,’ Harman said, pointing at the mutilated corpse.
‘Can’t say as I blame him,’ I said.
The detective grunted again. ‘He does. He ran straight into a police car.’ Harman smiled grimly.
‘And the girl?’
‘She’ll live. She fell on her own knife as she tried to fight him off but missed all her major organs. She was lucky.’
‘I guess, but that’s the kind of luck I can do without.’
‘I hear you.’
‘And the boy rapist?’
‘Again, he’ll live. Scrapes and bruises. Hit the side of the car and was winded, apparently. Couldn’t breathe and thought he was going to die.’ Harman twisted his mouth into something between a scowl and a smile. ‘Can’t say the world would have been the poorer if he had done.’
I didn’t comment. Seems to me there’s all kinds of bad luck in the world. The kind that gets you working the streets selling your body while you’re still little more than a child. The kind that gets you into trouble with the law when you are five years old and have been taught no different. The kind that gets you running into speeding police cars nine years later after upgrading to the sort of crime that means you’ll live out the rest of your childhood – and then some – in an institutional correction facility.
The kind of luck that gets you laid out on the cold floor of an old workshop. Being the centre of attention in a way that no one would have wished upon themselves in their worst nightmares.
I watched as Adrian put down the video camera, unzipped his case, took out his stills camera, screwed a lens onto its body, and stepped over to begin photographing the corpse.
He was using an MD180 which, according to Jack Morgan, was the best damn camera ever manufactured for the processing of crime scenes. He had insisted that Private London’s forensic unit should use the same and I reckon that Adrian would have kissed him for it. He certainly handled the camera as reverentially as he would a lover.
Wendy Lee stepped under the tape, suited-up but gloveless. I tossed her my car keys.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said.
‘Boss.’
I looked down again at the dead body. Like I said, it had been wrapped in heavy plastic. But rats had eaten away the central section, exposing the torso, pelvic area and upper ribcage. Bones protruded and much of the soft inner flesh and organs had been eaten away. There was no pooling of blood around the area.
A uniformed constable suddenly held a hand to his mouth and dashed out of the room.
I followed him out.
Not the start to the weekend that I had planned.
Chapter 16
‘Who’s been assigned to processing the body?’ asked Dr Lee.
She was looking at the sallow-faced DI who was pointedly not looking at the horror show that lay at his feet.
Ken Harman gestured as a tall woman entered. Wendy nodded at her pleased. Doctor Harriet ‘Harry’ Walsh had been her assistant at the time she had left the FSS when she’d been seduced by Private. And Wendy had never regretted her change of employer. Sure, she may not actually process the bodies at scenes of crime any more, but that was just data collection, after all. And it wasn’t the collection that was important – it was what you did with it afterwards that mattered. And Wendy Lee could now crank that data faster than the FSS by an order of magnitude.
‘What have you got for me, Ken?’ asked the pathologist as she snapped on the obligatory latex gloves and walked over. She dipped her head forward and tied back a glorious tumble of red-gold curls, causing them to sparkle momentarily in the bright artificial light before hiding them under a protective cap. She stood up again and at five foot eleven in her flat-soled shoes she made Wendy Lee feel dwarfed, not for the first time that evening.
‘Looks like a Jane Doe,’ said the detective. ‘Hard to tell for a layman like me. Whoever it is has been feeding a family of Rattus norvegicus for quite some time, by the looks of it.’
‘You don’t look too well,’ said Harriet Walsh.
‘Just finished a large doner kebab when the call came in,’ he explained. ‘Wish I hadn’t had the extra chilli sauce now.’
Doctor Walsh gave Harman a brief sympathetic smile and nodded to Wendy Lee.
‘What do you think?’
‘Just got here, Harry. But female… looks to be in her early twenties.’
Doctor Walsh looked down at what was revealed of the body and sighed. ‘And out of hunting season, too.’
She gestured to a couple of her SOCO assistants who were standing by, waiting for the nod. Then she kneeled down to peel back the plastic sheeting that partially covered the dead body. Using a scalpel to slice the plastic and peel it back as delicately as possible.
Any evidence could be vital – the merest speck of fabric or mud or blood. Nothing could be taken for granted. The whole scene would be processed, photographed, recorded, analysed. And it all took time.
Some half an hour later the plastic sheet that had once wrapped the body now lay either side of it. The gruesome package opened up like some macabre gift.
Adrian Tuttle moved in closer, the flash mounted on his camera making the bright light intermittently even more glaring as he shot photo after photo. The white skin of the dead woman almost bleached in the flashes.
It was now quite evidently a woman, likely in her early twenties as Doctor Walsh had concurred. Impossible to tell her exact age without proper forensic analysis. But the long dark hair, the exposed pelvic bone, the remains of her breasts that hadn’t been mutilated or cut or simply eaten away, all pointed to the sex of the victim.