But the lower face was missing completely. Where the mouth should have been was a gaping maw that exposed the cartilaginous tissue at the back of the throat. The jawbone, or mandible, was completely gone and only a few shattered stumps of teeth remained in the upper jaw.
The head had tilted to one side as the body had been rolled on to the sheet. Now it wasn’t covered by the coat collar I could see what looked like an exit wound at the rear of the skull, big enough to put my fist in.
Unperturbed, Lundy studied it, then turned to me. ‘What do you think, Dr Hunter? Shotgun?’
I realized I was frowning. I roused myself. ‘It looks like it,’ I agreed. The damage to the lower face certainly suggested the more explosive violence of a shotgun rather than a rifle or handgun. ‘There’s something embedded at the back of the throat.’
Without touching the body I leaned closer for a better look. An object was buried in the mangled bone and tissue: a small brownish disc, too regular to be natural.
‘It’s the wad from a shotgun shell,’ I said, making no attempt to remove it.
That would confirm the type of weapon. Not that there was any real question, but it was unlikely any of the pellets would have lodged in the body. Shotgun pellets begin to disperse the moment they leave the barrel. The further they travel, the larger their spread, and the bigger the resulting wound. From the relatively small size of this one the pellets had been closely bunched, and remained so as they punched a hole through the back of the skull. That suggested they’d been fired at close range.
Very close.
‘Contact wound, by the look of it,’ I said. A shotgun blast fired from one or two centimetres created a sort of tattooing effect, and that was evident here. ‘There’s blackening on what’s left of the teeth and bone, quite a bit of searing still present on the soft tissue, too. The barrel was either inside the mouth or resting against it when it was fired. At that range I’m surprised the wad from the shell didn’t go through as well.’
Lundy nodded agreement. ‘So it could be self-inflicted.’
‘It could, yes.’
A contact wound would be in keeping with a suicide, especially when a shotgun was used. The length of most shotgun barrels made it awkward to reverse them and still reach the trigger, so contact was usually unavoidable. Of course, that didn’t rule out the possibility that someone else had shot him.
Lundy must have picked up on my tone. His eyes creased in a smile, although I couldn’t see it because of his mask. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not jumping to any conclusions. But it looks like it’s who we thought it would be.’
I couldn’t argue with that. A potentially suicidal man had gone missing along with his shotgun, and now a body with a close-range gunshot wound had been found. There seemed little doubt this was Leo Villiers.
I said nothing.
Lundy beckoned to the waiting police officers. ‘OK, let’s get it on the boat.’
In the few minutes we’d been talking the tide was noticeably higher. The sea was already covering the lower edge of the plastic sheeting. As Lundy called in to report, I took hold of one corner while the marine unit officers took the others. Water streamed from the plastic as we lifted the dead weight and lowered it into the open body bag on the stretcher.
It seemed the least I could do; I hadn’t been able to contribute much else.
After everything had been loaded on to the RHIB, I took the same seat as before as the engine roared to life. The tops of the sandbanks had been above our heads not so long ago: now we were almost on a level as the tide rose. As the RHIB pulled away I looked back to where we’d just been. The waves were already lapping over where the body had lain, smoothing over the sand and erasing any sign that anything had been there.
Lundy nudged my arm as the boat picked up speed. He pointed to a rocky promontory that jutted into the estuary on the seaward side of the Barrows.
‘See over there? That’s Willets Point, where Leo Villiers lived.’ Unlike most of the other places I’d seen around here, the promontory was thickly wooded. Almost hidden by the trees, a large white Victorian villa stood alone on the lonely outcrop of land. Its large bay windows faced out to sea over a small dock, their view only interrupted by the towers of the sea fort that guarded the estuary.
‘Used to be the family’s summer home, but it was mothballed until Villiers decided to move in a few years back,’ Lundy said, raising his voice above the engine. ‘His father splits his time between London and the main house near Cambridge, so he had it to himself. Not a bad bachelor pad, is it?’
It wasn’t, but the family’s wealth hadn’t done Villiers much good in the end. I thought again about the condition of the body. ‘You were saying earlier you weren’t sure exactly when he disappeared,’ I shouted. ‘How come?’
Lundy leaned closer so he could speak without yelling. ‘He wasn’t reported missing until a month ago, but the last actual contact anyone had with him was a fortnight before. He called a vet out to his house to put his old dog down. She said he was pretty cut up over it, and no one saw or spoke to him after that. No phone calls or emails, no social media. Nothing. So whatever happened was sometime during that two-week window. We haven’t narrowed it down beyond that, but the vet’s fee was the last time his credit card was used. So the thinking is that whatever happened was probably closer to six weeks ago than four, but nobody realized until later.’
‘No one missed him for two weeks?’ That might be feasible if this was some lonely pensioner without friends or family, but it seemed a long time for someone like Leo Villiers. ‘What about his father?’
‘They weren’t what you’d call close. Seems to have been a bit of tension there, so it wasn’t unusual for them to go weeks without talking. It was his housekeeper who reported him missing. Villiers didn’t have many staff, just her and a gardener who both came in once a week. She had her own key and it wasn’t unusual to find no one at home, so she didn’t bother at first. But then she turned up one week and the place was a mess. Bottles everywhere, dirty plates in the sink, half-eaten food. He’d thrown benders before, so she just tidied up and left. She noticed the Mowbry’s cabinet was unlocked and empty, which she thought was strange because Villiers rarely took it out. Didn’t like hunting, which is a surprise. But it wasn’t till she went back the following week and found the house exactly as she’d left it that she thought something might be wrong. There was post filling up the mailbox, Villiers’ car hadn’t moved and neither had the dinghy he kept there. So she had a look round, found the note and that’s when she called us.’
‘She didn’t call his father first?’
‘I don’t think Sir Stephen’s the sort who takes phone calls from staff. Besides, I think she felt the news was better coming from us. Shooting the messenger, and all that.’ Lundy looked sheepish as he realized what he’d said. ‘Sorry. Bad choice of words.’
‘What about the shotgun? Wasn’t it at the house?’ I asked. Even if the gun had fallen in the water it should have been found at low tide.
‘No, which made us wonder at first if someone else might be involved. But given the note and everything else, suicide still seemed more likely, so we were working on the theory that he shot himself somewhere else. Probably the Backwaters, which is why it’s taken so long for his body to turn up. Explains why we haven’t found the Mowbry as well.’
He sat back, leaving me to think over what he’d said. Leo Villiers had been missing at least four weeks, but more likely nearer to six. I weighed up the decomposition I’d just seen, and the probable factors that might affect a body drifting in these estuarine waters. There was temperature and scavengers, both aquatic and avian. And then the effect of brackish water and tides that would leave it exposed to wind and weather twice a day.