Ten Guilty Men (A DCI Morton Crime Novel Book 3) (2 page)

‘What sort of accent did the tipster have?’ Morton asked.

‘It was a bit distorted. I’d say pretty neutral, possibly south London. Not cockney, not too street. Male, obviously. Probably middle-aged, white, definitely a smoker – I’d know that wheeze anywhere.’

‘How are you doing without cigarettes? I remember quitting. I was an irritable bastard for months.’

Ayala rolled up a sleeve to show off his nicotine patch. He grinned lopsidedly as if about to quip that Morton was still an irritable bastard but thankfully, for his sake, he thought better of it. He pushed the front door open, then stood aside to let Morton pass.

‘Bloody hell!’ Morton exclaimed. The entrance hallway should have been the height of luxury and yet it looked like squatters had taken up residence.

Oak flooring extended towards a pair of twin staircases where a plush red carpet began, but Morton could barely see it for the mess. Several bin bags, flies buzzing around them, lay on the floor against the near wall. The stench was overpowering.

Morton darted through the open doorway to his left in search of fresher air, and found himself in an open plan living area. The lounge was just as messy but the smell seemed less pungent. Two scene of crime officers were already at work at the back of the room.

‘Hard to believe this place was nominated for
The Impartial’s
“Best in Design Award”,’ Ayala said as he ran his finger along the mantelpiece where dust had gathered nearly a centimetre thick. ‘Looks like she hasn’t cleaned in months.’

‘Quite.’

The living area wasn’t quite as messy as the hallway, but it came close. It was split in two with a lounge at the front, and a kitchen at the rear. The lounge was comprised of four dark leather sofas arranged around a coffee table atop which Morton could see needles, white powder that looked like sherbet but Morton knew it wouldn’t be, and a number of empty beer cans together with a solitary wine bottle.

‘Chateau Neuf De Pape,’ Morton said. ‘Someone has good taste.’

‘Or had good taste, if it was the victim,’ Ayala said. ‘There’s a lipstick stain on the glass next to it.’

‘Well spotted,’ Morton said. He called over to one of the crime scene techs ‘Can you bag this please?’

The tech nodded. Behind the sofa, there were a series of artsy canvas prints on the wall. Morton gestured at them, and asked: ‘Did she take those?’

Ayala nodded. ‘Same over-saturated style she was famous for. I’ve got one you know. An early print that is.’

‘Better you than me.’

‘Peasant,’ Ayala said quietly. ‘It’ll be worth a fortune now she’s gone.’

Morton pretended not to hear him.

The scene of crime officers swarmed around Morton and Ayala in a flurry of activity as the two spoke. Morton watched as they worked in threes to photograph the evidence, bag it and then replace it with tiny plastic markers.

‘Mind if I grab that?’ one asked. He pointed at a used condom on the sofa next to Ayala.

Ayala turned to look, then jumped backwards almost into Morton. ‘Eww!’

‘Grow up, Bertram. There’s another one over there,’ Morton said. He pointed towards the kitchenette, where a second condom lay atop the counter.

Ayala shuddered, and turned away to watch one of the techs swabbing away at the stovetop.

‘I wouldn’t look too closely at that stove either.’

‘Why?’

‘Let’s just say those aren’t chocolate drops.’

Morton chuckled at Ayala’s reaction, and walked into the kitchen. The brown pellets sat atop a film of grease that shimmered lightly. Every surface was covered with some sort of detritus.

Still more techs were dusting the walls for fingerprints, of which there appeared to be many. Morton used his foot to clear a small area on the floor. Underneath was the same hardwood as in the hallway, but Morton was willing to bet that it had been many months since it had seen the light of day.

‘That doesn’t look like it belonged to a woman.’ Morton pointed to a large suit jacket folded on the breakfast bar which separated the lounge area from the kitchen. He picked up the jacket, and turned it over in his hands.

He turned to Ayala. ‘It’s nowhere near as dirty as the rest of this place. It’s got to be recent.’ A partially torn label was sewn into the hem. ‘Ike Feltham. Could that be the owner’s name?’

Ayala laughed, as if the question was so elementary that the truth should have been obvious. ‘No! He’s a tailor and my God is he amazing! Well, I say he but his name isn’t Ike–’

‘Why the bleeding hell is Ike’s name in the jacket then?’ Morton asked.

‘It was his old partner, an old timer who ran the tailor’s before him. He’s based over on Savile Row.’

‘Pricey then?’

‘A few thousand I’d say. For a whole suit with the trousers of course.’

‘Reckon we can get DNA off that?’ Ayala asked.

‘Doubt it,’ a voice said from behind Morton. He turned to the Chief Scene of Crime Officer, a chubby man called Stuart Purcell. ‘I’ve got ten men collecting samples for trace, but it’s going to take a week just to bag, tag and log it all.’

‘Fine, but make sure that sample is near the top of the pile. I want to know who is rich enough to leave that lying around.’

‘Is it really a big deal? It’s a nice jacket, but compared to this house it’s small change,’ Purcell said. ‘People leave coats behind all the time.’

‘They do, but you’d come back for something hand tailored, wouldn’t you?’

‘Fine. But you owe me, David. And not for the first time.’

‘Add a beer to my tab,’ Morton said. ‘Which way is the body?’

‘Out back with the coroner. Through that door at the back on the right.’ Purcell waved an arm to indicate a white uPVC door at the rear that hadn’t been visible from the main hallway. It seemed incongruous with the rest of the house. All the others doors were wooden, complementing the period features of the house, but the uPVC door had been put in much more recently.

Morton grabbed Ayala’s arm, and steered him towards the door. ‘Come on then. You get to meet a real life celebrity. I doubt she’ll be too talkative, but I’m sure you’ll jabber on enough for the pair of you.’

The door that Stuart indicated led through to a narrow hallway. A wooden bench ran down the middle of the room while a series of cubicle doors lined either side. Morton nudged the nearest door open with his foot to reveal a bench with private shower and a small shelf full of toiletries. Morton could hear Ayala exploring the next cubicle along.

‘Nice changing rooms,’ Ayala called out. ‘Ellis DeLange must be a fan of entertaining. You reckon anyone would miss a few of these?’ Ayala held up a few miniature bottles of toiletries.

‘Detective Ayala, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. This isn’t a hotel.’

At the far end of the hallway a door was propped open with a kitbag that Morton recognised as belonging to the coroner. Through the doorway, Morton could see a swimming pool with sunshine bouncing almost mockingly off the water’s surface as light shone through a windowed roof and danced off an array of tiny gemstones embedded in the pool floor.

As Morton entered, the heat and humidity of the room hit him, together with the sharp smell of chlorine mixed with a lingering fetid sweetness.

Doctor Larry Chiswick hunched low over the edge of the swimming pool. His shaggy grey mane, tied up by an elastic band, had been gathered into a shaggy ponytail that ran down his back.

At the pool’s edge nearest the coroner, the body of Ellis DeLange floated face down, gently bobbing under the current from the pool’s filtration system.

Morton crouched next to the coroner, and looked at the body. Ellis DeLange was a petite woman, with a frame to match. Morton guessed that she couldn’t have weighed more than eight stone. Long blonde hair covered most of her upper back, with a tiny pink string bikini, which left little to the imagination, visible underneath.

‘The curtains don’t match the drapes. She’s a brunette really,’ Ayala said from behind Morton.

‘Read that in one of your gossip mags?’

Ayala pouted. ‘No – look at her roots.’

Morton followed his gaze. Ellis’ roots were dark brown. The coroner used a gloved hand to sweep aside the sodden locks, which had splayed out to cover most of Ellis’ back, to give Morton an unobstructed view of a striking tattoo which covered her back and sides with a floral motif. In life she had once been a beautiful woman, but her skin was inelastic and had begun to slip underneath the tattoo, giving it a somewhat distorted appearance.

Morton glanced sideways at the coroner. ‘Can we get her out of the pool?’

Doctor Chiswick nodded, and few minutes later Ellis’ corpse was staring up at the ceiling from a plastic sheet, giving Morton the chance to look at her face.

She had the beginnings of crow’s feet, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. Her skin was pulled taut across high cheekbones, contrasting sharply with the sagging skin of her back. A waxy film had begun to form on the skin, which turned her a pale shade of green.

‘Adipocere,’ Chiswick said.

Thick purple veins criss-crossed her arms and legs like train tracks.

‘Drugs related?’ Morton asked.

‘Probably, but toxicology will confirm.’ The doctor referred to the standard array of toxicological tests performed in suspicious death cases.

‘How’d she die, Doc? Did she drown?’

‘I don’t think so. I wish things were that straightforward. I can’t see any petechia in her eyes or any foam in her airways. But she appears to have suffered blunt force trauma to the back of her head. Feel under her hair at the back of her skull,’ Chiswick said. He held out a box of gloves to Morton. ‘That could well be our cause of death.’

Morton grimaced and waved away the proffered gloves. ‘I’ll take your word for it, thanks.’

He stood, and stretched his arms.

‘Suit yourself. She’s got some sort of abrasion there,’ Chiswick said. ‘There are some post-mortem scrapes where she’s bashed against the tiled sides of the pool while floating, but that’s it.’

‘Definitely foul play then. What was she hit with?’ Morton stood, then twirled slowly on the spot, looking for anything that could have been used to bludgeon someone to death.

The doctor stood up, and looked Morton in the eye. ‘I can’t definitively rule out accidental death at this stage. She hasn’t bled out much so she can’t have been struck with anything particularly sharp. We’re looking for something large and heavy with a smooth edge. It’s got to be heavy enough to cause internal bleeding, but not so heavy that it would have broken the skull. That means something with a large surface area.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Something smaller would have concentrated the force of the swing into a small area of contact between the weapon and Ellis’ skull, causing it to break. Her skull isn’t that badly damaged. We’re looking for something large enough to have diffused the force across the skull. Her brain got the brunt of it, but the blow didn’t crack her skull open.’

‘Could she have slipped and hit her head on the edge of the pool?’

‘I doubt it. The impact would have been much more concentrated by the hard angle on the edge of the tiles, and that isn’t the case here.’

Morton nodded. He’d worked with Chiswick long enough to trust the coroner. ‘How long has she been dead then?’

‘Ballpark, a week or so but I can’t be sure. The water temp is twenty-three Celsius–’

‘Room temperature,’ Morton said sharply.

‘Yep. Body’s the same. Body temp while alive is about thirty-eight give or take, and the old rule of thumb is about one degree an hour, so it would have taken fifteen hours for her to hit room temperature. That’s our bare minimum estimate.’

‘Putting time of death yesterday at the latest?’

Chiswick crouched back down and pointed at a greenish patch of skin tinged with what looked to Morton’s untrained eye like bruising.

‘Normally adipocerous tissue would mean she’s been dead for a fortnight or more, but the atmosphere in here has messed up the forensic window. It’s so hot and humid that the skin became adipocerous faster than a buried body would have. I can’t accurately say how much quicker, though.’

‘Humidity in here is insane. Who in their right mind has an indoor pool?’ Ayala interrupted.

‘Someone with more money than sense,” Morton replied.

‘That’s all I’ve got for you right now. With your leave, I’ll get her back to the morgue, and let you and the forensics boys do your jobs.’

‘That’d be great. Thanks, Larry. Where is she in the queue?’ Morton referred to the autopsy priority queue.

‘You’re in luck. I’ve got no other suspicious deaths on my list. I’ll bump her up to the top, and get to work this afternoon. Come by around five?’

‘See you then.’

Chapter 2: The Old Coach House

Edgecombe Lodge had two unique buildings as its neighbours. To the east sat The Stables, while The Old Coach House could be found to the west. The three had once been one property when Richmond had been less crowded, with only a field where Edgecombe Lodge now stood. Back then The Stables had been an outbuilding for The Old Coach House, one of many of London’s lost coach houses.

Once they became detached homes in their own right, they shared little in common beyond a security fence which ring-fenced the three from each other and from the rest of the block.

The Stables had begun life as the most humble building, but little remained of the original structure as glass-clad extensions had been added on all sides to maximise space. A thick row of overgrown leylandii, nearly twenty feet tall and almost as dense, separated The Stables from Edgecombe Lodge, so Morton turned his attention to The Old Coach House, which had no such encumbrance.

When Morton pressed the security buzzer at the gate outside The Old Coach House, a camera perched on top of the gate swivelled towards him and a tiny red light blinked rapidly as the camera turned on.

‘Yes?’ A woman’s voice emanated from a speaker.

‘Good morning. Detective Chief Inspector Morton. Could I speak to the homeowner please?’

‘Wait.’

It was clear that the voice’s owner wasn’t English. A second voice, a man’s this time, came over the speaker, but it was muffled. Morton thought he heard the pair arguing. Then a few choice words, definitely not English, became audible as the man grew angrier.