Death of an Expert Witness (2 page)

Although she knew that he wouldn’t wake, she turned the handle of the door as carefully as if expecting it to explode. The night light, burning steadily in its saucer, was unnecessary, its yellow gleam extinguished by the moonlight which
streamed through the uncurtained windows. William, bagged in his grubby sleeping suit, lay as always on his back, both arms flung above his head. His head had flopped to one side and the thin neck, stretched and so still that she could see the pulse beat, looked too fragile to bear the weight of his head. His lips were slightly parted, and she could neither see nor hear the thin whisper of breath. As she watched he suddenly opened sightless eyes, rolled them upwards, then closed them with a sigh and fell again into his little semblance of death.

She closed the door softly behind her and went back to her own room next door. Dragging the eiderdown from her bed, she wrapped it round her shoulders and shuffled her way down the landing to the top of the stairs. The heavily studded oak banister curved down into the darkness of the hall from which the tick of the grandfather clock sounded as unnaturally loud and ominous as a time bomb. The atmosphere of the house came up to her nostrils, sour as a stale vacuum flask, redolent with the sad effluent of stodgy clerical dinners. Placing the night light against the wall she sat down on the top stair, humping the eiderdown high over her shoulders and gazing into the darkness. The stair carpet was gritty to her bare soles. Miss Willard never vacuumed it, pleading that her heart couldn’t stand the strain of lugging the cleaner from step to step, and her father never appeared to notice the drabness or dirtiness of his house. He was, after all, so seldom there. Sitting rigid in the darkness she thought of her father. Perhaps he was already at the scene of crime. It depended how far he had to drive. If it were on the very fringe of his area he might not be back until lunchtime.

But what she hoped was that he would return before breakfast so that he would find her here, crouched lonely and exhausted on the top stair, waiting for him, frightened because
he had left her alone. He would put away the car quietly, leaving the garage open in case the thud of the door woke her, then sneak in like a thief at the back door. She would hear the swirl of water from the downstairs washroom, his footsteps on the tessellated floor of the hall. Then he would look up and see her. He would come running up the stairs, torn between anxiety for her and fear of disturbing Miss Willard, his face suddenly old with weariness and concern as he put his arms round her trembling shoulders.

“Nell, darling, how long have you been here? You shouldn’t be out of bed. You’ll get cold. Come on, old girl, there’s nothing to be frightened of now. I’m back. Look, I’ll take you back to bed again and you try to get some sleep. I’ll see to the breakfast. Suppose I bring it up on a tray in about half an hour. How would you like that?”

And he would guide her back to her room, cajoling, murmuring reassurance, trying to pretend that he wasn’t frightened, frightened that she would start to cry for her mother, that Miss Willard would appear, censorious and whining, complaining that she had to get her sleep, that the precarious little household would fall apart and he would be parted from William. It was William he loved, William he couldn’t bear to lose. And he could only keep William and stop the court from giving Mummy custody if she were at home to help care for her brother.

She thought about the day ahead. It was Wednesday, a grey day. Not a black day when she wouldn’t see her father at all, but not a yellow day like Sunday, when, unless on call, he might be there most of the time. In the morning, immediately after breakfast, he would be at the public mortuary doing the post-mortem. There would be other autopsies too, those who had died in hospital, the old, the suicides, the accident victims. But the body he was probably examining now would be first on
the mortuary table. Murder has priority. Wasn’t that what they always said at the Lab? She mused, but without real curiosity, on what he might be doing at this very moment to that unknown cadaver, young or old, male or female. Whatever he was doing, the body wouldn’t feel it, wouldn’t know about it. The dead had nothing to be frightened of anymore, and there was nothing to fear from them. It was the living who held the power to hurt. And suddenly two shadows moved in the darkness of the hall, and she heard her mother’s voice, pitched high, frighteningly unfamiliar, a strained, cracked, alien voice.

“Always your job! Your bloody job! And my God, no wonder you’re good at it. You haven’t the guts to be a real doctor. You made one wrong diagnosis early on and that was the end, wasn’t it? You couldn’t take responsibility for living bodies, blood that can flow, nerves that can actually feel. All you’re fit for is messing about with the dead. It makes you feel good, doesn’t it, the way they defer to you? The phone calls at all hours of the day and night, the police escort. Never mind that I’m buried alive here in this bloody fen with your children. You don’t even see me anymore. I’d be more interesting to you if I were dead and laid out on your slab. At least you’d be forced to take some notice of me.”

Then the low, defensive mumble of her father’s voice, dispirited, abject. She had listened in the darkness and wanted to call out to him: “Don’t answer her like that! Don’t sound so defeated! Can’t you understand that it only makes her despise you more?”

His words had come to her in snatches, barely audible. “It’s my job. It’s what I do best. It’s all that I can do.” And then, more clearly. “It’s what keeps us.”

“Not me. Not any longer.” And then the slam of the door. The memory was so vivid that for a second she thought she
heard the echo of the slam. She stumbled to her feet, clutching the eiderdown around her, and opened her mouth to call to them. But then she saw that the hall was empty. There was nothing but the faint image of the stained glass in the front door where the moonlight streamed through, the ticking of the clock, the bundle of coats hanging from the hallstand. She sank back again on to the stair.

And then she remembered. There was something she had to do. Slipping her hand into her dressing-gown pocket she felt the cold, slippery plasticine of her model of Dr. Lorrimer. Carefully she drew it out through the folds of the eiderdown and held it close to the flame of the night light. The model was a little misshapen, the face furred with fluff from her pocket, but it was still intact. She straightened the long limbs and pressed the strands of black cotton she had used for hair more firmly into the scalp. The white coat, cut from an old handkerchief, was particularly successful, she thought. It was a pity that she hadn’t been able to use one of his handkerchiefs, a strand of his hair. The model represented more than Dr. Lorrimer, who had been unkind to her and William, who had practically thrown them out of the Laboratory. It stood for the whole of Hoggatt’s Lab.

And now to kill it. Gently she knocked the head against the baluster. But the plasticine merely flattened, the head lost its identity. She remodelled it with careful fingers, then held it close to the flame. But the smell was disagreeable and she was afraid that the white linen would burst into flame. She dug the nail of her little finger deeply in behind the left ear. The cut was clean and sharp, right through to the brain. That was better. She sighed, satisfied. Holding the dead creature in her right palm she squeezed the pink plasticine, the white coat, the cotton hair into one amorphous lump. Then, huddling deep into the eiderdown, she sat and waited for the dawn.

The car, a green Morris Minor, had been toppled over the edge of a shallow depression in the wasteland, and had lurched to rest on a grassy plateau about ten feet from the ridge like a clumsy animal going to earth. It must have been there for years, abandoned to the plunderers, an illicit plaything for the local children, a welcome shelter for the occasional vagrant like the seventy-year-old alcoholic who had stumbled on the body. The two front wheels had been removed, and the rusted back wheels with their rotting tyres were firmly embedded in the chalky earth, the paintwork was battered and scratched, the interior stripped of instruments and steering wheel. Two mounted arc-lights, one directed downwards from the top of the bank and the other precariously planted on the edge of the plateau, illuminated its stark decrepitude. Thus brightly lit it looked, thought Kerrison, like some grotesque and pretentious modern sculpture, symbolically poised on the brink of chaos. The back seat, its padding springing from the slashed plastic, had been ripped out and hurled to one side.

In the front seat rested the body of a girl. Her legs were decorously planted together, the glazed eyes were slyly half open, the mouth, devoid of lipstick, was fixed in a drool elongated by two small trickles of blood. They gave a face which must have been pretty, or at least childishly vulnerable, the vacuous look of an adult clown. The thin coat, too thin surely for a night in early November, was pulled waist-high. She was wearing stockings, and the suspender clips bit into plump white thighs.

Drawing close to the body, under the watchful eyes of Lorrimer and Doyle, he thought, as he often did at such a scene, that it looked unreal, an anomaly, so singularly and ridiculously out of place that he had to stifle a nervous impulse to laugh. He didn’t feel this so strongly when a corpse was far advanced in decay. It was then as if the rotting maggot infested flesh, or the tags of matted clothing, had already become part of the earth which clung to and enclosed them, no more unnatural or frightening than a clump of compost or a drift of decaying leaves. But here, colours and outlines intensified in the glare, the body, still outwardly so human, looked an absurd burlesque, the skin of the pallid cheek as artificial as the stained plastic of the car against which it rested. It seemed ridiculous that she should be beyond help. As always he had to fight the impulse to fasten his mouth over hers and begin resuscitation, to plunge a needle into the still-warm heart.

He had been surprised to find Maxim Howarth, newly appointed Director of the Forensic Science Laboratory, at the scene, until he remembered that Howarth had said something about following through the next murder case. He supposed that he was expected to instruct. Withdrawing his head from the open door he said: “It’s almost certainly a case of manual throttling. The slight bleeding from the mouth is caused by the tongue being caught between the teeth. Manual
strangulation is invariably homicidal. She couldn’t have done this herself.”

Howarth’s voice was carefully controlled. “I should have expected more bruising of the neck.”

“That’s usual, certainly. There’s always some damage to the tissues, although the extent of the bruised area depends on the position of the assailant and victim, the way in which the neck is grasped as well as the degree of pressure. I’d expect to find deep-seated internal bruising, but it’s possible to get this without many superficial signs. This happens when the murderer has maintained pressure until death; the vessels have been emptied of blood and the heart stops beating before the hands are removed. The cause of death is asphyxia, and one expects to find the usual signs of this. What is so interesting here is the cadaveric spasm. You’ll see that she’s clutching the bamboo handle of her bag. The muscles are absolutely rigid, proof that the grasp occurred at or about the moment of death. I’ve never before seen cadaveric spasm in a case of homicidal manual throttling, and it’s interesting. She must have died extraordinarily quickly. But you’ll get a clearer idea of what exactly happened when you watch the post-mortem.”

Of course, thought Howarth, the post-mortem. He wondered how early Kerrison would expect to get down to that job. He wasn’t afraid that his nerve would fail him, only his stomach, but he wished he hadn’t said he would be there. There was no privacy for the dead; the most one could hope for was a certain reverence. It now seemed to him monstrous that tomorrow he, a stranger, would be looking unrebuked at her nakedness. But for the present he had seen enough. He could step aside now without loss of face. Turning up the collar of his Burberry against the chill morning air, he climbed up the slope to the rim of the hollow and stood looking down at
the car. This must be what shooting a film was like: the brightly lit scene, the ennui of waiting for the chief actors to appear, the brief moments of activity, the concentrated attention to detail. The body could easily be that of an actress simulating death. He half expected one of the police to dart forward and rearrange her hair.

The night was nearly over. Behind him the eastern sky was already brightening, and the wasteland, which had been a formless void of darkness above the lumpy earth, was assuming an identity and a shape. To the west he could see the outline of houses, probably a council estate, a trim row of identical roofs and square slabs of darkness broken by patterned squares of yellow as the early risers switched on their lights. The track along which his car had bumped, rock-strewn and silver, alien as a moonscape in the glare of the headlights, took shape and direction, became ordinary. Nothing was left mysterious. The place was an arid scrubland between the two ends of the town, litter-strewn and edged with sparse trees above a ditch. He knew that the ditch would be dank with nettles and sour with rotting rubbish, the trees wounded by vandals, the trunks carved with initials, the low branches hanging torn from the boughs. Here was an urban no-man’s-land, fit territory for murder.

It was a mistake to have come, of course; he should have realized that the role of voyeur was always ignoble. Few things were more demoralizing than to stand uselessly by while other men demonstrated their professional competence: Kerrison, that connoisseur of death, literally sniffing at the body; the photographers, taciturn, preoccupied with lighting and angles; Inspector Doyle, in charge of a murder case at last, impresario of death, tense with the suppressed excitement of a child at Christmas gloating over a new toy. Once, while waiting for
Kerrison to arrive, Doyle had actually laughed, a hearty guffaw, filling the hollow. And Lorrimer? Before touching the body he had briefly crossed himself. It was so small and precise a gesture that Howarth could have missed it, except that nothing Lorrimer did escaped him. The others seemed unsurprised at the eccentricity. Perhaps they were used to it. Domenica hadn’t told him that Lorrimer was religious. But then his sister hadn’t told him anything about her lover. She hadn’t even told him that the affair was over. But he had needed only to look at Lorrimer’s face during the past month to know that. Lorrimer’s face, Lorrimer’s hands. Odd that he hadn’t noticed how long the fingers were or with what apparent gentleness they had taped the plastic bag over the girl’s hand to preserve, as he had tonelessly explained, conscientious in his role of instructor, any evidence under the fingernails. He had taken a sample of blood from the plump flaccid arm, feeling for the vein as carefully as if she could still flinch at the needle’s prick.