Too Much of Water (3 page)

The average stomach stretches to accommodate two to four pints after a meal. This one was no exception. Within two to three hours of eating, food moves out of the stomach and into the small intestine. Because the process stops at death, this is one of the most valuable areas for detectives investigating foul play, often enabling them to assess the time of a particular death. This woman had eaten a meal of fish and chips some three hours before she died, in the pathologist's opinion. He set the stomach contents carefully on one side in a sealed container for further investigation. Hook wondered if this anonymous woman had ever had such detailed attention paid to her diet when she was alive.

Meanwhile, the pathologist was preparing to examine the tissues of the brain, that most intricate and subtle of computers, which had now been stilled for ever. It was the noisiest part of the autopsy, as he followed the incision he had made from ear to ear at the back of the skull with the electric saw to remove the skullcap. Hook flinched a little despite his experience: the clinical brutality of this assault to reveal the most complex part of human existence, the brain, which elevates man above the other living things on the planet, still took him a little by surprise.

He was glad when he was out in the dazzling light of a high summer noon, blinking with the shock of the sunlight after the white, artificial illumination of the Chepstow pathology lab.

They had a murder victim all right. A young woman, as yet anonymous, stone dead before she was ever thrust into the wide, concealing waters of the Severn. Now they had to decide where to begin the investigation.

T
his crime was not going to be easy.

A Scenes of Crime team had examined the reach of the Severn and the bank beside it where the corpse had been discovered. The civilian head of the team was apologetic about the paucity of their findings. They had discovered a little detritus to bag and take away for examination. A battered comb, a ballpoint pen, a few fibres of some man-made fabric, a couple of hairs which were almost certainly human rather than canine. But these probably derived from walkers along the riverside path rather than from the corpse or anyone who had been in contact with it.

Superintendent Lambert nodded resignedly and told himself he had expected nothing. You had to conduct these examinations, in case something helpful turned up unexpectedly. But the Severn was tidal here: its twice-daily rise and fall and its fast-running waters would quickly remove anything not securely attached to the corpse. More importantly, this was not the spot where the murder had been committed. This woman had been dead when she was consigned to the river, might have been killed many miles from the water. They did not even know the spot where she had been dumped into the river, which would have been much more significant than the location where the body was eventually found.

Indeed, it was the absence of a real Scenes of Crime investigation which was one of the greatest problems of the case. In cases of serious assault and murder, the crime team comb the scene of the incident for any tiny detail of the ‘exchange' which takes place between a criminal and his victim. Even experienced criminals usually leave behind some scrap of themselves: a fibre from clothing, a hair, a trace of saliva, sweat or semen. A SOCO investigation is normally the starting point for any investigation. Because of increasingly sophisticated DNA and other forensic techniques, it is also in effect the finishing point in a surprising number of cases, since the material gathered at the scene is more often than not the key evidence in securing a court conviction.

Lambert's team did not know the scene of this crime, and they might never know it. As yet, they did not even know the identity of the victim. The pathologist's view was that the body had probably been in the water for between two and four days before being discovered. As the riverside walkers had come upon the corpse at Lydney on Wednesday morning, that indicated that it had probably been consigned to the Severn at some time during the preceding weekend.

DI Rushton's trawl of the Missing Persons register had so far produced no obvious candidate as the victim.

House-to-house enquiries were being instituted in villages and towns within five miles of the Severn, but unless and until the CID had a clearer idea where the victim had been deposited in its waters, it was far too wide an area for Lambert to be confident of success. It was a way of using the manpower resources immediately afforded to a murder enquiry, but not, the chief superintendent feared, a very productive way.

The team's first break came in unlikely clothing. The diffident and unprepossessing man who presented himself at the reception desk of Oldford police station was embarrassed to be there at all. He had never been in a police station before, and his fragile confidence drained away as he spoke to the duty sergeant. His assertion that ‘It's probably nothing really!' meant that he was left waiting on a bench for twenty minutes whilst a shoplifter was processed and the details of a missing dog were entered in the register.

It was only when he went up to the desk again and said that he thought he might be able to throw some light upon the identity of the Lydney corpse that he was ushered briskly through to the CID section. There Chris Rushton listened to his first halting sentences and decided that John Lambert would want to hear what this uncertain figure with the clean but frayed shirt collar had to say.

Once he was invited to speak, the words tumbled from him like a fall of scree. ‘My name is Harry Shadwell. I'm a tutor at the university. I thought you should hear what one of my personal students told me yesterday morning. We each take a personal responsibility for three or four students in each year, you see. They can come to us with personal as well as academic problems. I thought at first that it was probably nothing, but on reflection—'

‘On reflection, you thought we ought to know about it. Your second reaction is the right one, Mr Shadwell. It's a pity that it took twenty-four hours for you to decide to come here, but better late than never.'

Curiously, the rebuke emboldened Harry Shadwell rather than checked him. He was not the most efficient of teachers, and he was used to being chivvied in his academic work. He plucked the cuffs of his shabby leather jacket straight, fastened onto the idea that his information was to be welcomed rather than derided, and became more precise. ‘This concerns one of my personal students. A young woman called Clare Mills. She seems to have gone missing.'

Lambert made a note of the name. ‘Missing since when, Mr Shadwell?'

‘Only since the weekend. And there's probably a perfectly good explanation for it. It's just that I thought—'

‘Thought that you should act as a good citizen and give us the information. Quite right, Mr Shadwell. If she proves to be alive and well and merely embarrassed, so much the better!'

Yet Lambert knew that a part of him was hoping that she wouldn't be alive, that this was the body which had been cut up to reveal its secrets on the previous afternoon. He tried to conceal his growing excitement as he asked, ‘How normal would it be for a student to disappear from her studies for a few days like this?'

‘For many students, quite normal, I'm afraid. But not for Clare Mills.'

‘And why is she an exception?'

‘Clare's a mature student. Twenty-five years old, and determined to make the most of the opportunity she's been given to read for a degree. They're often the best, you know, the students who come to higher education a little later. Better sense of perspective, better attitude to work, better—'

‘They also often have other responsibilities. You don't think that it might be some other concern, some family matter for instance, which has required this student's attention?'

Harry Shadwell smiled in spite of himself: this was so near to his own initial reaction that it gave him confidence. He looked over the top of his glasses at his questioner and spoke as if outlining a difficult idea to a student. ‘That was exactly my initial reaction when her flatmate came to me yesterday, Mr Lambert. I thought the girl was probably busy with some other concern. But another twenty-four hours have gone past and there is still no news of her. Moreover, I have given some thought to the matter, as I indicated earlier. For Clare Mills, this is atypical behaviour. She does not miss lectures and tutorials: she is a most conscientious student. If she had needed to miss them – if she were ill or she had some family concern which needed her immediate attention – Clare would have been sure to let her tutors know that she was going to be absent.'

Lambert reflected that all this had been so twenty-four hours earlier, when Shadwell had first been made aware of the situation. The tutor had wasted a full day, when days were precious; it was a statistic of CID life that the further away you got from the date of the murder, the less likely you were to solve it. But that was history: at least the man was here now, pinning down a possible victim for them. ‘Was this lady married?'

‘No. Well, I don't think so.' Harry Shadwell felt a familiar panic at his own inefficiency. He should know the backgrounds of his personal students, but he could remember little about Clare except that she had been an able and diligent student, and thus no trouble to him. ‘She was sharing a flat with another girl.'

Lambert smiled at the man's naivety. ‘She could be separated from a spouse. She could be divorced. These things are highly relevant, if she's disappeared. As is the whole of her family background, and any friends and enemies she may have made whilst on her course at university.'

‘Yes, I see that. Well, I can check her file and—'

‘We'll need to have that file, Mr Shadwell. And if she does prove to be a murder victim, we'll need to talk to her friends and her tutors at the university. Does anyone else know that you have come here today?'

‘No. It was my own initiative.' Harry Shadwell seemed suddenly rather proud of himself.

‘Then please tell no one of it. The fewer people who know about this, the better. If the girl is alive and well, there is no need to stir up a hornets' nest. If she isn't, people will know soon enough what we are about.'

One of the host of people who had surrounded Clare Mills in the teeming buildings of a modern university might have strangled her. There was no reason to let him or her know that the hunt had begun.

They called him Denis.

It had seemed a strange name to him at first, and people had laughed as they said it, but he had got used to it now. In the early days, he had failed to react to it a couple of times, and there had been much laughter. Denis had grinned sheepishly at his error, but he hadn't been laughing inside.

He knew that not responding to his new name could be dangerous for him. So he didn't make that mistake any longer.

He had been here for six weeks now, picking the strawberry crop under ten-foot-high polythene tunnels in Herefordshire. It was stifling work, toiling for long hours in oppressive conditions in the hottest part of the year. You could see why the British did not want to do it, when they could get other work. You could see why the farmer had to assemble a polyglot workforce, the desperate and the defeated from all parts of Europe.

Denis was a Croatian, living in the wrong part of Kosovo at the wrong time. He had been training to be a doctor once. He had completed four years of his course, before war and all the things that went with it had intervened. Now he had lived so long by his wits that those student days seemed to belong to another person altogether, living a very different life: someone impossibly young and carefree, without the experience of horror, without the ruthlessness that came with it to enable you to survive.

Someone from the days before the medical student had turned into someone who killed people.

It had cost him money to get here, far more than he could afford. Everything he had owned in Kosovo had gone. And the passport he had been promised had never materialized. He could do nothing about that: he had as much chance of pinning down the man who had taken his money as he had of flying to the moon. He had learned to live life day by day, to survive and to save every penny he could from his earnings.

Denis was a natural linguist, and he had quickly picked up enough of the language to get by with. He trusted nobody, and he tried to anticipate trouble and keep away from it. You kept yourself to yourself, you saw trouble developing, and you kept away from it. ‘Keeping your nose clean', the English called it. Denis worked very hard to keep his nose clean. At first, he had counted off the days he had been in this strange new country. Then he had begun to measure his success in weeks, even occasionally to feel quite relaxed.

He was an excellent worker. The man who had hired him and a lot of other foreign labour to pick his strawberries was pleased with him. He even told him that, which was unusual for a farmer, Denis thought. He asked him to stay on to pick raspberries when the strawberries were finished. And after that, if all went well, he said, there might be work in the apple orchard, well into the autumn.

It wouldn't get him a passport. Denis didn't see how he was ever going to do that. But in the caravans the farmer had crowded onto the smallest of his fields to house his motley army of fruit-pickers, Denis listened and noted. He heard people say that if you could stay in this country for a long time, you had a better chance of being accepted here permanently. He had no idea whether this information was reliable, but it was an idea he clung to as he sweated out his days beneath the polythene tunnels. He didn't discuss it with anyone. He stored the notion away and kept his own counsel.

People learned to leave him alone. He got a reputation as a loner who didn't want to make friends. People thought he knew nothing of the language and couldn't converse. That suited him well. He listened and learned. Many of the people around him would never have been so open in their conversations if they had realized how much was understood by the wiry man with the very black hair and the deep scratches on his forearms.