Dead Famous

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT. 2.35 a.m.

They had received the call at one fifteen, and had arrived at the scene of the crime to take over the investigation by two thirty. By that time, probably the biggest mistake of the case had already been made.

“You let them wash?” Coleridge said, in what was for him nearly a shout.

“They’d been sweating in that box for over two hours, sir,” the officer who had been in charge thus far pleaded. “I had a good look at them first and had one of my girls look at the ladies.”

“You looked at them?”

“Well, blood’s blood, sir. I mean, it’s red. I would have spotted it. There wasn’t any. I assure you we had a very good look. Even under their fingernails and stuff. We’ve still got the sheet, of course. There’s a few drops on that.”

“Yes, I’m sure there is, the blood of the victim. Sadly, though, we do not have a problem identifying the victim. She’s glued to the lavatory floor! It’s the killer we’re looking for, and you let a group of naked suspects in a knife-attack wash!”

There was no point pursuing the matter further. The damage was done. In fact, at that point in the investigation Coleridge was not particularly worried. The murder had been taped, the suspects were being held, all of the evidence was entirely contained within a single environment. Coleridge did not imagine that it would be long before the truth emerged.

“This one’s got to be a bit of a no-brainer,” Hooper had remarked as they drove towards the house.

“A what?” Coleridge enquired.

“A no-brainer, sir. It means easy.”

“Then why don’t you say so?”

“Well, because… Well, because it’s less colourful, sir.”

“I prefer clarity to colour in language, sergeant.”

Hooper wasn’t having this. Coleridge wasn’t the only one who had been woken up at one in the morning. “What about Shakespeare, then?” Hooper reached back in his mind to his English Literature GCSE for a quote. He retrieved a sonnet:

“What about ‘Shall I compare you to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’ Perhaps he should have just said, ‘I fancy you’?”

“Shakespeare was not a policeman embarking on a murder inquiry. He was poet employing language in celebration of a beautiful woman.”

“Actually, sir, I read that it was a bloke he was talking about.”

Coleridge did not answer. Hooper smiled to himself. He knew that one would annoy the old bastard.

And Coleridge was annoyed once more, for, once they had arrived at the house, it became very quickly clear to him that this investigation was by no means straightforward at all.

The pathologist had no light to shed on the subject. “What you see is what you get, chief inspector,” she said. “At eleven forty-four last night somebody stabbed this girl in the neck with a kitchen knife and immediately thereafter plunged the same knife through her skull, where it remained. The exact time of the attack was recorded on the video cameras, which makes a large part of my job rather redundant.”

“But you concur with the evidence of the cameras?”

“Certainly. I would probably have told you between eleven thirty and eleven forty, but of course I could never be as accurate as a time code. Bit of luck for you, that.”

“The girl died instantly?” Coleridge asked.

“On the second blow, yes. The first would not have killed her had she gone on to receive treatment.”

“You’ve watched the tape.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Do you have any observations to offer?”

“Not really, I’m afraid. I suppose I was a little surprised at the speed with which the blood puddle formed. A corpse’s blood doesn’t flow from a wound, you see, because the heart is no longer pumping it. It merely leaks, and an awful lot leaked in two minutes.”

“Significant?”

“Not really,” the pathologist replied. “Interesting to me, that’s all. We’re all different physiologically. The girl was leaning forward, so gravity will have increased the speed of blood loss. I suppose that accounts for it.”

Coleridge looked down at the dead girl kneeling on the floor in front of the toilet. A curious position to end up in, for all the world like a Muslim at prayer. Except that she was naked. And, of course, there was the knife.

“Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him,” Coleridge murmured to himself.

“Excuse me?”

“Macbeth,” said Coleridge. “Duncan’s death. There was also a lot of blood on that occasion.”

Coleridge had gone to bed with the Complete Works the night before, preparing for the amateur dramatics audition that he knew he would fail.

“Well, there normally is a lot of blood when people get stabbed,” stated the pathologist matter of factly. “So that’s your lot for the moment,” she continued. “We might find something on the knife handle. The killer wrapped the sheet round it for grip and also, one presumes, in order to avoid leaving prints. They’d all been in a sweatbox, secreting copiously, so some cellular matter might have soaked through. Could possibly get an ID from that.”

“Nobody’s touched the knife, then?” After the washing incident Coleridge was ready to believe anything.

“No, but we’ll obviously have to touch it to get it out of her head. We’ll almost certainly have to cut the skull as well. Grim work, I’m afraid.”

“Yes.” Coleridge leaned over the body, trying to see as far as he could into the toilet cubicle without stepping in the pool of congealed blood. He put his hands against the walls to support himself. “Hold my waist, please, sergeant. I don’t want to fall onto the poor girl.”

Hooper did as he was told and Coleridge, thus suspended, took in the scene. Kelly’s naked bottom stared up at him and, beyond that, the toilet bowl.

“Very clean,” he remarked.

“What, sir?” Hooper asked, surprised.

“The lavatory bowl, it’s very clean.”

“Oh, I see, I thought you meant…”

“Be quiet, sergeant.”

“That was Kelly.” Geraldine spoke from behind him. “Scrubbed the toilet twice a day. She can’t stand dirty bogs…” Her voice trailed away as she reminded herself that Kelly was past caring about anything now. “I mean, she couldn’t stand it… She was a very neat and tidy girl.”

Coleridge continued his investigation. “Hmmm, not a particularly thorough girl, though, I fear. She missed a few small splashes of what I think is vomit on the seat. Thank you, you can pull me back now.”

With Hooper’s help and by walking his hands backwards along the walls, Coleridge rejoined the pathologist.

“What about the sheet worn by the killer?” he asked. “The one he took back into the boys’ bedroom?”

“You might be luckier with that. I mean, all that sweating must have loosened some skin. Some of it would certainly have stuck to the sheet.”

The original officer on the scene chipped in at this point. “We think that the sheet the killer used was the same one as the black lad, Jason, put on when he emerged from the room after the event, sir.”

“Ah,” said Coleridge thoughtfully. “So if by any chance Jason were our man, then he would have a convenient alibi for any residue of his DNA on the sheet.”

“Yes, I suppose he would.”

“It’ll take a day or two at the lab,” said the pathologist. “Shall I send it off?”

“Yes, of course. Not a lot of point in my looking at it,” Coleridge replied. “I see that the lavatory door has a lock.”

“That’s right,” said Geraldine. “It’s the only one in the house. It’s electronic and they can open it from either side, in case one of them faints or decides to top themselves or whatever. We can also spring it from the control room.”

“But Kelly didn’t use the lock?”

“No. None of them did.”

“Really?”

“Well, I suppose if you’ve got a camera staring at you while you do your thing privacy becomes sort of irrelevant. Besides, there’s a light that says when the loo’s occupied.”

“So the killer would not have expected to encounter a lock?”

“No, not since about the second day.”

Coleridge inspected the door and the lock mechanism for some moments.

“I only had it fitted as an afterthought,” said Geraldine. “I thought we ought to give them at least the impression of privacy. If only she’d used it.”

“I’m not sure it would have helped,” said Coleridge. “The killer was obviously very determined, and the restraining bar on this lock is only plywood. It would have taken very little force to kick it open.”

“I suppose so,” said Geraldine.

Coleridge summoned the police photographer to ensure that photographs of the door and its catch were taken, and then he and Sergeant Hooper retraced the killer’s steps from the lavatory back to the boys’ bedroom.

“Nothing to be got from the floor, I suppose.”

“Hardly, sir,” said Hooper. “The same eight people have been back and forth over these tiles twenty-four seven for the last four weeks.”

“Twenty-four seven?”

Hooper gritted his teeth before replying. “It’s an expression, sir. It means twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

“I see… Quite useful. Economic, to the point.”

“I think so, sir.”

“American, I presume?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I wonder if any item of colloquial English will ever again emanate from this country.”

“I wonder if anybody apart from you remotely cares, sir.” Hooper knew that he was safe to be as cheeky as he liked. Coleridge was no longer listening to him, nor was he really thinking about the changing nature of English slang. That was just his way of concentrating. Coleridge always turned into an even bigger bore than usual when his mind began to gnaw at a problem. Hooper knew that he was in for weeks of grim pedantry.

After another half-hour or so of searching, during which nothing of interest was discovered, Coleridge decided to leave the lab people to their work. “Let’s go and meet the suspects, shall we?”