Need You Dead

32 Friday 22 April

Guy Batchelor stared at Frazer Theobald. ‘What?’

‘The presence of semen.’

‘So she’s a sailor?’

Theobald looked at Guy Batchelor strangely. Humour had never been a part of the pathologist’s canon of talents. Most people, when thinking about it, realized they had never even seen Dr Frazer Theobald smile. ‘Sailor?’ he quizzed.

‘Sorry, just a bad joke. Semen. Sea men.’

The pathologist continued to stare at him, without getting it. ‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me.’

Batchelor noticed the creases around Gartrell’s and Websdale’s eyes. They were both grinning.

‘It’s OK. What can you tell us about it — are you able to say how recently she had intercourse before she died?’

Theobald lowered his mask, revealing almost in full his Groucho Marx moustache. With his diminutive frame, all he needed was a large cigar to complete the look, Batchelor thought, struggling to keep that thought to himself.

‘Without laboratory examination, I can’t tell you how fresh it is, but I would estimate that sexual intercourse had occurred within the last forty-eight hours. From the briefing you gave me, I understood this unfortunate lady was renting the flat she was found in as some kind of a bolthole — to get away from her abusive husband. I would hardly consider the presence of semen to be a surprise. You told me earlier that her husband’s fingerprints were found in this apartment, indicating his knowledge of it. It is reasonable to assume that he had sex with her, consensually or otherwise. Unless of course she was having an affair. DNA will establish this one way or another.’

‘I’ll get it fast-tracked,’ Batchelor said.

Theobald carried on, while the DI made notes on his pad, intending to update Roy Grace in a short while and ask him how he wanted him to handle the investigation from here.

Something bothered him a lot about the semen. Sure, to the Home Office pathologist the presence of it in the woman’s vagina, given the circumstance of her relationship with her abusive, dominating husband, was entirely plausible. But not to Guy Batchelor.

It told him a very different story.

Had she met a lover there? Had sex with him? The DNA result, which could be back in twenty-four hours, with luck, might provide an answer.

If it came back with a match to the husband, and his DNA was found on the beer cans which had been sent to the lab following the fingerprint identification, then it would be case closed.

But if not?

He hoped so much it would turn out to be the husband. To have solved this before Roy Grace had even returned from Germany would make him look very good.

But a feeling he could not explain told him that this wasn’t the whole picture.