The Dead Tracks

Chapter Fifty-six

Healy traced Markham's dead body with the torch, careful not to disturb the crime scene. Eventually we'd have to call it in, but first we had to clear our heads. Press Reset. Our best lead was lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor of a derelict house.

'Difficult to tell how long,' Healy said, 'unless you want to shove a thermometer up his arse and take his temperature.'

He moved the torch beam down Markham's arm, blue veins prominent below the skin. The blood that hadn't left his body through his chest had pooled in his legs, his feet and the small of his back. Healy used the torch to signal one of his calves. The area directly in contact with the lino hadn't filled with blood. The area just above it had.

'That's hypostasis,' he said.

Once gravity kicks in, your red blood cells head south and settle; but the skin that's in direct contact with a surface won't fill up because the capillaries are compressed.

He swung the torch around the kitchen.

'The body hasn't been moved,' he continued. 'Once the red blood cells drop, they stay dropped. If he'd been turned over from his front, the blood would be in his shins, knees, top of his thighs and the front of his chest - not where it is now.'

'Looks like he's got rigor mortis too,' I said.

Healy stopped, turned to me, eyes narrowing. 'So what else am I telling you that you already know?' He was angry that we'd hit another dead end, and he needed someone to offload on. 'You going to tell me how it is you're a part- time pathologist as well as a part-time policeman?'

I let the insult slide.

'Huh?'

'What are we arguing about, Healy?'

'I just like to know who I'm dealing with.'

I rubbed my fingers across my forehead. I'd only known him for a short space of time, but Healy was nothing if not predictable.

'I wanna know who I've got along for the ride,' he said. 'I don't want surprises. I don't want a knife in my back.'

I stared at him. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'You know what it means.'

'I don't even know what you're getting your knickers in a twist about. So I know what rigor mortis looks like. So what?'

'So, I don't trust you.'

You don't have to trust me. You just have to work with me. When this is all over, I'm sure there'll be plenty of time for us to find a cosy corner somewhere and discuss what we do and do not know about the human body after it dies.'

His eyes narrowed again. 'What the fuck do you know about death?'

He realized what he'd said within about a second of it coming out of his mouth, but Healy wasn't the type to apologize. The best he could do was a vague flattening of his mouth. It was a typical Healy moment; a pointless argument borne out of him realizing he wasn't in complete control.

He fixed the torchlight on Markham's face.

'Yeah, he's stiffened up,' he said quietly.

Rigor always starts in the facial muscles, before crawling its way through the jaw and the throat and then out into the rest of the body. It can give you an approximate time of death, but even a pathologist would have struggled to pinpoint it exactly based on the kind of conditions we were dealing with. The fact that rigor mortis had set in certainly put him at under thirty-six hours, and the hypostasis in the lower parts of his body was a dark purple. I'd shadowed the Forensic Science Laboratory in Pretoria for two months as part of a feature I was writing about post- apartheid South Africa in the late nineties, and had been to a few crime scenes. Maximum lividity occurred about six to twelve hours after hypostasis set in. Which meant Markham was alive when he woke up this morning.

'If we call this in, it's over,' Healy said, the torch back on Markham's body, running the length of one of the knife wounds. This whole thing goes down the toilet.'

I nodded. He was right. At the moment, we were ahead of the curve and the police were playing catch-up.

I started pulling the room apart, pushing furniture aside, dragging the sofa out from the wall, trying to zero in on anything that would give us a lead. Healy started as well, stepping around Markham in the kitchen, and opening and shutting drawers.

Moving to the TV cabinet and the stack of videotapes, I knelt down and started pulling them out of their sleeves, tossing them away one after the other.

Then, midway through, I stopped.

The second from last tape was in a bright red case, different from the others, and had no printing on it at all. I pulled the cassette out. Written across the label in the middle was a message in black marker pen.

It said, Help me.

We didn't speak as I switched on the VCR, slid the tape in and turned the TV on. Blackness. And then, seconds later, the set was filled with a shot of Markham.

He had tears in his eyes.

His brown hair was shorter than in the photo I'd taken from the youth club, and he'd lost the horn-rimmed glasses. Dark eyes like chips of wood gazed out at us; stubble bristled as his hand traced the line of his jaw. He looked in good shape and was dressed well too: a name- brand polo shirt and a pair of jeans. No shoes.

He sniffed and then took in a long breath. His eyes drifted off camera, before coming back again. It was recorded during the day, in the middle of the living room. In the background we could see the kitchen, and a little of the stairs. He ran a hand through his hair, as if he didn't know where to start.

Then he cleared his throat.

'My name is Daniel Markham,' he said, his voice wavering, his eyes watering, his face etched with unease. 'And this is my confession.'