The House Sitter

5

Hen Mallin’s television appeal needed some rapid script changes now. So it was Stella who drove out to Wightview Sands and met Dr Wilkinson. Not an easy assignment.

The first thing she noticed was the hair. Mrs Bassington, the health centre receptionist, had been right. It was emphatically more chestnut than copper. Thick, long, and worn loose, as if to make clear Shiena Wilkinson was off duty. She was in T-shirt and close-fitting denim shorts, with a figure that… well, maybe she looked more like a GP in her work clothes.

They spoke in the windsurfers’ club, close to where the Range Rover had been parked. The car park attendant who had spoken to Hen on the phone lingered as if he might have something to contribute, but he was a new face. Another man had been on duty when the body was found. From the looks he was giving the young doctor it was obvious what this fellow’s agenda was. He was around thirty, with thick, slicked-back hair and a stupid grin. Stella asked him if he shouldn’t be back in his kiosk.

“It’s on automatic,” he said. “We put it on automatic when things are quiet. People put in their money and the gate goes up. I can get you ladies a coffee if you want.”

“Thanks, but no,” Stella said. “Unless…” She gave Dr Wilkinson an enquiring look and was grateful for a shake of the head.

The car park man still hovered. “I expect you thought Dr Wilkinson was the victim, being the owner of the Range Rover.”

Stella gave him a look she reserved for really pathetic cases. “I’m asking you to leave us now, Mr, em…”

“Garth,” he said. “My name’s Garth.”

When the two women were alone, Shiena Wilkinson said, “I understand you took my car away because you thought it belonged to that unfortunate woman who was found dead. Well, I need it back-urgently.”

“Understood.”

“It contains things essential to my work. I’m a doctor.”

“And I’m a detective, so I know you are.” Stella smiled to ease the tension. “You’ll get your things back directly. But as for the car, you’ll need to hire another for the next day or two. We had to look inside. We’ll put the damage right, of course.”

“Damage?”

“We broke a window.”

“I thought you had bunches of keys for a job like that.”

“We couldn’t wait. We had a body, obviously murdered. We needed to identify her quickly.”

“Point taken,” Dr Wilkinson said in a more accepting tone.

“What made you leave it here?”

“That’s personal. I was going to collect it today. Hairy moment for me when it wasn’t here.”

“Do you mind telling me?”

She sighed. “I met a friend on the beach yesterday and spent the night with him in Brighton. He took me there in his car. It’s as simple as that. He offered to bring me back today to collect mine and he did.”

Stella drove the young doctor to the motor vehicle forensic unit to collect her medical bag and other things. On the way, Shiena Wilkinson talked about the man she’d met. He was Greg, a college friend she hadn’t seen for a couple of years, though they’d phoned each other. It seemed he regularly came to the beach to surf. He’d produced a bottle of cooled Chablis from an icebox he had in his car, and it had been like revisiting her student days because she’d got (in her own words) “rather mellow as the day wore on”. At the end of the afternoon Greg persuaded her she was in no state to drive (women being more susceptible to alcohol than men-at which Stella rolled her eyes, and Dr Wilkinson said, “Yes, but more to the point, I’d drunk two-thirds of the bottle”) and suggested it would be safe to leave the Range Rover overnight. If there was a problem, he’d say he was a member of the windsurfers’ club and square it with the car park man.”

“Was he worth it?” Stella asked.

“Are they ever?”

Stella asked which section of the beach the couple had been on. It was too much to hope they had witnessed something.

“Close to where I parked my car, almost opposite the club.”

Too far off.

“Did you hear about the body being found?”

“At the time? No.”

“News travels fast. I thought maybe people along the beach knew what was going on.”

“If I’d known, I’d have offered to help. It’s something you do, in my job. What time was she found?”

“What time did you leave?”

“Quite early. Around four, I think.”

Wrong woman, wrong place, wrong time of day.

After she’d been on TV, Hen Mallin returned to the incident room and told her team they weren’t just to sit around and wait for witnesses to get in touch. “What about the other cars left there on Sunday evening? There were three, apart from the Range Rover. One belonged to Claudia, the Boxgrove blonde. That leaves two.”

Sergeant Mason, the man who had contacted the Police National Computer, said, “Another Mitsubishi and a Peugeot, both registered to men.”

“I remember. I suppose they’re not still there, by any chance?”

“Both gone, guv.”

“Did you keep a note of the numbers?”

Mason sighed and shook his head.

“Or the owners’ addresses?”

“Sorry. I thought when we fixed on the Range Rover…”

“But I did, and I checked with the PNC,” the keeno, George Flint, said with unconcealed self-congratulation. He produced a notebook. “The Mitsu was registered to a guy by the name of Thomas West, 219 Victory Road, Portsmouth, and the Peugeot is down to a Londoner, Deepak Patel, 88 Melrose Avenue, Putney.”

“Nice work, George.”

He beamed.

“Follow it up, would you?” she told him in the same affable tone. “See if there’s any link with a missing woman.”

From looking like a golden retriever being stroked on the head, he changed to a snarling pitbull. “You mean go there?”

“In a word, yes. Take DC Walters.” Walters was the newest officer on the team, so green that he still thought speed was what you did on the motorway and H was a sign for a hospital.

Flint’s face said it all. What a way to reward initiative.

Stella said to the boss, “Speaking of missing persons, I looked at the MPI. You know how it is, guv. Thousands of names.”

“Yes, but we’re only interested in the ones reported in the past twenty-four hours.”

“It could take another week before our victim gets on the index. We’re talking about a missing adult here, not a kid.”

“Fair point. Keep checking each day. Do we have the list of all the objects picked up on the beach?”

“That’s in hand.”

“Meaning, no, we don’t.”

“It’s a long list, guv.”

“Get it on my screen by six tonight. And, speaking of tonight, does anyone have a problem working overtime?”

No one did, apparently.

In spite of all the overtime, nothing startling emerged in the next twenty-four hours. The television appeal brought in over seventy calls from people who believed they had seen the victim on the beach on Sunday. As Hen remarked to Stella, “I’m beginning to wonder if there was anyone on that bloody beach who wasn’t female with copper-coloured hair and a white two-piece swimsuit.”

The team were kept busy taking statements and the computer files mounted up, but no one was under any illusion that a breakthrough was imminent.

George Flint visited Portsmouth and London and spoke to the owners of the Mitsubishi and the Peugeot. Each had good explanations for leaving their vehicles in the car park overnight. The Mitsubishi had run out of fuel and its owner had got a lift back to Portsmouth from a friend who vouched for him. He’d returned with a can of petrol the next day. The Peugeot owner had gone for a sea trip along the coast to Worthing with some friends in a motorised inflatable and returned too late to collect his car. No women were involved in either case.

The inventory of items found on the beach gave no obvious clue. A pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses with a broken side-piece could have belonged to the victim, but how could you tell without DNA or fingerprint evidence?

“Why does anyone choose to strangle a woman on a crowded beach in broad daylight?” Hen asked Stella. “I don’t buy theft as the motive. I really don’t.”

“We don’t know what she had with her,” Stella said. “Maybe she was carrying a large amount of money.”

“On a beach? No, Stella, there’s something else at work here.”

“Crime of passion?”

“Explain.”

“A man she’s dumped gets so angry that he kills her.”

“What-follows her to the beach?”

“Or they drive there together to talk about their relationship, and she tells him it’s over, there’s a new man in her life. He turns ballistic and strangles her. Then he picks up her bag and returns to the car park and drives off. If they came together and he left alone it explains why we didn’t find her car at the end of the day.”

“That part I like. The rest, not so much. The strangling was done from behind, remember, and with a ligature. I doubt if the killer grabbed her by the throat in a fit of rage and squeezed the life out of her. He took her by stealth.”

Stella didn’t see any problem with that. “So they had their row and she told him to get lost and turned her back on him because she didn’t want to argue any more.”

“What did he use?”

“Use?”

“For a ligature.”

“I don’t know. Anything that came to hand. There are pieces of rope on a beach. Or cable.”

Hen said, “It’s more likely he brought the ligature with him.”

“Meaning it was premeditated?”

“Yes.”

A fresh thought dawned on Stella. “Well, what if she was wearing some kind of pendant on a thin leather cord? He grabbed it from behind and twisted it.”

“Better. You might persuade me this time.”

“You know the kind of thing I mean?” Stella said, her eyes beginning to shine at the idea.

“I do. Something out of one of those Third World shops, with a wood carving or a piece of hammered copper.”

“Exactly! You see, guv, I still think it’s more likely this was a spur-of-the-moment thing. If it were planned, it wouldn’t have happened where it did. He’d have taken her somewhere remote.”

“You’re making a couple of assumptions here. First, the killer is a man. All right, the odds are on a man. Second, that he drove her there. She could have done the driving. Or even a third person. Until we get a genuine witness, all this is speculation. The people we’ve got to find are the Smiths, the couple who first raised the alarm. Why haven’t they come forward?”

The post mortem was conducted the following morning by James Speight, a forensic pathologist of long experience, with Hen Mallin in attendance, along with Stella Gregson, two SOCOs and two police photographers, one using a video recorder. Formal identification (that this was the body discovered on the beach) was provided by PC Shanahan, one of the two who had been called to the scene first. He left the autopsy room before the painstaking process of examining the body externally got under way.

Hen had to be patient in this situation. Dr Speight gave minute attention to the marks around the corpse’s neck, having the body turned by stages and asking repeatedly for photographs. An outsider might have supposed the photographers were running the show, so frequently did the pathologist and his assistant step away for pictures to be taken. After three-quarters of an hour the body was still in the white two-piece swimsuit she had been wearing at the scene. The external findings would probably be more crucial than the dissection in this case. It was helpful to be told that there were no injection marks, nothing to indicate that woman had been a drug-user.

He pointed out that the ligature had left a horizontal line, apart from the crossover at the nape. There was some bruising in this area probably made by pressure of the killer’s knuckles. He noted the two scratches above the ligature mark on the right side of the neck and said indications of this kind were not uncommon, where the victim had tried to pull the cord away from her.

“It’s entirely consistent with strangulation by a ligature,” he said in that way pathologists have of stating the obvious. “I can’t see any pattern or weave in the mark, yet it’s fairly broad, more than half a centimetre. Not so clear-cut or deep as a wire or string. It could have been made by a piece of plastic cable or a band of leather or an extra thick shoelace. Certainly from behind. That’s where the pressure was exerted.”

“These scratches,” Hen said. “Is it likely she scratched her killer?”

“Possibly-but her fingernails are undamaged. I doubt if she put up much of a fight. Death was pretty quick, going by the absence of severe facial congestion and petechiae. There’s no bleeding from the ears. It’s not impossible she suffered a reflex cardiac arrest. We’ll find out presently. And the sea appears to have washed away any interesting residue under the nails. I’ve collected what I can, but it looks to me like sand.”

“Could she have screamed?”

“Before the ligature was applied, yes. Once it was in place, I doubt it.”

“So if he surprised her from behind, as it appears, and it was done under the cover of a windbreak, people nearby wouldn’t have known?”

Dr Speight gave a shrug.

“They wouldn’t have heard much, would they?” Hen pressed him.

“A guttural, choking sound, perhaps.”

“Like waves breaking on a beach?”

The doctor smiled. “Romantic way of putting it.”

“But you see what I’m getting at?”

“And it’s outside my remit.”

He continued with his task, removing the clothes and passing them to the SOCOs, and taking swabs and samples. Before proceeding, he gave some more observations. The relative absence of cyanosis, or facial coloration, suggested she had succumbed quickly, probably within fifteen seconds. There were no operation scars and no notable birthmarks or tattoos. She had the usual vaccination mark. Her ears were pierced. She still had all her teeth, with only three white fillings. Her copper-coloured hair was natural.

The next hour, the internal examination, might have appeared more proactive than the first, but mainly it confirmed the earlier observations, except that the unknown woman had definitely died of asphyxiation, not cardiac arrest. “The strangling was efficient,” Dr Speight said without emotion.

The findings gave minimal assistance as to identity. She was about thirty to thirty-five and sexually experienced, but had not given birth.

“So what’s new?” Hen muttered to Stella as they left the autopsy room. “Don’t know about you, but I need a smoke and a strong coffee.”

By three twenty each weekday, you couldn’t get a parking space in Old Mill Road, where the junior school was. Parents massed outside the gates and waited for their offspring to emerge with the latest piece of handiwork made of egg boxes or yoghurt cartons. Haley Smith was always one of the last, and Olga was always waiting for her.

Today, unusually, the class teacher, Miss Medlicott, walked across the playground with Haley, hand in hand. For a moment it crossed Olga’s mind that her child might be unwell, so she was relieved to see some colour in her face and a broad smile. Like many of the others, Haley was holding a sheet of paper.

“I’ve done a lovely picture, Mummy,” she called out, and waved it so energetically that it was in danger of tearing. “Do you want to see?”

Olga nodded, at the same time searching Miss Medlicott’s face for some clue as to why she was with Haley. “Beautiful!” she said without really looking. Devoted as she was to her child, she knew she was no artist. Other children did work strikingly more colourful, confident and technically proficient than Haley’s best efforts.

“It’s the seaside.”

“Isn’t it lovely?” Miss Medlicott said with a warm smile at Olga. She was a sweet young woman and the children adored her. “I’d like a word, if you can spare a minute.”

“Of course.” Olga turned to Haley, “Why don’t you have a ride on the swing while I talk to Miss Medlicott?”

“I’ll take care of your picture,” Miss Medlicott offered.

Haley ran across to the play area.

“Is there a problem?”

“Not really. At least, I don’t think there is,” Miss Medlicott said. “As you see, we were doing some art work this afternoon. I think this is one of her best efforts this term.” She held out the painting. There were several horizontal stripes in blue and yellow across the width of the paper. Some of Haley’s characteristic stick figures were there, probably done with a marker pen.

“Is that the right way up?” Olga asked.

“Yes, I’m certain it is. The people are supposed to be lying down. They’re sunbathers or swimmers, depending which bit of the picture they’re drawn in, so Haley informed me. It’s got its own logic. Her work usually has. She’s a good observer.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

“The reason I wanted to speak to you is that she insists one of these figures is a dead lady.”

Olga felt her flesh prickle.

“This one, I think,” Miss Medlicott said, with her finger on one of them, “though they’re all rather similar. I tried to persuade her that it couldn’t be so-that she must have seen someone asleep who was lying very still. But she won’t be budged. She’s adamant that she saw a dead lady when you took her to the beach a few days ago. When would that have been?”

“Sunday,” Olga said. “It was Sunday.”

“Yes. Obviously something made an impact. If certain of the children talked like this, I’d think nothing of it. The boys, in particular, have lurid imaginations. Dracula, dinosaurs, zombies, all the horrors you could name. But Haley isn’t like that. She’s in the real world, very practical, very truthful. That’s why I’m just a bit concerned about this. It’s real to her, and I think it troubles her.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“She said you were sitting just behind this woman, whoever she was.”

Olga wrestled with her loyalties. This young teacher was wholly sincere, concerned only with Haley’s mental well-being. “There was an incident,” she said. “It was in the papers. Wightview Sands. A woman found dead. I expect Haley overheard us talking about it and linked it to someone she noticed lying near us.”

“Do you think so? That would explain it, then.”

“It may have been on the television as well. You can’t always stop them seeing unpleasant things.”

“You’ll talk to her, then?”

“I’ll do my best. Thanks.” Ashamed of herself, she handed back the picture and went to collect Haley.

Miss Medlicott strolled back across the playground. The head teacher, Mrs Anderson, was at the school door. “Was that the child’s mother?”

“Yes. The mother is very sensible. She’ll be supportive. She looked rather stressed herself, so I’m afraid I ducked telling her the most disturbing part of the child’s story.”

“What was that?”

“Well, that her daddy was with this woman who died on the beach.”