The Tooth Tattoo

10

Georgina Dallymore, the Assistant Chief Constable, had spent the past week attending a Home Office course. Rumour had it that the top bananas were being instructed on how to maximise resources, government-speak for cuts. So a collective shudder should have gone through CID when she reappeared. In fact, the team were so busy that Georgina was scarcely noticed.

‘What’s going on here?’ she asked Peter Diamond. ‘I wasn’t told we had a major incident.’

‘You’ve been away, ma’am.’

‘I wasn’t away from my BlackBerry, if you know what that is. I expect to be kept informed. What’s it about?’

‘A body found in the river. We’re treating it as suspicious.’

She eyed the display board. ‘It looks like a full blown murder investigation. Is all this justified?’

‘It is when there’s an international dimension.’

She twitched in alarm. ‘In what way?’

‘The victim — the deceased, I should say — is almost certainly from Japan.’

‘A tourist?’

‘Possibly. We’re working closely with the Border Agency and the Japanese embassy.’

‘Do you know who it is?’

He shook his head. ‘Female, below average height, twenty to thirty, with a tooth tattoo as the only distinguishing feature.’

‘What on earth...?’

Diamond explained. After the dig about the BlackBerry he wasn’t missing a chance to let the boss know he was street smart.

Georgina peered at the close-up. ‘It looks like a music note.’

‘A quaver, actually.’

‘I didn’t know you read music, Peter.’

‘I have hidden depths, ma’am.’

‘I’ve known that for a long time, but music is something else. So is this the only clue?’

‘An iPod has been found on the river bank in Green Park.’

‘Hers?’

‘We can’t say yet. I’m having the scene examined for evidence of violence.’

‘Was she attacked, then?’

‘Unfortunately she was in the water too long to tell.’

She paused as if to play the statement over. ‘I hate to say it, but this has all the hallmarks of an unsolved case.’

He wasn’t being goaded into submission. ‘You’re entitled to your opinion, ma’am.’

‘What makes you think this isn’t an accidental drowning?’

‘In all my time here, I can’t recall any accidents below Pulteney weir, where she was found. You don’t find swimmers or canoeists there.’

‘She could have climbed over the railing,’ Georgina said.

‘Why?’

‘Suicide, obviously.’

‘But the iPod was found on the river bank further down.’

‘So you’re working on the basis that she was murdered and dumped in the river? A pretty big assumption from one lost iPod.’

‘We’ll know more when the crime scene investigators report.’ He decided this wasn’t the best time to tell her he’d asked for a second autopsy.

‘You may know more. Have you checked with missing persons?’

‘The first thing we did. Since then we’ve enquired at all the colleges and hotels.’

‘No names yet?’

‘So far, no.’

‘You’ve hit the buffers, then. Better scale everything down and get the room back to normal.’

‘I haven’t told you about Professor Hackenschmidt.’

She blinked rapidly. ‘Who’s he?’

‘The world expert on facial reconstruction using computer imaging. He and his team in Philadelphia are already at work.’

‘Did you say Philadelphia?’ Georgina was tight-lipped now.

‘He works from CT scans.’ Another bit of technological jargon coming to his aid.

‘Is this coming out of your budget?’

Diamond’s way of dealing with awkward questions was to ask one himself. ‘I expect you’re up with computer imaging, ma’am?’

‘I’ve heard of it, but I didn’t expect you of all people to give any credence to it. How much will this cost?’

‘I’m told the professor is only too pleased to be involved.’

‘Small wonder, if we’re paying. I hope you asked for an estimate.’

‘One of my team is dealing with it.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘John Leaman.’

‘Good. He’s no fool.’ Having said this, even Georgina seemed to realise Diamond could take offence. ‘This is just the kind of outsourcing we’ve been discussing on the Home Office course. These are tough economic times. We can’t employ experts for this and that and go way over budget. We need to make better use of our own resources.’

Diamond wasn’t backing down. ‘I wouldn’t trust this lot to reconstruct a face. We’d end up with something out of Frankenstein.’

‘Be serious, Peter.’

‘I am. You asked if we’ve hit the buffers and I’m telling you we haven’t. It’s all in train, if you’ll excuse the pun. Can’t be stopped now. As soon as the professor sends us a likeness we’ll forward copies to Japan and get them on TV and in the papers. Speeds up the whole enquiry. Once the woman is identified we’ll get to the truth of it, I promise you. Maximise our resources.’ The last words tripped off his tongue so glibly that Georgina was caught off guard. She drew a long, fatalistic breath and returned upstairs to consider her options. Dismantling the incident room might not be the best way forward.

At mid-morning, significant news came in from Keith Halliwell at the mortuary. The second autopsy had been conducted by Dr. Bertram Sealy, as Diamond had hoped.

‘And what did he find?’

‘He asked me to tell you he was sorry to have missed you, guv.’

‘Typical bloody Sealy.’

‘But he did find something the first man missed. There’s a bone called the hyoid in the throat, above the Adam’s apple, quite small and delicate and shaped like a horseshoe and not attached to any other bones. He removed it and pointed out that it was damaged, fractured at one end.’

‘Meaning that violence has been done to the neck?’

‘It’s the only sign of violence he could find, because of the bad condition of the flesh.’

Diamond whistled. ‘Fracturing of the hyoid bone is a common sign of manual strangulation. This could be it.’

‘I think it must be. He says it’s highly unlikely this was caused accidentally when the body was being recovered from the river, or while it was submerged. To break a young person’s hyoid bone you have to exert real pressure on the neck.’

‘Is this going into Sealy’s report?’

‘I asked him. He’s a pain. He kept me dangling for about ten minutes while he went through all the other symptoms of strangling: bruising, facial congestion, bleeding into the neck muscles. None of this showed because so much of the flesh had gone rotten in the water. Finally I got it from him. Cause of death: asphyxia by compression of the neck. His words.’

‘That’s all we need, Keith. We’re in business.’

‘I thought we were already.’

‘Nothing can stop us now, not Georgina, the coroner, Portishead. Tell Bert Sealy he’s my hero.’

There are times in police work when nothing goes right. Most days seemed like that to Diamond. Just occasionally there’s a break in the clouds and you have to make the most of such moments. Within twenty minutes of the call from Halliwell he heard from the search team at Green Park. Fibres had been found on a bramble bush on the river bank, and there were twin lines in the mud suggesting somebody had been dragged down the slope to the water.

‘Heel marks?’ Diamond said on the phone to the supervisor of the crime scene team. These days crime scene investigations were farmed out to private firms: outsourcing, as Georgina would put it.

‘Very likely.’

‘If she was wearing shoes, they may be in the water. I’ll arrange for the sub-aqua team to take a look. Is it deep there?’

‘Don’t know. I haven’t been for a swim.’

Now Diamond remembered the voice of a man he’d tangled with before, a smart-arse with a liking for sarcasm. ‘You’re Duckett, aren’t you?’

‘Who else did you expect? We’re a small business, not the Co-op.’

‘Surely you can tell at a glance if the river’s deep.’

‘It shelves steeply.’

‘And did you find any shoe prints near these marks?’

‘Far too many. We’ll need to check what every one of your search team was wearing.’

‘You’ll be telling me we corrupted your scene.’

‘A line of policemen tramping through? Give me a break. And presumably you had a look yourself?’

‘Only by the access path.’

‘Was there one? It’s like a football field here.’

‘The fibres,’ Diamond said. ‘What are they like?’

‘Like fibres.’

‘Wool, cotton, man-made?’

‘We won’t know until we get them under a microscope.’

‘And I suppose the iPod has gone to the lab as well?’

‘Where else?’

After the call had ended, Ingeborg said, ‘I heard you asking about the iPod, guv. I wonder if it’s still in working order. They’re well constructed. It would be good to know what music she liked.’

‘How will that help?’

‘It kind of brings her alive.’

He gave her a baffled look.

Ingeborg added, ‘Well, it tells us more about her. Any new information must be welcome.’

‘Give them a call at the lab if you like. I don’t fancy discussing music with the guy at the scene.’

Early in the afternoon when America was starting up, John Leaman took a call from Philadelphia. He discussed it with Ingeborg. ‘I’ve just been speaking to one of the professor’s team. He wants to know about the dead woman’s hair.’

‘What about it?’

‘The style, I suppose. It doesn’t show up in the CT scan, but they’d like to know what we observed. When they send us an image they want the look to be as lifelike as possible.’

‘Did you tell him she was in the water for weeks? It doesn’t do much for a girl’s hair.’

‘Can we say anything about the cut?’

‘Okay. It’s thick, dark hair with a fringe and cut sheer at the back. You can tell him that.’

‘I’d be happier if you did.’

She began to laugh ‘Aren’t you comfortable discussing hairstyles with another guy? I’ll speak to them if you like.’

Keith Halliwell was back from the autopsy looking pleased with himself.

Diamond soon altered that. ‘Now we know it’s murder, we must pull out all the stops. That’s a musical expression, in case you weren’t aware of it. Try the embassy again for names. They promised to get back to us.’

‘Be good if we could send them the computer picture. What’s the latest from Philadelphia?’

‘Inge was talking to them about hair. They must be close to sending an image.’

‘They know she’s Japanese, do they? Japanese in our opinion, anyway.’

‘They can tell from the shape of the skull, can’t they?’

‘I was told it isn’t obvious.’

Halliwell did his best to reassure. ‘I expect they’ll give her the almond-shaped eyes.’

‘Christ, I hope so.’ Diamond had a fleeting vision of a Betty Boop cartoon. ‘You’re making me worried. I’m less confident now than I was.’

‘About the whole case?’

‘The picture they’re sending.’ Diamond vibrated his lips. ‘And the whole case, if I’m honest.’

‘But the case is keeping everyone busy. Georgina was gobsmacked.’

He raised a smile. ‘Yes, that was a nice moment.’

A knock on the door interrupted them. It was Ingeborg. ‘Guv, I’m sorry to butt in, but you ought to hear this. The people at forensics found that the iPod was working okay and I asked them to play it for us. Hold on a mo and I’ll put it through to your hands-free.’ She touched the amplifying phone on his desk and music filled the room — music of an unexpected kind. She stood with arms folded.

Glances were exchanged. This was the first time Beethoven had been heard in Diamond’s office, an event about as likely as finding the Judgement of Paris on his wall.

‘Bit highbrow for me,’ he said. ‘I was expecting something Japanese. What is it?’

Halliwell shook his head.

‘John Leaman says it’s a string quartet,’ Ingeborg said. ‘At times it sounds like a full orchestra, but four instruments can make a big sound.’

‘This is on the iPod?’ he said.

‘This and a whole lot more. Whoever she was, she was into classical music.’

The heavy notes from the cello were starting to rattle the framed photo of his late wife, Steph. ‘Turn it down, will you? I can’t think with that row going on.’

She did so. ‘The point is that it ties in neatly with the tooth tattoo.’

‘Any kind of music would have tied in with that,’ he said. ‘The Stones, the Beatles.’

‘Duke Ellington,’ Halliwell said.

Ingeborg smiled. She had to admit that they were right. ‘And now we know she had better taste than any of us.’

The computer image from Philadelphia appeared on Leaman’s screen towards the end of the afternoon. Everyone got up for a look. Leaman rotated the face through several angles. This was definitely a young woman of Eastern appearance, with high cheekbones, a small cupid-bow mouth and widely spaced eyes topped by well-defined eyebrows. She had the fringe and fine head of hair Ingeborg had described.

‘How do they know she wore lipstick?’ one of the civilian computer operators said.

‘They don’t. It’s a balance of probabilities,’ Leaman said. ‘Most Japanese women I’ve seen use make-up.’

‘Wouldn’t it be more useful to show her without any?’

‘I don’t see why. We’re issuing this to help people recognise her.’

‘The eyebrows are a bit thick.’

‘They have to give her some, don’t they? We told them she had a good growth of hair.’

Halliwell said, ‘It seems to me a lot of this is guesswork.’

Leaman wasn’t having that. ‘Only the superficial stuff. The bone structure is entirely real.’

‘But the fleshy bits can’t be. How do we know her nose looked like that?’

‘They choose from a bank of features. She’s what’s known as a Mongoloid type and that means small, flat noses. The Japanese were ahead of most other countries in making a data bank of soft tissues.’

‘One thing we can all agree on,’ Diamond said. ‘This is easier on the eye than the photos taken at the autopsy. Back to work, people. I want a copy emailed to the Japanese embassy now and we’ll go public with a press release tomorrow morning.’ After the first buzz of interest was over, he said to Halliwell, ‘What do you think, Keith? Will it help?’

‘To me, it looks like everyone’s idea of a Japanese woman. There’s not much character you can pick out.’

‘It’s a proper face. Remember the photofit pictures we used to work with? Compared to this, they were like kids’ drawings.’

‘But is it reliable?’

‘We’ll find out. If it isn’t, it could do more harm than good.’

He gave his attention to the press release. The tooth tattoo would be featured and so would the clothes the dead woman had been wearing. Until a definite connection was made with Green Park he couldn’t mention the iPod and the interest in classical music. He seemed to have spent the best years of his career waiting for forensics to go through their painstaking procedures.

But there was a big plus. The printouts of the computerised face from several angles made a pleasing difference to the display board. He thought about sending copies upstairs to Georgina, but in the end decided to let well alone. With any luck the ACC would be dealing with her backlog of paper work after a week’s absence.

That evening he got home to a string of messages on the answerphone. Normally he wouldn’t have bothered to play them before supper. Most would be junk calls. He was tired of being told by some fruity voice sounding as if doing him a huge favour, ‘This is a free message.’ But after all this time he still had hopes of a call from Paloma. Nothing.

He opened a pouch for the cat and a beer for himself. Put two large potatoes in the microwave. ‘What shall I have with it this time, Raffles? Beans, egg or cheese, or all three?’

Paloma had been encouraging him to cut down on the calories and take more exercise. There was a reward system. To earn a pie, he’d had to take a two-mile walk, and she’d come along to make sure. Lately, he’d let himself go again. His ideal had been to look like Orson Welles in The Third Man, but he was in danger of ending up like the Welles of the sherry commercials. Did it matter? In his present mood, not a lot.

Baked beans, scrambled egg and grated Cheddar joined the potatoes on his plate. One of those obsessive Swedish detectives was on the TV. He reached for his DVD of Casablanca.

More sensational news greeted him at the office next morning. The forensic lab had got through with an early finding. A hair Duckett’s team had picked up at the Green Park river bank site matched the DNA of the drowned woman. All doubt was removed that this was where she had entered the water.

A turning point.

‘We can forget about suicide or accident now, guv,’ Ingeborg said. ‘The heel marks prove she was dragged there and dropped in. You were so right to get us up and running.’

Keith Halliwell said, ‘What are we suggesting here — that she was killed before she entered the water and this was the murderer’s way of disposing of the body?’

‘That’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Ingeborg said.

‘Then wouldn’t the body have floated, rather than sinking? A person who drowns takes water into their lungs. That’s why they go down. A corpse still has some air inside.’

John Leaman joined in with one of his erudite contributions. ‘It’s not as straightforward as that. Other factors come into it. For one thing, it depends how the body enters the water. Face down, any air in the lungs and airways is trapped and will take time to disperse. But if it gets submerged on its back, the weight of the head bears down and there’s more chance of water entering the nose and mouth. And anyway after a corpse has been several hours in the water the airways get filled passively and it will sink. Fresh water is less buoyant than the sea, so the process is quicker in a river.’

Diamond said, ‘Where do you learn this stuff?’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Let’s deal with what we know for certain. The body was rotting, so it must have been underwater for weeks. We now have a crime scene. With any luck, forensics will give us more information. But we know enough already to get headlines with the press release.’

‘Are we going to use the computer image?’ Halliwell asked.

‘You sound doubtful.’

‘I’m not convinced by the science.’

Leaman said at once, ‘It’s based on a scan.’

‘Did you say scam?’

Diamond said, ‘Silence in the ranks. The answer, Keith, is yes, I’m going to issue it to the media. A picture is worth a thousand words.’

‘And if the picture is nothing like her?’

‘There must be some resemblance.’

‘May be.’

Ingeborg said, ‘People don’t expect a computer image to be perfect. There’s news value in the fact that we’re using this method. And when we finally do get a photo of the victim they’ll want to compare it. So we get more publicity, a second bite at the cherry.’

‘So speaks our ex-journo,’ Diamond said.

Halliwell shrugged and was silent.

The Avon & Somerset sub-aqua team was sent to Green Park.

‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they found her handbag?’ Ingeborg said.

‘You’re joking,’ Halliwell said. ‘If the killer takes the trouble to dump the body in the river, he’s not going to dump her bag in the same place.’

‘I was trying to be positive. You’re getting as grouchy as the boss. Is it catching?’

Diamond’s 11 A.M. press conference was well attended. The Manvers Street media relations manager, John Wigfull, presided. He and Diamond — old adversaries from way back — sat in front of a large projected image of the computerised face. Diamond read his prepared statement and invited questions. It all went well until someone asked about the music on the victim’s iPod.

‘Classical music, you said, superintendent. The murdered woman liked listening to string quartets, is that right?’

‘You’ll find a note of it in the release we handed out.’

‘Would that be Haydn or Mozart?’

He hesitated. These smart-arse reporters were always trying to put the boot in. ‘Beethoven, actually.’

‘So you’ve listened to it. Are you a Beethoven expert, Mr. Diamond?’

‘I wouldn’t claim that, but I’m not a complete duffer.’

‘So was it the Amadeus?’

‘Trying to catch me with a trick question?’ he said. ‘That’s Mozart.’ He didn’t add that he’d seen the film.

‘The Amadeus Quartet. I thought every music-loving policeman would have heard of them.’

CID press conferences aren’t renowned for laughs, so when they come they are appreciated.

Diamond still wasn’t sure if he was being tricked. ‘I was stringing you along,’ he said, and got a satisfying groan for the pun. ‘And that’s a good note on which to finish.’

He asked Paul Gilbert to drive him back to Green Park. Already the cameramen were there in force, lined up behind the tape getting shots of the underwater team in their scuba suits. From now on the press would be tracking every development.

Duckett, arms folded, watched him arrive. Neither needed to treat the other with much deference, and neither did. But to their credit Duckett’s firm of crime scene investigators had been prompt this time in reporting the significance of the hair found at the scene.

‘Any more discoveries?’ Diamond asked after dipping under the ‘do not pass’ tape.

‘Haven’t they put you out to grass yet?’ Duckett said.

‘I was going to ask the same question, but come to think of it you look more at home up to your knees in mud.’

‘It may look like mud to you, my friend, but it could be the piece of evidence that gets you off the hook.’

‘So what else have you found, apart from the hair and the fibres?’

‘We won’t know until we get it cleaned up.’

‘Have you worked out what happened?’

‘You want it in a plate, don’t you?’ Duckett said. ‘What do you do all day in that police station — watch the racing on TV? It’s a pig of a scene, this one.’

‘Always is.’

‘Too many coppers have tramped through in their big boots. It’s a wonder we found the hair.’

‘Where was it?’

‘Caught on a bramble, quite low down. If you really want to know what happened, I reckon she was dead or out to the world before she got here. There’s no evidence of a struggle except dragging her to the bank and heaving her in. Have you seen the heel-marks?’

Diamond nodded. ‘If she was dead already, would she have floated?’

‘Not for long in the current. You see what it’s like. She’d have got waterlogged.’

‘And after she sank, wouldn’t the flow of the river continue to move her along the bottom?’

‘In this case it didn’t. My opinion is that the body lodged against something deep down. You want to speak to your frogmen. All kinds of stuff gets tipped into the river over time. We’re only a few hundred yards from Sainsbury’s here. Nothing pleases the yobbos more than heaving trolleys in.’

‘It’s true the body didn’t travel very far,’ Diamond said. ‘It was spotted at Lower Weston, three or four hundred yards away. But it had been submerged some weeks from the state of it.’

‘It will have inflated, as they do, and the pressure finally lifted it clear. The absence of the corpse at the scene is a real pain for me. We’re reduced to looking for traces. It’s not good for my back.’

‘Any traces of the killer?’

‘You’re an optimist. What do you expect — another hair? We’ll examine everything we’ve got under the microscope and let you know, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. Ninety percent of it is going to be rubbish blown across the park.’

‘When do you reckon to finish?’

‘In a couple of hours if people stop asking damn-fool questions.’

Diamond left him to it. To Paul Gilbert, he said, ‘You wouldn’t think we’re his paymasters, would you, cocky bastard? He’s not going to get work from anyone else.’

‘He seems to know what he’s talking about,’ Gilbert said.

‘He could say it in a more civil way. Now, I’d like your opinion. Come with me.’ They left the crime scene and moved some distance from the press people. ‘It’s a park, right? You can’t drive straight through it.’

‘You might with a four-by-four.’

‘The tyre tracks would be a giveaway. I haven’t seen any. And you wouldn’t get any kind of four-wheeled vehicle along the towpath. If you wanted to drop a body into the Avon, how would you get it here?’

‘Carry it, I suppose.’

‘Where from?’

‘Your transport.’

He tried picturing someone burdened with a corpse, stumbling the hundred yards or more from where the road ended. ‘You’d need to be strong.’

‘She was quite small, guv.’

‘True. But it would be easier with some kind of barrow.’

‘A supermarket trolley?’

‘Maybe, if there was one handy. And this would be done by night, I imagine. Anyway, the killer got her to the bank and dragged her down the last bit, leaving the heels trailing.’

‘You’d need to, just to make sure of your footing,’ Gilbert said. ‘It can’t be easy pitching a body into the river.’

‘But still a good method of disposal. People are going to assume she fell in, or jumped. It’s unlikely any of the killer’s DNA will be recovered, even if some was transferred. And he’s buying time. Worth the extra effort, wouldn’t you say?’

They checked with the sub-aqua team before leaving. Nothing of interest had yet been found. Visibility was a problem and so was the force of the current. A few days of rain had brought extra water off the hills and may well have contributed to the freeing of the corpse from whatever had trapped it. Several days of searching beckoned and the team didn’t hold out much hope of more discoveries.

‘We got a few unfriendly looks, I thought,’ Diamond said as Gilbert drove them back along Green Park Road. ‘They volunteer for this work. It gets them out of the office. What do they expect? Diving for pennies in the hot baths?’

His mood improved in the incident room. The excitement was obvious.

‘What’s happened?’

‘We’ve got a name. That’s what’s happened, guv,’ Ingeborg said.

‘Already? Someone recognised the computer image?’

‘No,’ said Halliwell. ‘That’s just confusing everyone. The embassy delivered.’