Where Death Delights

FOURTEEN

Richard Pryor could stay up working or reading late into the night without protest, but once in bed, he detested having to get up again. That was the one thing about forensic medicine that he disliked, the frequency of being called out in the early hours.

It was fortunate then, that just before midnight on Sunday, he was still reading in his room when the phone went and his presence was requested in a wood about twenty miles away. The call came from a Detective Superintendent Tom Spurrel in Cheltenham.

‘Sorry to disturb you so late, Doctor, but we’re in a bit of a spot. We’ve got a shooting and no pathologist to attend the scene.’

He went on to explain that their regular Home Office pathologist from Oxford was already out on a double murder that would keep him occupied until late next day.

‘My old friend Trevor Mitchell had told me about you and suggested that if we ever needed a backup, you might be able to help us out,’ he added.

Richard was only too happy to oblige, as he was keen to get a foothold in the Home Office work. He asked the Gloucestershire officer for more details.

‘We’ve got a chap shot dead in a car in a forestry area between Ross-on-Wye and Gloucester. It looks like a suicide, but the DI that was called is not happy about it, mainly because the deceased is a known villain from London. We can fill you in more when you get here.’

He gave some directions to Richard, suggesting that the best route was up to Ross via Monmouth, then down on the A40 towards Gloucester.

‘I’ll have a police car waiting for you on that road a couple of miles before you get to Huntley village. He’ll lead you to the scene, as it’s hidden away up some country lanes.’

With a promise to be there within an hour, Richard ran upstairs and tapped on Angela’s door.

‘Are you in bed or decent?’ he called.

She was not in bed, but was in a dressing gown when she opened the door.

‘What’s this, Richard? Are you desperate enough to come knocking on a lady’s door in the middle of the night?’ she quipped.

He quickly told her about the phone call. ‘Do you want to come?’ he asked. ‘Be like old times for you.’

She agreed readily. ‘Give me time to get some clothes on. I’ll see you downstairs in five minutes.’

The Humber’s headlights were soon carving a passage through the slight mist that filled the valley as they drove. There were few other cars on the road and at Ross, they turned east towards Gloucester. Some miles down the A40, Angela spotted the illuminated roof sign of a police car parked in a field gateway. They slowed to a crawl until the big Wolseley flashed its headlights at them and Richard pulled up alongside.

‘We’ll go on a short way, Doctor and then turn left,’ called the driver from his open window. They followed him for a couple of miles through a sleeping village called Dursley Cross and then along narrow roads with woods on either side.

Angela was looking at a folded road map by the light of a small torch. ‘There’s a huge area of woodland here, must once have been part of the Forest of Dean.’

After another half mile the brake lights of the police car came on and he slowed to turn left into a bumpy track which went deep into the trees, seen dimly in the reflected light of their headlamps. A few hundred yards more brought them into a clearing, where two other police cars, two unmarked cars and a plain van were parked.

The other driver came across to them as they were retrieving their bags from the back seat.

‘We’ll have to walk a little bit now, sir,’ said the officer. ‘The way we came in isn’t the direct way to the scene, but we didn’t want to drive over any tyre marks.’

Another uniformed bobby was standing guard over the cars and took their names down on a clipboard.

‘I’ll take you through, I’ve got a decent torch here,’ said the police car driver, leading the way.

Walking through the forest was an eerie experience, as soon a glow appeared ahead where portable lights had been set up. A dense mist was hanging at head height between the trees and the dim light revealed only the straight black trunks of the larches on every side. The macabre effect was heightened when they overtook two men in black carrying a coffin through the ghostly scene, presumably the duty undertakers coming from the van parked in the clearing.

When they reached the lights, propped on tripods over car batteries, they saw a dark-coloured car at the end of a barely visible firebreak running through the wood.

Around it were half a dozen men, two of them in uniform. One of the others came to meet them as they approached.

‘Good of you to come, Doctor! And you, miss’ he added to Angela, assuming she was his secretary.

‘She’s a doctor too,’ explained Richard with a grin. ‘Doctor Bray, formerly of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, until I stole her away!’

The superintendent introduced himself as Tom Spurrel, another large man, as most of Gloucester police seemed to be. Another officer approached them and Spurrel explained that he was Brian Lane, the DI who first attended.

‘The situation is this, Doctors,’ the superintendent began. ‘There’s a dead man in that car, shot through the neck. The gun’s on the floor and it looks like a suicide – but maybe that’s what it’s supposed to look like.’

‘You already know who he is, you said?’ asked Pryor.

‘Well, we know who the car belongs to and from the description we had over the phone from the Met, there seems little doubt that the chap is Harry Haines, a toerag from South London.’

‘Harry Haines? I’ve heard of him,’ exclaimed Angela. ‘Wasn’t he a villain from New Cross way, who got off on a murder charge a few years back? Some fight between rival gangs, that ended in a shooting. We had material from it in the Met Lab.’

Spurrel nodded in the gloom. ‘That’s him, his mob ran protection rackets and a bit of prostitution and drugs.’

‘So what the hell’s he doing in a Gloucestershire forest?’ asked Richard.

The detective inspector, Brian Lane, answered. He was as tall as Spurrel, but leaner with a saturnine face.

‘We’ve heard that his mob have been trying get in on the nightclub and dog racing scene here, to extend their protection scams. Same as what’s happening in Tyneside and Manchester, the London boys are wanting to muscle in on the local action.’

‘That’s why we’re cautious about accepting it as a suicide,’ broke in Tom Spurrel. ‘Why would he come all the way down here to top himself?’

Both the detectives wore belted raincoats and wide-brimmed felt hats, more reminiscent of the forties – or American B-movies, thought film buff Richard.

‘Want to have a look now?’ offered Spurrel. ‘The forensic lab in Bristol is sending someone over, they should be here soon. We called them a couple of hours ago.’

‘And there are officers coming down from the Met, to definitely identify this chap,’ added the DI, as they walked to the car, sitting silently in the ring of lights. It was an almost new Rover P4/90.

Going round to the driver’s side, Richard and Angela saw that the front door was wide open and a man sat there, his head lolling backwards against the top of the seat.

‘Is it alright to go nearer?’ asked Pryor, looking down at the ground. It was covered with a spongy mat of pine needles and there seemed no chance of footprints being left.

‘Go ahead, Doc, we’ve got all the pictures. Just keep your fingers off anything but the body.’

Richard gingerly moved nearer and stood right against the door pillar, holding a large torch that Spurrel had handed to him. The man inside was dressed in a fawn check suit over a white shirt with no tie. He was thin and wiry, looking about forty years old, his brown hair cut short.

His mouth was open and blood ran from both corners, as it did from a wound in the front of his neck, just under the chin. There were runnels of dried blood on each side of the bristly skin of his neck. His hands lay on his lap and on the floor between his feet, there was a pistol.

Richard looked carefully at the corpse, his eyes running over every inch, from the crown of his head to the toes of his expensive brown shoes. Then he stepped back a pace and turned to the waiting onlookers.

‘You’re right, it’s no suicide!’ he said. ‘And he wasn’t shot here, either.’

The two senior detectives and three other officers who had gravitated to the group, looked at Pryor as if he was some Old Testament prophet.

‘That’s quick work, Doc!’ said Spurrel. ‘How d’you know?’

Richard grinned and winked at Angela. ‘I’m sure Doctor Bray here will tell you!’

She rose to the occasion easily, blood stains and sprays being one of her specialities.

‘Those dribbles of blood on the face and neck are going the wrong way for a chap sitting upright,’ she explained, waving her own torch at the body. ‘Look, that blood coming from the corner of the mouth goes straight across towards the ear, the same as the one coming from the gunshot wound. He must have been lying on his back when those were leaking.’

Richard added his own bit of expertise. ‘And that post-mortem lividity, the blue staining of the skin on the back of his neck, could only have happened if he spent a few hours face-up after death, not sitting in a car seat.’

Richard knew that police always liked experts who would give them a dogmatic answer off the cuff, though it was a habit fraught with danger if it turned out to be wrong. Tom Spurrel rubbed his hands together and looked at his DI.

‘Right, Brian, pull out all the stops on this one!’

As they started snapping instructions to the inspector and two detective constables, Richard saw torches bobbing towards them from the parking area and a moment later, two other men arrived, one carrying a large case.

As soon as this new arrival saw them in the gloom, he called a greeting.

‘God God, Angie, what are you doing here? I needn’t have come if I’d known the big chief from the Met was here already!’

The speaker was a moon-faced middle-aged man with wire-framed spectacles, short and rather plump. He dropped his bag well away from the car and advanced on Angela, giving her big bear hug.

‘I thought I’d better come and show you how to do the job properly,’ she chaffed and introduced him to Richard as Archie Gorman, her biologist counterpart from the Bristol Forensic Science Laboratory. The man with him, a younger, slim version of Trevor Mitchell, introduced himself as Detective Inspector Morrison, the liaison officer from the Bristol laboratory. These were detectives seconded for a period from one of the local forces, to act as links between the investigating officers and the scientists.

When everyone knew who was who, they turned their attention back to the job in hand. After Gorman had looked at the body and agreed with Angela and Richard, Tom Spurrel asked the pathologist what he wanted to do next.

‘Very hard to do much with him stuck in that seat,’ answered Richard. ‘Do you want to get him out soon?’

‘We’ve got all the photographs, so just tapings and whatever the lab wants,’ answered the superintendent.

‘Then we’ll haul him out for you.’

The two from the laboratory opened their case and began dabbing lengths of Sellotape across the clothing of the corpse, picking up stray hairs and particles. They stuck these on to sheets of clear celluloid for later examination under the microscope. Then a detective constable who was acting as exhibits officer, carefully retrieved the gun from the floor, pushing the safety catch on with the end of a pencil. Wearing rubber gloves and holding only the edges of the trigger guard to avoid spoiling any fingerprints, he slid it into a brown paper bag, filling in the exhibits label before putting it safely into his own large box.

Now it was Pryor’s turn and he tested the stiffness of both arms to look for rigor mortis.

‘When was the body found?’ he asked.

‘About nine o’clock,’ said Brian Lane. ‘As usual, by a local chap walking his dog. It wasn’t here at four this afternoon, as we’ve found two women who were riding horses up this firebreak then.’

Richard looked at his wristwatch. ‘Just half past one now. He’s in full rigor, not that that helps a great deal, except to suggest he died more than a couple of hours ago and less than a couple of days.’

With a torch, he looked closely at the wound just above the Adam’s apple. ‘No soot or powder burns, so it wasn’t a contact or very close discharge. A lot depends on the weapon and the ammunition, of course. That’s the lab’s problem.’

He felt carefully at the back of the head, pushing against the stiffness of the neck. ‘No exit wound, though there’d be blood soiling on the upholstery if there had been.’

He felt the face and forehead with the back of his hand.

‘Doesn’t feel warm, but I need to use the thermometer when we get him out. What’s the air temperature, Angela?’

His partner had anticipated what he wanted and had taken a long chemical thermometer from his bag several minutes earlier, allowing time for the mercury to settle.

‘It’s just fifty degrees here. Better check it inside the car as well, though the door’s been open for a time.’

Richard held the thermometer near the body for a minute or two. ‘Just the same, fifty degrees,’ he said, using the Fahrenheit scale.

The detective inspector and one of the DCs brought a large red rubber sheet and laid it out a few feet away from the car, then carefully hoisted the body out of the driving seat and laid it on the sheet. Due to the stiffness, the head remained bent back and the knees and hips stayed flexed.

Richard rolled the body over on to its side so that the two people from the laboratory could dab their sticky tape over its back and legs, then they carried on examining and taping the driving seat.

Pryor looked all down the back of the corpse and again noted the purple-red discoloration of the back of the neck from settling of the blood after death. He looked up at Spurrel, who was the officer in charge of the investigation.

‘I’d like to take a rectal temperature before he cools down any more,’ he said. ‘Is it alright if I pull his trousers down for a moment?’

The superintendent nodded. ‘OK by me, if the lab’s happy about it. We’ve no reason to think there was any sexual involvement.’

Archie interrupted his work inside the car to agree with the detective but as Richard and the liaison officer wrestled with the dead man’s belt and trousers, Angela held a swab ready, a test tube with cotton wool wound round the end of a stick stuck in the cork.

‘Better use this first, just in case,’ she murmured, as the corpse’s buttocks were exposed. She did not want to appear as if she was interfering, as officially she was not there as a forensic scientist, except as the pathologist’s assistant. Richard took the hint and as Angela held the glass tube, he pulled out the cork and prodded the swab into the victim’s fundament. Replacing the swab in the tube, he put the thermometer in its place, two inches deep and waited until the mercury stabilized again.

‘Eighty-four degrees,’ he announced. ‘There’s still a bit of warmth to be felt on the backside.’

They hauled up the underpants and trousers and laid the corpse on its back again.

‘I can’t do any more here, superintendent,’ he said. ‘Are we taking it straight for a post-mortem?’

Tom Spurrel nodded. ‘I’d like to, Doctor, if you can. The mortuary in Gloucester is laid on.’

As the photographer moved in to take more shots of the inside of the car and the body on the ground, the senior detective asked the inevitable question.

‘How long do you reckon he’s been dead, Doc?’

Richard hated answering this particular query, as where the time of death eventually became known from circumstantial evidence, the pathologist’s estimate was almost always wrong, unless he gave a wide range of possibilities.

‘It’s fairly cool out here now, but we don’t know where he was before he was brought here,’ he began. ‘It’s the end of June and it was quite warm earlier today. The car door has been open, presumably since soon after nine.’

He did some mental arithmetic. ‘His temperature has dropped about fifteen degrees. The old wisdom was a drop of a degree-and-a-half every hour, but that’s always wrong. The problem is that there’s often a variable time lag in the fall in temperature soon after death, which makes it impossible to be accurate.’

‘So what are you going to tell us?’ demanded DI Lane.

‘You can’t get within a bracket of less than four hours with a cat’s chance in hell of being right, so I’m going to say he died between a maximum of twelve hours ago and a minimum of eight – and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m still wrong.’

The detectives did their own rapid calculations.

‘It’s getting on for two o’clock, so that means between about two yesterday afternoon and six in the evening,’ said Spurrel.

‘Gives them plenty of time to dump him, before he’s found at nine,’ commented Lane.

Morrison, the liaison officer, pulled his head out of the car. ‘Got anyone in the frame for it, sir?’

Tom Spurrel frowned. ‘There’s a couple of local villains I fancy for it,’ he replied. ‘They run the Gloucester and Cheltenham protection rackets and one of our snouts has been telling us that some outsiders have been trying to get in on their act.’

He turned to the pathologist. ‘I’ve spoken to the coroner, he’s quite happy for you to do the post-mortem.’

Contrary to what most people thought, though the police could call a doctor to examine a scene of death, they had no power at all to order an autopsy, which was entirely the coroner’s prerogative.

‘If you want to get along to the hospital mortuary in Gloucester, Doctor, we’ll get the body shifted as soon as we can. The undertakers are already here.’

Pryor was happy with this, for he knew that most mortuaries could rustle up a mug of tea at any time of the day or night.

‘I’ll just see the client into the shell and then we’ll be off,’ he agreed.

It was the pathologist’s responsibility to see that the corpse was removed from the scene without damage or contamination of trace evidence – or if there was any, to check what it was, so that no artefact was misinterpreted at the post-mortem examination.

The two ghostly figures that Angela and he had seen on the way in, had all this while been patiently sitting on their coffin fifty yards away, smoking and chatting in low voices. Now they brought over their ‘shell’, a lightweight box of five-ply that was used over and over again for collections. Richard watched as the exhibits officer and the other constable folded the rubber sheet over the body and secured it with string, to ensure that no trace evidence fell out in transit. Then the two undertakers expertly lifted it into the box and fitted the lid. With a heave, they hoisted it up by its rope handles and vanished into the dusk, preceded by a police officer with a torch. When the macabre procession had vanished into the trees, Richard and Angela followed them back to their car and soon they were driving through the silent countryside towards Gloucester, about ten miles down the A40.

‘Being a second string to this area would be an advantage in getting us established elsewhere,’ said Richard. ‘If I could get my name on the Home Office list, it would confirm our respectability, so to speak.’

Angela laughed. ‘I think you’re respectable enough now, Richard – but I know what you mean. Perhaps this superintendent will mention you to his senior officers – and I thought Brian Meredith also claimed to have some pull.’

The description ‘Home Office Pathologist’ was a title beloved of the Press, though it had no great significance. The Home Office, the ministry responsible for law enforcement, kept a list of pathologists in England and Wales who were willing to assist the police when required. It was more a matter of geographical convenience than any accolade of expertise and, in some areas, no one wished to be saddled with the job. It meant being called out at unsocial hours, spending time in unsavoury conditions, such as muddy ditches and scruffy mortuaries – and wasting days in coroner’s, magistrates’ and assize courts, where they were harassed by sometimes aggressive barristers. The financial rewards were derisory, so the glory of having your name in the newspapers occasionally was the only reason for doing the job, a fact which tended to attract rather odd characters. The exceptions were those who had academic posts in the few university medical schools which still had a forensic medicine department. This meant that London, which had a number of such units, did not have ‘Home Office Pathologists’, as there was no lack of people to compete for the work.

The two partners talked about the situation as they drove along.

‘Any regrets yet about taking the plunge, Angela?’ asked Pryor, always slightly guilty at encouraging her to give up her safe job in London.

‘No, I love driving around the countryside at three in the morning, when I could be tucked up in bed!’ she replied flippantly. ‘Seriously, it’s a challenge. I was getting stale in the Met, every day filled with blood grouping and examining ladies’ knickers for stains.’

She looked ahead at the lights of Gloucester appearing ahead of them.

‘As long as we can keep our heads financially above water until we get really well established, I’m quite happy. It’s a lovely place to live. I was thinking I ought to look for a place of my own, but Garth House is so pleasant, that I’m in no hurry to move out.’

Reassured once again, Pryor concentrated on finding the Royal Hospital and after stopping to ask directions from a policeman flashing his torch into shop doorways, arrived at the mortuary at the back of the large compound.

The attendant, called in on overtime at the coroner’s expense, was expecting them and he lived up to Richard’s hopes by having a kettle boiling on a gas ring ready to make tea. Soon, Angela and he were sitting in his pokey little office, with mugs of strong tea and even being offered biscuits from a battered tin marked ‘Jacobs Cream Crackers’.

By this time, the body had arrived and was lying in its rubber sheet on the post-mortem table. The next arrivals were the photographer and Exhibits Officer, closely followed by the two from the Bristol laboratory. Then the detective inspector came alone, explaining that the superintendent had gone back to Headquarters to get the investigation moving. After more tea had been dispensed, the first mugs being rinsed and reused, everyone adjourned to the post-mortem room and set about their tasks.

The lab people unfolded the sheet and kept it bagged for later inspection in case anything useful had fallen off during the journey. Then photographs were taken, while Richard set out his instruments and put on a rubber apron and rubber gloves. He directed the photographer, who had a big MPP camera on a tripod, as to the shots he wanted, including front and back of the body and close-ups of the wound in the neck.

The scientist, Archie Gorman, took swabs of the skin around the wound for propellant residues, though Richard again confirmed that there was no burning or tattooing around the very small entrance hole, the diameter of which he measured with a small ruler. The rim of the hole was discoloured, due to the friction of the hot bullet and contamination with oil and metal residues.

‘Can’t have been either contact or a short range discharge,’ he announced to the group who were clustered around. DI Lane, still in his wide hat and raincoat, peered closely at the neck, as Pryor demonstrated the direction of the dried blood which had run from both the wound and the mouth.

‘Any idea what the range of the shot would have been, Doc?’ he asked.

Richard shrugged at this. ‘All depends on the weapon and the charge in the cartridge,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid that’s up to the lab to discover from test firing.’

Archie nodded. ‘Probably have to send it off to Birmingham for that, they’re the experts on shooters.’

The post-mortem proceeded, everyone knowing their role in the task. The exhibits officer was busy packing and labelling everything that might be needed for evidence, down to samples of blood and urine when Pryor had collected them.

He cut a circle of skin from around the bullet hole and kept it for possible analysis, as the soiling on the edge of the hole might contain substances that could identify a particular batch of ammunition.

Inside the head, the bullet had smashed its way into the thick bone at the base of the skull and had to be recovered. It was essential to retrieve it as intact as possible, so that it could be matched to a given weapon by the marks made on it by the spiral rifling inside the gun barrel.

‘It’s pretty much flattened, but there’s a bit of jacket that is still in fair condition,’ said Pryor, as he carefully fished out the missile with a pair of forceps with rubber tubing pushed over the tips, to avoid making false scratches.

The liaison officer packed it in cotton wool to stop it knocking against the glass of the small container in which it would be sent to Birmingham.

‘Looks like a “two-two”, which would suit the gun from the car,’ he commented. Though it seemed almost inevitable that this was the weapon used, nothing could be taken for granted.

‘No chance of tightening the time of death, Doctor?’ asked Detective Inspector Lane, hopefully.

Richard had taken another rectal temperature before starting to examine the body. ‘It’s dropped another degree since we were in the woods,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t really help much. There are so many variables that anyone who claims to be more accurate is just guessing.’

The rest of the hour-long examination revealed little of significance. The stomach contents gave off a strong smell of beer, but there was no food present.

Richard was just about to finish and let the mortuary attend-ant begin to restore the body, when the door opened and two other men walked in. Once again, their large size and confident bearing marked them out as plain-clothes policemen. Richard happened to be looking at Angela at that moment and saw her face change expression. Her jaw tightened and her cheeks reddened as the first man identified himself.

‘Sorry we’re late, I’m Detective Superintendent Paul Vickers from the Met – and this is DI Waverley.’ The other man nodded, but it was the senior officer who did all the talking. ‘Hell of a drive down, pouring with rain until Cheltenham. We’ve come to see if your chap really is Harry Haines.’

Brian Lane went forward to welcome the superintendent from London and started to introduce the others in the room, but Vickers suddenly saw Angela and seemed to freeze on the spot.

‘Good God, Angela!’ he said. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’

The local DI looked from one to the other. ‘You know Dr Bray, then? She came to help Doctor Pryor.’

Angela nodded stonily at the newcomer.

‘Hello, Paul,’ she said icily. ‘How are you?’

He mumbled something and turned his attention quickly to the body on the table. ‘This is the chap, then?’ he asked unnecessarily.

Pryor, wondering what was going on, stood back so that Paul Vickers could get a good look at the face of the corpse. It took him only a few seconds to confirm the man’s identity.

‘That’s Harry Haines alright,’ he said grimly. ‘I can’t say that he’ll be any great loss to London.’

He fell into discussion with the Gloucester detectives about the case and Angela took the opportunity to move to Richard’s side.

‘Can you give me the keys to the car, please?’ she murmured urgently.

‘They’re in my jacket pocket, hanging out in the office,’ he replied. ‘Anything you need from it?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ll wait for you there, this place has suddenly become overcrowded,’ she said cryptically and quietly went out of the room.

It was only later, when they were driving out of the hospital grounds that he fully learned the reason for her strange behaviour, though he had begun to guess what had happened.

‘Sorry about that, Richard, it wasn’t very professional, but I wasn’t really doing much in there, anyway.’

He looked sideways at her profile and saw in the dim first light of dawn, that she was staring fixedly ahead.

‘Are you alright, Angela?’ he asked solicitously. ‘Anything I can do to help?’

She shook her head, angry at herself.

‘You’re a good chap, Richard, but no thanks. It’s just me being silly.’

‘That was him, wasn’t it?’ he said gently. ‘What a coincidence! Perhaps I shouldn’t have dragged you out tonight.’

She laughed more easily, rapidly returning to her normal poise.

‘You weren’t to know, were you! Yes, that was him, the unfaithful bastard! Another reason why I’m happy to be out of London.’

She laid a hand briefly on his sleeve, in a rare gesture of affection.