Хилари Боннер - Dreams of Fear

The high intensity floodlights, which had been erected, illuminated the scene with stark brilliance, their beams crossing each other, so that numerous shadows of the hanging body were cast around the hallway.

It was an eerie sight. Vogel stood for a moment taking it all in. Unlike Phil Lake he had seen more death, and almost always violent death, than, in his opinion, any one man ever should. He’d never got used to it, and he knew that he never would. He looked up at the woman’s distorted face. His stomach heaved involuntarily, as it always did, and as Phil Lake’s had done earlier. But the young officer would never know that.

She hung there, suspended, like a puppet waiting to be jerked into life by its puppeteers. However, this poor broken soul would never know life again. The striped men’s pyjamas she was wearing gave her the look of a somewhat obscene Andy Pandy.

Vogel took a step closer, in order to more intensely examine the body, making himself set aside those feelings he had never quite been able to overcome, and concentrate hard on the scene before him.

David Vogel was a most meticulous man. He had a natural eye for detail, and a rather decent brain which had yet to be numbed into submission by the routine drudgery so often required of the modern police officer, whether or not he might be a fine detective.

This was a fairly large house, probably 1930s built, with high ceilings and a tall ornate staircase. He guessed the drop from the landing to the hallway below to be about fifteen feet. The spacious hallway was probably about ten feet square, and the staircase curved around it. There was little doubt that it was a location rather well suited to a successful suicide.

‘What do you think, Saslow?’ enquired Vogel.

The young detective was standing to one side also carefully scrutinising the body. If she were at all alarmed or distressed by the sight before her, she gave absolutely no sign of it.

Not for the first time Vogel considered that Dawn Saslow was probably made of sterner stuff than him. Indeed, during her relatively brief police career she had successfully dealt with, or at least given every impression of having done so, one almost cataclysmic personal experience far more extreme than anything Vogel had ever faced.

‘Hard to tell, boss,’ replied Saslow. ‘You can see pretty much from looking at this woman that the cause of death was almost certainly strangulation, can’t you? But it does also look as if someone might have been knocking her about.’

‘Indeed,’ agreed Vogel. ‘Which naturally makes us turn our attentions to the husband, of course. Whether or not Mrs Jane Ferguson ultimately did take her own life.’

‘What, an esteemed local businessman, the son of the mayor of Bideford, and the commodore of the local yacht club, boss?’ responded Saslow sardonically, echoing Vogel’s own words to PC Lake. ‘Surely not.’

Vogel smiled wearily.

‘Do not fret, Saslow,’ he said. ‘At least we can escape back to Bristol when the job is done. No wonder Nobby Clarke wanted to farm this one out.’

He made himself concentrate on the task in hand, taking in the old bruising and the freshly healed cut on the woman’s face, and the way her arm dangled in such a way that it had surely been wrenched from its socket.

Vogel could see at once why the two uniforms had called in as a suspicious death what must have, at first sight, looked like a suicide. Smart work, all the same, which had led to him and Saslow being summoned in the early hours of a Sunday morning all the way from Bristol to the scene of what might otherwise have been dismissed as a domestic tragedy. That and all this local political nonsense. Vogel groaned silently. He hated that sort of thing.

Stealing himself, he continued to study the grotesque tableau before him.

‘So, on balance, Saslow, do you think this still might be a straightforward suicide, our Jane here just got her arm entangled in the bannisters somehow, and there could prove to be an innocent explanation for the old injury to her face?’ he asked. ‘Or do you think, as the D and C bigwigs clearly suspect, that we might be faced with something more sinister here?’

‘Well, suicide could remain a possibility, boss, but—’ Dawn Saslow began thoughtfully.

She got no further before being interrupted by Karen Crow.

‘One thing’s certain, Vogel, if you give the go-ahead for that body to be brought down so that I can examine it properly, we might well all gain a far better idea of what really happened here,’ proclaimed the district Home Office pathologist forcefully. ‘We waited long enough for you to get here, for God’s sake. It really would be nice if we could all now get on with what we have to do.’

Vogel treated her to one of his most benign smiles. He knew that Dr Crow, whose extensive territory also stretched across much of the Avon and Somerset’s beat, was based in Exeter, which even he realized was one heck of a lot closer to the North Devon coast than Bristol. About an hour and a quarter’s drive away he guessed. And the doctor would have been notified almost as soon as the incident was called in, whereas he and Saslow were alerted only after a conflab between two chief constables. So she had possibly been hanging around for as much as three hours waiting for him and Saslow to arrive. He had earlier speculated that she wouldn’t take kindly to that sort of wait. And he had just been proven absolutely right.

David Vogel did not give the appearance of being in any way a forceful or assertive man. He was tall, thin, and heavily bespectacled. He walked with just the slightest hint of a stoop, and tended to wear honourably ancient corduroy jackets and comfortable slip-on suede shoes even when the weather and terrain rendered them highly inappropriate. He rarely appeared to be in a rush either to speak or to act. And it was invariably apparent from every iota of his body language that he was unlikely to speak, or certainly not to venture an opinion, without giving the subject of his vernacular considerable thought and consideration. Indeed, Vogel resembled rather more an academic, a school teacher, or perhaps a clergyman, in his bearing, than he did a police detective. Nonetheless, twenty years or so of being a fairly exceptional detective, or certainly an exceptionally clever one, had resulted in appearances being significantly deceptive.

Vogel could be rather impressively forceful, both physically and mentally, if required, and was actually by nature an assertive man, albeit a quiet one.

In this instance a demonstration of assertion was not required. There were few people Vogel would allow to speak to him in the way Karen Crow just had. But she was definitely one of the exceptions. In the first place she was a pathologist, and pathologists and senior police officers were programmed to indulge in a certain degree of banter, if only as a diversion from the horrors with which they were usually confronted when working together. And in the second place, Karen Crow had earned the right. She was one of the most experienced Home Office pathologists in the country, with a reputation for brilliance. When she had first plied her trade almost thirty-five years previously, hers had been a ground-breaking appointment. And for many years she was the only woman in the UK to acquire and to hold down such a job.

‘My dear doctor,’ he began, in the slightly old-world manner he sometimes adopted. ‘Please feel free to go ahead. Who am I to stand in your way?’

He inclined his head in what might have been a gesture of gracious acquiescence were it not for the persistent twitch of a smile around his lips and the twinkle in his dark brown eyes, which was only partially disguised by his thick-lensed spectacles.

Karen pursed her lips and frowned at Vogel. She knew him pretty well. She said nothing more. Vogel indicated to the waiting CSI team that they could start to bring down the body. And he watched with some admiration as the CSIs worked together to release the body of Jane Ferguson whilst causing as little disruption as possible to it or to the crime scene. The two tallest male CSIs lifted the body from the ground floor, whilst another two forensic investigators untied the rope used to hang the woman from around the upper bannister. Ultimately the CSI team lowered Mrs Ferguson’s body carefully to the ground and lay it on the floor in the middle of the hall directly below where it had been found hanging. The dead woman was positioned on her back, legs straight, with the noose which had caused her death still tight around her neck.