Paul Gitsham - The Last Straw

“Fingerprints?”

Harrison shook his head in frustration. “Nothing. Working hypothesis at the moment is that he also wore two or more pairs of latex gloves. It’s easy enough to remove a pair of gloves without getting what’s on the outside on your hands, but you should leave traces of DNA or even partial prints on the inside of the glove. We’ve found nothing. Assuming it was someone in the lab, these guys are all molecular biologists — they know how to avoid contaminating their work with foreign DNA. Put that together with a DVD boxset of CSI for Christmas and we’re talking pretty forensically aware individuals.”

“Can you make any inferences about height et cetera?”

“Only general. Almost certainly right-handed as the slitting of the throat was definitely right-handed and it requires a degree of skill; the angle of the cut is slightly upwards, suggesting that the attacker would likely have been of at least average height and would need to have been moderately strong.

“The gloves were standard university issue, medium size, but they’re made of stretchy latex so I wouldn’t want to speculate on hand size beyond suggesting the attacker wasn’t a NBA basketball player; similarly the booties were medium size and with the cardboard inserts it’s impossible to determine the shoe size of the person that wore them. A measurement of the distance between the footprints again suggest a person of average height and build, but the margin for error is so large I’d never sign off on it for court.

“Best I can say, is that the person was not very small and weak and probably right-handed.”

“Bugger,” said Warren quietly. None of the evidence presented excluded Severino — however it also couldn’t exclude half of the males in the country and a fair percentage of the women as well. Severino’s lawyer was right when he’d said that Severino was in the middle of the bell-curve.

There were still some photographs next to Harrison’s briefcase. “Anything else?”

“I’m afraid so, Chief. We’ve analysed the blood staining on the clothes that you gave us. It doesn’t contradict your theory, but it does raise a few awkward questions.”

Warren sighed. “Go on, then, kill the mood even more.”

The analyst rummaged through the photographs, ordering them carefully. Taking the first photograph, he placed it on the table in front of Warren.

“As you can see, this is the hoodie that you gave us-” he placed another photograph next to it “-and this is the lab coat. What do you see?”

Warren carefully examined the two images. “The front of the lab coat is covered in blood, loads of it — he must have been bleeding right at the attacker. The hoodie also has blood on the front of it, but only a triangle on the front from the collar down. If I had to do an interpretation, I would say the patterns are roughly consistent with a powerful arterial bleed straight at the attacker. The lab coat blocked most of the blood, with some getting inside to stain the hoodie that he was wearing underneath. In fact, rather a lot of blood got in.” Warren frowned.

Harrison picked up on Warren’s bemusement. “You are right, sir, that’s a hell of a lot of blood. In fact, the size of the patch on the hoodie is consistent with the top three buttons of this style of lab coat being undone and the flap loose. Why the hell would you go to the trouble of sticking your lab coat on, only to leave the bloody thing wide open? Severino wore this coat every day — it’s not as if he doesn’t know how to do the buttons up.”

Warren grunted his agreement, his mind spinning. “Perhaps Tunbridge struggled and pulled the coat open?”

Harrison didn’t look convinced. “It’s possible, but doesn’t really sit with everything else. Besides, there’s more.” He pulled out another photograph; this one appeared to be the back of the hoodie. Clearly visible on the back were large smears of blood. Placing it on the table, he also took one of the blown-up CCTV images.

Warren looked closely. “Shit,” he cursed quietly, “where the hell are those blood stains on this image? How can they suddenly have appeared on the back of the hoodie after his attacker exited the building?”

Harrison nodded. “We wondered about that as well. You can’t see the front of the hoodie, so we can’t tell if it has blood on the front. We wondered if he’d done some sort of switch, you know, stuck a new jumper on after taking the blood-stained one off. After all, he wouldn’t want to walk down the street with a massive blood stain on his chest-” his finger stabbed the image again “-but that doesn’t really explain how the blood got on the rear of the hoodie. So we had the blood analysed and got one of the splatter experts to give it a good look, and she reckons the pattern is consistent with the hoodie being rolled up before being stuffed in the black bag. The wet blood on the front was transferred to the rear as the two pieces of material came into contact.”

“OK.” Warren wasn’t quite sure where Harrison was going with this.

“But, she is adamant that the blood was still soaking wet when it was transferred, at most a few minutes old when it was rolled up. It’s a good fifteen-minute walk back to Severino’s. She reckons that if he’d walked home with the hoodie on and then taken it off and rolled it up, the blood would have dried to a different consistency and the transfer would have been different.”

Warren saw the peculiarity at once. “So the attacker kills Tunbridge, covering himself in blood in the process. He leaves the office and removes his lab coat, second pair of booties and latex gloves and bags them, but leaves on his blood-stained hoodie and jeans. Now he is no longer leaving bloody footprints or handprints. Somewhere further on, he discards the second pair of booties and their cardboard liner, probably in a random bin somewhere. He now exits the building, but then decides to get rid of the hoodie and bag that as well.”

Harrison nodded. “It’s a reasonable interpretation so far, sir.”

“The question is, why didn’t he take the hoodie off when he removed his lab coat? Why did he exit the building, running the risk of bumping into somebody whilst covered in blood. and then take the hoodie off? What about his jeans?”

“Well, the jeans are black, so he probably figured he was safe — there wasn’t that much blood on them. I guess he stood close enough behind Tunbridge that he took it full in the chest. As to the other question, I suppose he could have not realised the blood was on the front, or perhaps he was wearing something that would identify him underneath, like a T-shirt with his name on it?”

Warren wasn’t convinced and he could tell that Harrison wasn’t entirely satisfied with his answer either. This case, decided Warren, had just got a lot more interesting.

After a brief respite late Sunday evening, it was time to start the week with the goal of securing Severino’s prosecution and determining if anybody else had been involved in the murder.

By ten p.m. Warren had been unable to put off work any longer and with apologies all around, had retired to the kitchen table to plan out his to-do list and get ready for Monday morning.

First and foremost Warren had circled the phrase ‘Why?’.

Why was Tunbridge in work so late? Was this normal behaviour for him? Second, was Severino working alone? If so, how did he know that Tunbridge was in the building and alone? To answer both of those questions, Warren had felt that he needed access to Tunbridge’s diaries and personal correspondence — phone calls, emails, texts. A close look at his phone bills — private, work and mobile — might shed some clues, whilst his email accounts, work and personal, could be extremely useful. His appointments diary might also prove useful. Did he use a paper diary or something electronic? They already had Tunbridge’s mobile phone — a BlackBerry smartphone found in his trousers pocket — and a meeting was scheduled with the university IT support team to look at Professor Tunbridge’s work laptop. It had just had its screen cleaned of Tunbridge’s blood but nobody had yet accessed the machine’s hard drive or his university filespace. Warren had made a note to seize his personal laptop as well if he owned one.