Paul Gitsham - The Last Straw

“Are you the only Scenes of Crime duty officer that Herts and Beds employ?” asked Warren, only half joking. Harrison gave a short laugh. “No, but I get a lot of Middlesbury jobs because I live up here. I was on call tonight.”

“What can you tell us about what happened?”

The three men entered the front door, Warren and Sutton slipping on latex gloves and plastic overshoes before they crossed the threshold.

The two CID officers stopped dead in their tracks. Both men had seen death in their career. Both men had seen violent and graphic death — most recently, of course, the previous Friday — but this was nevertheless a deeply disturbing sight.

Crawley’s eyes were wide open and staring at them. His skin was a grey waxy colour and traces of vomit had dried in sticky trails down his chin, soaking into his smart white shirt. Around his neck he wore an expensive-looking blue silk tie that fitted well with the neatly creased trousers and shiny shoes. What went less well with the ensemble was a hangman’s noose made out of multicoloured nylon rope, the sort used to climb mountains or as a tow rope. Warren made a mental note to work out which it was, the two being very different. As a friend of his had found out recently to her cost, a climbing rope is a hell of a lot more expensive than a tow rope — and if you used it for the latter it was no longer suitable for the former.

It looked as if Alison Carmichael had been correct. He had either done the sums correctly or chanced upon the correct length of rope from the bannister. From the unnatural angle of his neck, Warren could clearly see that the drop had been just sufficient to snap his spinal cord, causing instant death, rather than the slow death by suffocation that had so nearly been Antonio Severino’s fate.

“Well, first of all, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest unofficially and before the results of the PM or any tests that this wasn’t a suicide — or at least an unassisted suicide.”

Warren and Sutton looked up sharply. “What makes you say that?”

Harrison gestured towards the living room, a mirror image of the room that they had been sitting in a few minutes before, albeit with more modern furniture and a big-screen TV with a games console underneath. On the coffee table sat an empty bottle of Smirnoff Vodka and several empty blister-packs of the type used for pills.

“I believe that the scenario we are supposed to accept is that Mr Crawley set up his hangman’s noose, then consumed a mixture of alcohol and heavy sedatives to numb the pain, before hanging himself.”

Warren nodded. “It looks that way at first glance. What makes you think different?”

“First, do you know if Mr Crawley was a heavy drinker?”

Warren shook his head. “Quite the opposite, I believe. I think Mr and Mrs Turnbull said that he doesn’t drink.”

“Hmm, that just strengthens my theory. We’ll have to confirm this by looking for signs of past alcohol abuse by looking for a history in his hair or by the state of his liver. But the fact is that it looks as though the late doctor drank pretty much this entire bottle of vodka this morning. Everybody’s tolerance of alcohol is different, of course, but frankly George Best would have been struggling to stand up after this amount of alcohol and we all know that he wasn’t a teetotaller. Add to that some of these migraine pills — we’ll have to look at his stomach contents to determine how much vodka and pills he consumed exactly — and we are looking at a potentially lethal state of intoxication, especially for someone who isn’t used to alcohol.”

“What are you saying? That Crawley didn’t die from a hanging?”

“No, not at all. I think that the PM will probably reveal exactly that — instantaneous death from a hangman’s drop. What I’m suggesting, however, is that if he had been left to his own devices he would probably have expired a few minutes later anyway from acute alcohol poisoning and or an overdose of painkillers. What’s more, he would have been so obliterated, I doubt he would even have been conscious, let alone able to get up from the couch, climb the stairs, place his neck in a noose and then clamber over the bannisters before dropping.

“Somebody did this to him.”

* * *

There was a stunned silence after Harrison delivered his prediction.

“This is all preliminary, of course. But I would be willing to bet good money that the post-mortem will show marks on his body consistent with signs of a struggle and restraint.”

“I think that your money is probably safe,” whispered Warren.

“And another thing, although I am probably straying well beyond my professional remit here, that suicide note is decidedly fishy. The wording isn’t right.”

“Crawley had dyslexia.”

“Oh, I could see that clear enough. It’s the bits that aren’t dyslexic that stand out to me. I would have somebody from Documents Analysis take a look at it, and have IT go over the laptop to see if they can find any other versions of the letter.”

Warren nodded absently, his mind now frantically trying to rearrange the pieces of a jigsaw that he thought he had already mostly solved.

“One thing’s for sure,” remarked Tony Sutton ruefully. “I think we can be certain that Antonio Severino didn’t kill him.”

The two men sat in a bar just around the corner from Crawley’s house. It was past ten p.m. and Warren knew better than to risk the wrath of Susan by turning up late again, smelling of beer. Their interrupted reconciliation notwithstanding, he was well aware of the fact that he was still in the doghouse. Besides which, he was driving.

Nevertheless, the two men needed something to clear their heads, to wash away the memory of what they’d seen and dull the rawness of the emotions that they had witnessed. Warren nursed the gin and tonic in front of him, making a mental note to crunch a few mints on the way home.

Sutton stared into his pint of lager, saying nothing, deep in thought. Eventually he looked up.

“I’m going to request a transfer to Welwyn.”

Warren nearly choked on a mouthful of gin. This was the last thing he had expected. After the previous night’s argument about how much Middlesbury CID meant to him, asking to leave the unit didn’t make any sense. Warren said so.

“You were right last night. It’s become an obsession. I was so desperate to preserve this romantic notion of Middlesbury CID that I had built up in my head, that I refused to accept the facts as they were presented to me.” He took another swig of his drink. “I’m a detective, damn it. I’m supposed to follow the clues, wherever they lead, and leave my own ideas and prejudices at home.”

Warren wasn’t sure what to say.

“I’m amazed that I’m not suspended after the way I spoke to you yesterday. I was so far out of line, I’m surprised you didn’t punch me.”

Warren half smiled. “The thought did occur…”

“Anyway, I think I need to get away from here. Move to Welwyn, where I can work crimes all over the county. I need to be a detective again, digging out clues and following leads, without constantly worrying that if I don’t work fast enough or hard enough, the whole unit could be closed down. I need some distance from Middlesbury CID and the ghost of DCI fucking Sheehy.”

And that was it, Warren realised. That was what it was all about. Sheehy. The corrupt, former detective chief inspector, who’d made hard-working, honest men like Tony Sutton believe that they were doing something more than just their jobs. It was the sign of an inspirational leader, Warren knew. Making those who followed you view their job as more than just a way to pay the mortgage and put food on the table. But that had made his betrayal all that harder.