Paul Gitsham - The Last Straw

Sutton nodded. “Yeah, probably better make tracks. The missus wasn’t impressed when I didn’t come home last night.”

Warren snorted. “Your missus wasn’t impressed? How do you think mine reacted when she saw what I’d brought home?”

The following morning started even more early than usual, with the whole team at their desks by seven a.m. The air crackled with energy; everyone felt that today would be the day. Jones briefed his team, plus a number of additional officers, on the previous night’s events and outlined his plans for the upcoming day. At eight a.m. the preliminary autopsy results for Crawley came through and Jones and Sutton attacked them hungrily. Attached to the report was a Post-it note, signed with Andy Harrison’s scrawl, “ This is the second all-nighter we’ve pulled for you in a week, DCI Jones — we’d better be top of your Christmas card list! ”

Despite the grimness of the report it was attached to, Warren couldn’t help but smile and made a mental note to find out what tipple Harrison enjoyed. He pushed it towards Tony Sutton, who snorted. “Top bloke, Andy Harrison. Most of the folks who work over there are bloody weird in one way or another — something about working with stiffs all day, I guess. They’re all nice enough, but Andy’s the only one I’d be seen in public with.”

From the report, which was repeatedly annotated with comments in red pen that stressed conclusions were preliminary or simply stated ‘Pending Lab Results’, it looked as if Crawley’s death was definitely murder, not suicide. Furthermore, there was no sign of forced entry, suggesting that Crawley had known his attacker or attackers.

Based on the temperature of the body, the degree of rigor mortis and the state of his stomach contents the coroner suggested a time of death of about midday, plus or minus about two hours. Which fitted in with his wife and children leaving the house about ten a.m.

A further look at the stomach contents had revealed the presence of most of the litre bottle of vodka as well as a large number of semi-digested painkillers. The blood toxicology analysis was still pending, and would be for some time, but it looked as if Harrison’s initial belief that Crawley would have been too intoxicated to have successfully hung himself was correct.

Adding weight to his theory that Crawley had been an unwilling imbiber, the coroner had found pressure marks around the hinge of his jaw consistent with Crawley being forced to drink the vodka and swallow the pills. Curiously, there were no obvious bruises that suggested he had been restrained. However a tiny nick in the skin close to his carotid artery was enough for Harrison to speculate that a very sharp implement — possibly another scalpel blade — had been pressed against his neck.

Warren shuddered. He’d seen firsthand what a skilfully wielded scalpel could do to a human throat. Add in a bit of coercion — perhaps a threat against his wife and kids — and Warren could see how Crawley could be forced to drink vodka and swallow pills. However, he doubted that they’d ever really know exactly what went on in that suburban living room.

The PM had also revealed some small bruises under the armpits consistent with an unconscious man the size of Crawley being manhandled up the stairs before having the noose placed around his neck and his being tipped over the bannister. The cause of death was as expected — severed spinal cord from hanging.

The rope used was a climbing rope that belonged to Crawley. He had been a keen member of a local club, along with his eldest son, and the cupboard under the stairs offered a selection of different ropes suitable for the purpose. Warren felt a flash of disappointment — another dead end.

Attached to the post-mortem findings were other reports from the scene. The vodka was a basic litre bottle of Smirnoff vodka, available in thousands of off-licences and supermarkets all over the country. Lizzi Crawley was adamant that it hadn’t come from their house, since her husband never drank and she preferred wine. Their seventeen-year-old son had sworn blind that he knew nothing about it. A batch number had been taken off the bottle in an attempt to trace where it was sold from, but it wasn’t expected to yield much in the way of useful information.

The bottle had been dusted for fingerprints and other trace evidence. The only fingerprints found were a single set belonging to Crawley, around the middle of the bottle in a classic drinker’s hold. There were no other sets. This observation had been underlined twice in red pen. A handwritten annotation, prefaced with ‘Speculation’ in large block capitals, questioned why there was only one set of prints — suggesting it unlikely, albeit not impossible, that Crawley had only touched the bottle once with bare hands between acquiring the bottle and his unscrewing the cap and swigging a litre of the fiery spirit. Even if that was the case, what about the fingerprints from the sales assistant from where it was bought or the person who placed it on the shop’s shelf? The suggested conclusion was that the bottle had been carefully wiped clear of prints before being pressed into the hand of an already comatose Crawley. Given that Crawley was a known teetotaller, the killer would have needed to bring the bottle to the scene and it would have been difficult to justify buying a bottle of vodka in the middle of a heatwave whilst wearing gloves.

The pills were revealed to be a legitimate prescription for Crawley’s migraines. His condition was openly acknowledged amongst his friends and co-workers, so it wasn’t surprising that the killer knew of the pills. Combined with the vodka they would have formed a lethal cocktail that would have killed Crawley just as effectively as the hanging. And maybe they would have succeeded in passing it off as a suicide, Warren thought. It was just possible that the murderer’s quite literal overkill might be their undoing.

More fingerprints had been taken from the cardboard box and the plastic blister-pack that had contained the pills. This time the box was covered with Crawley’s fingerprints, plus a few smudged prints from his wife, consistent with her perhaps moving the box of pills around whilst looking for something else in the crowded medicine cabinet that they shared. Another handwritten note suggested that the thumbprints on the blister-pack where the pills had been pushed through the tin-foil might have been added after the pill was popped from the pack, but it had been annotated as ‘Highly Speculative’ and so Warren disregarded it for the time being.

The next report was the preliminary findings from the Document Analysis Team on the suicide note. Since it had been typed on a Word Processor with an inbuilt spell-checker and left on screen, the amount of information that could be gleaned from the document was much less than would have been available from a hand-written note on paper. Nevertheless, the report made Warren sit up straight.

The note was largely consistent with a letter written by an intelligent person with dyslexia. Although it appeared the inbuilt spell checker had corrected any obvious spelling errors, it had been unable to fix the incorrect usage of homonyms; that is words that sound the same, but are spelt differently and have different meanings. Examples from within the suicide note included the opening ‘Deer’, instead of ‘Dear’; ‘bare’ instead of ‘bear’ and ‘now’ instead of ‘know’. Other examples included transposed letters, such as ‘won’ instead of ‘own’. Incorrect apostrophe usage and other punctuation errors were also common throughout the letter, although the report noted that that was not necessarily a hallmark of dyslexia.

However, some parts of the letter deviated from this, with sections containing almost none of these errors. The analyst had noted of a repetition of the sentiment ‘I can’t bear’ and had highlighted it in the text. The first two instances incorrectly used the spelling ‘bare’, whilst the third used the correct spelling. This third usage also correctly used ‘thought’ rather than ‘fought’. The analyst also noted a rare example of correct apostrophe usage in the word ‘boys’ further on in the same sentence. The analyst underlined the examples.