William Shaw - She's leaving home

“Do you want a cough drop, sir?” said the local copper.

Still leaning over the patch of weeds he answered, “No, I’ll be fine,” spitting onto the grass again to try to clear the stinging taste from his mouth.

He straightened himself up, stomach aching from the convulsions. “Was she killed here, or dumped?” he asked Wellington. His voice was quiet, not much more than a whisper.

“Dumped,” said the doctor.

“Yes?”

“Well, I don’t think she bloody walked here looking like that. Looks like she was lying on her side for an hour or so after she was killed. Come here. Only don’t go chucking up on the evidence, Breen.”

Breen took a deep breath, stood up straight and approached the corpse again. “Look here,” said Wellington, leaning over the woman. “Blood pooling in the tissue of her left-hand side.” He pointed to a blueness in the skin on her pale thigh. “A prettier corpse than the last pile of bones you brought me,” he said.

Still leaning, he reached out and, holding it between finger and thumb, inserted the thermometer into the dead girl’s anus. “Convenient, at least,” said Wellington, twisting the glass rod a few times to push it in farther. “This won’t hurt a bit,” he muttered.

Breen quelled the spasm in his throat.

“Charming,” muttered one of the coppers.

Satisfied that it was in far enough, Wellington stood and looked at his watch. “You don’t look well, Breen,” he said. “You want me to take your temperature too? When she’s finished with it?”

“I’m fine, thank you, Dr. Wellington. Thank you for asking.”

“How was she killed?”

“I’ll go a tenner on asphyxiation. No other signs of injury so far.”

“Strangled, like?” said a constable.

Wellington glanced at the young man, irritated. He was not an investigating officer and had no right butting in. “Possibly,” he said. “Faint petechiae on the face. Blood spots. Her head appears to be congested with blood.”

The rain was starting to come down harder now, forming puddles in the dirty earth. Water dripped off the dead girl’s white fingers. Wellington carried on counting the seconds on his watch.

For constables who spent most of their time on the beat, a murder was a treat. They crowded round, eager, notebooks at the ready. Breen started by dividing them into two groups. The first were to start with a fingertip search of the whole back alley, working out onto the road and then spreading out from there.

“What are we looking for?” said one.

Breen paused. He felt another lurch in his stomach.

“Anything,” he said.

The policemen looked at each other, puzzled. Breen pulled out his handkerchief again and held it to his mouth. He turned his back to them and stared hard at the ground as the world around seemed to dip and weave.

A voice behind him. “Sir?”

“Give me a minute,” he muttered.

He could hear the buzz of conversation growing behind him. Someone laughed.

“Clothes,” he said. The murmuring stopped. He took another breath of air. “Clothes. Dress. Blouse. Bra. Knickers.” He paused, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, then continued. “She’s naked, isn’t she? Where are her clothes? Handbag. Coat. Purse. Think of anything a girl carries around. Lipstick. Powder. Women’s things. You”-he pointed to a ruddy-faced copper who looked a little older than the rest. “You’re in charge of checking out these flats’ bins, OK?”

A groan.

“Shrubbery. Front gardens. Knock on doors and ask to look in back gardens. Any railways or canals round here?”

“There’s the underground up there.”

“Good. How far?”

“’Bout a quarter-mile.”

“You. Call up the Transport Police. Give them my name. Say we want to search the banks, especially around road bridges. You two do the canal.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You…” Breen pointed to one of the constables.

“Me, sir?” He’d picked the tallest, a lanky lad with thick eyebrows.

“You take a note of the locations where they have searched and write down exactly where anything is found.”

“Right, sir,” the lad said, pleased to have been picked.

“Can’t I do that?” said the one who’d been given the bins. “Only I got a bad back.”

“You stick to the bins. You’ll be fine. Anybody finds anything, report it back to…What’s your name?” The copper mumbled his name. “Towels. Sacks. Blankets. Sheets. Anything she might have been wrapped in before she was dumped. Or just anything that you think shouldn’t be there…” he tailed off.

Still they stood there, waiting for more instructions.

“Right then. Start by that wall,” he said. “In a line. Move towards the street. And then…spread out.”

Finally they shuffled off, happier now he’d told them what to do. He turned to the second group. “Door-to-door,” he said.

This time they huffed like kids who had been picked for the fat boy’s team. Like all beat policemen, they abhorred knocking on doors, talking politely to members of the public. He gave them four questions. Did anybody have any idea who the dead girl might be? How long had that rubbish been piled by the sheds? Had anyone heard anything suspicious last night? Had anybody seen or noticed anyone different around the flats in the last few weeks? There were almost certainly better questions, but he couldn’t think of any, right now. He told the constables to start with the ground floor flats and work up. After that they could begin to move on up the road.

When they had set off to do what he had asked, he went to sit in the police car and lit a cigarette. Breen smoked five cigarettes a day. No more. He liked using them to divide up the day, plus it made a packet of No. 6’s last four days. Today he was already on his second. He sat behind the driving wheel, leaning forward to lay his head on the cool plastic. The sight of a dead body had never affected him like this before. He was not well.

After a minute he sat back and pulled out the clean notebook and the pencil. He sat for a while, holding the pencil in one hand and the cigarette in the other.

A few minutes after Wellington had left, an ambulance arrived, bell ringing, to take the body away. It parked in the middle of the street. The flash of its blue lights shone off the last damp leaves on the lime trees. As always, a small crowd had gathered to watch the goings-on. A young man dressed in football kit, and a woman with a headscarf and shopping trolley. A pair of young girls joined them to watch the gurney pass, rattling on the uneven ground. Dressed in big woolen coats and loud scarves the girls clutched each other by the arms as the dead girl passed them, covered by a black sheet. Craning her neck to see past them, a nanny dressed in a dark uniform stood smoking a cigarette just a few yards back from the rest of them. They seemed to be there just to feast on the sadness of the scene. Jones had arrived. He was picking through the debris, where the body had lain.

After a while, Breen started to feel cold, so he switched on the Cortina’s engine. The hum of the engine was reassuring.

A knocking on the driver-side window. It was one of the constables. “Are you all right, sir?”

He wound it down.

“I said are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” said Breen. He wiped his eyes with the cuff of his jacket. “I just needed a couple of minutes to think.”

“Yes, sir. Only, there’s a woman on the second floor. I think you should speak to her.”

He squinted up at her, leaning down towards the car’s open window. “Did she hear something?”

“She was the woman who called it in, sir. And she says new people moved in round here.”

“And?”

“And I think you should speak to her, sir.”