Nick Oldham - Hidden Witness

‘I hadn’t noticed it,’ Henry admitted.

‘That’s why we have pathologists,’ she responded. Henry saw her ears rise as she smiled teasingly behind the mask.

‘How old?’

She shrugged. ‘Difficult to say exactly… it’s well-healed and it looks as though it was treated medically and well… maybe five years,’ she estimated.

Henry blinked, did the maths. ‘So if this guy is at the lower age you estimated, he got shot when he was sixty?’ His voice rose incredulously on the last few syllables. O’Connell nodded. ‘Not likely to be a war wound, then?’

‘Not unless he was in Dad’s Army.’

Henry stood upright. ‘Can we get that photographed?’

‘All part of the service.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And so we begin.’

Henry retreated a couple of steps, his forehead creased in thought by the wound in the man’s side as he considered the possibilities. ‘I’ll go bag and tag his clothing,’ he announced.

When the body had been stripped, the clothing had all been dropped into a plastic basket that was now in one corner of the room. He went across and picked it up, then carried it through to the mortuary office where he dumped it on a desktop. He nipped out to his car parked in the tiny car park at the back of the mortuary and brought back several paper bags, sacks, polythene bags, tags, and a notebook he always had with him — just in case. Most detectives are similarly equipped. You could never tell when some bloodstained clothing or other evidence might have to be seized. He left his portable fingerprinting kit in the boot. That job was going to go to a CSI.

Back inside he began the process of inspecting, recording, describing and bagging each item taken from the dead man, aware that care needed to be taken to preserve any evidence that might be useful, and that such evidence might well be invisible to the naked eye. All the stuff would be going to the forensic science lab for analysis sooner rather than later, so he had to do a good job and not compromise any evidence.

The first item he picked up was the man’s sports jacket, which to Henry’s untrained eye, looked quite an expensive one. All the clothing, on brief inspection, seemed to be good quality Italian. In an inside pocket was a slim, pigskin wallet, heavily stained with blood. Henry opened it carefully. There was a maker’s imprint in the leather and Henry guessed it was an Italian word, something to check on, perhaps. There was no form of ID in the wallet itself, just a hundred pounds in twenties, a hundred Euros, an old thousand-lira note and a faded, bloodied, photograph of a young child. A granddaughter, Henry hazarded. There was nothing else in the jacket, other than three keys on a ring, one mortise, one Yale, and the other possibly a padlock key.

Henry recorded the items, then carried on with what was left in the basket — trousers, socks, shoes (definitely Italian leather), a shirt, silk tie, a vest — and Henry made sure he noted each item and sealed it in the appropriate manner in the correct type of bag.

Finally he was left with two items, a watch and the old man’s walking stick. The watch was a heavy Rolex and Henry looked at it longingly. One day, he promised himself, and logged it, tagged and bagged it, then moved on to the stick. It was silver tipped with an intricately carved wooden handle. Henry held it up and his eyes skimmed it, but just as he was about to drop it into a polythene bag, something on the shaft caught his eye, about two-thirds of the way down from the handle. He frowned, then packed and did the paperwork for the stick.

The only things he hadn’t recorded were the keys.

He held them up on the simple ring and said, ‘But no ID,’ to himself. He scratched his ear thoughtfully.

An old man, out and about at night with no form of identification. How weird was that? Well-dressed — slightly dashing if anything — well nourished, a bit of money in the wallet. And a not-so-old bullet wound in the ribs.

Unless something turned up in the meantime — such as, ‘My old grandad’s not come home,’ and here Henry thought that unless grandad was a dirty stop-out, that ‘meantime’ might well have passed as it was now well into the early hours — one of the first tasks of the morning would be to flood the area with uniforms knocking on doors armed with an artist’s impression of the old man’s face, as a direct photo might have been a tad too gruesome to shove under peoples’ noses at breakfast time. Although Henry realized he was making an assumption, he’d lay odds that the guy was on his way home — but from where and to where?

Already the questions and ideas were starting to mount up and Henry’s mind, fatigued as it was, was starting to marshal these thoughts. He sat down at the desk in the mortuary office and jotted down a few ideas about the way forwards with the investigation in the notebook. He’d hardly had time to scribble down three headings on separate pages — ‘Victim’, ‘Location’, Offender’ — when someone came into the office and interrupted him.

It was DS Alex Bent, who tapped lightly on the glass door, even though it was open. He was drenched, looked exhausted. ‘Boss?’ he said, quietly but urgently.

Henry squinted at him. ‘I was just about to solve this murder by cracking the intricate medieval and religious code I found in this book,’ he said seriously, tapping his finger on the notebook.

‘Really?’ Bent said, Henry’s little joke flying right over his head.

‘Yeah — so this better be good.’ Henry closed the notebook, realizing it was completely the wrong time of day to have a stab at humour. ‘What?’

‘Well, you being the only SIO in spitting distance — do you want to turn out to another job?’

The shiny, perfectly sharpened dissecting knife was poised above the old man’s chest, ready to make the first incision: the classic cut down the middle of the body from the soft skin just below the Adam’s apple, all the way down to the pubes. From that first cut, the outer layers of skin and subcutaneous fat would be pared away to expose the ribcage which, depending on its condition, would be removed by use of shears, not unlike those found in a garden shed. It would then be lifted off like the lid on a square biscuit tin. Only difference was there wouldn’t be any goodies in this tin, but a squashed heart, lungs, liver and kidneys — organs that would then be hacked out for examination.

‘Don’t even think about it.’ Henry said mock dramatically as he swung through the mortuary door.

The pathologist, Keira O’Connell, paused, keeping the knife hovering just inches above the flesh like the Sword of Damocles. She inclined her head and peered over her facemask. ‘And why not?’ she asked, voice muffled. ‘Has this man actually died of natural causes, meaning a post-mortem is no longer necessary?’

‘Would it be possible to delay?’ Henry asked.

‘Give me one good reason.’

‘Another shooting’s come in — young lad up on Shoreside. No more details as yet, but I’d like you to come to the scene if possible.’

‘OK…’ O’Connell checked the clock and for the benefit of the recording equipment stated the time and date and that the PM was being suspended for the time being, then asked the mortuary technician to turn off the machine. He obeyed, using a remote control. ‘Not much detail you say?’ she said, stepping away from the slab and replacing the knife in its position in the line of tools, then removing her mask, ‘but you must have something?’ she asked Henry. She walked towards him, peeling the latex gloves off, then unpinning her hair, which she shook free and patted into place, even though the expensively cut bob tumbled out perfectly.

Something clogged up Henry’s throat as he replied, ‘No, nothing,’ dreamily.