Stuart Pawson - Chill Factor

I gravitated back into the master bedroom. That’s where the clues to Mr Peter Latham’s way of living and dying lay, I was sure. Find the lady, I was taught, and there were framed photographs of two of them on a chest of drawers, opposite the foot of the bed. I stood in the window and looked down on the scene outside. Blue and white tape was now ringing the garden and the street was blocked with haphazardly parked vehicles. Neighbours coming home from work were having to leave their cars in the next street and Jim, the PC, was having words with a man carrying a briefcase who didn’t think a mere death should come between him and his castle. I gave a little involuntary smile: he’d get no change out of Jim.

The first photograph standing on the chest of drawers in a gilt frame was one of those wedding pictures you drag out, years afterwards, to amuse the kids. It was done by a socalled professional, outside a church in fading colour. The bride was taller than the groom, with her hair piled up to accentuate the difference. She looked good, as all brides should. This was her day. Wedding dresses don’t date, but men’s suits do, which is what the kids find so funny. His was grey, with black edging to the floppy lapels of his frock coat. The photographer had asked him to turn in towards his new wife, in a pose that nature never intended, and we could see the flare of his trousers and the Cuban heels. Dark hair fell over his collar in undulating cascades. He’d have got by in a low budget production of Pride and Prejudice. It wouldn’t have stood as a positive ID but I was reasonably confident that the groom and the man lying on the kitchen floor were one and the same. So where was she, I wondered? The second picture was smaller, black and white, in a simple wooden frame. It showed a young girl in a pair of knickers and a vest, taken at a school sports day. She’d be ten or twelve, at a guess, but I’m a novice in that department. Some men would find it sexy, I knew that much. Her knickers were tight fitting and of a clingy material, with moderately high cut legs; and a paper letter B pinned to her vest underlined the beginnings of her breasts. It was innocent enough, I decided, but she’d be breaking hearts in four or five years, that was for sure. Maybe a niece or daughter. At either side of her you could just see the elbows and legs of two other girls, and I reckoned that she’d been cut from a group photograph. A relay team, perhaps. As with the other picture, I wondered if this young lady might come bounding up the garden path anytime now.

“Boss?”

I turned round to see the SOCO who was standing in the bedroom doorway, still dressed in his paper coveralls. I hadn’t put mine on, because the case had looked cut and dried.

“Yes!” I replied, smartly.

“We’ve finished in the kitchen,” he said. “We just need the knife retrieving.”

“I’ll have a look before anybody touches it,” I told him.

“Oh. We, er, were hoping that you’d, er, do it.”

“Do what?”

“Well, retrieve it.”

“You mean…pull it out?”

“Mmm.”

“That’s the pathologist’s job. He’ll want to do it himself.”

“Ah. We have a small problem there. He’s on his way back from London and his relief is nowhere to be found, but he’s spoken to Mr Wood and he’s happy for you to do it if we take a full record of everything.”

“I see. What does it look like for prints.”

“At a guess, covered in ’em.”

“Good. What do you make of those?” I asked, nodding towards the photographs.

“The pictures?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“It looks like their wedding day.”

“I’d gathered that. Do you think it’s him?”

“Um, could be.” He looked more closely, adding: “Yeah, I’d say it was.”

“Good. What about the other?”

“The girl? Could be their daughter,” he replied. “The hair colour’s similar, and they both look tall and thin.”

“Or the bride as a schoolgirl,” I suggested.

The SOCO bent down to peer at the picture. After a few seconds he said: “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because the timing’s wrong.”

“You’ve lost me,” I told him.

“Can’t be sure,” he went on, “but they both look as if they were taken around the same time. About fifteen or twenty years ago, at a guess. Maybe a bit less for that one.” He pointed towards the schoolgirl.

“How do you work that out,” I asked, bemused.

“The knickers,” he replied. “Long time ago they’d be cut straight across. Now they wear them cut higher. These are in-between.”

“I take it you have daughters,” I said.

“Yep. Two.”

“Some men would find a picture like that provocative,” I told him.

“I know,” he replied. “And you can see why, can’t you?”

I suppose that was as close as we’d ever get to admitting that it was a sexy image. “I don’t find it sexy,” we’d say, “but I can understand how some men might.”

“Why,” I asked him, “do the knicker manufacturers make them with high-cut legs when they know that they are intended for children who haven’t reached puberty yet?”

“Because that’s what the kids want. There’s a demand for them.”

“But why?”

“So they can be like their mothers.”

“Oh.”

All knowledge is useful. Knowledge catches crooks, I tell the troops. But there are vast landscapes, whole prairies and Mongolian plains, which are a foreign territory to me. They’re the bits surrounding families and children and relationships that have stood the test of time. My speciality, my chosen subject, is ones that have gone wrong. Never mind, I consoled myself; loving families don’t usually murder each other.

We went downstairs into the kitchen. Peter Latham hadn’t moved, but there was a thin coating of the fingerprint boys’ ally powder over all his possessions. “We decided not to do the knife in situ,” one of them told me.

“So you want me to pull it out?”

“Please.”

“Great.”

“But don’t let your hands slip up the handle.”

“Maybe we should use pliers,” I suggested, but they just shrugged their shoulders and pulled faces.

“Have we got photos of it?” I asked. We had.

“And measurements?” We had.

“Right, let’s have a look, then.”

Sometimes, you just have to bite the bullet. Or knife, in this case. I stood astride the body and bent down towards the sightless face with its expression cut off at the height of its surprise, a snapshot of the moment of death. Early detectives believed that the eyes of the deceased would capture an image of the murderer, and all you had to do was find a way to develop it.

I felt for some blade, between the handle and the dead man’s chest, and gripped it tightly with my thumb and forefinger. It didn’t want to come, but I resisted the temptation to move it about and as I increased the pressure it moved, reluctantly at first, then half-heartedly, like the cork from a bottle of Frascati, until it slipped clear of the body. The SOCO held a plastic bag towards me and I placed the knife in it as if it were a holy relic.

“Phew!” I said, glad it was over. I could feel sweat on my spine.

“Well done,” someone murmured.

My happy band of crime-fighters started to arrive, wearing the clothes they’d intended spending the rest of the evening in. Annette Brown was in jeans and a Harlequins rugby shirt, and my mouth filled with ashes when I saw her. She’s been with us for about a year, and was now a valuable member of the team. For a long while she’d kept me at a distance, not sure how to behave, but lately we’d been rubbing along quite nicely. She was single, but I’d never taken her out alone, and as far as I knew nobody else had. Inevitably, there were rumours about her sexual inclination. She has wild auburn hair that she keeps under control with a variety of fastenings, and the freckles that often go with that colour. I looked at my watch, wondering if we’d have the opportunity to go for that drink later, and ran my tongue over my teeth. No chance, I thought, as I saw the time.