Michael Robotham - Say You're sorry

“You missed,” I say.

She holds up another snowball. “That was a warning shot.”

Drury leans on his shovel. “Hold your fire, Gracie.”

“I think we should arrest him, Daddy, he looks like a bad’n.”

“Let’s see what he has to say first.”

Gracie is wearing a woolen cap with earflaps that make her look like Snoopy in a Peanuts cartoon. Her pale cheeks are dusted with freckles and glasses are perched on the end of her nose. Her younger brother is sitting on the front steps, pushing a toy bulldozer through clumps of ice.

“What are you doing here, Professor?”

“I have a question.”

“It could have waited.”

“I talked to Augie Shaw again.”

“On whose authority?”

“His lawyer and his psychiatrist.”

Drury sets the shovel aside, pulling off his gloves. “What’s your question?”

“Why would a woman go out in the middle of a blizzard without any shoes?”

“You talking about anyone in particular.”

“You have an unidentified female found in a lake.”

“What about her?”

“Augie Shaw said he saw a woman on the road that night. He thinks he might have hit her. That’s why he drove his car into the ditch.”

Drury doesn’t seem surprised at this. I try again.

“You found a woman’s body in a lake. I saw the crime scene from the train. How far is that from the farmhouse?”

Drury doesn’t answer. His wife has appeared at the top of the steps, her body framed in the doorway, standing with one hand on her hip. Pregnant. Pretty. Tired around her eyes.

“Is everything all right, Stephen?” she asks.

“Everything’s fine. This is the psychologist I was telling you about.”

She smiles. “You should invite him inside where it’s warm.”

“The Professor won’t be staying.”

She picks up the young boy and rests him on her hip before turning inside.

I notice the curtains moving at the front window. She’s watching.

Drury rubs at his neck. “Get to the point, Professor?”

“The woman in the lake-was she wearing shoes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she have any injuries?”

“I haven’t seen the post-mortem. Body was frozen solid. They can’t cut her open till she thaws.”

The DCI plunges the shovel deep into a pile of snow.

“I think she was at the farmhouse that night,” I say. “A dress was soaking in the laundry. Shoes were drying by the fire. Someone took a bath…”

“You’re like a broken bloody record.”

Gracie covers her mouth. “You said a bad word, Daddy. You know what that means.”

Drury roots in his pocket for spare change. Gracie holds out her gloved hand and her fingers close over the silver coin.

“Go put it in the swear jar,” he says. “Right this minute.”

She skids across the packed snow and runs up the front steps.

“Take your shoes off before you go inside.”

The door bangs shut. I can hear Gracie’s voice-telling her mother that her daddy swore.

“That swear jar earns more than I do.”

He turns to me, stretching his fingers against the cold.

“Dress it up however you like, Professor, but it doesn’t change a thing. Augie Shaw murdered those people.”

“What about the clothes on the bed upstairs and the broken window in the bathroom?”

Drury pinches one nostril and blows out.

“OK, let’s say you’re right and this woman was at the house. Maybe she ran off. Maybe Shaw hunted her down. I’m happy to charge him with a third murder.”

The detective gazes past me at his house where Christmas lights are twinkling behind the net curtains. His wife has gone.

“My father was a detective, Professor. One of the best lessons he ever taught me was to wait until the mud settles so you can see things more clearly.” The DCI glances at his watch. “We’re done here. Have a nice life.”

The mortuary supervisor at John Radcliffe Hospital has a face like a chewed pencil and less personality. Rising from his chair, he searches for his reading glasses, which are hanging around his neck.

“Only next of kin can view a body.”

“I don’t want to see the body, I want to talk to the pathologist.”

“That’d be Dr. Leece. Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“Are you a friend?”

“No.”

He blinks at me as though I’ve asked him to donate a kidney. Perhaps he’s unaccustomed to greeting visitors who don’t arrive in body bags. I try again, hoping that I’m giving a smile. I can never be sure with my Parkinson’s.

Grudgingly, he picks up the handset and punches a number. A brief conversation ensues. The supervisor cups the phone.

“Dr. Leece is asking what it’s about.”

“It’s a police matter. Tell him I’ve spoken to DCI Drury.”

It’s not a complete lie, I tell myself, as I sign the visitor’s book and look into the camera. My image is captured, laminated, hung around my neck.

“Through those doors,” he says. “Straight ahead, turn right at the end of the corridor. It’s the fourth door on your right. Not the storeroom, that’s too far.”

The wide corridor is empty except for a cleaning trolley and a cart full of test tubes and sample bottles. Glancing through an open door, I notice a stainless steel table in the middle of the room with a central channel leading to a drain. Halogen lights are suspended from the ceiling on retractable arms. Cameras and microphones are positioned above.

I get a flashback of my medical training. I fainted during our first practical lesson working with a cadaver. That’s when I realized I wasn’t equipped for a career in medicine. I had the memory, the steady hands and the patience, but not the stomach. It took me another two years to tell my father, God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting.

Dr. John Leece meets me outside his office. Mid-fifties, tall, with graying hair, he has eyes that seem to change size depending upon the angle of his bifocals. It’s like watching one of those magic 3D pictures that transform when you tilt them.

He has three pens in the breast pocket of his business shirt. Black. Blue. Red. I imagine the order doesn’t change. Every morning he straps on his wristwatch and puts the pens in his pocket, a creature of habit, a lover of order.

“A psychologist,” he says, a pulse of surprise in his eyes. “I didn’t know DCI Drury was so fond of the dark arts.”

“He keeps an open mind,” I say, remembering my last conversation with the detective.

The pathologist laughs and looks over his shoulder at me, assuming I must be joking. He taps a security code into a panel and the door clicks open. Around the walls are filing cabinets and whiteboards. He circles a desk and offers me a seat.

“You have an unidentified body,” I say, hoping to stop Dr. Leece from asking any more questions.

“We have four. The oldest has been here two years. We think she’s probably foreign but Interpol hasn’t managed to come up with a match.”

“What about the most recent one?”

“Yes, of course, the newspapers are calling her the ice maiden. Makes her sound like a character from a fairy tale or a Russian novel. What’s your interest?”

“A couple were murdered four nights ago at their farmhouse outside of Bingham.”

“I did their post-mortems.”

“A suspect in the case claims that he saw a woman on the road during the blizzard. He almost ran her down. He says she wasn’t wearing shoes.”

“Now there’s a coincidence,” says Dr. Leece, pushing his glasses further up his nose. “Our ice maiden was similarly unshod. Do you have a name?”

“No.”

“Pity.” He seems to make a decision. “Her body has only just thawed out. I’m due to begin the post-mortem. You can watch if you like. Some of my students are coming along.”