A few minutes after Humphrey left the house, Detective Chief Superintendent Frank Briers entered. He asked a couple of quiet questions of the policeman on duty outside, gave a couple of quiet instructions. Any other entrances? There is another policeman outside the garden door? The same instruction was to be passed on to him. No one was to be allowed inside except his own officers and the technical people. Then Briers looked at the lock on the front door, said it must be changed, and went upstairs. He was followed by a young Detective Inspector Shingler, who had been sitting beside him in the police car. Shingler had already been allotted to the chief Scenes of Crime job.
Briers himself was still under forty. He was restlessly springy on his feet, exuding force and energy, middle height, built like a professional footballer, light above the waist, muscular thighs. His face was neat-featured, not specially distinguished to a spectator unless and until his eyes were caught. They weren’t the eyes others expected in a detective, not sharp and concentrated. For that the spectator would have done better to take a look, under the general air of composure, at Humphrey Leigh. Briers’ eyes were brilliant enough, deep-coloured, a startling blue. They were the kind of eyes, set under fine brow-ridges, that innocent persons expected to see in artists or musicians, and seldom did.
It was an accident that he had been given this new assignment. After the first survey, the local police station wasted no time. It was clear enough that the murder of Lady Ashbrook was bound to make the news. They tried to summon the Chief Detective of the Division. He was out on another case. Within minutes, the station made an appeal to Scotland Yard. Briers was by chance unoccupied, the appropriate rank, with a reputation already made, tipped to go higher. By 9.20 a good deal was already in train. He had sent off two men with whom he had worked before to get an office organised at the police station. Photographers and laboratory technicians were due to arrive. Briers’ favourite pathologist should be at the house before long.
Briers went alone into Lady Ashbrook’s drawing-room. ‘Give me ten minutes,’ he had said softly to Shingler. He stayed still, a yard or so from the body. His senses were alive. He was getting impressions as Humphrey had done not two hours before. Some of Briers’ impressions were similar to Humphrey’s, but imbibed with more purpose and concentration. It wasn’t the first time he had been inside a ransacked room: there were things to look for. Some of his thoughts were different from Humphrey’s. A suspicion hadn’t crystallised, but was somewhere, as it were in solution, at the back of his mind.
He remained still, except for the direction of his glances, which travelled from the body round the room. He was long-sighted, and the detail of the spilled-out objects thirty feet away he could make out as though it were bold print.
He didn’t take a note. Note-taking on the spot didn’t suit him. It seemed to shut out impressions which were lurking on the edge of observation. Perhaps that was a minor vanity, for he had faith in his memory. Although he carried a recording machine in his pocket, he rarely used it. He preferred to give reminders to Shingler, who could feed them into his own machine. Then photographs were the best recorders of all.
Soon the first photographs were being taken. After some more solitary moments, he called to Shingler: ‘Ready now.’ Shingler came in with a photographic officer. For the first series of shots, Shingler didn’t need instructions. The camera clicked, Lady Ashbrook was photographed more often and from more angles than ever in the past, even when as a young society beauty she had been caught by journalists after a supper party with the Prince of Wales. The body finished with, Briers told Shingler what shots he wanted round the room. The visual scouring clicked on.
Shortly after nine-fifty, the constable on duty outside let another man into the room. He was carrying a bag, his face was flushed. His first act was to take off his jacket and throw it back to the constable. ‘Too hot for this lark,’ he said in a euphonious tenor. ‘Sorry I’m late, Frank.’
‘You always are.’
In fact, he had come with maximum celerity. This was Owen Morgan, Professor of Forensic Science, who with the curious Anglo-Saxon lack of inventiveness about nicknames was known as Taffy. He was heavily set, fair, round-faced. He and Briers had worked together often. They had respect for each other, and a kind of protective friendship. Each thought the other a master of his trade. They found it necessary to express this by outbursts of sparring, or what used to be called ribbing. This didn’t seem particularly appropriate for either of them.
‘I suppose everyone’s made a mess of things already,’ Morgan said, as a thoughtful preliminary. He wasn’t referring to the casualty or the litter on the floor.
‘Oh, yes, our prints and traces, they’re all over the place.’ Briers was responding in kind.
‘Actually, Professor,’ said Shingler, in a placatory manner and a south-of-the-river accent, ‘nothing’s been touched. It’s all yours.’
‘That’s something, I suppose,’ Morgan said, as though displeased. He hadn’t met Shingler before, and Briers introduced them. Morgan said: ‘Well, let’s have a look.’
He put on a pair of near-transparent gloves, trod with elephantine delicacy over particles on the floor, and began to touch the body. Out of proportion to his bulky chest and stomach, his hands were small, delicate, quick-moving, adept. He pulled up an eyelid, glanced at the scalp wounds, sniffed like one who had just opened a good bottle. He twitched an arm, which was limp, all stiffness departed. He turned back the collar of the dress and exposed a bruise on the upper arm. Carefully he passed his fingers round the neck. He grunted, and said: ‘Nothing much in it for me.’ He was turning back to Briers. ‘It’s going to be your problem, not mine. Unless you know already.’
Briers shook his head. ‘Tell us. What do you get paid for?’
‘My God,’ Morgan broke out, ‘why aren’t you coppers given a course in medicine? If you were capable of taking it in. Have you looked at her face, man? Couldn’t you see the spots? And on the eyelids? It’s too bloody clear. Nothing in it for me.’
‘Come off it. You mean she was strangled?’
‘What else? Very easy with a woman that age. Almost certainly from in front, coming from her right-hand side. There was a bit of a struggle. One or two bruises. Not much good struggling at that age. I shall want photographs of the bruises, of course. Before I cut her up.’
‘So shall we,’ said Briers. ‘What about her head being bashed in?’
‘Done after death.’
‘How long after?’
‘Difficult to say. Not a great deal of blood. But it might have been done very soon after.’
‘Might have been a frenzy. We’ve seen that before, haven’t we?’
‘We have.’
They were both used to actions after a killing. More often than not, they would have said, they were not nice for the public to know.
‘She passed water, of course,’ Morgan commented. The other hadn’t seen him make an examination, but his nose was acute. ‘No defecation, I think. Her bowels can’t have been loose.’
‘Any semen?’
‘That I can’t tell you till I get her to the hospital.’ They were used to such consequences, too. They dropped into the formal textbook words. They made it that much more abstract, more hygienic.
Briers asked more questions; Shingler, anxious not to be left out, putting in his own. Had the body been moved after the murder and the blows on the head? Morgan thought not. The blood on the floor and the urine staining didn’t look like it. ‘You mean,’ said Shingler, ‘he just killed her, stove her head in afterwards and left her.’
‘That seems to be the form.’
‘Time of the murder – any idea?’ Briers asked.
‘That’ll have to wait till the hospital as well. Temperature won’t tell us anything after this time. Maggots may. The larvae boys are beginning to be useful – you’ve seen what they can do. There must be plenty of infestation. The maggots have come along damn quickly in this weather. You can see them. My guess is that she’s been dead about thirty-six hours, plus or minus three or four. Saturday night, that would take you back to. But we might get a bit nearer than that. Look, have you finished here? It’s time we got down to some serious work.’
Briers required some more tests, on the floor and the walls around the body, and called in a laboratory man. Then the body was lifted on to a stretcher, and carried down to the pavement. A few people were watching, for news had filtered round the Square and farther off. A miniature convoy, three vehicles, moved off, ambulance in the lead, Briers’ police car, Morgan’s private one.
The convoy got through with police speed. Soon they were moving along a wide East End street, low buildings, humble paint-peeling shops, Jewish names, shields of David. Shingler, sitting beside Briers in the back seat, tried to talk. Briers did not respond. He had enough thoughts to occupy him.