The pathologist had come and gone, required only to certify death.
The dribbling tap had been turned off, but the water still lapped around her feet, transferring any movement Rhona made into tiny waves of energy that crossed the floor tiles to break against the pile of the hall carpet.
The bathroom was small. Not much bigger than a coffin.
Rhona had heard about Leila’s friend, who had been with her the night she’d died, but hadn’t viewed an image of her. The hair floating in tendrils in the water reminded Rhona of a painting of Ophelia. Contrary to popular opinion, drowning wasn’t an easy death, unless the victim was comatose to begin with.
The notion that you could enter water, deny your lungs air and not experience pain and terror, was a cruel fallacy. Which was why waterboarding as a means of torture was so widely used and successful.
She had already taken her ‘before’ photographs, as had the Return To Scene team. Now, they would require taking again, without the water. As the last liquid was pumped out of the bath into a container to be transported to the lab, Rhona took close-ups of the exposed face and upper body, then stepped outside and gave the Return To Scene personnel access. Their 360-degree recordings of before and after would be invaluable.
McNab had departed, due, Rhona surmised, to her presence or a desire for Bill not to engage with them together. A wise move on McNab’s part. Rhona was well aware that the tension between them was tangible, despite their mutual agreement to ‘let things lie’. Secrets had a habit of revealing themselves, eventually.
And Bill, she knew, was a natural detective.
Still, she reminded herself, I made the right decision.
Waiting for R2S to complete their recording, Rhona checked out the other rooms in the flat. A forensic team was already at work, eyes above the masks acknowledging Rhona’s presence. The flat was tidy and pretty in an understated way. No room of hanging dolls, no evidence of anything but normality, except in the bedroom.
A circular mat had been laid out at the foot of the bed. Around it, at four locations, stood candles. Rhona’s first thought was that Shannon had been meditating recently, soft music and candlelight being a common method of relaxation. Then again, the circular mat might have something to do with the Witchcraft angle.
With that in mind, she gave Magnus a call.
‘Describe the bedroom scene to me,’ he said.
Rhona did so, including the candles.
‘Are they set at the points of the compass?’
Rhona tried to work out where north was via her knowledge of Glasgow landmarks.
‘Probably,’ she said. ‘Any chance you could come and take a look?’
‘I have a lecture shortly, so it will have to be after that,’ Magnus said.
‘Not a problem, I’m likely to be here for some time.’
Rhona rang off and headed back to the bathroom.
Roy Hunter and his colleagues at R2S had worked alongside Rhona on many jobs, including the most recent Stonewarrior case. Vastly experienced, particularly in some of the more forensically challenging crime scenes, Rhona always valued Roy’s opinion.
‘What do you think?’
‘Suicide drownings usually involve slit wrists and a warm bath. So I don’t buy the chair and submersion,’ Roy said. ‘Who would hold their own head under water long enough to drown? But, then again, she may have been under the influence of drugs or drink at the time.’
Roy’s thoughts mirrored her own. If Shannon had taken her own life, then it was a difficult way to do it. McNab had reported her as very distressed and frightened by her friend’s death, so there was no doubt she was in a vulnerable state. The scene in the bedroom only served to emphasize this.
Perhaps Shannon had run a bath to help her relax? The chair she sat on, painted white and made of light wood, looked as though it belonged in the bathroom. Shannon’s clothes were in a pile close by on the floor. The bath water, Rhona suspected, had had lavender oil added to it, a bottle of which stood nearby.
All of which suggested Shannon was trying to calm herself.
There had been no evidence of alcohol being consumed and no evidence of drugs on the premises. They would have to wait for toxicology tests to discover if Shannon had ingested any drugs prior to her death, legal or otherwise.
Had Shannon been intent on killing herself, the easiest way, as Roy suggested, was to ease the passing with drink and drugs and simply allow herself to sink under the water. In this case Shannon was sitting on the chair, which had been turned to face the bath and her head submerged. Either by accident or by force. Shannon wasn’t tied to the chair, although she might have been at the time. Rhona checked the wrists first.
The hands were small and slim, the fingers free of jewellery. On initial inspection, there was no obvious bruising on the narrow wrists. Rhona examined the chair for evidence of anything having been tied to the legs or main body and found nothing. Using the magnifying glass, she took a closer look.
The fingernails were bleached white from the water, but there was something caught beneath them. Rhona extracted a fibre and bagged it, then swept below the nails on both hands.
She then examined the neck, finding no evidence of bruising.
The scalp was more of a problem, covered as it was by thick wet hair.
Rhona visualized a hand forcing Shannon’s head underwater and where the fingers of that hand might have gripped, and was rewarded by a surface cut on the crown which could have been inflicted by a fingernail.
After sampling the head and all its orifices, Rhona called for some help to tip the chair back. Slim and undoubtedly light in life, Shannon had become heavy and waterlogged in death.
With Roy’s help, Rhona set the chair upright and Shannon with it. From this vantage point, it was clear that her knees had been pressing against the side of the bath, perhaps as her head had been held under the water.
Having freed her from her watery grave, Rhona stepped outside to allow Roy to record the scene again. Once that was done, she set about cataloguing the body forensically, every square inch covered, every nook and cranny sampled. If Shannon Jones had been manhandled, evidence of her attacker was on her. It was up to Rhona to find that evidence.
Magnus arrived a couple of hours after she’d called him. He appeared suddenly in the bathroom doorway, immediately recognizable despite the forensic suit, mainly because of his height. His eyes above the mask registered his dismay.
Rhona took a moment to describe the original scene, before they’d emptied the bath and uprighted Shannon.
‘Her head and shoulders were underwater while still on the chair?’ Magnus said.
‘The chair was tipped forward as you can see by the pressure marks on her knees, although it’s not certain whether the bruising occurred before or after death.’
‘So she drowned?’ Magnus said.
‘That’s what it looks like, although we’ll have to wait for the post-mortem to be certain.’
‘Forced?’
‘Perhaps,’ Rhona conceded. ‘Again, it’s too early to say.’
Magnus nodded. ‘Can you show me the circle?’
Rhona led him through to the bedroom.
Magnus studied the mat, bending down to sniff at the candles before asking Rhona whether a cingulum or any other Wiccan artefacts had been found in the flat.
‘Only the mat and candles so far,’ she told him.
‘The mat is a type used to create a magic circle. The candles are normally placed at the four points of the compass. If your victim was frightened for some reason, it would be natural for her to make a circle and stay inside it until she felt better.’ He paused. ‘I picked up the scent of lavender in the bathroom. I assume she’d added it to the bath water?’ Magnus asked.
‘I think so.’
He nodded. ‘There was another scent in the bathroom, one I’m not so sure of. It’s not present in here. Can we go back?’
Magnus stopped outside the third room. ‘What’s in there?’
‘The sitting room and kitchen.’
Rhona followed Magnus in. The room was small, with the kitchen tucked into a corner. There was a single window overlooking a back court, an L-shaped settee, a coffee table, a small gas fire and a flat-screen TV. There was also a forensic officer dusting for prints. Nothing looked unusual or out of place.
Magnus exited, without speaking, and went back to the bathroom, where he sniffed the soap at the sink, then shook his head.
‘Maybe it’s the smell of the chemicals I’m using,’ Rhona suggested.
Magnus shook his head again. ‘No. I can identify them, having met them all before at various times.’ He stood for a moment, eyes closed, deep in concentration, breathing in slowly through his nose.
‘It could be a man’s cologne, it smells astringent. Citrus, spicy.’ He shrugged his shoulders in defeat, then hunkered down to look more closely at the victim.
‘Was she tied to the chair?’
‘Not when she was found.’
‘But maybe?’
‘There were fibres under her nails, but no obvious pressure marks on her wrists.’
‘Finding her like that reminds me of a ducking stool,’ Magnus said.
‘What?’
‘In medieval times Witches were primarily disposed of in three ways, as I said before. They were either burned at the stake, hanged or they were drowned by tying to a ducking stool.’