‘DS Cross,’ he said, warrant card held up high for Clare to see.
‘I left a message for you to call me. You didn’t have to come all the way over,’ she said. He didn’t reply, but she knew why he was actually there. To see the body for himself. To double check her work. She sighed, turned to one of the assistants and said, ‘Could you bring in Miss Wilson?’
Cross thought this encapsulated her attitude to the dead. She always accorded them a formal courtesy. To her they weren’t bodies, cadavers, stiffs, corpses. They were still people, albeit dead, who should be given the same respect they would’ve been given if alive.
‘So what can you tell me about Miss Wilson?’ he asked.
‘Cause of death, overdose. Only one puncture wound, in the crook of her arm where the hypodermic had been left, and a bruise on her forehead. It’s impossible to tell whether it was caused at the time of death or was something that was incurred prior because of the length of time since her death,’ she said.
‘So possibly irrelevant?’
‘Nothing is irrelevant at this stage, Sergeant,’ she reminded him.
‘This is very true,’ he replied.
It was three weeks since Cross had asked Clare to look at Flick. This interval was because she had decided to run the toxicology tests again.
‘There is something odd here, though. Flick died from an overdose of diamorphine,’ she continued.
‘Why is that odd?’ Cross asked.
‘Because in this case, taking into account the presentation of the death scene and the victim’s past history of drug use, I’d expected it to be heroin. Heroin is a synthetic form of diamorphine. People assume they’re the same, but they’re not. Heroin breaks down in the body in a different way to diamorphine. They share the same breakdown product, a substance called 6-MAM. But street heroin is not a clean drug. There would also normally be adulterants present – codeine, noscapine and papaverine. None of them are there.’
‘So what are your conclusions?’ he asked.
‘Flick died from an overdose of medical morphine, which raises a lot of questions. Questions that should have been looked into previously. If she had wanted a fix, which I doubt, or wanted to end it all, you would expect it to be by virtue of heroin, street heroin. Where would she have got medical morphine from?’
‘What are you saying, exactly?’
‘You asked me to look for the out of place, the not normal, the out of the ordinary, and this is it. In my opinion it lends credence to her mother’s claim that she was murdered. I’ll admit it asks more questions than it answers. But I suppose that’s your job,’ she said.
Cross was thinking this through. It was exactly this kind of kink in the facts of a case that others often overlooked – as indeed in this situation – or hadn’t seen, that led him to believe a crime had been committed.
‘One other thing they also failed to do was a hair test. If she had taken heroin in recent months there would have been traces left in her hair. A residue. This woman had been clean for at least eighteen months,’ she concluded.
At this point a body covered by a sheet was wheeled into the room by the assistant. Cross turned and started to leave.
‘Don’t you want to look at the body?’ she asked.
‘No need. You’ve found the un-obvious, as I was sure you would, given your application to your work.’ So saying, he left.
‘Bye!’ she said into the air. The mortuary assistant turned to her.
‘Did he just pay you a compliment?’ he asked.
‘If he did, he definitely wasn’t aware of it,’ she replied.