THESE SMALL TOWN POLICE SURGEONS ARE MOSTLY A WASTE OF TIME
BALDERSTONE ESCORTED THE PATHOLOGIST AND HIS ASSISTANT along the pathway leading to Bolehill Copse. By now a crowd had gathered on the roadway; kept away from entering the path by a squad of five constables. Already Arnie Muckraker had been twice escorted from the vicinity of the murder site as he and his cameraman sought ways of bypassing the cordon of police but Harding, forewarned as to the deviousness of Arnie when trying to get at a story had most of the access points to the murder site covered but even so he remained vigilant.
Another reporter, from the evening ‘Sheffield Star,’ recognized Gordon-Blood and pointed him out to his cameraman and there was a flash as the flashbulb went off followed by a tinkle of glass as the cameraman discarded the used bulb, cursing ‘shit’ as he burnt his fingers on the hot glass. He then inserted another bulb to take the shot as Gordon-Blood preened himself for the photograph before Balderstone urged him on. ‘This way sir.’
Behind them Balderstone could hear distant shouts as Arnie Muckraker tried to follow but was barred by the police. ‘It’s the public interest to know,’ he was shouting but to no avail.
‘Bloody parasite!’ thought Balderstone.
The late afternoon was still very hot; the day’s fierce summer sun had baked all the long day into the hard-dry soil of the beaten path and into the flanking dry stone walls and the convected heat now rose from the ground and walls in shimmering waves. Clouds of midges hovered in wait, the pathway was steepening and rough underfoot and Marjorie Thundercliffe soon regretted the three-inch heels on her shoes and the woollen jacket that she was wearing, and she could feel the sweat soaking her blouse under her armpits – most unladylike. Although she had left her overnight bag in the boot of the police car, she still carried her handbag, the camera case particularly heavy as it banged against her thighs as she struggled up the pathway.
She paused to catch her breath and looked about her, at the green fields demarcated with dry stone walls, the white fluff balls of sheep and the stone-built farmhouses on the upper slopes. The farmhouses, built from local stone with stone or slate roofs, sometimes ivy cloaked, looked postcard pretty in the sunlight, but she knew from her own childhood in just such a farm above the Edale Valley that this was an illusion.
The farmhouse she grew up in was never warm, even in the height of summer, and in winter, the stone-flagged floors and stone walls were damp and chill, full of draughts and ice-caked windows. Winters were hard on the upper slopes, often cut off for days as the snows banked up high against the walls, blocking off access lanes and paths. No, she thought, that is definitely not for me again.
Breathing deeply, she set off again, cursing under breath at the ungainly loads she carried. Balderstone noticed her difficulties and took the camera case from her, carrying it on his shoulder as she gasped out her thanks.
Gordon-Blood marched on ahead, seemingly impervious to the heat and stinging sweat-devouring insects. The pathologist hated the countryside, with its unsanitary stenches of animal excreta, the insects, and the desperate lack of sophistication among farming people, bucolic and dull, just like the bovine creatures they tended. He hurried on, eager to get the initial in situ examination of the body over and done with so that he could get back to the comparative civilization of the mortuary, even though the mortuary would be at West Garside Hospital rather than his own domain, his kingdom, the mortuary at Sheffield City General Hospital.
A PC stationed to show them the murder site nodded to Balderstone as they approached. He pointed to the right to where the dry-stone wall had partially collapsed; the entry into the copse. ‘It’s down over here, down the right, that path there,’ he said, indicating with a sweep of his arm. ‘Down towards the bottom.’
They climbed over the section of broken wall and into the copse, to be immediately shrouded in shadow, the sudden drop in temperature chilling the sweat on their bodies. They then carried on down the right-hand footpath as pointed out by the PC, down the slope
Towards the murder site.
The area had now been roped off, a cordon sanitaire some fifty feet in diameter, encompassing the small copse where Emily Black’s broken body still lay and the surrounding area. On his return to the site, Marcus Harding had noticed a shoe print in a patch of drying mud to the side of the path, almost at the edge of the roped-off crime scene. The area around the print had been roped off as well to avoid possible damage to the print. A forensic technician would later take a plaster cast of the embedded print.
Harding now moved up to greet the pathologist. ‘Afternoon, sir, the body is through here,’ lifting the rope to allow Gordon-Blood and Marjorie Thundercliffe to enter. Emily lay as she had been left by the killer; she had not been touched except by the police surgeon to certify death. She had not even been covered up, and the summer flies had found the dried blood and swarmed about her shattered skull. Irritably, Gordon-Blood waved them aside, but they swarmed back regardless. ‘The police surgeon, Dr Bagster Donald, has already confirmed the death,’ Harding stated, somewhat unnecessarily, but procedure had to be followed.
‘Well, he got that right at least, I suppose, but I can’t say I will have much faith in any other of his findings; these small-town police surgeons are mostly a waste of time,’ Gordon-Blood stated loudly, sniffing in contempt, ‘testing drunk drivers for inebriation is about the extent of their usefulness or ability.’
Balderstone bristled. The police surgeon was popular at the station, and the pathologist’s glib, insulting dismissal of his abilities irritated PC Keith Balderstone intensely, but he said nothing – there was nothing he could say without causing trouble. And they had a job to do.
He handed the camera case back to the assistant, who gave a big smile as she squatted down to open the camera bag. From the bag, she took out a Rolleiflex camera and attached to it an extension bar to hold a flash gun, checked the film count, took light readings with a light meter, and set the aperture settings on the camera, ran a tape measure back from the body, and set the focus; now ready to photograph the body and the murder site.
Although there was an official police photographer on hand, Gordon-Blood preferred that his assistant took the photographs he needed, the corpse and the scene of the crime and then in the mortuary. Marjorie had taken some training in photography at Sheffield College and processed all her films in a dark room attached to the mortuary. It was not so much that she was a better photographer than the official ones; it was simply another way for Gordon-Blood to express his contempt at parochial police forces. ‘I’m so important I have to have my own photographers on hand’ seemed to be his attitude.
Yarrow had been waiting at the murder scene and was somewhat irritated to find that Gordon-Blood was the designated pathologist. The two men had met disagreeably on previous occasions when Gordon-Blood’s hectoring and lecturing postures intensely annoyed Yarrow, believing that it did not assist the police but was meant to display the pathologist’s inflated opinion of himself.
However, on this occasion, the two merely exchanged curt greetings before jointly examining the scene. They agreed on an access route to the body which would minimise disturbance and reduce the risk of contaminating the site or obliterating forensic evidence such as footprints or trace elements such as the possibility of blood from the murderer, if for instance, little Emily had managed to scratch or bite him, unlikely from such a tiny little girl but it still had to be considered.
They slowly walked around the site, careful not to disturb any blood stains. From a distance, they studied the pathetic little body, but in contrast to Yarrow, Gordon-Blood felt no emotional pull on him just because the body was that of a murdered three-year-old girl.
Finally, Yarrow backed away to go and direct the investigation into the killing whilst Gordon-Blood squatted beside Emily’s body for his initial examination. She had now been dead for more than twelve hours and already her once bright blue eyes had started to shrink, sinking back into her skull and rigor mortis was fully set, all her muscles rigid.
However, he would not take this fact as any indicator as to the time of death. Her body temperature would have fallen by 1.5 degrees F every hour since her death, her liver maintaining body heat longer than any other organ and this would be the determinant factor that Gordon-Blood would use to establish, approximately, how long she had been dead, although he did take her rectal temperatures as an initial indicator, to be confirmed later in the mortuary.
He directed Marjorie Thundercliffe as to the photographs he required; close-up shots of her broken head and blood-sleaked vulva, full body shots and establishing shots of the scene from all corners of the site, two full rolls of 36 exposures, the burst of her flash bulbs briefly illuminating the scene and casting sharp shadows to the surrounding bushes and trees.
He took scrapings of blood and hair where her head had been smashed with a yet unfound weapon, further samples from the dried-up pool of blood beneath her head, vaginal, rectal, and oral swabs. He collected samples of dirt from close by the body to compare with any dirt which might be found on the clothing of any suspects and then, after a final thorough close examination of the scene, announced he was finished and finally allowed the official photographer to take his own shots for the police record, his lip curling in disdain at what he perceived to be an incompetent performance, although in truth there would be little, if no, discernible difference between the two sets of photographs in respect of quality or thoroughness of capture.
‘OK,’ Gordon-Blood said at last. ‘You can take her away now.’ This to the undertaker’s men waiting silently at the entrance to the murder copse, dressed in black, hands clasped reverently in front, as quiet as monks with a vow of silence, as solemn as judges, as watchful as vultures.