Dani was shocked when the ringing phone woke her and she realised it was gone nine a.m. As expected she’d slept horrendously at the hospital, cramped into the too-hard armchair by Jason’s side, and even though he was no longer constantly monitored through the night, the nature of the place meant there was nevertheless a constant stream of noise coming from beyond Jason’s closed door. From four till just after seven a.m., Dani had been frustratingly wide awake, and had very nearly bitten the bullet and headed off to HQ early, but apparently tiredness had eventually caught up with her.
Jason wasn’t even in the room now. He’d somehow got up and out without her even knowing. What the hell?
She answered the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘DI Stephens, it’s Saad Tariq.’
‘Hey. You have something for me?’
‘I think so.’ He briefly explained the results of tox on Clara Dunne, also the prelims on the various fibres and other samples taken from her home. ‘Perhaps it’s best if you come down to the lab so I can properly explain it all.’
Dani thought about that one for a moment. ‘Have you got the post-mortem results too?’
‘I was told they’d be ready this morning. Weren’t you planning on going to see Ledford for those?’
‘Not if I can avoid it,’ Dani said. She never welcomed a trip to the morgue.
‘I’ve got all morning free,’ Tariq said, ‘if you’ve time to stop by.’
‘No, I’ve got a better idea,’ Dani said.
Easton beat Dani to it. He’d already been at HQ when she’d called him, and had headed straight over to Oldbury. She’d needed to take a shower at the hospital and get herself into shape first. She found him standing outside Clara Dunne’s home, playing with his phone. Behind him blue and white police tape remained stretched across the front door of the house.
‘Let me guess,’ Dani said. ‘More vampire research.’
He looked at her quizzically, as though it had never crossed his mind. And anyway, wasn’t she the one who’d spent all that time yesterday either searching or thinking about Strigoi?
‘You look rough,’ he said.
Dani snorted. ‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘Seriously. You have a bad night or something?’
‘I was at the hospital.’
Easton looked concerned now. ‘Is Jason OK?’
‘Oh, he’s fine. Just one of those things.’
Easton didn’t look convinced but he didn’t push further. Likewise, Dani didn’t bother to probe into the latest about him and his sister. There was only so much sharing of private grievances she could take.
Tariq soon arrived and Easton did the honours of pulling away the tape and unlocking the front door. With no heating on for the last forty-eight hours, the inside of the house was nearly as cold as outside, and there was a strangely dank and murky smell. Even though Clara Dunne’s body had been removed way before any rot had set in, Dani could not just smell, but also sense death in this place now.
A house was just four walls and a roof, but how could any home ever move on from such a thing? The very reason she would have found it impossible to stay in hers and Jason’s Harborne home.
‘Give us the short version first,’ Dani said to Tariq, as the FSI shut the front door behind him. In the hall they each put plastic shoe covers on.
‘Certainly,’ Tariq said. ‘Before I start, I have these for you, hot off the press.’
Tariq took two thin wads of paper from his satchel and handed one each to Dani and Easton.
Dani took the post-mortem report and spent a few seconds quickly flicking through for the vital finds.
‘Drowning?’ she said, a little surprised.
Tariq held up his hands. ‘You know you’ll have to go through the details with Ledford, I’m no pathologist.’
‘So it wasn’t the drugs or alcohol that killed her,’ Easton said, a frown on his face as he rifled through the papers.
‘Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as conclusive as that,’ Dani said. ‘Looking at these tox levels, she had easily enough drugs in her system to kill her, plus the alcohol. Was that a deliberate attempt to kill herself? Or was she simply unconscious and slipped under the water?’
Both Tariq and Easton took pause now as they looked over at Dani, as though they were unsure where she’d taken that information from. The sad fact was, as someone who’d relied on alcohol and anti-depressants to get by for years, she knew all too well the potential problems of overdosing on either, or both. She knew the limits, had always stayed within them herself, but what Clara Dunne had in her system was way beyond.
‘In fact, you wouldn’t even need to be unconscious,’ Dani added. ‘Just drunk enough to not wake up. You’d be surprised how common it is.’
Neither Easton nor Tariq said anything to that.
‘And these bruises,’ Dani said, working through the report in her head as she read it. ‘On her lower arms, upper arms, around her shoulders.’
‘There were no bruises on her body when we were here,’ Tariq said. ‘It would have been obvious to the eye, never mind in the pictures.’
‘Meaning what?’ Easton said.
‘Meaning they were either inflicted very close to death, or when the body was moved,’ Dani said.
Easton now looked seriously baffled.
‘You know your stuff, DI Stephens,’ Tariq said.
Unfortunately so.
‘Bruising can still occur on a dead body,’ Dani explained to Easton. ‘Bruising is little more than blood pooling beneath the skin, so even when blood isn’t flowing, as long as there’s sufficient force applied to the flesh of a fresh corpse, then you can get bruises appearing.’
‘Most frequently when we move bodies from a scene,’ Tariq said.
‘But if you’re saying these bruises weren’t there when you were first called in, but are now, it’s also possible the trauma was caused just before death, isn’t it?’ Easton asked.
‘That’s one for Ledford, I’m afraid,’ Tariq said.
‘The logic follows,’ Easton said. ‘And what about this swelling to the back of the head?’
Tariq was looking more and more uncomfortable now, as though he was being put on the spot.
‘Again, it could have been caused when we moved the body. It’s not easy taking a sixty-kilo corpse out of a slippery bath.’
‘Ledford’s saying if the impact that caused that swelling occurred while she was still alive, it likely wasn’t sufficient to incapacitate her,’ Dani said.
More of a statement than a question, as she was reading the finding direct from Ledford’s own words.
‘OK,’ Dani said, folding the report away. ‘Walk us through your scene analysis.’
‘Of course,’ Tariq said, looking a little relieved.
He produced another report each for Dani and Easton, then got to work explaining.
‘First up, I should say we did standard tests with UV light all around the house for bodily fluids, blood, etc. Nothing stood out, but then that was expected as there was nothing about the scene to suggest Clara had been attacked or bled elsewhere within the house.’
Dani made a mental note of that. She’d possibly come back to it later as she wasn’t sure it was the most straightforward of conclusions.
‘We tested all obvious surfaces for prints,’ Tariq continued. ‘Around the bathroom, doors and frames, kitchen surfaces, banisters, the like. We found what you’d expect. Plenty of areas with Clara’s prints, and one or two areas where we have other unidentified prints, but mostly only partials.’
‘Anything that looked unusually print-free?’ Dani asked.
‘Not really. Kitchen was particularly clean, but that’s not unusual as such. A good cloth and a bit of Fairy will take prints off a lot of surfaces.’
‘And the partials?’
‘There were seven different fragments in total. We’ve matched five of those, to various degrees of accuracy, to Bianca Neita’s prints.’
‘And where were they?’ Easton said, eyes down, flipping a page as he spoke.
‘Front door, on the outside handle. Inside edge of the front door too. Bathroom doorframe. Side of the bath.’
‘Which is all consistent with her statement about coming in and finding the body,’ Easton said, looking to Dani for confirmation.
‘Consistent enough. For now,’ Dani said. ‘What about the final two partials?’
‘This is where it gets a bit more… unclear,’ Tariq said. ‘One was in the bathroom, on the edge of the cabinet door, and the other was on the top of the baluster at the bottom of the stairs.’
They were standing right by it, and Dani stared over to the dark wood now, as though trying to seek a glimpse back in time.
A thought was building in the back of her mind, but she held on to it for now.
‘Let’s take a look as we talk,’ Dani said.
They moved through to the lounge first, then the kitchen, Tariq regurgitating the procedures his team had undertaken in each room, and the generally bland results that had been returned.
Soon they were in the frighteningly cold bathroom, and Dani felt a wave of sorrow pass over her as she stared at the bleak-looking bath, and the brown tide mark a couple of inches from the top.
‘Did you test the water?’ Dani asked.
‘We took a sample. Not yet tested, though, I don’t think.’
‘Could you?’
‘Certainly.’
Dani looked around the room, from the bath, to the tiled floor where the glass of neat vodka had been found, to the cabinet.
‘Nothing on the floors? No footprints, no shoe-prints?’
‘The only surfaces you’d get anything useful from were the laminate in the hall and kitchen, and the tiles in here,’ Tariq said. ‘We found some faint outlines which match to the shoes worn by Bianca Neita, and a few partial foot imprints. We can match some of those to Clara, but some are too smudged to reach a conclusion on.’
‘Smudged?’ Easton asked. ‘As in someone tried to remove them?’
‘Unlikely, as it’s normally quite obvious when an area has been deliberately cleaned in that manner. I’d say most likely the smudged prints are from Clara walking around in socks. You can still get residue transfer – oils and skin cells – through the material.’
Easton sighed. ‘So basically, this all adds up to pretty much nothing. There’s nothing I’m seeing here to suggest someone else was in the house. Except for Bianca Neita, that is.’
Was the answer that simple? No, Dani didn’t believe so.
‘I don’t think Neita killed her friend,’ Dani said.
‘I wasn’t suggesting she did,’ Easton said.
‘I know. I’m just thinking out loud. Bianca Neita’s prints are easily explainable. But thinking back to what she said, if we’re looking for an explanation of the mysterious figure she claimed to see…’
Dani’s brain hit a wall as the thoughts continued to take shape. The bathroom was horribly silent for a few seconds. Dani turned and strode out, heading back for the hall.
‘Bianca opens the door. Sees a figure exiting out the back.’ Dani turned when she reached the front door, looking back along the way. ‘Say an intruder came in, took their shoes off so as to not leave shoe-prints. Gloves on their hands to stop transfer.’
‘OK?’ Easton said. ‘But that doesn’t explain the partials then?’
‘Actually, it might,’ Dani said. ‘Shiny leather, as an example, is pretty good at collecting residue. When you put two gloves on you still have to pick the things up bare-handed.’
‘Secondary transfer,’ Tariq said.
‘Exactly.’
‘I guess that’s possible,’ Easton said.
‘So going back to shoes,’ Dani said, ‘when Bianca storms in, the intruder runs. If they’d taken their shoes off to prevent prints, they wouldn’t have had time to put their shoes back on before they fled. Nor did we find any obvious footwear left behind, so they didn’t scarper in their socks.’
‘But they could have had shoe covers on,’ Easton said.
‘Exactly. But they wouldn’t have put those on outside. The ground was damp that day, from frost melt. Wet shoe covers would have left stains on the laminate, which we don’t have. So the intruder would have put covers on their feet only when they came inside.’
Dani stared down to the welcome mat by the front door.
‘One of my team looked over the mat,’ Tariq said. ‘We found hair fibres and plenty of dust but nothing much else. We haven’t got a clear picture yet on any of the DNA results from the various hair samples, I’m afraid.’
Dani took in the words as she crouched down and took hold of the edge of the mat. She lifted it up slightly to peer underneath. Just as she’d expected.
‘It’s double-sided,’ she said as she flipped the whole thing over. Debris and grit and whatever else was stuck in the thick and coarse pile sifted onto the floor.
‘You checked both sides?’ Dani asked as her eyes darted across the brown surface.
‘I… I’d have to check.’
‘No need,’ Dani said. She could already see the answer. ‘You got any tweezers?’
Tariq did. And they were fine enough to allow Dani to delicately pick off the tiny speck of blue plastic caught in one of the prongs of the mat.
‘Bloody hell,’ Easton said when Dani held the find up.
‘Intruder, gloves already on, breaks in silently,’ Dani says. ‘Puts on blue plastic shoe covers while on the mat. Kind of like we did, except ours are much better quality. The intruder’s were cheap, the type you get at your local swimming pool. Easily snagged. He, or she, turns the mat over for good measure. Then the attack takes place.’
‘There’s really very little evidence of an attack though,’ Easton said. ‘Other than the bruising which may or may not have occurred after death.’
It was true, but Dani wasn’t finished yet. ‘Intruder subdues Clara, one way or another. Puts her in the bath. Drugs her. Drowns her. Wait… no, that doesn’t work.’
‘Really?’ Easton said. ‘You almost had me then.’
‘Her phone, laptop, everything was still here, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ Tariq said. ‘We bagged it all. The computer forensics team are just waiting on the word before they start processing and searching.’
‘That’s it,’ Dani said.
‘It is?’ Easton said.
‘That could explain the bruises. The intruder was looking for something. Clara was held down. Threatened. Not so forcibly as to cause serious injury, but enough to bruise. Maybe she had a knife to her throat. A gun even. She gave the attacker what they wanted.’
‘Which was what?’
‘I don’t know.’ She thought back to the cupboard upstairs. The pictures of Liam Dunne and Nicolae Popescu. ‘But they killed her anyway. Then they were disturbed. They had to leave before they were finished. That’s why nothing was cleaned down even. The partial prints were a mistake. Which means…’
Dani couldn’t quite finish the sentence.
‘Which means what?’ Easton said.
‘Which means as far as I’m concerned, this is now officially a murder investigation. Not only was Clara Dunne killed in her own home, but I believe the reason she was killed was right here, in this house, all along. Now we need to find it.’