| |
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, UK
29th of June, 11:45 a.m. (GMT+1)
––––––––
“I’ll be there,” DCI Jones affirmed before ending the call. He slipped his mobile back into his pocket and popped his head out of his office. “Let’s go, Tully.”
Tull, who was in the middle of a call, placed his hand over the mouthpiece before asking, “Where to?”
Jones put his jacket on and grabbed his keys. “Slough morgue. That was Dr. Brinston. He wants to talk to me.” The last time Jones had gotten such a call was regarding the Grollo case, which turned out to be the strangest he had ever worked. He didn’t typically take his DC along, but it was time for Tull to broaden his horizons.
Tull nodded and followed suit, abruptly making his apologies to the party on the other end of the line. On the drive, he filled in Jones on the new information they’d acquired. “Phone records show that Mr. Farah was out for the inaugural meeting of the ‘Chiltern Truth Seekers’ with three others—”
“Chiltern Truth Seekers?” Jones queried.
“Yes sir, a society that Mr. Farah had just founded a few months earlier—ghost hunters,” Tull responded, his voice as nonjudgmental as he could muster.
“Ah,” Jones matched his DC’s tone.
“Precisely, sir. The others of the group are: Mia Davenport, age twenty-one, biology student and resident at Oxford; Victoria Acton, age thirty-six, owner of Acton Action Graphics and resident of West Brompton; and Olivia Dean, age twenty-seven, programmer at Fujitsu and resident of Basingstoke. We haven’t been able to track down more than the basics for the last two; they haven’t returned our calls.”
Jones kept his eyes on the road but that didn’t stop the gears from turning in his head. He didn’t like the unreturned calls—in this day and age of instantaneous communication, it sent up a warning bell. “What do we know about the first one?”
Tull flipped to a new page of his notebook. “Mia Davenport. I was just wrapping up with her on the phone before we left. She said the group was there to meet and take a haunted tour, led by a Vivienne Clark, age seventy-one, an artist of some sort. Clark is a bit of a fixture in the area, running ghost tours for decades, and has been a resident of Greater Missenden her whole life.”
Jones said nothing while maneuvering the car around one of the many hills between Aylesbury and Slough. Tull paused his narrative to allow his DCI to focus on the road. Once around the bend, Tull continued, “According to Davenport, the four of them met at the Greysides Inn in the early evening and had a long dinner followed by several rounds of drinks before setting off on the tour, sometime around eleven at night. She guessed the tour lasted for about an hour, after which they went back to the Greysides and had a few more rounds. Acton and Dean left—via train—around one o’clock this morning, and Davenport followed about an hour later. Farah walked her to the station, and she caught the 2:15 back to Oxford.”
“So no one knows what Farah did between 2:15 and 4:30?” Jones checked his mental account.
“Correct, sir, but according to Davenport, Farah had rented a room at the Greysides,” Tull added.
“Good to know. First, let’s make sure he checked in, and then we’ll need to take a look at his room and go through his belongings. Any response on the request for video from the park-side cameras?”
“They’re saying I should get the files sometime between one and two this afternoon,” Tull answered as he added items to his to-do list.
“Good. We need to expand our camera request now that we have an idea of where Farah was besides being at the park. Get the images from the train station as well as the nearby cameras oriented to capture foot-traffic between the station and Greysides. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to track him as he goes.”
They rode in silence for a bit before Tull quietly spoke. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one, like the one I had with Grollo.”
Jones didn’t immediately respond but eventually admitted, “Me too, Tully. Me too.”
****
Slough Hospital was one of many public buildings erected in the 1960s, and it looked it. Constructed of gray concrete and gray steel—now rusting in several locations—it embodied the brutalist style so popular at the time. A post-modern monolith punctuated with gray windows, it loomed over the neighborhood like Quasimodo among a gaggle of well-dressed children.
DCI Jones and DC Tull had an appointment with Dr. Andrew Brinston, the medical examiner at Slough, where the body of the deceased Mr. Muhammad Farah had been sent earlier in the day. Brinston could be a prickly fellow, but he was sharp as a tack and had considerable pull in the area’s medical community. As such, Jones took great pains to remain on Brinston’s good side. Over the years of working together, the rough edges in their professional interactions had been ground down, and they had developed a good rapport despite Brinston’s quirks.
The neutral-yet-antiseptic smell endemic to all medical facilities hit Jones and Tull as they entered the hospital and roamed the maze of corridors that led to the morgue. After a short brisk minute walk, they showed their IDs to the single guard on duty and headed downstairs into the basement. Jones steadied himself before pushing the swinging double doors open—he was not a fan of this part of his job.
The hinges were still squeaking when Brinston called out, “Ah, DCI Jones, right on time as normal.” His voice had a quality of absentmindedness, a dilly-dallying timbre that rose and fell like the cadence of a man who’d forgotten where he put his keys, even when he was elbow-deep in gore. Brinston was a tall, thin man with close-cut brown hair that circled his head, and the bright full-spectrum lights reflected off his smooth pate. He was bent over the corpse of Farah, needle and thread in hand. “If you’ll wait just a moment, I’ll be right with you.”
Jones and Tull stepped toward the steel table, and Brinston glanced up at their approach. “I see you brought someone with you. DC Tull, is it?”
“Yes, sir,” Tull replied.
“Nice to see you again, DC Tull. It’s important that you familiarize yourself with all aspects of the work,” Brinston espoused his thoughts while his fingers executed the stitches on muscle memory. “I do wish that DCI Jones would bring you every time he visited.”
“As do I, sir,” Tull politely agreed with Brinston, diplomatically flashing a “sorry, boss” look Jones’s way.
“And there we go,” Brinston announced as he tied off the last knot. He replaced his materials on the nearby cart and stood to his full height. “So, Mr. Muhammad Farah; where to begin?”
“Cause of death, if you would,” Jones suggested. This was a well-orchestrated chess match that Jones and Brinston had played many times, and Jones opened with his typical gambit—come at it directly and test how oblique Brinston was feeling today.
With a straight face, Brinston answered, “Blood loss.” Dr. Brinston was parsimonious with direct answers when he had the luxury of walking “his investigators” through the process. How else would the detectives of the Criminal Investigation Department even learn? He had an unfailing confidence in the importance of education, and each corpse that landed on his table was a teaching moment.
Jones maintained his game face and looked thoughtfully at Mr. Farah. “Okay,” he acknowledged his opponent’s move. “The obvious source of blood loss would be the removed skin on the torso, but I seriously doubt it was consensual. The lack of ligature marks suggests he was otherwise subdued. So my next questions are ‘Any drugs in his system that could produce unconsciousness?’ and ‘Were the head wounds enough to produce such?’” Jones had become accustomed to this educational treatment and had grown to enjoy it. It was definitely better than reading about forensics, which was drier than a Sauvignon Blanc.
“Excellent questions, DCI,” Brinston praised him. “There was only alcohol in Mr. Farah’s system, and not enough to cause unconsciousness. For his weight, age and gender, my guess is no more than a few drinks were consumed prior to death. As to the head wounds, they appear superficial, although other information—”
“What information?” Tull interrupted abruptly. Jones shot him a look, and Tull immediately knew he had made a faux pas, but wasn’t entirely sure how to fix. He opted for adding “Dr. Brinston” to the end of his question.
“The vomit on his left hand, Tull,” Brinston stated flatly. Jones hoped he wasn’t the only one that picked up on the lack of honorific in Brinston’s response. Tull nodded obsequiously, and Brinston resumed his talk-through of the evidence. “It’s a bit of a wild card. Although his blood-alcohol level was far from extreme, I can’t rule out rapid intake of excessive alcohol that caused vomiting before it could be absorbed in the system, because his stomach was completely empty. However, it could also be related to the head injury. It’s not uncommon for someone to vomit after a blow to the head, even with a minor concussion that would have resolved on its own in time. In the hospital, we didn’t worry too much, as long as the vomiting was an isolated incident immediately after the head injury and there were no other concomitant neurologic problems. I found minor injury to the brain from the impact and also on the opposite side from where the brain whiplashed inside the skull, but I didn’t see any significant swelling or bleeding, although sometimes there can be delayed cerebral edema up to twenty-four hours after injury.”
Jones quizzically summed up, “So, no drugs, no ligature marks, yet someone flayed all the skin off his torso.”
“Precisely,” Brinston said. “You see now why I called you.”
Jones addressed his DC, “We really need to get his phone records, as well as all the street camera footage we can grab, Tully. There’s got to be something there that will make sense of this. See if you can speed that up, will you?”
Tull nodded and stepped out of the morgue to make some calls.
“Time of death?” Jones asked.
“I’d place it at three to four in the morning,” Brinston answered.
“That fits in our window,” Jones affirmed.
The two men looked down at the body in silence, just the latest in a string of times they’d stood together over the remains of what was once a life. “Not much else I can tell you, Detective Chief Inspector. The family’s been asking for a quick release of the body. Twenty-four hours, you know.” Brinston covered the body with a sheet, peeled off his gloves, and tossed them into a nearby wastebasket.
“Any reason to deny them?” Jones inquired.
The ME shook his head. “I’ve got everything I need. It’s straightforward on my end. It’s your end that’s tangled, I believe.”
“You are not wrong, Dr. Brinston,” Jones said heavily. “You are not wrong.”