The embalmer, p.4
The Embalmer, page 4
part #3 of Mullins & Sullivan Series
‘When did that ever stop anyone?’ said Rory. ‘You need to sit down.’
Francis ignored him. ‘I want to see her.’
‘Let me give you the facts first.’
Rory led him into one of the interview rooms and closed the door.
‘When did it happen?’ said Francis. ‘Who brought her in?’
‘Early yesterday evening.’
‘She was with me.’
‘For God’s sake, boss. She was found by a neighbour, cradling Thierry’s body, with a bloody knife in her hand.’
‘It wasn’t her.’
‘She said, and I quote, “What have I done? What have I done?” and she had his blood all over her clothes. You can’t give her an alibi. She was there, at the scene of the crime.’
Francis’s head spun and he clapped his hands to his face.
‘Thierry’s dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was with her, Rory. I dropped her off at her house, no, at the corner of the street, at just after seven.’
‘Angie took the call at seven thirty, brought her in under suspicion.’
Francis shook his head in disbelief. ‘She took that decision fast.’
Rory drew himself up to his full height, though he was still several inches shorter than his boss.
‘She made the right decision in the circumstances,’ he said firmly.
‘That’ll be for the CPS to determine. If it comes to that.’ He glared at his subordinate. ‘Which it won’t.’
Rory lowered his brow. ‘Mullins was found with the body and holding the murder weapon. Her hands and clothes were covered in his blood. There was no one else at the scene.’
‘What does she say about it?’
‘She hasn’t been interviewed yet.’
‘No one’s seen her yet? For fuck’s sake, Rory. I’ll go talk to her.’
He left the interview room and went along the corridor to the row of rooms where they held individuals after arrest. Rory followed him.
‘Which room?’
The heavy doors had small reinforced glass panels. Francis peered through each one as he went past. Most of them were empty, but there were a couple of young men lying on the flat, hard beds that were the only furnishings. Finally, he came to the cell in which Marni languished.
He stared in through the glass. She was lying face down on the floor, her head rested on her folded arms, not moving. He could see dried blood on her hands. Her hair was a tangled mess, her clothes were rumpled, and she seemed to be missing a shoe.
‘Marni!’ he gasped, trying the door handle. Of course, the room was locked. ‘Get this door open, sergeant.’
He banged on the door to attract her attention, but she didn’t move. ‘Marni!’
‘I don’t think so, boss,’ said Rory, placing a hand on Francis’s arm. ‘If you were the last person to see her before it happened, you’re an important witness in the case. There’s no way you can talk to her.’
‘She needs to see a doctor,’ said Francis.
‘She’s been seen by the duty doctor,’ said Rory. ‘She came in in a state of shock. She’s been sedated, which is why no one’s interviewed her yet.’
‘What about her meds? You know she’s diabetic?’
Rory shook his head. ‘No.’
As Francis turned to face him, the custody sergeant on duty hurried towards them.
‘Open this door,’ said Francis. ‘Help her onto the bed, and get her some water.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Francis addressed Rory. ‘Get the doctor back here. Tell him she’s Type 1 diabetic – she uses insulin. He’ll need to check her blood.’
Rory glanced at the custody sergeant, who was fiddling with his keys in the lock. ‘Just get the doctor, sergeant,’ he said. Then he pushed Francis back hard against the wall.
‘You can’t be on this case, boss. You can’t speak to her. Got that?’
‘Damn you,’ said Francis, pushing Rory out of his way. But he knew Rory was right, and he turned up the corridor towards the exit of the custody suite.
‘Stay away from her or I’ll take it to the chief.’
Rory Mackay. He might be right about the propriety of Francis getting involved, but it also proved one thing – he was still Bradshaw’s boy.
‘I’ll keep you posted,’ the sergeant called after him.
‘Too right you will.’
What the hell had happened after he’d dropped Marni off?
8
Thursday, 2 November 2017
Marni
The thin prison mattress on the concrete base offered no comfort, the threadbare blanket no warmth. Although she was avoiding sleep, Marni kept her eyes tightly closed. She’d dreamt she was back in a police cell. She’d dreamt she’d been arrested. She’d dreamt there’d been blood on her hands. And she wouldn’t open her eyes, just in case it wasn’t a dream.
Thierry was dead.
She sat bolt upright.
‘No.’
The pain of realisation ripped through her. Thierry was dead. Images – memories – flashed in front of her eyes. Thierry’s blood on the floor. The back door slamming shut as Paul ran out. That awful woman cop who she hated. A bearded policeman dragging her away from Thierry’s body. Blue lights flashing on the short drive to the police station.
‘No. No.’ She shook her head frantically, as if vehement denial could reverse what had happened. It hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have. Those were false memories. She was still dreaming. She’d wake up in a minute.
But she didn’t.
Her mind joined up the images into a coherent narrative and her world disintegrated around her.
The door to her cell opened and she looked up.
‘Francis!’
‘Shhhh, I’m not supposed to be in here.’
That didn’t make sense. She stood up to go to him, but he took a step back from her.
‘What happened, Marni?’
‘It was Paul.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Paul was there, in the kitchen, when you dropped me off. They were fighting.’
‘But you said Paul was dead, didn’t you?’
Marni shook her head. ‘No. Thierry thought he was dead. Thierry thought he’d killed himself. But I never believed that. And I was right.’
‘Why did he come back?’
‘He’s obsessed with me, I think.’
‘Still? Even after all that’s happened?’ Francis appeared to doubt what she was saying.
‘He couldn’t get over the idea of having a family. Me and Alex. He was always jealous of anything Thierry had, ever since they were children – and it got worse as they got older.’
Francis stared at her, an incredulous look on his face. ‘But Alex is, what, twenty now? That boat has long sailed.’
‘You have to believe me, Frank. I didn’t do it.’
‘I want to believe you.’
But he evidently didn’t. And if Francis Sullivan didn’t believe her, who the hell would? She dropped down onto the bed, her head in her hands, overcome once more with the enormity of what had happened. Thierry was dead. It didn’t matter what happened next. But then a thought struck her.
‘Francis, does Alex know?’
Francis shrugged. ‘Would he have been back to the house?’
‘He’s staying at his cousin Liv’s at the moment.’ She stood up again. ‘You have to get me out of here. I need to go to him.’
‘I can’t get you out. A family liaison officer will visit him, and tell him what’s happened.’
‘A stranger, for God’s sake? His father’s dead. You’re in charge around here, aren’t you?’
Francis took hold of both her hands. ‘Okay, Marni – I’ll go and talk to Alex, but I can’t have anything to do with this case. I dropped you off just before . . . it happened.’ He paused awkwardly as if he didn’t know how to refer to it. ‘That makes me a witness.’
‘You mean you won’t help me?’
‘I’ll do what I can, but my hands are tied.’
Marni pulled away from him. ‘No, it’s my hands that are tied. Now why don’t you fuck off? And don’t come back till you’re on my side.’
She turned her back on him. He didn’t believe her. He thought she’d done it. And now he was going to let her rot in a police cell, while her son had to cope with his father’s death on his own.
She’d thought Sullivan was one of the good guys. It was funny how wrong you could be about people.
9
Thursday, 2 November 2017
Rose
Rose was beginning to wish she hadn’t taken the call.
‘Do me a favour, Rose,’ Sullivan had said. ‘You’re the assigned pathologist for Thierry Mullins’s murder, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘When you go to the house, will you take a look round for me? Marni didn’t do it. There was someone else there, and I need somebody I can rely on working the scene.’
This was wrong on so many levels. For a start, this wasn’t Sullivan’s case. Furthermore, nothing had been found so far to suggest that Marni Mullins wasn’t guilty, whereas there was a lot suggesting that she probably was. Policing wasn’t about searching for the evidence you needed to fit your hypothesis. Quite the opposite. And she knew how he felt about Marni.
So why did she now find herself in her car, driving towards Great College Street, working out how to do what he asked? Because she had a soft spot for the man – and she was stupid. After all, it wasn’t as if she had time to spare – not with a potentially mummified corpse waiting for attention in the morgue. She’d have to work as quickly as she could.
The scene-of-crime officers were already hard at work by the time Rose arrived. She’d been held up doing the post-mortem of a drunk driver who’d wrapped his car around a tree in the early hours of the morning up on the South Downs. Of course, they knew the cause of death, but she still needed to catalogue the internal injuries he’d sustained and record his blood alcohol level. As soon as he was safely back in his refrigerated drawer, she’d driven down to Kemptown.
The Mullins family lived about halfway along Great College Street in a small terraced house with a yellow front door and a bay window. Rose recognised the white CSI van parked outside, and a constable was standing watch at the open door. Rose showed her ID and went inside with her bag of kit. She was already wearing a white paper scene-of-crime suit, but on the front step she slipped shoe covers over her trainers so she wouldn’t tread dirt into the house.
She knew from Francis that the kitchen was the scene of the crime, but she could see that the investigators had been busy taking prints from the front door, the living-room door and all the way down the hall. Here, they’d laid down metal stepping plates to protect the integrity of the floor. They would have photographed everything and taken samples from the blood spatter and stains around the kitchen. She was here in her official capacity to examine Thierry’s body and organise its removal to the morgue. Unofficially, as Francis’s spy.
She’d never been to Marni’s house before, but the kitchen spoke to her of the woman she knew. There were watercolour versions of Marni’s signature chrysanthemum tattoos hanging on the wall, a battered, kilim-covered armchair in one corner, empty wine bottles on the kitchen counter and a half-smoked spliff in an ashtray on the island unit. But these were fleeting impressions. Rose’s attention was immediately snagged by a body, lying in the centre of the floor between the door and the kitchen island. She recognised him immediately – it was Marni’s ex-husband, Thierry Mullins, who she’d met on a couple of occasions during the Tattoo Thief case.
She got out her camera and started taking pictures. The crime-scene team would already have done this, but she wanted her own record, from every conceivable angle. Thierry was lying flat on his back, his legs bent awkwardly to one side. Rose had read the arrest report and she knew the body would be just as it settled when Gavin and Angie had pulled Marni away from it. From him. His eyes were closed and his face looked at peace, but that wasn’t a true reflection of how he must have been feeling when he died. Muscles changed after death – first they relaxed, then contracted with the progression of rigor, then relaxed again as the muscle tissue began to decompose – that included the facial muscles, which is why some corpses looked like they were gurning and others looked terror-struck.
She measured the body temperature and checked the rest of the muscle groups for rigor, but she already had a good idea of the time of death from the time of Marni’s arrest. The first paramedics on the scene, called by one of the neighbours, confirmed that he had literally died just a few minutes before their arrival. She pulled up Thierry’s blood-soaked T-shirt to expose the stab wound in his chest. She probed it with a sterile spatula to estimate the depth of the wound and its angle. The single puncture was deep enough to kill him, the blade passing cleanly between two of his ribs to pierce his heart. A fraction higher or lower and the tip of the knife would have hit bone, and Thierry might well have survived the attack. It had travelled into him at a downward angle, which suggested to Rose that his attacker was possibly his height or taller. But it didn’t necessarily prove that. Thierry could have been bent, seated, kneeling or even lying down when the blade went in, or a short person could have simply struck with a raised arm.
The trajectory of the wound further suggested that the killer had been right-handed. She didn’t know if Marni was right- or left-handed.
After looking at the wound, Rose turned her attention to Thierry’s hands to see if there was any evidence of trauma. Had he fought back? Were there traces of his killer’s skin or DNA under his fingernails? His right knuckles showed signs of fresh abrasion, so he hadn’t gone down without a fight. Rose would need to alert the investigative team to check whether Marni had any corresponding bruising. She slipped paper evidence bags over each hand and secured them with tape around his wrists. She would inspect underneath his nails once she was back at the morgue.
Rubbing her back, Rose stood up and looked around the kitchen floor at the pattern of the bloodstains. Around Thierry’s body it was a mess. He’d bled heavily from the moment he’d been stabbed and someone – himself or maybe Marni – had pulled the knife out of the wound while he was still alive, causing even greater blood loss. She’d been careful to look at him without treading in any of the spilt blood, but a range of footprints tracking from it to the door and even into the hall suggested that others hadn’t been. The paramedics for certain, and no doubt Gavin and Angie hadn’t been able to avoid treading in his blood when they’d taken Marni into custody. The CSIs would have close-up photos of all the footprints and would be eliminating them by comparing them to the footwear of everyone present.
Rose watched the two officers working. One was dusting the back door-handle for prints, while the other was retrieving DNA evidence from a number of wine glasses. They were both wearing masks, so it was difficult to tell which was which.
‘Ken?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said the man by the back door.
She went over to him, skirting around the smudges of dried blood.
‘Anything I should know about?’
He finished dusting the area he was working on, then lowered his face mask.
‘Yes.’
He stepped away from the door and across to an area of floor close to Thierry’s body.
‘Look here,’ he said. Rose looked to where he was pointing. ‘See that?’ He was indicating a tiny smudge amid a row of three splashes of blood. Rose bent down and examined it. There was a straight line of red, about an inch long, with a shorter line jutting out at right-angles to one side. ‘It’s a partial footprint.’
Rose nodded. ‘You could be right.’
‘So far it doesn’t seem to match any of the other prints in here and we’ve accounted for all the feet that were on the ground.’
‘So there was someone else here after he died?’
‘After, or as he died.’
Was this what Francis had hoped she’d find?
‘Does it repeat anywhere?’ said Rose, glancing around to look for another print.
‘Yes. He or she walked in this direction,’ said Ken, pointing towards the rear of the kitchen. ‘There’s a faint imprint of it here, and then another small mark just there.’
‘Heading towards the back door? You been outside yet?’
Ken shook his head and Rose looked out at the Mullins’s garden. It was a tiny postage stamp of grass, bordered by narrow flower beds in which someone had planted a few scrubby bushes. Low walls separated it from the gardens on either side. Could someone have got away out here?
Rose went outside, examining the back step and the small patio for traces of blood.
Ken stuck his head out of the door. ‘We’ll get to it, don’t worry.’
The body was her remit, not investigating the scene. That was clearly his inference.
Rose ignored him and continued to look around. There was nothing. But a plant stalk in the right-hand bed had been recently snapped and there was a scuff mark in the dirt that clung to the lower part of the wall. Rose peered over into the next-door property. This garden had been paved over, so there was nothing to indicate whether someone had jumped over and run through it.
Rose pulled her mask off her face and clambered over the wall. She looked around nervously. Technically, she was trespassing, but the house seemed quiet. Its occupants were probably at work. She looked back towards the Mullins house. Ken had disappeared back inside. She climbed over the next wall and the one after that. The final house had been extended at the back and there was just a narrow pathway between it and the property it backed on to. She squeezed through the gap and opened the gate at the end. She came out and found herself in a small private car park, the entrance of which brought her onto Abbey Road.
