Knight & Culverhouse Box Set - Books 7-9

Chapter 6

6

Jack Culverhouse parked his car on Hollybush Lane and walked the remaining thirty or so yards to the crime scene. It was a sad indictment of the realities of his job that his foremost concern at that moment in time was whether he’d put the milk in the fridge when trying to jettison his shopping at home.

He flashed his ID badge at the officers on the edge of the cordon and donned the requisite white forensics suit, the scene having already been sealed off. It was customary for the chief investigating officer to direct proceedings even before that stage, but public areas sometimes had to be treated differently.

The scene had to be sealed off and preserved at the earliest possible opportunity, to minimise the risk of contamination, and in this case there had to be road closures, too. It was all about preserving evidence and minimising the risk of an upstart brief trying to get his client off the hook at any future trial by opening up the possibility of contaminated evidence.

‘What’s the SP?’ Culverhouse asked as he zipped up his white plastic oversuit.

‘The woman who lives there,’ the officer said, pointing to the house they were parked outside, ‘Mrs Gwendoline O’Connell, was out walking her dog. The dog started digging in the undergrowth and found an arm. She tried to get the dog to stop, but it started tugging at the arm. She says she was afraid of getting too close to it, and by the time she managed to get the dog away, it was pretty clear there was a whole body there. She’s inside with a couple of my colleagues.’

Culverhouse nodded and walked a little closer towards the body. It looked fresh. Although he was no forensics expert, he doubted if this person had been dead twelve hours. From what he could see, the victim was a young male.

‘You happy for us to get to work?’ one of the SOCOs asked him. The Scenes of Crime Officers would be the first people to actively work with the scene, photographing it and taking items of evidence whilst recovering the body.

‘Perfectly. Let me know what you find. I’ll go and have a word with the dog walker. I’ve got two DSs en route. Send them my way when they arrive.’

Culverhouse was barely outside the police cordon when he tore the white protective suit off. He hated those things. They were noisy, sweaty and claustrophobic, but a necessary part of the job. Regardless, he tried to minimise the amount of time he spent wearing them.

He walked up the front path of Gwendoline O’Connell’s house, admiring her front garden as he did so. The front door was ajar, so he knocked and let himself in.

He walked through to the kitchen, a cosy, tiled cottage affair, and introduced himself to Mrs O’Connell and the young female officer who was sitting with her.

‘I just want to ask you a few questions if I may, Gwendoline. I know my colleague has probably already asked you most of them, but I’m afraid you’ll have to bear with me.

‘Gwen,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Only my mother called me Gwendoline.’

‘Ah. Sorry. Gwen. My colleague outside told me—’

‘I was in shock. I had police officers speaking to me. Sorry.’

‘Don’t be. Between you and me, Jack’s not my real name either, but hey ho. We’re masters of our own destiny. Could you just run through what happened this morning for me, please?’

‘I’ll try. I went out for a walk with Bessie, my dog. I do the same walk every morning, and some evenings as well. We’d barely been out of the house thirty seconds. I was about to go through the gate over the road there, and Bessie started scratching and digging at the undergrowth. By the time I got there… There was an arm.’

‘What did you do next?’

‘I called the police.’

‘On your mobile?’

‘No. I don’t know why, but I went back into the house and called from the landline. I had my mobile with me, so I don’t know why I did that. The shock, I suppose.’

Culverhouse nodded. He knew only too well that people did bizarre things when confronted by a dead body. A large part of his job was spent trying to get people to act normally.

He recalled one incident about ten years earlier where he’d turned up to a crime scene, where a man had discovered a body in an industrial waste bin. The man had been so shocked he couldn’t remember his own name, and had to wait for his colleagues to turn up for work before he could identify himself to the police.

Another time, back when Jack was a uniformed constable attending a report of a burglary in progress, he’d turned up to find the burglar sitting in a little old lady’s kitchen, quietly enjoying a packet of Jelly Babies as the homeowner sat talking to him. Far from being shocked and frightened when she discovered the burglar sorting through the contents of her living room, she’d taken pity on his skinny frame and decided he needed fattening up.

‘You mentioned you walk the dog in the evenings sometimes. Did you go out yesterday evening?’

‘No,’ the woman said, seemingly speaking to an area of carpet. ‘I went to visit a friend yesterday afternoon and was back later than I’d hoped. By the time I’d sorted dinner out, it was too dark to be heading out. I was going to give Bessie an extra long walk this morning, but…’

‘And she showed no sign of being interested in that area of undergrowth yesterday morning on her walk?’

‘No, nothing at all. We walk right past it, and she didn’t notice a thing. This morning, though, she bolted straight over there before we’d even got close. That’s the weirdest thing about it. It makes me almost certain it couldn’t have been there yesterday.’

Jack felt inclined to agree, and forensics would be able to tell if the victim had been killed within the past twenty-four hours. It was a shame, though, that Gwen hadn’t walked Bessie the previous evening, too. That would have enabled them to narrow the window down to something closer to twelve hours, rather than twenty-four.

‘I don’t suppose you or any of your neighbours have CCTV cameras on the fronts of your houses, do you?’ Jack asked.

‘I’m not sure about the neighbours, but we have.’

Jack’s ears pricked up.

‘What area do they cover?’

‘There are two on the front. One covers the front door and some of the drive, and the other is higher up and covers the rest of the drive and the road up to the hedgerow on the other side.’

‘Would it show any vehicles that drove past the house and stopped in or near the layby?’

‘Yes, it would. They would have had to come past the house. The road doesn’t lead anywhere. It carries on for another half a mile or so, but it only leads to the other houses down the lane. So it would be on CCTV unless the vehicle came from a house further down.’

‘How long is the footage stored for?’

‘I think it cycles every month or so. It saves onto a box in the loft. I don’t know how to get it off, mind. I’d need to call the company who installed it.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Culverhouse said. ‘Our officers have used most types of CCTV system, so I’m sure they’ll manage if you’re happy to let them try.’

‘Yes. Of course.’

He could see from Gwen’s face that she was only just beginning to process the fact that someone might have, only hours ago, parked a vehicle virtually outside her house and offloaded a dead body. He tried to think of something to say to put her mind a little more at ease, but was interrupted by an officer knocking on the door of the living room and gesturing for Culverhouse to step outside.

‘Sir, the SOCOs have found something you might be interested in,’ the nervous young constable said. ‘It’s not a dead body that’s buried in the undergrowth. It’s two.’