Leigh Russell, page 3
Jonah looked up as she entered, his squashed face lighting up in a smile. He held out his bloody gloved hands in a theatrical wave from the other side of the room.
‘Well, well, well,’ he greeted her. ‘Hello, stranger. It must be getting on for a year since you were last here.’
‘Nearly eight months,’ Geraldine replied, returning his smile. ‘But it feels like a lot longer.’
‘So you missed me too,’ he replied with a grin. ‘That’s a relief. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten all about me.’
‘How have you been?’ she asked.
‘Other than pining for you?’ he replied, with mock gravity. He placed a bloody hand on his chest and looked at her with a pained expression. ‘The days have dragged so slowly while you’ve been away, it’s been agony, sheer agony. And how’s your little one?’ he added, brightening up.
Geraldine smiled. For all his protestations of interest, Jonah evidently didn’t know if she had a son or a daughter. ‘He’s fine,’ she replied. ‘He’s called Tom.’
‘Tom,’ he repeated, nodding as though he was committing the name to memory. ‘Congratulations on looking so well on it. Being a mother clearly agrees with you. Ah, I remember the sleepless nights.’ He chuckled. ‘Would you believe it? With my good looks, I actually looked worse than him for a while?’ He gestured at the corpse.
Geraldine turned her attention to the body. ‘What can you tell me about him?’
Jonah nodded. The time for banter was over. He told Geraldine that the victim had suffered a fatal gunshot wound.
‘So he definitely didn’t drown?’
‘He was killed, instantly I would say, by a gunshot. The bullet passed through one of the ventricles through which cerebrospinal fluid flows. You have to appreciate that over ninety per cent of gunshot wounds to the head are instantly fatal, and this one was definitely one of the ninety per cent. So you’re right, he didn’t drown. There was no froth, and no cerebral anoxia.’ He pointed at a repulsive heap of sludge which Geraldine barely recognised as what had once been a human brain.
She turned her attention back to the body with its mutilated head and pale hands and feet, wrinkled from immersion in the river. ‘Do you think someone shot him and then carried or dragged the body to the river and threw him in?’
‘There are no post mortem injuries, which suggests he wasn’t dragged bodily from the car to the river, and no signs of resistance. My impression – and this is just speculation, so please don’t quote me on it – my impression is that he walked right to the water’s edge before he was shot and then fell straight into the water.’
‘He might have been forced to walk to the edge at gun point,’ Geraldine murmured.
Jonah shrugged. ‘There’s no way of knowing, but that would make sense, yes, given that he was shot.’
‘He was shot from the side and then fell or was pushed into the water. We’re examining the footprints along the river bank.’
Jonah grunted. ‘Once your people have finished, I dare say you’ll have a better idea of what happened. All I can tell you is that he was shot dead before he entered the water. I take it you know his name?’
She nodded. ‘We suspect he was called Martin Reed. That’s the registered owner of a car found abandoned near where the body entered the water, and as far as we can tell the body seems to match his appearance. It’s not yet been confirmed, but we’re confident that’s who he was.’
‘What else do we know about him?’ Jonah asked.
‘We’re looking into the circumstances of his life. Now, what can you tell us about his death?’
‘Oh, it’s like that, is it? You’ll show me yours if I show you mine.’ Jonah teased her with a laugh. ‘Very well then, I’ll go first. We’re looking at a man in his late sixties, I’d say, in very good physical shape for his age. He took good care of himself and exercised regularly. He had eaten well not long before he was killed: steak, green vegetables and potatoes. The medical examiner who attended the scene estimated the time of death at between midnight and four o’clock in the morning.’
She nodded, thinking. The scene of crime officers would already have studied the ground, but Jonah’s report would be read alongside their findings and every different piece of information needed to be meshed together like a giant jigsaw. It was impossible to say exactly how long it would take to discover all the pieces, and then gather them into a coherent picture. They still hadn’t confirmed the identity of the dead man. And, in the meantime, the murder weapon had not been found. An armed gunman was on the loose in the city, a gunman who had already committed one murder, and might be prepared to kill again.
6
They needed to move quickly. However careful they were to avoid contaminating the crime scene, any traces left by the killer were inevitably deteriorating, exposed as they had been to the wind and intermittent drizzle overnight. The longer they spent closely examining the area, the less they were likely to find. While scene of crime officers carried out their painstaking scrutiny of the river bank, searching for recent footprints, Geraldine needed to establish the identity of the victim. The body was almost certainly that of Martin Reed, so she went to his house, a large red brick property in Friars Terrace, near the minster. The walls looked as though they had recently been repointed, and the tall windows were well maintained, with handsome bay windows on the ground floor.
A woman of around thirty opened the gleaming black front door. Her heavily made-up eyes widened on seeing Geraldine waiting on the threshold. She swept glossy honey-blonde curls back off her face, displaying long scarlet nails. Her elegant pink and silver dressing gown shimmered as it swirled around her.
‘Have you come to see Martin?’ the woman enquired in a low and gentle voice. ‘Only he’s not here and before you ask, I don’t know where he is. He didn’t leave any message and he’s not answering his phone.’ Beneath a show of insouciance, her eyes betrayed her anxiety. ‘Who are you?’
Geraldine held up her identity card and the woman leaned forward to squint at it before she drew back with a scowl.
‘May I come in?’ Geraldine asked, taking a step forwards to prevent the woman from closing the door.
‘I don’t think so. What I mean to say is, it’s not my house so it’s not really my place to let you in. What do you want?’
‘Can you tell me first who you are, and why you’re here?’ Geraldine responded with questions of her own.
The woman answered that her name was Serena, and she lived there with Martin. ‘But it’s his house. Like I said, it’s not my place. I only moved in with him recently.’
‘You just told me Martin’s not here, and you said you don’t know where he is.’
Serena nodded.
‘We’re trying to find him. I’m afraid we’re going to have to come inside to look for any clues to his whereabouts.’
Serena frowned and she shifted her weight, poised to retreat and close the door. ‘I don’t understand. Has something happened to Martin?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Why else would you be here? What’s happened to him?’ Suddenly alert to the situation, Serena responded with a series of questions. ‘Tell me what you’re doing here. Something’s happened to him, hasn’t it? What? Tell me!’ She was becoming slightly hysterical.
‘I suggest we go inside and you can sit down and answer a few questions.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re doing here,’ Serena insisted. ‘I haven’t reported him missing.’
‘Let’s go inside where we can talk more comfortably.’
Her outburst over, Serena nodded and led Geraldine past a grandfather clock and a tall vase of flowers, across a narrow hall with several closed doors leading off it, and past a broad staircase with a wooden balustrade that swept upstairs. Geraldine waited until they were both seated in a lavishly furnished living room before she started questioning Serena.
‘When did you last see Martin?’
Serena stared at her, no longer defensive. ‘Where is he? Is he all right?’
‘We’re not sure. When did you last see him?’
‘I was away for the weekend. When I got home on Monday morning, he wasn’t here. I thought he’d be back in the evening, but he never appeared. I tried his phone but couldn’t get hold of him. I kept trying all day yesterday, but he still wasn’t answering. When he hadn’t called me by the evening, I called every hospital in the area, but no one had any record of him being admitted. They all said the same thing – to wait, he would probably turn up. I guessed his car had broken down, or something had come up and he had gone out without telling me, but by last night, I was really worried. He had been gone for more than twenty-four hours, and possibly longer because I didn’t speak to him over the weekend. I was planning to go to the police station in person this morning to report him missing. It’s better than phoning, I think.’ She shrugged. ‘But anyway, now you’re here I’d like to report him missing. Can we do that? I mean, officially? It would save me having to go to the police station, although I’ll probably do that anyway.’
‘Tell me about your relationship with Martin Reed,’ Geraldine replied, ignoring the question.
‘We worked together. That is, I worked for him as his personal assistant. But then, after his wife died, we fell in love. The truth is, I’d always had feelings for him, but he was married, so nothing ever happened between us and I thought nothing ever would. But after she died, I discovered he felt the same way. I know there’s a bit of an age difference between us.’
‘Forty years,’ Geraldine murmured.
‘Forty-five. I know what you’re thinking, but we love each other. There’s no point in pretending we don’t. Martin asked me to come and live with him, and I agreed. Why wouldn’t I? I love him. We love each other. So here I am.’ She gazed at Geraldine, her attractive features creased in a worried frown. ‘Only I don’t know where he is. Why would he go off without telling me? Do you know where he is?’
Geraldine listened as Martin’s girlfriend justified moving in with a man so much older than herself. Serena didn’t mention Martin’s wealth, although Geraldine supposed that might have been part of his attraction. She took down details relating to Martin’s disappearance and concluded by asking for his toothbrush or comb. Serena gasped and covered her mouth with both hands.
‘You think he’s dead, don’t you?’ Serena whispered, her eyes glistening with tears. ‘You’ve found his body. That’s why you want his DNA, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’
Watching her closely, Geraldine wondered whether Serena’s concern for Martin was as fake as her nails and eyelashes.
7
Returning to the police station, Geraldine discussed the case with her colleagues.
‘According to the pathologist’s report, there was nothing to indicate he had been dragged along the ground, no contusions or scratches inflicted before or after death, which suggests his killer must have carried the body quite carefully right to the water’s edge. So that means we’re probably looking for a man,’ Naomi suggested.
‘A man or a strong woman,’ Ariadne added.
‘Not necessarily,’ Geraldine said. ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions when there are other possibilities. The victim could have been forced at gun point to walk to the water’s edge and then been shot right there so he would have fallen into the water without needing to be pushed. Even carrying him carefully might have left some bruising, but there was nothing, and no defence wounds.’
‘He could have been shot actually on the water, forced to stand up in a boat,’ Naomi speculated.
‘Or even once he was in the water,’ Ariadne added. ‘You’re right, there are all sorts of possibilities.’
‘We need more evidence, and in the meantime we have to keep open minds. It’s a pity other people walked along the muddy footpath before SOCOs got there to examine it, but there’s still a chance they’ll come up with something.’
‘There might have been two sets of footprints, but we’ll never know,’ Ariadne said.
‘The body could have been carried there really carefully, but it does look like no one dragged it to the water’s edge,’ Naomi added.
Geraldine sighed. ‘I know it’s difficult when you have a theory that seems to make sense, but just because something could be true doesn’t mean it is. And so far, the evidence isn’t helping much.’
They finished their coffee and were about to go back to work, when they received confirmation that the DNA on Martin Reed’s toothbrush was a match for the body pulled from the river. No one was surprised. While it was never a cheerful discovery, it made their job simpler knowing the identity of the victim. Confident Martin Reed was the dead man in the river, Geraldine had already instructed Naomi to start looking into his background.
‘Our upright citizen Martin Reed had an interesting past,’ Naomi told them. ‘He was married to his second wife Ann for nearly forty years, since he was thirty, and they had two children, a son and a daughter.’
‘What happened to his first wife?’ Geraldine asked.
‘His first marriage didn’t last long, and his ex-wife went abroad after the divorce. She lived in America for around forty years and only returned to the UK two years ago when her partner there died.’
‘She came back around the time his second wife died,’ Geraldine said.
‘Yes, although there was no suspicion of foul play at the time. It was a brain tumour, all very sudden.’
‘So it was a coincidence, his first wife returning just then?’
Naomi nodded. ‘It seems so. She lives in Surrey and doesn’t appear to have had any contact with Martin for many years. As far as we know, she didn’t attend Ann’s funeral. So she seems to be out of the picture, although we’ll check, just to make sure. What may be more interesting is that six months after Ann died, his young PA moved in with him.’
‘How did his children feel about that, I wonder?’ Geraldine murmured.
Naomi nodded. ‘We need to find out whether he made any changes to his will,’ she added thoughtfully.
There seemed to be a handful of potential suspects, all of whom might turn out to have alibis. Until they knew for certain who could be ruled out as guilty, there was a lot of work to be done. DNA suggested the pillow found at the scene had come from Martin’s own bed, but it wasn’t yet clear who had brought it to the river bank. Possibly Martin had kept it in his car.
Ian had collected Tom and by the time Geraldine walked through the front door and kicked off her shoes, the baby was already asleep. She felt a flicker of disappointment that she hadn’t been there to put him to bed.
‘You could have waited for me to get home,’ she muttered.
‘He was tired,’ Ian replied. ‘And I thought you would be too, after your first day back. I hope it wasn’t too much of a shock?’ He smiled kindly. ‘Why don’t you go and put your feet up and I’ll get something out of the freezer?’
Geraldine was pleased that Ian seemed supportive, now he had accepted that she was back at work. All the same, she hesitated to tell him about the case she was working on. She was afraid he would remonstrate with her, arguing that she ought to ease herself back into work slowly. She could imagine him questioning whether she was in the right mental state to deal with the demands of a murder investigation. She knew she ought to reassure him before he could mention his concerns to the detective chief inspector, who could easily take her off the case. Puzzled by the shooting, she was determined not to abandon the case without a fight. She certainly wasn’t prepared to step back because Ian took it upon himself to worry about her needlessly. Tom was fine with the childminder, and she was enjoying the challenge of being back at work. Objectively, Ian had no reason to be concerned.
They were living happily together in the flat Geraldine had bought with the proceeds from the sale of her London flat which she had purchased with the help of a sum inherited from her family. Following an acrimonious divorce, Ian had lost his marital home to his ex-wife. He steadfastly maintained he was too pleased to be rid of his ex-wife to care about his material losses. He claimed to have realised fairly early on that his marriage had been a mistake. He had done his best to make it work, until his ex-wife had run off with another man. Ian insisted he had been happy to see the back of her, but it had been a difficult period in his life, and he had been grateful to Geraldine for standing by him. She had done more than that, admitting that she had been in love with him for a long time.
After dinner, when they were sitting at the table with a glass of wine, Geraldine broached the subject of her work obliquely, asking Ian how his day had gone. He grunted before launching into a detailed account of his current caseload. Preoccupied by what she wanted to tell him, she wasn’t really listening. She needed to preempt his inevitable disapproval of her leading a murder investigation by telling him how well she was coping, but she didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t admit that she was relieved to be handing the responsibility for child care to a stranger. At last Ian drained his glass and asked her how her day had gone. She was about to reply, when Tom let out a howl and she jumped up, secretly relieved at the reprieve. Telling herself she would tackle the issue of her workload as soon as Tom had gone back to sleep, she went into the small bedroom that had once been her study and was now the nursery. They were going to have to move before Tom was very much older, so he could have some space of his own, but for now the flat was fine and by all accounts it wasn’t a good time to be moving anyway.
‘If we wait until it’s a good time to move, we’ll never go anywhere,’ Ian had complained when he had first moved in with her. ‘We might as well put the flat on the market and start looking around, and see what happens.’ But then Tom had come along and they had been too tired to organise moving, so had agreed to shelve the idea for a while.
