Death in the City, page 2
The Superintendent got a paper handkerchief from a drawer in his desk and took the bullet in a strip of tissue from the handkerchief. ‘Looks like an army rifle bullet,’ he said. ‘It’s certainly live – at least, it hasn’t been fired. Whether it would fire after being in the river, I can’t say. Needs handling carefully, but I don’t need to tell you that. It’s not been in the water long enough to corrode. There’s a good fingerprint on the cartridge case – presumably yours, when you got it out of the mud.’ He rubbed the base of the cartridge gently with a piece of tissue. ‘There are some marks on the rim here, under the mud – maker’s mark, or batch mark, I’d think. An expert should be able to identify them. I take it you’ll send it for examination straight away?’
‘Yes. I’ll list it separately, of course, because it wasn’t found actually on the body, but I thought I’d send it with the others in the chap’s pockets.’
‘Reasonable enough. You haven’t been through the pockets yet?’
‘No – I couldn’t very well do it in the mud. But I want to get on with it as soon as possible, to see if there’s anything to identify him. I thought I’d better come here first, though, in case you wanted to take over.’
‘You’ve done all right so far, Ian, and I don’t see that we could do any better. He’s obviously been in the river, so it doesn’t look as if he was knocked out on the beach. When it comes to working out how or where he got in the river, maybe we can help. But none of us can do much without a full medical report, and an analysis of the water in the clothes – how salty it is, whether there are any traces of fresh-water weed, and all the rest of it.’
‘If he’s been in the tidal river, wouldn’t the water be tidal water, anyway?’
‘Not necessarily. Try running cold water into a hot bath – unless you stir it up, it takes ages to mix. When you get water in the fibres of clothes it takes longer still. Suppose he went in somewhere above Teddington – you’d almost certainly find traces of fresh water in the clothes. But that’s a laboratory job. When we’ve got some facts, we can get to work on them. It’s certainly your case at the moment, but naturally we’ll work together, as we’ve always done. Look, if you don’t mind, I’ll ask Detective Sergeant Burgess to go with you to the mortuary. He’s a good man – he did a fine job of identification in that Tilbury case last year. Then if there’s anything in our line that wants following up quickly, he’ll be on hand to do it.’
Redpath thought this an excellent idea. The Superintendent got to work on the telephone. Then he said, ‘Burgess is at home, and I’ve asked him to report to you at the mortuary. He should be along in half an hour or so.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Well, I’m beginning to think about breakfast. I’d gladly offer you some, but you’ll be wanting to get on. Good luck, Ian – and thanks for coming round so quickly. People talk a lot about departmental friction, and, of course, it does exist. But we’re all doing, or trying to do, the same job. You’ve got to have specialised departments in any big organisation – it helps a lot when people recognise that we can’t all be brilliant loners.’
Inspector Redpath hadn’t breakfasted, either, but he didn’t fancy breakfast with that distasteful job at the mortuary in front of him. Redpath had seen violent death in many forms, and to some extent the technical problems it involved clouded the human side of it. But Redpath was a good policeman partly because he was also a sensitive and humane man. He could never forget that the broken body on a mortuary slab was linked, somehow and somewhere, to living human beings – wives or husbands, parents, children, friends who might really care about the dead. Breaking the news to next of kin was a vile job. Often, nowadays, he didn’t have to do it; relatives might live in different parts of the country, and usually they were best called on by a uniformed man. But the responsibility for sending out the grim, pathetic news was often his, and he hated it. That didn’t mean that it was a task to be delayed – from every point of view the identification of a dead person was of urgent importance.
He was familiar with the mortuary, and he knew where the body he had last seen lying in the mud would be. In accordance with his instructions it had been left as it was, forlorn, unwashed, the crumpled clothes with their bulging pockets suddenly become grotesque. He was wondering whether he ought to start going through the clothes at once, or wait for Sergeant Burgess, when an attendant came to say that the sergeant had arrived. ‘Quick work,’ Redpath thought.
Detective Sergeant Burgess was a pleasant faced young man, but with hair already greying round his temples, for all that he was still in his twenties. ‘Inspector Redpath? I was told to report to you,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about it yet.’
Redpath gave him a brief account of the finding of the body. ‘Now we’ve got to try to find out who he is – was, rather. It’s not clear at the moment whether this is a case for the City Division or the River Police. Superintendent Carstairs thought it might be helpful if you were present when we examined the clothes. I agree. I’m glad that you got here so quickly.’
Sergeant Burgess looked at the body. ‘There’s something the matter with his head,’ he said.
‘Yes. He seems to have been hit on the head. There’s no external bleeding, but his skull was fractured, and the doctor thinks the blow probably killed him.’
‘Clothes of quite good quality. That’s a fashionable lightweight suit. What on earth has he got in his pockets?’
‘Rifle bullets, and they appear to be live ones. We’d better get them out. I don’t think they’re likely to go off, but you never know with live ammunition, particularly when it’s been jumbled about, as this stuff has. I’ll empty the pockets, and you stand back a bit. Write down the contents of each pocket as I call them out.’
Burgess didn’t much like leaving whatever risk there might be to the Inspector, but he did as he was told. Redpath put on a pair of silk gloves and started going through the inside pocket of the jacket, following with the outside pockets. Little piles of cartridges accumulated on the slab – there was nothing else whatever in any of the pockets. The trouser pockets produced more piles of cartridges, but also nothing else. There was no money, no pocket book or wallet, no bunch of keys, no watch, no penknife – nothing. The Inspector next examined the clothes themselves. A slight discoloration of the lining of the breast pocket of the jacket suggested that there might have been a tailor’s label, but if there had been, it had been removed. Closer examination showed that it had been cut out – a row of stitch-holes could still be seen, and in two places there were scraps of the thread that had formed the stitches. ‘We can get the size of the label, anyway,’ Redpath said. He had a pocket steel tape, and carefully measured the marks on the lining where the label had been.
He and Burgess then carefully undressed the body, scrutinising each garment as they came to it. There was a cotton shirt that had once been cream-coloured, but was now a sodden, muddy grey. This, too, was of good quality, and there was a small patch on the collar where another maker’s label had apparently been cut out. There was no tie, but a dark red silk scarf was tucked into the open neck of the shirt. The man wore no vest. He had light, cellular underpants, again with no maker’s label on them. He had dark red nylon socks to match his scarf. There were no shoes. ‘Somebody’s gone to a lot of trouble to remove anything that might give a clue to his identity,’ Redpath said. ‘Shoes would almost certainly have had a maker’s name on them, and such names on shoes are generally stamped in the leather and not easy to take out. Perhaps that’s why his shoes were taken off. Well, I don’t think there’s much more we can do here. The clothes must all go to the forensic laboratory for examination, and as your Superintendent suggested, for analysis of their water content. The cartridges must go to the firearms experts. And the doctor will want the body for his autopsy. Slip along to the mortuary office, would you, Sergeant, and see if you can get some cardboard boxes for the cartridges, and wrapping paper and string for the clothes, while I let the doctor know that the body is ready for him.’
These jobs were soon done, and Redpath telephoned for a police car to take the cartridges and clothes to their respective experts. ‘I’m going back to the station for a wash,’ he said, ‘and then I’m going to have breakfast. Could you come with me? There are a lot of things I want to talk about, and it would be easier in my office, where I’ve got maps and things.’
*
Cleansed in some sense mentally as well as physically by their wash, and fortified by bacon and eggs in the police canteen, the two policemen stood in front of a big wall map of the Thames. It was still not quite ten o’clock.
‘Lord, I feel as if I’ve been living with this case for ever!’ Redpath said. ‘What do you make of it, Sergeant?’
‘It was high water at London Bridge at twenty minutes to twelve last night. So it would have been pretty well dead low water when the woman saw him,’ Burgess replied indirectly.
‘Yes, the tide had just about turned when I got there. It was coming in again before I left. Where does that get us?’
‘It means that he was floating pretty well down – that he was sinking, but not quite sunk. And that he was meant to be carried out to sea.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, what was the lead for? If he’d been thrown in as he was, he’d have sunk for a bit, and then probably come up again. A dead body is liable to do that. It will go with the tide, more or less awash, until it finally sinks altogether. That may take some time, and in a waterway as busy as the Thames a floating body is likely to be seen. They didn’t want that, so they filled his pockets with lead.’
‘Why didn’t he go to the bottom?’
‘Because there wasn’t quite enough lead – enough to keep him down, but not to sink him. If he’d gone right down, he’d have stuck in the mud, and been out of the tide. He wasn’t, so he didn’t go right down, but was carried along under water. Now you can assume that whoever put him in just made a mistake, or panicked, and couldn’t find enough bullets, or something, but the careful cutting out of all those clothes labels doesn’t look like panic, or making careless mistakes. So my reading of the evidence so far is that they didn’t want a body lying around on the river bed, where it might come up sometime, or perhaps even be found by divers, but they wanted him carried under water well out to sea.’
‘And they miscalculated a bit?’
‘Yes. But probably they wouldn’t have known. The tidal fall this morning was around two feet lower than normal – I know this because we live with the tide tables, but most people wouldn’t think of it. A couple of feet more water, and he’d have gone on being carried along near the bottom, and safely out of sight. As it was, he just grounded.’
‘That seems good reasoning. Can you work out where he was likely to have been put in?’
‘Not without knowing how long he was in the water.’
‘Maybe we’ll get some idea of that from the medical report. Let’s think a bit more about the man himself. The doctor put him in the middle or late fifties, though, being a doctor, he hedged a bit by saying he might be anywhere between forty-five and sixty. From the look of him, I’d say mid-fifties was about right.’
‘About that, I’d think. And a neat dresser, with a bit of money. That lightweight suit with the cream shirt and dark red scarf was just right for a summer evening – smart, but not dressy.’
‘If they went to all that trouble to take out the clothes labels, why did they leave his face untouched? Why not disfigure him?’
‘There could be lots of reasons. First, it would have been a horrible job. If the doctor’s right about the sandbag or lead piping in a sock, and from the look of things it seems right, they didn’t want any blood. You can’t disfigure a face – not enough to make it unrecognisable, anyway – without blood. And his face wasn’t meant to be seen – don’t forget, the pockets were weighted to keep the body down. Given that he’d stay under water in a seaway for at least some weeks, the face would be more or less unrecognisable even if he were washed ashore somewhere later on. Clothes are different. It’s a long time before cloth wholly decays – look how long a bag of cement lasts under water when it’s used for emergency repairs to a sea-wall. Tailors’ labels usually aren’t printed – the name is generally woven in. They weren’t taking any chances – they didn’t want to risk the clothes being identified if anything went wrong.’
‘Well, something did go wrong – the behaviour of the tide.’
*
Detective Sergeant Burgess went off to report to his Superintendent, and Redpath, who’d been on duty since midnight, decided to try for a few hours’ sleep. He could do nothing more until the various reports he’d asked for came in, and he couldn’t hope for anything much before late afternoon. He didn’t go home, but lay down in one of the rest rooms at the police station, asking to be called at once if there was any news. At two o’clock he was called, and told that he was wanted on the telephone. It was the firearms expert. ‘You asked me to report preliminary findings as soon as I could, so I’m giving you a ring,’ he said. ‘You’ll get a written report later, of course, but it won’t have any more than the preliminary findings, because there doesn’t seem much to find. The rounds you sent me are all standard NATO army ammunition, all unfired, and most of them probably still usable. They’ve been in water, but the bullet fits tightly in the cartridge case, and they don’t seem to have been in water long enough for much water to have got in to affect the charge. They’ve all come from the same factory – a small-arms factory in Belgium. There’s a batch mark which should give you the date of manufacture, but you’d have to get that from the factory, or perhaps through the Ministry of Defence. They’re standard army ammunition, but not necessarily issued to the British Army – again, the Ministry of Defence should be able to tell you if they’ve come from some British Army depot or not. There isn’t much else to say. I’ve examined each round under a microscope, and none seems to have any fingerprints, except the one that you packed separately, which you say you found in the mud. That has one good fingerprint on it.’
‘Yes, it’s almost certainly mine, but I’ll get it checked, of course. You did well to spot it. I didn’t think there were any prints on the other rounds, and there can’t be any of mine because I handled them in gloves. Thank you for getting on with things so quickly. Can you get photographs of the maker’s mark and batch mark and let me have them here?’
‘I’ve already had them photographed, and the prints are on their way to you.’
‘You couldn’t have done any more, and I really am grateful.’
Redpath was meditating on the cartridges when there was a knock on his door and Dr Gillespie came in. ‘I’ve done the autopsy on that man you found this morning,’ he said. ‘It was a perfectly straightforward job. Well-nourished body of middle-aged man. Hair originally darkish brown, with a touch of red in it, but greying now. No trace of dye – sensible man accepted his age. Organs all in good shape. He was killed by that blow on the head – a thoroughly savage blow. Can’t tell you precisely what weapon, but my guess of a piece of lead piping wrapped in a sock is as good as any. The blow would have killed him instantly – at least, he might have lived for a few minutes in a technical sense, but he would have been unconscious and effectively dead.
‘He’d had a meal not long before he died – ordinary sort of light supper, I’d imagine. And he’d taken some alcohol either just before, or with his meal. But not much – a couple of small gins, perhaps, or a glass or two of wine. He was dead when he went into the river – no trace of river water in the lungs.
‘Time of death – well, you say he was found just before 6 a.m. He hadn’t been dead for very long – my earlier estimate of around six hours will be somewhere near the mark. The fact of his being in the water clouds things a bit, because it alters normal body cooling. If you add an hour or two, I wouldn’t quarrel. That would fit in with supper, say, around eight o’clock.’
‘Any distinguishing marks?’
‘None. No operation scar, no tattoo marks.’
‘Teeth?’
‘His own, and in good shape. One or two extractions, and three fillings. If you could find his dentist, he could probably identify him. Of course, he might have had dental work done abroad.’
‘That’s the trouble. It looks as if we’re going to have a hell of a job to identify him. Every scrap of personal property was removed from his pockets, and every maker’s label on his clothes had been cut out. There was nothing on him but an extraordinary collection of live ammunition – rifle bullets.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Well, the River Police suggest that it was to weight the body enough to keep it under water, but not to sink it. So that he’d be carried out to sea by the tide without coming to the surface.’
‘Ingenious, that. But I don’t know, of course.’
‘Can you estimate how long he’d been in the water?’
‘He was dead when he went in, and as he’d been dead only for about six to seven hours, it couldn’t have been longer than that. It might have been less, naturally. There’s no means of telling. Judging from the general appearance of the body I’d say at least two to three hours, but that’s a guess. It might easily have been six. Afraid I can’t help you there.’
‘Well, doctor, you’ve done what you could, and you’ve helped a lot by coming along. God knows what the next move is. I hate unidentified corpses – can’t help thinking of women and children, living and waiting in false hopes. But there it is. Maybe someone will turn up to report him missing.’
*
Redpath decided to pay another call on the River Police. The Superintendent had gone off duty, but Sergeant Burgess was there, and an Inspector who’d just come in from a river patrol. Redpath accepted a cup of tea, and reported the information he had had from the firearms expert and the doctor.
