In spite of himself, the DCC felt his stomach heave. He fought it as always, by concentrating on what had to be done, and took his hand-phone from the pocket of his shirt. ‘Better get Brian Mackie up here,’ he muttered.
‘Brian’s away for the weekend, with his girl-friend,’ his colleague told him. ‘Try calling Rose instead.’
Skinner nodded and punched in the home number of his former personal assistant; it was filed in his memory.
‘Hello.’ The call was answered after four rings, by a gruff male voice.
‘Morning, Mario, it’s the DCC here. It’s Maggie I need.’
‘Ah, morning, Boss. Just when we were looking forward to a lie-in. Hold on.’There was a pause as Inspector Mario McGuire passed the handset to his wife.
‘Yes, sir.’ It occurred to Skinner that he could remember only one occasion on which he had known DCI Margaret Rose to look or sound remotely flustered.
‘I’m sorry, Mags, but DCS Martin and I have come across a problem in your area. I need a team up here on the double, and everything needed to set up a murder inquiry. You call out your duty people, and I’ll alert an ME and the scene-of-crime team.The address is Number Seventeen, Garston Avenue, Bonnyrigg. There’s one victim, female, believed to be Miss Hannah Bennett.’
‘Bennett?’ Rose’s voice was suddenly sharp.
‘Yes. Nathan’s sister. Let’s not jump to conclusions, though. It may be completely unconnected with her brother, but then again . . . Just get up here as fast as you can. There’s a street full of sleeping neighbours waiting to be knocked up and interviewed.’
He ended the call, then keyed in his own number. Sarah picked up the phone almost at once. ‘You still in bed?’ he asked.
‘No. I’m just out of the shower. I’m standing here stark naked, if you want to know.’
‘That’s very nice, but tell me; what time are you due at your autopsy?’
‘Eleven-thirty.’
‘That’s good. In that case, I want you to chuck on some clothes and get here on the double. I’ve got a job for you before you see Prof. Hutchison.’ He gave her the address, then called headquarters, and left orders to be passed on to Detective Inspector Arthur Dorward, head of the scene-of-crime team. By the time he replaced the phone in his pocket, Martin was standing beside him once more.
‘That’s Hannah Bennett all right,’ he said. ‘Facially, she looks very like her brother.’
‘What?’ growled Skinner. ‘Does he have a big fucking knife sticking out of his head too?’
17
The interior of Hannah Bennett’s home was as neatly ordered as her garden. Skinner, Martin, Sarah and Inspector Arthur Dorward sat in her tidy living room while a stream of uniformed police officers and detectives came and went from the mobile headquarters caravan which had been set up in the avenue, on the grass verge which ran between pavement and road.
It was nine-fifty: the avenue was wide-awake now. Small groups of residents stood together in the roadway, others alone in their gardens, staring in shocked wonder at the scene.
‘What’s happening in there?’ Sarah asked, pointing at the vehicle.
‘Maggie’s co-ordinating the interviewing of all the neighbours,’ her husband replied, ‘now that you’ve given us a time of death to work on.’
‘Estimated,’ she cautioned. ‘I won’t be able to go firm on that until we can get the body back to the morgue.’
‘I trust you. Between ten p.m. and midnight last night is good enough for me. Can you tell us anything else that might help us?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know how much help it’ll be, but I think that the woman was hiding from her attacker, and that she was killed where he found her. There was mud on the palms of her hands, and her slacks were dirty from the knees down, as if she was kneeling in the bushes.
‘I couldn’t see any marks on her body, save one, a big bruise round the back of her neck. It looks as if it could have been made by a hand, a strong hand, grabbing her there and hauling her to her feet.
‘There were no wounds at all, other than the one which killed her. My thought is that something happened in the house, that Miss Bennett evaded her attacker at first, and that she ran out into the back garden. He followed her . . . very definitely a man, from the size of the hand-print on her neck, and the force of the blow . . . found her hiding place, picked her up and hit her with the knife, just once.
‘Death would have been instantaneous, given that size of cerebral shock.’
She looked at Skinner, then Martin. ‘There’s one thing I find strange, though.’
‘What’s that?’ asked the Head of CID.
‘Why did she hide in the garden? Why didn’t she run out into the street, where it would have been safer?’
‘Because the back gate was jammed. It would have taken her too long to force it open.’
‘I see.’
Martin nodded. ‘Poor woman had nowhere to run to. She was pretty well alone here too. Number Fifteen and his wife were in the pub till one o’clock, and Number Nineteen, through the wall, is on holiday.’ He turned to Dorward, who was still wearing his white scene-of-crime tunic.
‘Do you agree with Sarah?’ he asked.
The Inspector nodded. ‘Everything inside matches that theory. There were broken dishes in the kitchen when we went in, and there was a rolling pin lying on the floor. I wondered if she hit him with that before she ran outside. The back door was unlocked too, in support of Doctor Skinner’s proposition.’
‘Did you find any prints on the knife hilt?’
‘No, although it wasn’t easy to dust since the doctor wouldn’t let us remove the weapon from the skull.’
‘That must be done under autopsy conditions,’ Sarah explained.
‘Fair enough. Did you find any signs of forced entry, Arthur?’
‘None at all, sir. I’d say that the victim let her attacker into the house.’
‘Couldn’t he have come through the back gate and in the back door?’ asked Skinner.
Dorward frowned. ‘Looking at the gate, I’d say it’s only been opened once in quite some time, and that was when you came through it this morning.’
‘Could he have come over the top?’
‘That’s possible, sir, but unlikely I’d say. The thing is two metres high. An agile bloke could scramble over it, but the wood is soft, and he’d be bound to leave a mark. You did, just shouldering it open, but other than that, it’s clean.
‘The way it looks to me, he rang the bell and she let him in.’
‘Did she have a boy-friend?’ asked Sarah.
‘We don’t know for sure,’ Martin replied. ‘But it was her birthday recently, and the cards are still on show. Apart from one from Nathan, none of them is from a single bloke. There are no give-aways in the bedroom either. No Y-fronts in her chest of drawers, no men’s clothes in her wardrobes, no condoms or pill packets in the bedside cabinets.
‘We’re asking the neighbours, of course, but so far there’s no indication that this could have been a lovers’ tiff. All of which takes us back to the possibility of a link to her brother, and the team that he was mixed up with.’
Skinner stood up. ‘Right,’ he boomed. ‘And that’s where we’d better go now . . . off to see him. When he finds out that his sister’s dead, and we can persuade him that one of his associates killed her, maybe he’ll be mad enough to give them up.
‘If not,’ he added, with a meaningful glance at Martin, ‘then you and I will keep him sweating in an interview room until he does, however long that takes.You couldn’t scare him enough, and neither could Mackie. If necessary, it’ll be my shot next.’
He stood up. ‘Sarah, love, you’d better be off to your post-mortem.’ He jerked a thumb in the direction of the back garden. ‘When you get there, see if you can persuade Joe Hutchison to hang on to do another.
