blue, only a shade or two darker than Abbott’s crime-scene suit.
The bedroom was noticeably cooler than the rest of the house. And there was an obvious reason for that — the casement window stood open. A cool breeze blew through the back garden of Bain House, and a few dead leaves had drifted on to the window ledge.
‘So,’ said Kessen. ‘Three shots, you said?’
Abbott stood over the body. ‘Well, two shots hit the victim. The medical examiner says either one of them might have been enough to kill her. Certainly enough to put her on the floor.’
‘So where did the third shot go?’
‘That was a miss. The bullet embedded itself in the bedroom wall there, high up near the ceiling. See it?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll be able to give you an idea of the weapon once the bullets have been recovered.’
‘Time of death?’ said Kessen, without much sign of optimism.
‘Between thirty and forty hours ago, according to the ME. Rigor mortis was almost gone when he examined the victim, but for a bit of residual stiffness in the abdomen.’
‘My God, forty hours?’
‘At the maximum.’
Hitchens looked at his watch. ‘That would put the earliest time of the incident at nine p.m. Saturday. And the latest at seven a.m. Sunday.’
Kessen shook his head. ‘For heaven’s sake, how does a woman get herself shot and then lie dead for nearly two days without anyone noticing? Why didn’t someone somewhere miss her? Why didn’t they get worried when she wasn’t out and about doing all the things she usually did?’
‘The time is just a temperature-based estimate, of course,’ said Abbott. ‘You’ll need some other evidence to pin it down more closely.’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Well, temperature-based methods of calculating time of death are the most prone to error, you know. Newton’s Law of Cooling isn’t the most modern approach.’
Ah, Newton’s Law of Cooling. It was a familiar phrase, one that had stuck in Cooper’s mind from his training. When he first heard of it, he’d pictured some seventeenth-century eccentric sitting under a tree with an apple bouncing off his head. He didn’t know the mathematics behind Isaac Newton’s theory, but he knew it was almost always inaccurate — hence the medical examiners hedging their bets and stretching out time scales like Play- Doh.
Like everyone else, he’d been taught that rigor mortis in a dead body was complete by twelve hours and gone by thirty-six. But later he’d discovered that there were as many differences of opinion as there were experts, and too many factors involved. Time of death should be based on witness reports, not physical evidence. But he hadn’t heard a hint of any witnesses yet.
‘Surely we can send FSU home?’ said Hitchens. ‘Whoever did the shooting will be long gone.’
‘Not until we’ve completed a sweep of the area and done door-to-door in the village,’ said Kessen. ‘For all we know, he might be holed up somewhere nearby.’
‘Yes, understood. It just seems to be making the residents a bit jittery, seeing armed police officers on the street. They’re not used to it around here.’
Kessen shrugged. ‘Point of entry, Wayne?’ he said. ‘On the face of it, this open window looks like the way the assailant came into the house.’
‘Perhaps. But it wasn’t forced — there are no tool marks on the frame. We lifted several latents, though. I should get results on those within the hour.’
‘The first officers to arrive came in through a side window,’ said Hitchens. ‘But they had to smash it themselves, which set off the intruder alarms — Control got a call from a monitoring room somewhere, but we were already on the scene by then. The alarms were still going like crazy when I got here.’
‘Our officers set off the alarms? They weren’t activated by the assailant?’
‘No, sir.’
Kessen walked out on to the landing and looked down the stairs. A SOCO was crouched over something in the hallway.
‘What have you got there?’
‘A video intercom system. It must be connected to the unit on the front gate.’
Hitchens came over to look. ‘I don’t even have a gate at my house, let alone an intercom. I live on one of those open-plan estates. Any bugger can run across my front lawn, or up my drive.’
‘They call that community living,’ said Abbott.
‘I know what I’d call it. So how does that thing work?’
The SOCO picked up the handset. ‘When someone presses the button at the gate, there’s a tiny camera in the unit on the gatepost that shows their image on the screen here.’
‘So the householder can see the postman in the flesh, and know he’s not an impostor.’
‘That’s it.’
Cooper looked down at the body again as the exchange went backwards and forwards around him. Voices echoed strangely in the house, as if it wasn’t fully furnished. Actually, the furniture
He felt uncomfortable for the victim, lying there on the floor. He knew nothing about Rose Shepherd, but he was sure she’d have hated anyone to see her like this. Her grey hair was dishevelled and fell in loose strands across her face. Her mouth had fallen open, and a trail of saliva had dried on her lips. Crime-scene photographs would show up a small rip in the victim’s nightdress and the white, crinkled flesh on the back of her thighs. The flash would cruelly expose the crow’s feet around her eyes, the loose skin at her neck, the beginning of liver spots on the back of her hand where it clutched the rug. Death did nothing for the appearance. But this was the way Miss Shepherd would be immortalized.
Kessen walked back to the bedroom and looked out on to the garden. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said, ‘but there’s quite a bit of money tied up here, isn’t there?’
Abbott nodded. ‘A few hundred pounds for that intercom unit alone, I’d say. Probably double that for the installation of the gates.’
‘So it looks as though the victim really needed to know who was calling on her, doesn’t it?’
‘We’ve got house-to-house under way. But so far, everyone we’ve talked to is in agreement on one thing: Miss Shepherd never got any visitors. Apart from the postman — and even he didn’t get past the gates.’
‘No visitors at all?’
‘So they say.’
‘No. We just haven’t talked to the right people, yet,’ said Kessen.
‘Why?’
‘Well, that can’t be true, can it, Paul? You’re a property owner. What about all those folk who come to your address? The refuse men to collect your wheelie bin, the tanker driver to deliver your central heating fuel, the man who reads your electricity meter? No one can build a moat around their property and keep everyone out. It isn’t possible these days. Life has a way of intruding in all sorts of ways.’
‘Rose Shepherd does seem to have been a very solitary person, though. She lived on her own, and she didn’t mix with the neighbours, by all accounts. No one in Pinfold Lane knows who Miss Shepherd’s next of kin could be, or whether she had a family at all. We found an address book near the phone downstairs, but we can’t see any obvious relatives listed. In fact, the entries seem to be all routine stuff — doctor, dentist, a local garage.’
‘There must be something in the house to give us names. A diary, letters …?’
‘Well, we’re still looking. But it seems odd. There ought to be somewhere obvious for her to keep information like that. Why make us hunt for it?’
‘Try a phone bill. See what numbers she called most often, who was on her Family and Friends list.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How long had she lived here? Do we know that?’
‘The neighbours say about a year. Miss Shepherd moved in on her own, with no sign of a husband or
