‘Sorry?’
‘The author’s thoughts were in my head, and I didn’t want them there.’
‘Diane, that wasn’t what I meant either.’
‘So I burned it.’
‘What? You burned a book?’ Cooper was shocked. He wanted to ask her what book it was, but he was worried he might be even more shocked if she told him.
‘You’re right, though,’ said Fry. Till check with the prison
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library what Quinn liked to read when he was inside. Maybe he let some kind of poison into his mind.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So what are you doing this afternoon, Ben?’
‘We had a call from an outdoor equipment shop in Hathersage. One of the staff remembers serving someone who answers Quinn’s description. Then I’m going to drop by the railway station up there, on the chance someone might have seen him catching a train when he left his mother’s.’
‘Are you taking Gavin with you?’
‘Unless you need him.’
‘No, that’s fine.’ Fry tapped the file, which Cooper had almost forgotten. ‘Well, I thought you might want to see this before you go. Then you can’t say I don’t keep you up to date.’
‘What is it?’
‘The postmortem report on Rebecca Lowe. Mrs van Door estimates that the victim had died between an hour and two hours before she was found by her sister at eleven thirty that night. She was killed by multiple knife wounds, as we know. The problem is the weapon.’
‘Not a kitchen knife, then?’
‘Oh, yes. But not one that we’ve found in the house.’ Fry slipped a photograph out of the file. ‘You remember me mentioning the knives at the scene?’
‘Mrs Lowe had a whole block full of them in her kitchen.’
‘Yes. Decent stuff, too. Henckels Professional S range, according to one of the suppliers in town. Stainless-steel blades. Kept in good condition, they’re as sharp as hell. And these were almost new.’
Cooper looked at the photo. Taken by one of the SOCOs, it showed a section of the floor in Rebecca Lowe’s kitchen at Parson’s Croft. The victim’s left leg and hip were just visible on the edge of the picture, and the blood spatter spread most of the way from her body to the kitchen units. Lying on the
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tiles were several items that Cooper hadn’t noticed when he was in the house, because he’d been too busy looking at the body and the blood.
The wooden block itself is here, on the floor near the end unit,’ said Fry. ‘Dawn Cottrill says it usually stood on the work surface there, or on the window ledge behind it, depending on whether Rebecca had been using the knives. It would have been near enough to the door of the utility room for somebody to make a quick grab at it as he came through.’
Cooper could see five or six black-handled knives of various sizes lying on the floor. They were all neatly labelled by the crime scene examiners, and all of them had traces of blood visible on their stainless-steel blades.
‘So we reckon he grabbed one knife from the block, sending the rest flying in his hurry,’ said Cooper.
‘The position of the block and the knives is consistent with that theory.’ Fry sniffed again and tried to clear her throat. ‘There’s a close-up of the block here.’
‘It still has a knife in it.’
‘It’s a ten-centimetre paring knife - the smallest and lightest item in the set. It wasn’t thrown clear of the block, as the others were.’
‘How many pieces in the set?’
‘Seven.’ Fry pointed at the main picture again. ‘Here’s a twenty-centimetre cook’s knife, and near it a bread knife the same length. There’s a smaller sandwich knife over here, a sharpening steel under the edge of one of the units. And just by the victim’s foot, where you can hardly make it out, there’s a pair of kitchen scissors. As you can see, they all have bloodstains on them, except the paring knife.’
‘So which of them was the murder weapon?’ asked Cooper.
‘None of them. At the PM, they tried all the blades to get a match with the victim’s wounds. There was no fit.’
Cooper looked up. ‘One piece of the set is missing, of course.’
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‘Ah. So you did arithmetic at school, as well as reading.’
‘That means he took the murder weapon away with him.’
‘It would be the sensible thing to do, especially if he wasn’t wearing gloves when he grabbed it.’ Fry consulted the report again. ‘The seventh item in a set of this kind would be a slicing knife. The same length as the bread knife and the cook’s knife, but with the perfect blade for the job, I guess.’
‘In fact, it’s the one you’d choose if you knew what you were going for, rather than just grabbing the first thing that came to hand.’
Fry wiped her nose again. ‘Good point, Ben. I suppose you’re thinking that he must have known what he was doing and planned which knife he was going to use in advance. Then he knocked the rest over to make it look like an impulse grab. Clever, eh?’
Cooper was starting to feel he should have made more of an effort to escape from the office before she
