it was. Look, I'll just. . . '
A temporarily rejuvenated Mitchell was bounding up the station steps three at
a time as Evans turned to Lewis: 'Reckon he mis-heard a bit.'
'Just a bit,' said Lewis, with quiet resignation.
^5
chapter thirty-two Should any young or old officer experience incipient
or actual signs of vomiting at the sight of some particularly harrowing scene
of crime the said person should not necessarily attribute such nausea to some
psychological vulnerability, but rather to the virtually universal
reflex-reactions of the upper intestine (The SOCO Handbook, Revised 1999)
barry edwards was another of the SOCO personnel called out that busy
Saturday. In fact, simply because he lived only a short distance away along
the Botley Road, he was the first of the team to arrive at the scene of the
crime. A well-set, dark-haired man in his late twenties, he had a pair of
diffident brown eyes that seemed to some of his colleagues strangely naive,
as if he would ever be surprised by the scenes that would inevitably confront
him in his new career.
His SOCO training had been completed only a few months previously, and now he
was a fully fledged (civilian) officer, employed by the Thames Valley Police.
Furthermore, thus far, he was enjoying his job.
After leaving school, with a comparatively successful performance in the
comparatively undemanding field of GCSE, he had worked as a supermarket
shelf-filler, hospital porter, barman, and ironmonger's shop-assistant,
before finally completing a police recruitment questionnaire and duly
learning of the opportunities in his present profession. He had taken his
chance; and he was enjoying his choice.
He felt quite important sometimes, especially when he dealt
THE REMORSEFUL
DAY
off his own bat with some fairly minor affair, when (as he knew) he was
important. And he'd looked forward to the time when he would be called out
to a big job, to some major incident. Like murder. Like now as he sensed
immediately when he drove his van into the Gloucester Green Car Park. The
full complement of the team would have been called in, and almost certainly
he would witness, for the first time, the operation of those basic principles
preservation of the scene, continuity and non-contamination of evidence which
had guided his training in photography, fingerprinting, forensic labelling,
and the meticulous procedure vital to all in-situ investigations.
Edwards had introduced himself immediately to the plain- clothed Sergeant
Lewis, obviously the man in charge: yet perhaps only temporarily in charge,
since (as Edwards guessed) it would only be a matter of time before some more
senior-ranking officer would put in an appearance -just as he himself was
awaiting Bill Flowers, the senior SOCO, a man who had seen everything in
life. As he, Barry Edwards, hadn't. Not yet. For the moment, however, the
appropriate procedure had been applied, with blue-and-white police ribbon
cordoning off an area containing three cars, noses all to the wall: R
456 LJB;
to its left, a grey H-Reg Citroen; to its right a dark-blue P-Reg Rover the
owner of the latter (just arrived) making a statement to one of two uniformed
PCs summoned from the St Aldate's Station. No effort had as yet been made to
disperse the growing band of curious onlookers who stood in silent, hopeful
expectation of some gruesome discovery. Things were happening, though.
Flowers arrived just before the other two SO COs and soon everything would be
ready, once they got the word from someone. Doubtless the same someone
awaited by Sergeant Lewis, the latter a man with 'under authority' written
all over his honest and slightly worried features.
But there was a frustrating twenty- minute wait before the 'authority' put in
his appearance, stepping from the back of a 147
marked police car with a
