Newman’s patience snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake, just wait, Dryden. Patience. It’s a virtue. Look it up.’
The press pack, fired up by mugs of Nescafe, took their places. In the mid-morning heat there was indeed a whiff of something unwashed, something, Dryden noticed with satisfaction, that liked a drink. He felt a twinge of admiration for his trade.
Newman flicked open a manila folder. Someone farted loudly and the press giggled. Newman adjusted his reading glasses and wished, with an almost religious intensity, that he was in the metaphorical bird-hide of his retirement, removed to a world where communication was not only inessential, but a liability.
‘The body of a white male was found last night in a Second World War pillbox about half a mile from this church. He was manacled to the wall.’
‘We can read the papers. Tell us something we don’t know.’ It was Mike Yarr. The PA needed fresh information to wire to its customers, mainly evening newspapers with first editions which went to press before noon. But for now Yarr was gyrating a pencil in his ear. ‘Like an ID.’
‘Enquiries are continuing into the identity of the victim. We expect a positive ID this afternoon. I can tell you he appears to be between forty and fifty years of age. Now, if I may continue…’ There was some irritable shifting in chairs and some dark looks at Dryden. Most of the press pack suspected he knew more than he’d given away in his copy for the dailies – they feared being scooped again, and this time on a story they’d been sent to cover.
Newman pressed on. ‘I am prepared to release details of this man’s death but one aspect must remain under embargo until you are otherwise directed to print it. Agreed?’
This was standard procedure in murder cases. The police often withheld details in order to weed out cranks who rang up to confess to the killing. Dryden had not been told to keep anything out of his reports except his own name – and the fact that an empty glass had been found at the scene. So whatever Newman had to say it had to be something which the pathologist had found, or the scene of crime team. The rest of the press pack nodded wearily. ‘Bound to be the best bit,’ said Yarr, yawning and revealing a sliver of yellow-green cabbage caught between yellow incisors.
‘Fine,’ said Newman. ‘The cause of death is to be ascertained, but at the moment we are working on the theory that he was poisoned.’
That did it. Silence.
‘With?’ asked Dryden, surprised. The pathologist at the scene had guessed he died of thirst.
Newman flicked through some notes. ‘Samples are at the lab but the stomach contained benomyl, carbendazim, and thiophanate-methyl. Fungicidal weedkiller to you lot. But this wasn’t the garden variety. Industrial strength. Usually sold for crop spraying.’
Mike Yarr, a typical wireman, took a perfect note in 200-wpm Pitman shorthand. He weighed eight stone soaking wet and drank Guinness in buckets. His eyes were marbled like a pickled egg. ‘And he drank it, did he?’ he asked.
‘Yup,’ said Newman, still reading. ‘Which was hardly surprising, given his condition.’
‘Which was?’ asked Dryden, remembering the empty pint glass on the shelf below the pillbox window.
‘Severely dehydrated,’ said Newman. ‘The pathologist who got to him first on site reckoned he hadn’t had any fluid for at least six days. It was eighty-two degrees in the box at two o’clock this morning. In the day – a hundred and twenty, possibly more. In the pathologist’s words, the victim’s body tissue was about as moist as a Jacob’s cracker.’
‘But it didn’t kill him?’ asked Joey Forward. Joey was scratching his beer belly, his fingernails screeching on the white nylon shirt.
‘No. But it would have. I won’t go into the specific details, but let’s say it would have been a race between gagging on his own swollen tongue or drowning in his own stomach juices. His last meal had been taken even longer ago than his last drink. Two sausages with beans: pork.’
Several full english breakfasts rearranged themselves in the room. There was another fart, but this time nobody laughed.
‘When was his last drink – the poison cocktail – taken?’ It was Mike Yarr again.
‘About twenty-four hours before his body was found. Pathologist at the scene believed he would have died within an hour of drinking the poison. But in his case it would have been quite a long hour.’
‘And the body – found by a farmer it says ’ere,’ said Yarr, now ostentatiously reading a copy of the
‘Those details we are withholding – for the time being – while investigations continue.’
The press corps examined Dryden, and he examined a wine gum he’d found in his pocket.
‘Further points of interest – and you can use all this, gentlemen. The victim was naked above the waist but fragments of clothes were found amongst ashes in the pillbox.’
‘What kinda clothes?’ said Forward.
‘White linen. With traces of animal fat. Tomato ketchup.’
‘Suggesting?’ said Yarr.
‘Anything you like. Now. There was also a lot of loose change on the floor, more than a tenner’s worth in coppers and silver.’
Newman pinned a black and white photograph to the incident room board. It showed a narrow-bladed seven- inch knife sticking horizontally out of a wooden door jamb. The hilt was gilded and decorated with raised, geometrical patterns.
‘And this. No traces of blood and no knife wounds on the victim. The designs are Arabic.’
‘Fingerprints?’ said a voice from the back.
Newman thought for a second. ‘Yes. Partial prints. We’re putting them through the computer now. I’ll keep you
