Isaac knew that without an identity they were going nowhere. He hoped the team out at Regent’s Canal knew that. The visit that morning had been the first time he had been there for some years. As a child, he had walked with his parents from Camden along the towpath, and enjoyed lunch at the Waterside Café, no more than fifteen feet from the murder scene.
***
The early morning search at the furthest point on the Delamere Terrace side of the canal had revealed nothing of interest. The discarded cigarette they had found, Turkish in origin, had interested Gordon Windsor at first, with its connotations of a crime syndicate, but it had soon been discounted when the owner of one of the houseboats admitted to throwing the cigarette end out on the towpath, rather than in a rubbish bin. ‘It’s my wife. She can’t stand the smell of it,’ he said. ‘I bought it on holiday in Istanbul.’
The team on the Bloomfield Street side found nothing.
Constable Jenny Arnett, a newcomer at Challis Street, newly trained and still young and enthusiastic, not jaundiced as some of the others after previous searches on a cold morning, made the first discovery. ‘There’s blood here,’ she shouted.
Gordon Windsor arrived within two minutes. The area next to the towpath was quickly sealed off, even to the other police in the area.
Windsor brought up his trained investigating officers. The blood, just visible on the top of the brickwork lining the edge of the canal bank, looked recent, but until it had been checked, it was circumstantial.
‘It’s a good place to conceal a crime, under a bridge’ Larry Hill, Isaac’s DI, said.
‘Even so,’ Windsor reminded him, ‘they would have had to walk up to here, either from the entrance of the Warwick Crescent side of the bridge or by the gate next to the Canal and the River Trust’s offices on Delamere Terrace.’
With a confirmed possibility, all of the police on that side of the canal removed themselves from the immediate vicinity and reassembled downstream of the murder scene. From there they continued searching, although it was no longer blood that interested them, but anything that may have been discarded or lost by those disposing of the body.
After so many years as a crime scene examiner, Gordon Windsor was confident that what had been discovered was relevant and would be tied in to the body.
Grant Meston, one of Windsor’s team, knelt down by the blood. The temperature under the bridge was still markedly colder than outside where the sun had briefly deemed itself worthy to show through the clouds. ‘I can take a sample first, and if I’m careful, I can remove the brick and take it back to the laboratory,’ Meston said.
Gordon Ashburton, arriving at work to find the Canal and River Trust building surrounded by policemen, watched horrified as part of his precious canal was removed.
‘Don’t worry,’ Larry Hill said. ‘You’ll get it back when we’re finished with it.’
With the blood sample removed, Grant Meston and Gordon Windsor looked for further traces of blood. Further down towards the Waterside Café, they found another bloodstain on the metal railing on the footpath leading up to Westbrook Terrace Road. The weather was turning nasty, and rain was in the air; the worst possible scenario for the work still to be completed.
Several crime scene tents, already erected, were brought down to the immediate area and secured in position. Some of the houseboat owners, blocked from the most direct entry to their boats, complained. They had tried to reason with Larry, but he was resolute, and he could not allow them to traverse an area of investigation. One of the owners, an angry man, said that he would talk to his local member of parliament, but Larry knew it was just bluff. And besides, the inconvenience would not last for more than a few days.
Meston, assisted by Rose Denning, whom Larry knew from a previous case, methodically worked his way back from under the bridge where the first blood sample had been taken and down towards the Waterside Café, before turning up the walkway to the bridge. The blood sample on the metal railing at the bottom of the walkway had already been taken. Larry, at first enamoured by the idyllic lifestyle that living on the water represented, realised that come winter when the water was cold and the towpath was slippery, or on rare occasions was covered in snow, it would not be so agreeable. He admitted that his small semi-detached, basic as it was, without the romanticism of a houseboat, represented normalcy, sometimes boring normalcy. However, it was what he wanted; apart from his wife’s faddish diets, which tested his resolve sometimes.
After three hours of painstakingly checking the area, Grant Meston and Rose had to admit that no more evidence would be found.
However, at 2 a.m. or thereabouts in the morning, a person carrying a heavy bag down the path and then under the bridge could possibly have been seen by someone. Wendy knew it was back to knocking on doors.
Chapter 3
Confirmation had been received from Forensics: the blood retrieved at the site was from the body.
‘It was early when the body was dumped. It must have been well wrapped as the blood discovered at the two locations was minimal,’ Isaac said.
‘But we found no sign of wrapping where the body was placed in the water,’ Larry said.
‘Which means they were careful in holding the body and the packaging over the water.’
‘The divers?’ Wendy asked.
‘They’re scouring the canal floor looking for anything, but the visibility is virtually zero, and the water’s cold.’
‘Could the packaging still be in the water?’
