‘What does it say?’ Wendy asked.
‘I’ll send you a photo. You can figure it out. We’ll remove the body in the next hour and take it for autopsy. I’ll need the area secured, and we’ll be back tomorrow morning to look through the place, see if we can follow the shoeprint, not confident that we can.’
It was close to two in the morning, and the traffic on Kilburn Lane had reduced. Across the road, Wendy saw Rose getting into the front seat of her father’s Jaguar, Brad getting into the back seat. Rose was correct that her father was a good man. The folly of youth, she thought, only to be thrust front and centre into a murder investigation. Whoever it was that they had seen, he had to be regarded as dangerous, and she hoped the two young lovers weren’t to become more inextricably involved.
Wendy remembered a time long ago in Yorkshire, up on the moors. She had been fourteen at the time, well developed for her age, and precocious. It had been her and a fifteen-year-old boy from the next farm and a haystack. They’d only been heavy petting, not that her father understood when he caught the two of them. She didn’t sit down for two days afterwards; the boy, she couldn’t remember his name now, had taken his punishment like a man, attempted to defend her honour. However, it didn’t stop her father laying him out cold with a punch in the stomach and a fist, hardened by manual farm labour, in the face.
Times had changed for the better. Tim Winston, upset and disappointed by his daughter, angry with the young Brad, could at least act rationally and treat the two teenagers with the civility and sensitivity required.
Chapter 3
The crime scene yielded little more. The CSIs went through the place extensively, and even though the shoeprints found alongside the body were confirmed with a high degree of probability as those of the murderer, no more were found on the footpath that cut across from Harrow Road to Kilburn Lane.
Pathology confirmed certain facts about the dead woman, including agreeing with Gordon Windsor about her age. It was also confirmed that she was not a drug addict and in good health. No sign of sexual activity at the time of her death, which precluded sex as a motive. A notice had been placed at both entrances of the path that Brad and Rose had traversed, with officers questioning those passing by – the cemetery was closed to pedestrian traffic – as to whether they had walked through in the last couple of days, and if they had seen anything suspicious, anyone loitering, in particular in the vicinity of the grave that the woman had died on.
The only piece of luck to come from the questioning was that one man confirmed he had walked through at 9.36 p.m. and had seen nothing. The time had been checked against the bus he had alighted from, found from the bus company to be on schedule, and confirmed that the bus stop was next to the Kilburn Lane entrance. The man, a salesman in a menswear shop on Oxford Street, had admitted to having had a few drinks after work and feeling slightly tipsy, but was adamant he had seen nothing, although he would have if there had been any noise, or anyone hanging back in the shadows. A timid man, Larry thought, when he was interviewed at Challis Street later in the day, the sort of man who’d jump out of his skin if someone said boo to him. However, his testimony was regarded as sound, which narrowed the stabbing of the woman to between 9.38 p.m. and 10.14 p.m., the latter time based on Rose arriving two minutes late at Harrow Road, and the time it took to walk through the park.
Pathology agreed with the time of death, more accurate than usual, but it did not help with who had murdered the woman. She was marginally overweight, with poor muscle tone which indicated little exercise, white, presumed to be English, but with the recent wave of new arrivals in the country, that couldn’t be stated with more than a ninety per cent accuracy. The clothes she wore, a blue skirt, a white top, sandals on her feet, could all have been bought in a hundred high street stores in London, as well as on the continent. It was an avenue of enquiry to follow up on, and a couple of uniforms were given the task: an eager policewoman in her early twenties and an unattractive policeman in his thirties who Wendy didn’t like, believing the man had a chip on his shoulder and an unhealthy attitude to women, on account of his condescending manner when she had instructed the two police constables on what they were looking for, and how to go about the questioning.
‘We might get a quicker result if we go online,’ Constable Kate Baxter suggested before she and Constable Barry Ecclestone walked out of the door. Ecclestone, judging by his face, Wendy could see, was not pleased to be held back in the office for any longer than necessary. He was a slovenly man who would just do his duty, Wendy surmised, never rising above the melee, not amounting to much in life and in the London Metropolitan Police; definitely not a man for Homicide.
Wendy left the two of them to it, and they went to the back of the office, found themselves a couple of desks. Kate Baxter opened up a laptop, Ecclestone checked out the coffee machine and what he could buy from a vending machine in the hallway outside.
What was of more interest than
