The most vexing question was how anyone could have gained access to the house without Sam and Scott noticing. Leaving Sarah to continue her work in the master bedroom and Vik to examine the break-in at the back door, Bridget made her way back inside the house. She climbed the stairs to a guest bedroom that overlooked the rear garden. If, as Sam and Scott swore, the intruder hadn’t gained entry to the house from the front, then logically they must have approached from behind.
The large garden behind the house was mostly laid to lawn with neatly clipped bushes along both sides. It looked like the sort of place where nature was never allowed to get the upper hand, unlike Bridget’s own tiny garden which had long since turned into a wildlife habitat. She wouldn’t have been surprised if several endangered species had made it their home.
A line of paving stones led across the grass to a door in the tall brick wall that surrounded the garden. From here, it looked as if the door led out onto a narrow lane at the back. Sam and Scott had sworn that the door was locked both before and after the murder. Since the glass in the kitchen door had been broken to gain entry to the house, it was unlikely that the intruder had a key for the garden door. Bridget tried to estimate the height of the wall. Could someone have climbed over it? Bridget could never have managed it herself, but she supposed it was just about possible for someone who was taller and fitter than she was. She went downstairs and put the idea to Vik.
‘Let’s take a closer look, shall we?’ he suggested.
They went outside together, Bridget following him along the line of paving stones that led to the end of the garden. The air was still chilly, and early morning dew glistened on the grass to either side. The wall that enclosed the area stood well over six feet tall and was topped with a layer of moss and lichen.
‘If someone had scaled a wall of that height,’ said Vik, ‘you’d expect to find signs of disturbance – footprints in the soil where they jumped down, or the marks from a ladder – especially when the ground is soft like it is today. There’s been a lot of rain recently. But there’s nothing out of the ordinary as far as I can see.’ He crouched down, examining the ground in front of the back wall. ‘Unless they jumped with cat-like accuracy and landed on the paving stone right in front of the gate.’ He stepped back and viewed the top of the wall above the gate where the moss was at its thickest. ‘It doesn’t look as if anyone has disturbed that part of the wall, but I’ll get someone to climb up with a ladder and take a closer look.’
‘It was just an idea,’ said Bridget. ‘They must have reached the kitchen door somehow.’
‘From a neighbouring property?’ suggested Vik.
‘It’s possible,’ said Bridget, but the walls that separated the garden from the houses either side were just as tall as the rear wall.
She and Vik walked around the perimeter of the garden, checking the ground carefully for tell-tale marks, but at the end of their perambulations, Vik stopped and shook his head. ‘No one has climbed over these walls in the past few days.’
‘Could someone have been hiding in the garden shed?’ asked Bridget. They walked over to the wooden structure, but the door was securely padlocked and when Bridget peered through the window, she saw that there was barely enough room for the lawnmower and other gardening equipment, never mind for someone to hide.
‘I guess not,’ said Vik.
Still puzzling about how the intruder had gained access to the house, Bridget followed him back inside. Since Vik had no answers for her, she returned upstairs, hoping that Sarah Walker would have some by now. When she poked her head around the door to the master bedroom, she found the medical examiner kneeling by the bed, peering closely at Diane Gilbert’s exposed torso. Sarah must have heard her enter, because without turning she said, ‘Come and take a look at this.’
The room still smelled of Diane Gilbert’s rather cloying perfume, lingering on even after her death. The scent brought the woman vividly back to life and made it hard to think of the body on the bed as no longer living.
Sarah pointed to a spot just below the victim’s left breast. ‘Can you see that?’
Bridget edged closer, stooping to examine the body. A tiny red dot was visible on the exposed skin. ‘It looks like a pinprick.’
‘Not a pin precisely,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s a mark from a hypodermic needle.’
‘A needle? Could this be what killed her?’
‘We’ll need a full toxicology report. But it’s possible that she was given a lethal injection. I can’t find anything else wrong with her. There are no stab wounds or strangulation marks, no bruising or signs of a struggle. I can’t rule out natural causes, but for a woman of her age she’s in very good shape. At least she was until she died. Roy will get to the bottom of it, I’ve no doubt.’ She turned away from the corpse and began to peel off her surgical gloves.
A lethal injection, if that really was how Diane was murdered, raised all kinds of worrying possibilities. But Bridget’s interest was also aroused by Sarah’s casual reference to the senior pathologist, Dr Roy Andrews, by his first name, rather than by title and surname. She knew that Sarah and Roy had spent Christmas Day together, and Sarah had divulged the fact that
