Henry inspected each item in the clear plastic bags, held up the wedding ring and peered closely to see if it was inscribed. He saw ‘ To J ’ next to a tiny love heart etched inside the ring.
‘Jennifer,’ he thought.
Another ring also had an inscription. This looked like an eternity ring with ‘ J ’ and ‘ H ’ inscribed and intertwined by another heart.
‘Jennifer and Harry,’ he thought, a great detective’s mind at work, piecing all the clues together.
There were no markings on any of the other pieces of jewellery, so he turned his attention to the body, looking but not touching. He peered closely at the crown of her skull and saw a deep cut which formed a parting in her hair, the injury Professor Baines had already noted. Henry raised his eyes and saw her body was not showing any signs of other wounds, but the skin was what he described as ‘curdled’ after being in the water for so long, and smelled like a blocked drain. There was nothing more he could tell, but he gave her a last glance and thought what a shame it was to have died so early. The thought made him shudder for a moment. The fairly recent death of his wife, Kate, zipped through his mind.
He swallowed back his emotion and packed it away in a separate brain compartment, then turned to the bags into which the dead woman’s clothing had been placed.
As the constable had recorded it, he had also gone through the pockets and found nothing.
Henry gave each piece a quick squeeze and was satisfied: nothing.
‘Should I wash her down?’ the technician asked brightly.
‘No, let’s wait until the pathologist has had a look first… he’s somewhere, not far away.’ At which point Baines entered the mortuary, having parked his beloved E-type at the far end of the car park and purposely across two bays to discourage others from pulling up too close. He was already removing his jacket and replacing it with a green overall, walking across to the body and circling it for the close visual inspection. He was recording his observations via the mike fitted to his ear.
Henry watched and listened, although the man’s voice was fairly quiet, and eventually Baines turned to him.
‘Nothing of real note, certainly nothing I wouldn’t expect to see on someone who has drowned in such circumstances.’
Henry nodded. He was glad this was getting a little further away from him, still hoping it would turn out to be a tragic but ultimately run-of-the-mill death that the uniformed branch could deal with. Nothing to bother him.
Baines moved to the woman’s head, placed a hand carefully under her neck and tilted it backwards, using his hand as a fulcrum. Her mouth sagged slackly open. With his other hand he pulled her jaw wider and looked inside, pulling her cheeks wide and inspecting her teeth.
‘Nice set,’ he commented. Then frowned. Something caught his eye, so he tilted her head slightly to the right to get the light working better for him and said, ‘Fancy.’
‘Fancy what?’ Henry said.
Baines shrugged. ‘Gold filling in a pre-molar.’
‘And?’ Henry shook his head.
‘And… don’t know yet, maybe nothing,’ Baines said, but Henry could see the man’s mind flicking through its internal Rolodex.
‘Anything for me?’ Henry said.
‘Hard to say yet… need a closer look.’
Henry pouted with disappointment. He was going to say something, but his words were cut short when the muzzle of a gun was screwed painfully into the back of his neck at the point where his skull balanced on his spinal column.
The gun was removed. The man holding the weapon backed off, keeping it aimed at Henry, who turned slightly and saw there were two of them, both armed, having entered the mortuary through the public entrance which should have been locked.
They arced their guns threateningly across the four people in this section of the mortuary — Henry, Baines, the PC and the technician.
The gun that had been jammed into Henry’s skin was a large-calibre pistol of some sort; the other gun was a black, ugly looking machine-pistol, very deadly in this enclosed space, capable, with one short burst, of cutting them all down.
The men were dressed in black jeans, black zip-tops, trainers and balaclava masks, with latex gloves on their hands. Henry thought there was something familiar about them.
‘What the…? Henry started to utter angrily. He’d not yet had the chance to get frightened.
But then he wished he hadn’t opened his mouth.
The man with the handgun, a big, heavy-framed guy, stepped quickly forwards and slammed the pistol across his face like he was doing a backhand smash in tennis.
Henry’s head jerked sideways, his whole face distorted with the strength of the impact. His jaw crunched, his teeth catching the inside of the mouth. He staggered with a ‘Ungh’ noise and pain seared diagonally across his cranium like a knitting needle had been hammered into him. His knees buckled as all communication between brain and spine was disconnected. He crumpled over, even though he tried not to.
The next moments were just hazy and confusing for him, as though he was drowning in dish water. Then a dreamy sensation of being dragged across the tiled floor, his cheek stretching, a trail of blood dribbling from his mouth. He heard shouting, a scream of agony, the voices unrecognizable and distorted, then nothing but blackness as he passed out.
Then his eyes flickered open. He knew instinctively he had not been out for long. His brain clicked into gear as he found himself lying on his side in the recovery position, this time on a carpeted floor. He could feel the weave of the carpet against his cheek. And taste blood in his mouth.
He didn’t move. Tried to work out what was happening, but for the moment that conundrum was beyond him, even though his mind was functioning. He moved his face slightly and looked up with one eye into the concerned face of Professor Baines kneeling down over him.
‘Henry, old man, are you OK?’
Henry squinted and moved his mouth, the salt-taste of his own blood on his tongue. He tried to speak, but could not manage the words. Instead he manoeuvred himself onto his hands and knees. His head drooped between his arms and he spluttered blood out from his lips, the whole left hand side of his face creased with pain.
‘What happened?’ he asked fuzzily.
‘They locked us in here at gunpoint,’ Baines said.
Henry raised his head painfully and looked around. ‘Where’s here?’ He was having a bit of trouble focusing.
‘The viewing room. They locked it from the outside so we couldn’t get out.’
Henry twisted carefully around, but his elbows gave way and he thumped arse-down on the floor with a groan. Exhaling carefully, he moved his head and tried to make sense of where he was and who was with him. Baines knelt by him, there was the uniformed PC, the mortuary technician and two more mortuary employees, a man and a woman. Henry’s eyes descended on the constable for an answer.
‘They ripped my PR off,’ he blurted, but held up his mobile phone. ‘I called it in… backup’s on the way.’
‘Good lad. Anybody else hurt?’ Henry’s eyes were beginning to work a little better now and he checked the terrified faces of the mortuary staff. He saw a woman tending to the mortuary technician sitting on one of the chairs, dabbing something on his eyes.
‘They sprayed something into the tech’s eyes,’ Baines said ‘CS spray, I’d guess. His eyes are streaming, but he looks like he’ll be OK.’
They had been herded (or in Henry’s case, dragged) into and locked in the viewing room. This was the room to which relatives of deceased persons were brought to either view a body in a casket in the room itself, or to look through a large curtained window on the other side of which was an anteroom where trolleys could be pushed, the curtains drawn back and they could see through the glass. It all depended on the circumstances and the state of the body.
Henry rattled the door handle.
Correct, it was locked from the other side by twisting an inset bolt which could be released from this side if they’d had a big, flat-bladed screwdriver. Like being locked in a toilet cubicle.
