Killing by Colours Read online

  ‘I was on my way to my club when my partner for this afternoon rang to say he had been held up in the car park of the Red Dragon Centre because the police were crawling all over the place. Apparently even before he and his family left the area there was an announcement on a local radio station that the body of a woman had been found stabbed in one of the cars in that very car park. Is that right, and if so why haven’t I been informed?’

  Martin’s first thought was to wonder who had leaked the information to the media. He had already given a brief statement but it had only stated that the body of a woman had been found and that the police were treating her death as suspicious. Quite deliberately he had not mentioned the cause of death.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he began. ‘Yes, it is true that we are investigating the murder of a woman probably between nine and nine thirty this morning – and in exactly the place you mentioned.’

  Martin didn’t bother to explain why he had not notified the super because he knew from past experience that he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, and on this occasion he had not wanted it known that he had taken over the case from DI Hall.

  ‘I can’t tell you much at the moment other than that the victim was a retired teacher and that she was stabbed twice. The PM has already been done and the first full briefing on the case is set for 4.30. Do you want me to update you after that, as it’s likely to be when you’re still on the golf course?’

  Superintendent Bryant looked horrified. ‘Mobile phones are frowned upon during the round and we’re already forced to tee off at a later time because of the delay, so I’d rather not be disturbed again. Just let me know what’s being released to the press and anything else can wait until Monday.’

  With that he left Martin’s office, and Martin sat wondering what the visit had been all about. A simple phone call would have been sufficient but he had better things to do than second-guess his senior officer. He opened his desk drawer and took out a pencil and a couple of blank sheets of paper that would help focus his mind on the facts of the case ahead of addressing the team.

  The victim had been a teacher, and even in today’s society teachers had a degree of respect – and the murder of any public servant always grabbed the interest of the media. Martin knew that the horror of a single woman being murdered in a busy public car park in broad daylight would strike a note of terror with the general public.

  He also had to consider the personal element that the poem had thrown up, and although it worried him slightly he was fully committed to solving this case. He wished he could come up with some ideas regarding why the poem had been sent to him, and what the last couple of lines were all about. In preparation for the briefing he wrote down everything that came into his head and managed to cobble together four pages of organised scribble.

  About ten minutes before the briefing was due to start he got a phone call from Charlie. She had received the CCTV tapes from the Red Dragon Centre and had transferred the images to her computer. What she had seen had caused her to contact Martin immediately, and within minutes he had joined her to watch some of the most chilling CCTV evidence he had ever seen.

  Chapter Three

  CCTV murder

  It was a few minutes before 4.30 and the room was buzzing. Placing his papers on the table at the front Martin listened to the opinions that were being voiced about the killing and the way in which a normal Saturday had, for hundreds of ordinary people, turned into an occasion they would never forget. He heard some of the uniformed police officers relating stories of the abuse they had taken from drivers, who were unaware of the crime that had been committed and just angry at the disruption to their day.

  Martin missed Matt, and knew that if his usual sidekick had been around they would by now have had a session of bouncing ideas to and fro and possibly come up with a few more ideas than Martin had done alone. His temporary DS and the recently appointed DC Cook-Watts had returned from their visit to the victim’s house and were deep in conversation.

  Alex was leaning over one of the computers and advising Charlie on the order in which he wanted scenes of the crime presented and she was explaining that Prof. Moore’s images would need to be first because he had to get away early.

  At the mention of the professor’s name Martin looked around and realised that their esteemed friend was not there, but as it was now exactly 4.30 Martin got to his feet to bring the meeting to order.

  Talk about being upstaged! The room fell into immediate silence but it had nothing to do with Martin’s leadership skills and everything to do with the person who had just made a grand entrance.

  The professor’s hair was only slightly less dishevelled than usual and the familiar half-rimmed glasses were still perched on the end of his nose but apart from that there was a complete transformation. Shiny, black leather shoes replaced his usual open-toed sandals. The much loved baggy khaki trousers had been substituted by immaculately pressed, black fine woollen ones with a black silk stripe that matched the material on the lapels of his jacket. Under the jacket the professor wore a brilliant white dress shirt and a perfectly knotted deep burgundy bow tie that matched the colour of his cummerbund. The final touches came in the form of a pair of thick, square gold cufflinks and the overall effect was certainly a showstopper.

  Martin had no control over the situation as the room erupted with spontaneous applause and comments, such as ‘he scrubs up well’ and ‘would hardly recognise him,’ followed the professor as he made his way to the front of the room. ‘OK, the show is over.’ Prof spoke in his usual miserable way, so no change there. ‘I need to be away in thirty minutes, so may we get started?’

  The question was directed at Martin, and although the voice had been the one of the miserable old git they all loved to hate, Martin had spotted a twinkle in the professor’s eyes and knew that he had enjoyed his entrance and the resulting response.

  Martin held up his hand and this time the audience responded to the DCI’s cue and there was silence. ‘I suggest that DS Cotter gives us the background to today’s events and then, as Professor Moore has to leave by five o’clock, we go straight into the results of the post mortem.’

  DS Cotter got to his feet and outlined the details of the 999 call and the subsequent response. Nothing he said caused Martin to add anything to what he had already written on the whiteboard, but it did ensure that everyone was up to speed on the precise facts that were known up to that point.

  Martin picked up from where DS Cotter had left off but spoke only briefly to inform every one of the identity of the victim. ‘Before I arrived for this meeting I spoke briefly to a Mr Danny Lloyd, who had just identified the body as his neighbour, Miss Rossiter, a retired school teacher. DS Cotter will tell us more about her later, but for now it’s over to Professor Moore to tell us what he has found.’

  Instead of immediately enthralling the audience, as he usually did, with the precise details of his forensic examination, the Prof turned to Martin and asked about the poem that was written on one of the smaller whiteboards. Martin briefly explained the origin of the poetry, and to the wider audience he added that they would go into it in more detail later.

  ‘It’s a pity I have to rush off,’ said Prof Moore. ‘I would have enjoyed watching you tease out that puzzle – but maybe on Monday you could give me an update.’

  Martin nodded and the first post-mortem image appeared on the large whiteboard. For the next twenty minutes the room was quiet as the professor gave a detailed account of his findings.

  ‘First thing to say is that the woman, who we now know to be Miss Rossiter, had very likely reached her three score years and ten, and if her life had not been cruelly ended in this way she could well have gone on to the day of receiving her telegram from the Queen. She was five feet seven inches tall and weighed one hundred and thirty-six pounds, and for those of you into the metric system that’s 1.7 metres and 61.7 kilograms respectively.

  ‘She looked after herself and I doubt if she
has ever smoked or had more than the occasional glass of alcoholic drink in her life. Prior to the stabbings all her major organs were in very good shape and I found no sign of any abnormal pathology anywhere. It is obvious that she had had a hysterectomy, but not recently and I would put the time of surgery at considerably more than twenty years ago, so possibly around the time of her menopause.

  ‘Miss Rossiter had the hands and nails of someone who has done very little in the way of manual work. She had a ‘port wine stain’ birthmark at the top of her right arm but I doubt if many people even knew of its existence, and the only other thing to mention is that although she had several well-cared for fillings most of her teeth were perfect and they were certainly all her own.

  ‘So as you can deduce when this lady left her home this morning she was fit and well and so now I will go on to show you the damage done by her murderer.’

  The Professor nodded in Charlie’s direction and she hit one of the buttons at her fingertips and an image of Miss Rossiter filled the whiteboard. This image was not of the healthy mature woman just described by the Prof., but of a pale, lifeless body covered in a white mortuary sheet with just the head, neck, and shoulders visible.

  The Professor continued. ‘As you can see, there is a gaping hole at the side of her neck, towards the back, and I believe that we are looking at the second stab wound.’

  The next image showed the rest of the body with the sheet folded back to the top of the pubic bone and slowly zoomed in on an abdominal wound that looked lethal. ‘This, I believe, is the first stab wound inflicted by the killer and it is what killed her. I have had the opportunity to see some of the CCTV footage that you will be viewing later and it confirms what I believe happened.’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Phelps will take you through the possible reasons why this woman would have opened her car door to a man with a knife but I can tell you that within seconds of her doing so she was dead. A long sharp knife was plunged into the abdomen just beneath her ribs and followed exactly the correct upward direction to make contact with some important blood vessels to the right side and immediately below her heart.

  ‘The inferior vena cava is the large vein in this area and its purpose is to carry de-oxygenated blood from the lower half of the body into the right atrium. As I’m sure you all know the heart is made up of four chambers and the right atrium is the one that is situated above the right ventricle. In this case our killer either knew exactly what he was doing or was extremely lucky, as his knife went through the large vein and into the right ventricle.’

  He asked Charlie to zoom in still further so that the damage to the internal organs could be witnessed clearly.

  ‘Would that have killed her instantly?’ asked DS Cotter.

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t have had time to get her parking ticket, that’s for sure, and my guess is that she would have immediately lost consciousness and been dead within a minute.’

  With another nod towards Charlie the images returned to the neck wound. ‘That’s why I don’t really understand this second stab wound. I didn’t need to scientifically work out which order the wounds were inflicted because as you will see, when you are presented with an actual video of the murder, my forensic science genius was surplus to requirements.’

  ‘The only thing I can add is that both incisions were made with a sharp knife and it would have had to be long to cut through the upper abdominal contents and make contact with the heart.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ said Martin, as he realised that Prof Moore was finished and heading for the door. ‘Hope your evening goes well.’

  Even before Martin had finished speaking the Prof had left the room, and the level of conversation had drowned the last words of the DCI’s sentence. The excitement had obviously been caused by the Professor’s reference to the possibility of there being a CCTV recording of the actual murder. It was the one that Charlie had called Martin to see before the briefing started, and it certainly showed how the murder had been committed, but it asked as many questions as it answered.

  Martin didn’t want to go straight into viewing the CCTV records as he wanted to go back to the order in which things had been discovered, and he shouted above the noise to Alex, who responded by displaying the first of the images from the crime scene.

  The room fell silent as the body of a woman whose head was positioned in an awkward angle, face down on the steering wheel of her car, came into focus. The injury to her neck was obvious, but in the position she was sitting the only clue to the fatal abdominal wound was the colour change of her clothing. The cream cotton skirt was emblazoned with an extra scarlet waistband of sticky red blood that had seeped up the material of her floral blouse, creating bizarre patterns.

  Alex painstakingly took the meeting through every detail of the SOC operation and then handed back to Martin, who in turn asked DS Cotter if there was anything he wanted to add at this point. He replied. ‘Just to say that we are looking for the weapon, known to be a sharp, long-bladed knife but so far nothing has been recovered.’ He explained how the car keys had been recovered and with them keys to Miss Rossiter’s home.

  ‘DC Cook-Watts and I have just returned from the house and basically there was nothing found that at first glance is of any help. The only thing that caught our attention was a desk drawer that we opened with the third key on her keyring. The drawer contained old school reports and exercise books, some over as forty years old, and appear to be just a random selection of her pupil’s efforts. We have brought them all back and will study them in more detail, but on the face of it they don’t appear to be connected to her murder.’

  ‘Thank you.’ said Martin. ‘The only other thing to mention, before turning our attention to the CCTV footage, is the mobile phone found in the victim’s handbag, and Charlie will tell us more about that.’

  Charlie smiled. ‘It’s a long time since I have seen one of these second generation prepaid phones and it reminded me of how far the technology has developed over the past twenty years. It’s an old Vodafone, and I guess it’s about eighteen years old but it was easy to get into and I was able to retrieve eleven names and telephone numbers. Can you imagine that? – having a mobile for all those years and only having eleven names and numbers registered in the memory.

  ‘The last time the phone was used was four months ago, and that was an incoming call from her dentist. However the numbers that were registered have been useful and one enabled us to contact a Mr Simon Rossiter, who is her brother’s son and apparently her next of kin. He lives in Cambridge and the last time he saw his aunt was at his mother’s funeral eight years ago.’

  ‘I will need to speak to him,’ said Martin, ‘but I understand he was in Germany when you spoke to him; has been for the past week, and lots of people can verify that. So at least we can cross him off our non-existent list of suspects.’

  Martin continued. ‘I have already seen the footage you are about to watch and it is one of the most chilling things I have ever experienced. It looks a bit like something we would see at the cinema or watch on the television, but this is real – this is a real murder. Please watch carefully and if you spot anything that could help us identify this killer, no matter if you think it’s trivial, jot it down and we will discuss it at the end.’

  Charlie pressed the button and the first images from the CCTV camera showed the area of the car park where Miss Rossiter would be parking her car. The time was displayed in the top right hand corner and the seconds were seen ticking along and when they reached 09:13:03 the black Mondeo car was seen entering the car park and by 09:13:59 Miss Rossiter had parked the car.

  She didn’t get out of the car and just sat there. It wasn’t possible to see what she was doing as the camera was not picking up that level of detail. The officers watched and waited as the CCTV showed other cars around her arriving and departing. Having watched the action once already Martin was concentrating on the people on foot rather than the movements of the vehicles. He was therefore on
e of the first to spot a man approaching the black Mondeo. The man was tall, probably around six feet, and wore black jeans and a navy polo-neck sweater. His head was well covered by a baseball-style cap with a large rounded peak that made it impossible for the camera, from its high vantage point, to show his face. He carried a dark blue canvas sports bag with no visible logo.

  The man was obviously aware of the security cameras and looked down at the floor as he purposefully made his way directly to Miss Rossiter’s car. The time displayed was now 09:19:02. It seemed as if she had been waiting for him as she started to open the car door when he approached it. Keeping his head well down the man, who it could now be seen was wearing gloves, took charge of the door and swung it wide open. As he did so he stepped between the door and the car and took something out of his sports bag. Still keeping his head down he ducked into the car and was seen lunging in a forward and upward movement.

  There were gasps of horror from some of the people watching as they realised they had just witnessed a cold-blooded murder. The killer didn’t stop there and he seemed to yank something forward at the same time as he pulled something out of the body. That first something must have been Miss Rossiter’s head but before her head reached the steering wheel the killer made a second stabbing movement and the head rolled forward into the position it had been discovered just a short while later.

  It looked as if he was pulling her arms backwards and he must have returned the knife to his bag because he was using both hands to do something.

  Because the killer’s body was, for the most part, preventing a full image of what was happening in the car there was no sign of the knife and the only reason the audience knew a knife had been used was because they had seen the post-mortem results. They knew that what they had witnessed was a knife being thrust into the woman’s upper abdomen, just below her ribs and aimed in an upward direction to sever her inferior vena cava and pierce her right ventricle. They also knew that the second stabbing of her neck was an unnecessary affront on a body already damaged to the point of death.