Dead To Me - [5]

‘You’re like a bloody windmill,’ Janet once told her, ‘or someone on the tote, at the races.’

One Christmas the team bought her a pair of white cotton gloves, the kind a magician wore. Gill had got very pissed at the works party and waxed lyrical about how what they did was magic of a sort. Dark magic, maybe, solving the sordid little details of the crime, turning a tragedy into an achievement.

‘For who?’ Andy had objected, winking at Janet. ‘We’ve still got a dead body. Someone’s still lost a family member.’

‘But they know how, why. And that’s all we can do for them,’ she had said, taking another swig of vodka. ‘Give them the story, the facts, the name, the face… At least we can do that.’ She had sliced at one hand with the other for emphasis, and Janet had laughed and shaken her head. ‘Without that they are in bloody limbo for ever,’ Gill said. They all knew that. Lee and Mitch had nodded, muttering in agreement.

She had drunk way too much that night; it wasn’t long after Dave had gone walkabout, and she’d ended up curled over a bog in the Ladies, with Janet holding her hair out of the way and saying, ‘Time for bed, Houdini. Got you a cab.’

Gill walked through the tiny porch on the stepping plates that had been laid down and turned ninety degrees into the narrow hallway, noting the bathroom immediately to the right. Straight ahead, a bedroom. The door ajar. Gill took in the mattress on the floor, the carpet littered with clothes and scraps of paper, cigarette papers, DVD cases, burn marks on the carpet. Someone had once attempted to redecorate the far wall either side of the window. It was painted a muddy ginger shade, reminding Gill of parkin, the cake they ate round Bonfire Night. But they’d obviously lost heart and the edge near the ceiling still showed the cream woodchip paper underneath. Gill could smell damp in the room mixing with the rank stench of stale fag ends and, peering carefully round the door, saw an area in the corner there mottled with mildew. She didn’t go in, it had yet to be examined. The next ninety-degree turn took her past a storage cupboard on the right and into the living room at the end. The smell was different here, unpleasantly metallic.

‘Hello,’ Gill greeted them all.

The girl was under a duvet, face partly visible, wedged between a sofa and a squat, dark-coloured coffee table. The table was slightly askew and tilted, one leg broken. The technicians would already have filmed and photographed the room before anyone else was allowed in, creating a record of the scene as close as possible to how it had been found. Phil Sweet, the CSM, was logging details and supervising everyone. Gill had worked with him maybe half-a-dozen times. He raised a gloved hand in acknowledgement. ‘Go round that way.’

Gill did as Phil said; using the stepping plates she skirted around the easy chair that stood near the kitchen door, close to where two markers indicated drops of blood, and past the coffee table to get closer to the victim.

She stared at the body, at the girl’s head angled slightly back and to the right, touching the base of the sofa. There was a slick of blood on the carpet beneath her, some dark stains on the edge of the duvet. Gill didn’t need a second opinion, this was a homicide. She straightened up and got out her phone to ring the coroner. The body legally belonged to the coroner and their authorization would be needed to order a post-mortem.

‘Who called us?’ she asked Phil as she selected the contact number.

‘Boyfriend; came in and found her like this.’

Gill nodded. Because he had been at the scene, the boyfriend would have to submit his clothes for examination as potential evidence and give a witness statement to assist the police.

‘Hello, Mr Minchin, Gill Murray here from MIT,’ she identified herself to the coroner. ‘I’m out at a job in Collyhurst: young, white, adult female. I’m thinking we’ve got ID, not formal as yet, looking like a stab wound. I’m after doing a forensic post-mortem?’

‘Be my guest. I’ll take the details.’

Gill told him the rudiments: the address and the apparent name of the victim: Lisa Finn. Her next call was to the pathologist, Ranjeet Lateesh. No one would touch the body or disturb anything at the scene until he’d arrived and been able to examine the body in situ.

She watched one of the CSIs start work with his fingerprint kit on the doorway and door handles into the room. The silver sooty powder he was smothering over the surfaces would be a bugger to clean off again afterwards.

‘Shoulder bag in the kitchen, bus ticket in there shows her on the bus at half-ten this morning. But we didn’t find her phone,’ Phil Sweet told them.

Gill groaned. The phone was a rich mine of information in any inquiry; traffic to and from helped them build not only a timeline but a network of contacts, and the content of texts would sometimes flag up animosity or threats. They’d have to approach the provider, who would be able to give them a log of incoming and outgoing calls and texts, but not the content of any texts, and not the pictures or music or videos or address book on the handset. With a little more time, the provider would also be able to give them the cell site location data and pinpoint where the phone was when calls were received and made. In effect, a tracking device.