‘Yes, ma’am,’ Hennessey smiled. ‘I have learned my lesson, made my journey. . between the time he was last seen alive and the time the body was discovered is as close as medical science can get.’
‘Except possibly in this case. . maggot pupae are in evidence. I’ll take one or two samples, but their presence means he died some time within the last forty-eight hours. . but this heat,’ she brushed flies from her face, ‘it could speed things. Rigor is established and you can see for yourself that as corpses go, this is quite a fresh corpse.’ She paused. ‘I note bruising round the neck.’
‘Yes, ma’am, Dr Mann mentioned those marks.’
‘Could not fail to notice them. . extensive. . not linear, suggestive of manual strangulation. If he had been garrotted with rope, or a length of electrical flex, then we would expect linear bruising, but this is extensive. . and. .’ she felt the scalp of the deceased, ‘a possible skull fracture. Possibly rendered unconscious with strangulation and then he sustained a massive blow to the head to finish him off. I see no sign of a struggle hereabouts, so he was most likely conveyed here possibly within a container, such as a cabin trunk, and deposited where he was found. Definitely murder and within the last forty-eight hours, with a time window of twelve hours either side of that.’
‘Understood and appreciated. It is at least something to go on.’
Dr D’Acre stood. ‘Well, if you have taken all the photographs you need to take, then from my point of view the body can be taken to York District Hospital for the post-mortem.’
‘SOCO?’ Hennessey turned to the uniformed sergeant.
‘Still to arrive, sir.’
Hennessey glanced skywards in a gesture of despair, and noted a single wispy cloud in the canopy of blue. ‘We should bring them with us, then they won’t keep getting lost all the time.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Contact them, if you can, hurry them along. We need their cameras here asap.’
The uniformed sergeant gripped the radio on his lapel and pressed the send button, and walked towards the centre of the field as he did so, presumably, thought Hennessey, that he might achieve a better reception.
‘I presume you are going to remove the scalp?’ Hennessey turned to Dr D’Acre who, dressed in white coveralls in such bright sunshine, caused Hennessey to squint when looking at her.
‘I’ll have to,’ Dr D’Acre replied matter-of-factly, ‘head injuries. I’ll have to look at it. Why do you ask?’
‘It will aid identification if you can delay doing the post-mortem.’
‘I see. Yes, I can delay doing it.’
‘We have what might be his library card. If it is his, it will give us his address, then we can get a next of kin to view the corpse.’
‘Never easy, but yes, I can delay to allow that. Doesn’t sound like you’ll need a great deal of time?’
‘I anticipate it being done today.’
‘Will you be observing for the police, Chief Inspector?’
‘Yes, I will.’
‘Very good. I’ll return to York District, I have a post-mortem still to conduct. . university student.’
‘Oh. . narcotics overdose?’
‘Don’t believe so, not alcohol either. Found lying in his bed with very blue lips, indication of carbon monoxide poisoning, probably caused by a faulty flue on his gas fire.’
‘He had his gas fire on in this weather?’
‘He was Malaysian; even this weather is cold for them.’
‘I see.’
‘So, how was he discovered?’ Dr D’Acre pointed to the body on the ground covered with the tent.
‘By a swarm of flies.’
‘A swarm of flies?’ she grinned at Hennessey.
‘A sharp-eyed lady in those houses over there. .’ Hennessey pointed to a line of houses on the far side of the field, the ground floors of which were hidden from view. ‘She glanced out of her bedroom window and saw the column of black flies beside the trees. She knew the field is not being used for pastoral grazing at the moment and knew that flies in such numbers are attracted to newly deceased animals or humans, so she strolled across the field and. . here we are.’
‘New one on me, it’s usually dog walkers or courting couples.’
George Hennessey smiled gently, ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’
The middle-aged, smartly dressed man stood facing the heavy velvet curtain. He was a small man, so short in stature that Hennessey, standing beside him, felt that he was towering over the man. The room was dark, being dimly lit, heavily carpeted with darkly stained, heavily polished wood panelling on the walls. The man took a deep breath as he and Hennessey waited for the nurse.
‘It won’t be like what you. .’
‘I know,’ the man turned to Hennessey and forced a smile, ‘I have done this before.’
‘Really? I am sorry.’
‘My wife, she was knocked down and killed by a drunken driver and I had to identify the body. As you say, it’s not like it’s portrayed in the films, lifting a sheet over a body that is in a metal drawer. . more sensitive. . the last image I had of my wife was of her sleeping in space.’
At that moment, the smaller of the two doors to the room opened, silently, and a sombre looking nurse entered. She glanced at Hennessey who gave a single slight nod of his head. The nurse then pulled a cord and the velvet curtains slid open, again silently. What was revealed to Hennessey and the man was a pane of glass, and beyond the glass was the body of the man who had been found earlier that day when a householder had noticed a swarm of flies. The body was, by then, tightly swathed in clean white bandages with only the facial features showing. Nothing else could be discerned, just an endless seeming blackness. It was as the man had described, as if the person on the bed was at peace, floating in deep space.
‘Yes,’ the man spoke quietly, ‘yes, that is James, James Post, my younger brother.’
‘Thank you, and I am sorry.’ He once again nodded to the nurse who pulled another cord and shut the curtains. ‘Can you answer some questions?’
‘Here?’
‘No, we’ll go to the interview suite at the police station.’
Hennessey drove Mr Nigel Post, brother of James, to Micklegate Bar Police Station. The journey was passed in silence.
In the interview suite, Nigel Post settled into the chair and glanced round the room at the orange coloured walls and the hard-wearing carpet of similar colour, though of a darker shade of the same. ‘Not as functional as I imagined,’ he commented.
‘We have more functional rooms for interviewing suspects,’ Hennessey replied, ‘upright chairs, table, tape recorders set in the wall, but for less formal Q and As we use this room.’ He sat opposite Nigel Post and rested his notebook on his lap.
‘If you could tell me about your brother?’
Post reclined back in the chair and eyed Hennessey with a look of concern. ‘You would only bring me here and ask that question if there was some suspicion about his death. When my wife was killed by that idiot I was only asked to identify her body.’
‘Yes. .’ Hennessey avoided eye contact with Nigel Post, ‘I am afraid that this is a murder inquiry.’
Post leaned forward. ‘What happened?’
‘We don’t know. Yet. The post-mortem has still to be conducted but injuries were noticed on your brother’s body about his neck and head, and he was found in a field outside York with no identification, no wallet, but we found a library card which led us to your address.’
‘Yes,’ Nigel Post sighed, ‘James used my address as an accommodation address. It had a permanency about it, whereas he could never settle in one address, in the early days he moved from rented flat to rented flat as if he was looking for something and hoped to find it in the next flat he moved into. So it was easier to use my address for things like library membership. . and he just kept up the practice.’
‘I see.’
‘I didn’t mind. It enabled me to keep track of him. He was my brother. . a complete wastrel, but my brother just the same.’