‘I think you’re playing devil’s advocate, boss,’ commented Saslow.
‘Perhaps,’ said Vogel.
‘And I don’t reckon you really think for one minute that Jane Ferguson took her own life.’
Vogel grunted in a non-committal sort of way.
‘Let’s just hope the PM examination gives us a definitive answer to that question,’ he said.
‘What d’you make of Felix Ferguson, Saslow?’ asked Vogel, as they settled into Saslow’s car.
It occurred to him that the arrival of Felix’s father had diverted both their attentions from their earlier interview with his son, still their most significant ‘person of interest’.
‘I don’t know quite what to make of him,’ responded Saslow. ‘On the one hand he seems plausible enough... ’
Saslow let the sentence trail off. Vogel finished it for her.
‘And on the other, you get the feeling he’s hiding something, not being entirely honest. Which he denied, of course. But then, he would, wouldn’t he? Something more about those dreams, maybe.’
‘Exactly—’
Saslow didn’t get to finish that sentence either. She was interrupted by the strident ring of Vogel’s mobile.
He glanced at the screen and half smiled. Saslow was pretty sure she had a fair idea who was calling.
‘Morning, boss,’ said Vogel.
He could have been speaking to Detective Superintendent Hemmings. He wasn’t though. Saslow was quite sure of that. She knew the difference.
‘All right, all right,’ muttered Vogel half apologetically into the phone. ‘Nobby. Morning, Nobby.’
Saslow congratulated herself on her astuteness, and how well she knew her senior officer. He reacted to any contact with Detective Superintendent Nobby Clarke in unique fashion. She listened as Vogel continued to speak.
‘Well, no, I don’t know quite what to make of it yet, Nobby,’ Vogel began. ‘Jane Ferguson was clearly a disturbed young woman, and yet there was more than enough potential evidence at the scene to at the very least call suicide into question. And I’ve got the feeling there’s a lot more going on that we don’t know about... What? Now? We’re on our way to the post-mortem. Oh. Lunch! OK. Sorry. I suppose we could make it to Exeter. Yes. All right. See you there.’
The DCI was frowning as he ended the call.
Saslow glanced at him enquiringly.
‘She wants to talk about it over lunch,’ Vogel remarked, his voice incredulous.
Saslow barely suppressed a chuckle. Her senior officer was not the sort of police officer who would build a lunch break into the first day of a murder enquiry. Or, come to that, probably any day of a murder enquiry.
‘So we’re going to Exeter?’ she queried, somewhat surprised he’d agreed to that. Even if it was Nobby Clarke who’d made the suggestion.
‘Yes, that’s where the Devon and Cornwall’s MCT is based, of course,’ Vogel replied. ‘Some restaurant Nobby likes, near the cathedral, apparently. We need a word with Jane Ferguson’s trick cyclist anyway, and she’s based in Exeter. So it kind of fits in.’
Vogel didn’t sound totally convinced.
‘But first, it’s Barnstaple, and the post-mortem,’ Vogel continued.
Saslow pulled the car out of the Fergusons’ driveway and turned left along Bay View Road in the direction of Northam and the Torridge Bridge.
The entire Torridge and Taw estuary lay to the left of the bridge. The sun was still shining and reflecting on the water. The wind might have got up, but perhaps because of it, the sky was spectacular, lines of yellow and white were splashed across a pale blue backdrop.
Saslow was one of those who had an inborn love of the sea. She thought this part of North Devon was one of the most beautiful places she had ever been to.
She glanced at Vogel. He was sitting quite still, hands clasped in his lap, his eyes cast downward. As was often the case, he did not seem aware of anything much going on around him except the case he was working on.
Nine
Karen Crow had fast tracked the post-mortem for eleven a.m. at the North Devon District Hospital. She was just about to start work when Vogel and Saslow arrived at the mortuary.
The body, lain on its back with arms and legs outstretched, was no longer clothed, its nakedness adding to the vulnerability of this small slight woman. That was something else Vogel always found difficult to deal with.
Jane Ferguson had certainly sustained a number of bruises and other injuries of varying degrees of severity, and of varying longevity. There were old bruises on one of her upper legs, and also on one thigh, as well as the scars on her lower arms and wrists which the pathologist had earlier suggested could be signs of self-harming. There was also, of course, the faded bruising and the half-healed cut to Jane’s face which had been apparent when her body was first discovered. Most of these could not have been sustained as she fell from the landing of her home, because they couldn’t be post-mortem. And then there was the injured arm, dislocated at the shoulder according to Karen Crow’s initial examination at the scene.
Vogel leaned closer to examine the body.
The dead woman’s head lay very slightly at an angle. Vogel already knew that her neck had been broken, as he would suspect in the case of someone who had hanged to death. He stared for a moment or two at her distorted features, the swollen discoloured flesh where the rope had tightened around her neck, the protruding tongue. Then he looked away. He had already seen Jane Ferguson’s body once, at first hanging from a rope and then lying on the floor of her home. This was far from the first death by strangulation that he had encountered in his police career, and would almost certainly not be the last. He still found it one of the most disturbing causes of death, and probably always would, whether self-administered or by a third party. Vogel fought to keep his facial expression neutral. He just had to accept that if he continued in police work until the end of his days he still would not get used to it. Nor to what he regarded as the equally horrific mechanics of a forensic post-mortem examination, come to that.
He glanced at Karen Crow. He could see that she was preparing the instruments she would use to saw open the dead woman’s torso and remove the top of her head. He steeled himself. He suspected Karen could already answer most of the questions he needed to ask, but she was notoriously tetchy concerning what she considered to be interruptions whilst she was at work.
Eventually she turned to Vogel.
‘I can see no initial signs of any internal injuries that may have contributed to death,’ she said. ‘There seems little doubt that my initial prognosis was correct and that the victim died of strangulation. The protrusion of the tongue, the bulging eyes, the skin discolouration, all point to that, in addition to the obvious circumstantial evidence of a rope which was tightened around her neck by her own weight when she fell from the bannisters on the landing of her home. Which she quite clearly did. And this is consistent with the fracture of the axis vertebra which she sustained.’
Karen Crow paused again.
‘Hangman’s fracture,’ said Vogel.
Karen nodded.
‘What, boss?’ queried Saslow, who had never encountered a death by this kind of strangulation before.
‘The name given to the fracture commonly sustained by those sentenced to death in a court of law in the days of judicial execution by hanging,’ explained Vogel. ‘Isn’t that right, Karen?’
‘Yes, it is,’ said the pathologist. ‘Although more recent studies have shown that the axis, which is the second spinal vertebra and the one that carries the pivot upon which the head rests, was not actually fractured in judicial hangings as often as used to be supposed. If it is fractured, particularly in circumstances like this, then it certainly serves to confirm that death was by hanging. But... ’