‘That’s quick work, Doc!’ said Spurrel. ‘How d’you know?’
Richard grinned and winked at Angela. ‘I’m sure Doctor Bray here will tell you!’
She rose to the occasion easily, blood stains and sprays being one of her specialities.
‘Those dribbles of blood on the face and neck are going the wrong way for a chap sitting upright,’ she explained, waving her own torch at the body. ‘Look, that blood coming from the corner of the mouth goes straight across towards the ear, the same as the one coming from the gunshot wound. He must have been lying on his back when those were leaking.’
Richard added his own bit of expertise. ‘And that post-mortem lividity, the blue staining of the skin on the back of his neck, could only have happened if he spent a few hours face-up after death, not sitting in a car seat.’
Richard knew that police always liked experts who would give them a dogmatic answer off the cuff, though it was a habit fraught with danger if it turned out to be wrong. Tom Spurrel rubbed his hands together and looked at his DI.
‘Right, Brian, pull out all the stops on this one!’
As they started snapping instructions to the inspector and two detective constables, Richard saw torches bobbing towards them from the parking area and a moment later, two other men arrived, one carrying a large case.
As soon as this new arrival saw them in the gloom, he called a greeting.
‘God God, Angie, what are you doing here? I needn’t have come if I’d known the big chief from the Met was here already!’
The speaker was a moon-faced middle-aged man with wire-framed spectacles, short and rather plump. He dropped his bag well away from the car and advanced on Angela, giving her big bear hug.
‘I thought I’d better come and show you how to do the job properly,’ she chaffed and introduced him to Richard as Archie Gorman, her biologist counterpart from the Bristol Forensic Science Laboratory. The man with him, a younger, slim version of Trevor Mitchell, introduced himself as Detective Inspector Morrison, the liaison officer from the Bristol laboratory. These were detectives seconded for a period from one of the local forces, to act as links between the investigating officers and the scientists.
When everyone knew who was who, they turned their attention back to the job in hand. After Gorman had looked at the body and agreed with Angela and Richard, Tom Spurrel asked the pathologist what he wanted to do next.
‘Very hard to do much with him stuck in that seat,’ answered Richard. ‘Do you want to get him out soon?’
‘We’ve got all the photographs, so just tapings and whatever the lab wants,’ answered the superintendent.
‘Then we’ll haul him out for you.’
The two from the laboratory opened their case and began dabbing lengths of Sellotape across the clothing of the corpse, picking up stray hairs and particles. They stuck these on to sheets of clear celluloid for later examination under the microscope. Then a detective constable who was acting as exhibits officer, carefully retrieved the gun from the floor, pushing the safety catch on with the end of a pencil. Wearing rubber gloves and holding only the edges of the trigger guard to avoid spoiling any fingerprints, he slid it into a brown paper bag, filling in the exhibits label before putting it safely into his own large box.
Now it was Pryor’s turn and he tested the stiffness of both arms to look for rigor mortis.
‘When was the body found?’ he asked.
‘About nine o’clock,’ said Brian Lane. ‘As usual, by a local chap walking his dog. It wasn’t here at four this afternoon, as we’ve found two women who were riding horses up this firebreak then.’
Richard looked at his wristwatch. ‘Just half past one now. He’s in full rigor, not that that helps a great deal, except to suggest he died more than a couple of hours ago and less than a couple of days.’
With a torch, he looked closely at the wound just above the Adam’s apple. ‘No soot or powder burns, so it wasn’t a contact or very close discharge. A lot depends on the weapon and the ammunition, of course. That’s the lab’s problem.’
He felt carefully at the back of the head, pushing against the stiffness of the neck. ‘No exit wound, though there’d be blood soiling on the upholstery if there had been.’
He felt the face and forehead with the back of his hand.
‘Doesn’t feel warm, but I need to use the thermometer when we get him out. What’s the air temperature, Angela?’
His partner had anticipated what he wanted and had taken a long chemical thermometer from his bag several minutes earlier, allowing time for the mercury to settle.
‘It’s just fifty degrees here. Better check it inside the car as well, though the door’s been open for a time.’
Richard held the thermometer near the body for a minute or two. ‘Just the same, fifty degrees,’ he said, using the Fahrenheit scale.
The detective inspector and one of the DCs brought a large red rubber sheet and laid it out a few feet away from the car, then carefully hoisted the body out of the driving seat and laid it on the sheet. Due to the stiffness, the head remained bent back and the knees and hips stayed flexed.
Richard rolled the body over on to its side so that the two people from the laboratory could dab their sticky tape over its back and legs, then they carried on examining and taping the driving seat.
Pryor looked all down the back of the corpse and again noted the purple-red discoloration of the back of the neck from settling of the blood after death. He looked up at Spurrel, who was the officer in charge of the investigation.
‘I’d like to take a rectal temperature before he cools down any more,’ he said. ‘Is it alright if I pull his trousers down for a moment?’
The superintendent nodded. ‘OK by me, if the lab’s happy about it. We’ve no reason to think there was any sexual involvement.’
Archie interrupted his work inside the car to agree with the detective but as Richard and the liaison officer wrestled with the dead man’s belt and trousers, Angela held a swab ready, a test tube with cotton wool wound round the end of a stick stuck in the cork.
‘Better use this first, just in case,’ she murmured, as the corpse’s buttocks were exposed. She did not want to appear as if she was interfering, as officially she was not there as a forensic scientist, except as the pathologist’s assistant. Richard took the hint and as Angela held the glass tube, he pulled out the cork and prodded the swab into the victim’s fundament. Replacing the swab in the tube, he put the thermometer in its place, two inches deep and waited until the mercury stabilized again.
‘Eighty-four degrees,’ he announced. ‘There’s still a bit of warmth to be felt on the backside.’
They hauled up the underpants and trousers and laid the corpse on its back again.
‘I can’t do any more here, superintendent,’ he said. ‘Are we taking it straight for a post-mortem?’
Tom Spurrel nodded. ‘I’d like to, Doctor, if you can. The mortuary in Gloucester is laid on.’
As the photographer moved in to take more shots of the inside of the car and the body on the ground, the senior detective asked the inevitable question.
‘How long do you reckon he’s been dead, Doc?’
Richard hated answering this particular query, as where the time of death eventually became known from circumstantial evidence, the pathologist’s estimate was almost always wrong, unless he gave a wide range of possibilities.
‘It’s fairly cool out here now, but we don’t know where he was before he was brought here,’ he began. ‘It’s the end of June and it was quite warm earlier today. The car door has been open, presumably since soon after nine.’
He did some mental arithmetic. ‘His temperature has dropped about fifteen degrees. The old wisdom was a drop of a degree-and-a-half every hour, but that’s always wrong. The problem is that there’s often a variable time lag in the fall in temperature soon after death, which makes it impossible to be accurate.’