A Perfect Pose

4

4

Nathan’s journey to the location Frank Wells had given him took a little longer than it should; almost ten minutes were added to the journey time because of the detours he took to avoid both the street where he had lived and his family had died, and the street where Kurt Walker was shot dead by a police marksman.

When he finally arrived, he parked alongside the patrol car of the uniformed officers who had responded to the emergency call. Next to the patrol car was the silver Mercedes with the personalised license plate that belonged to the police force’s medical examiner, Doctor Daffyd Jones.

It was a short while before he could bring himself to get out of the car. Once he did he approached the tape that prevented people walking down the dirt road through the woods. It hadn’t affected him when the duty sergeant told him where the body was located, but now he was here it brought up painful memories of the night he received the call telling him of the fire at his house - he had been at the other end of the dirt road, co-ordinating a search of the woods surrounding the ruined Roman fort, when he got the call.

“Good morning, sir,” the elder of the two constables greeted Nathan the moment he saw him. “It’s good to see you back at work.”

“It’s good to be back,” Nathan said with false heartiness. “How are you, Eddie?”

“I’m good, thanks.” He was about to untie the end of the tape, so his superior could proceed down the shadowed, and slightly muddy road, which had originally been used by Roman legionnaires, and the Britons who lived in the village shadowed by their fort, when Nathan ducked underneath it.

“Has my partner arrived yet?” Nathan asked as he straightened up. The lack of another car suggested they hadn’t.

Eddie nodded. “Yes, sir, she got here about ten minutes ago. She insisted on driving through and parking at the picnic site.”

Making worse any damage that might have been done to whatever evidence the dirt road held, Nathan thought unhappily. He couldn’t help wishing that Stephen - Detective Sergeant Burke - his usual partner, wasn’t otherwise occupied.

He had chosen not to tell his sister that he would be handling his first case back with a new partner, even if it was only temporary; doing so would only have made her worry more than she already was. Now, though, he had cause of his own to worry about the situation; his first piece of news about the woman who was taking Stephen’s place suggested she was not furnished with an excess of sense.

Nathan left the two constables to their duty, and made his slow way along the dirt road. As he walked, he searched his surroundings for anything that might be evidence of what had happened, without seeing anything obvious. Once he reached the far end of the road, from where he could see the ruins of the Roman fort, and the car park, he paused.

An old man stood alongside a dark blue Vauxhall Corsa, with a dirty white shepherd dog at his feet. Nathan guessed he was the one who had reported the body, but he decided to leave talking to him until later. Instead he turned and headed back down the dirt road to where the constable he had passed earlier stood, marking the spot where the body was to be found.

After a few moment’s contemplation, he picked the spot he felt best and began his descent. Unfortunately, he slipped when he took his first step down the bank; if WPC Beck hadn’t leapt to his aid, he would almost certainly have tumbled down to the river. She kept him from falling, but not from sending a shower of stones, leaves, and other debris tumbling down the slope.

“It’s good to see you’re as graceful as ever, Nathan,” Daffyd Jones said in a voice that held the barest trace of a lilt that could only have come from the Welsh valleys.

Nathan scowled briefly, but he was too used to the doctor to take any real offence at his words. “I didn’t end up in the river, that’s all that matters,” he said.

“True enough. It’s good to see you.” Daffyd held out his hand to shake Nathan’s. “Hardly a pleasant welcome back, this, is it?” he said, shifting aside slightly so Nathan could see the body he was examining better.

“Not really, but if we wanted pleasant, we’d have picked different lines of work.” Nathan sighed and turned his attention to the body at Daffyd’s feet, which he examined silently from where he stood. He didn’t want to squat and get closer to the body just then, he didn’t trust his footing and had no desire to fall, either on his backside into the mud, or onto the body, which would most likely have tumbled them both into the water.

The body was that of a teenage girl, somewhere between fifteen and seventeen; far too young to die on a riverbank, or anywhere, he thought sadly. She still wore clothes, a black mini skirt and a blue top, which was a relief to Nathan since it meant her death was less likely to have anything to do with either s*x or a s****l assault. He knew he couldn’t completely rule out the possibility, though, not until the post-mortem was done.

Just visible, where the girl’s head rested against a medium-sized rock that protruded from the bank, was a wound encrusted with dried blood. Nathan also saw a circle of bruising around her throat, something he was unhappily certain he could identify.

“She was strangled?” he asked, wanting confirmation.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but who the hell are you?”

Nathan shifted his attention from the body, and Jones, to the third figure on the riverbank. He knew who she was from what Frank Wells had told him. “Sorry,” he apologised. “I should have introduced myself. I’m Detective Inspector Stone, your boss, and your new partner, and you’re Detective Constable Ariana Georgius.” It amused him a little, about as much as anything did these days, to see his new partner’s olive complexion pale a little upon hearing who she had spoken to so abruptly. “Do you have a preference how you’re addressed?” he asked of the young woman, though his attention had already returned to Daffyd as he waited for the doctor’s answer to his previous question.

“She was strangled,” Daffyd agreed, “but I can’t tell you if that’s what killed her right now. The head wound could be the culprit. I won’t know for certain until I do the post-mortem; I’ll try and squeeze it in this afternoon.”

“Thanks, Daff.” Nathan sighed. “Either way, someone else was involved, and that means we could be looking at murder.”

“Failure to report a fatal accident at the very least,” Daffyd said. “Pretty girl,” he remarked sadly. “It always seems to make it worse when it’s the pretty ones who die young. You have to wonder why God lets them, it’s so unfair.”

Out the corner of his eye Nathan saw his new partner bristle at that comment, clearly unhappy with it. He stepped in quickly before she could say something she would later regret. “You’ll have to forgive Daffyd,” he told her with the sincerest smile he could muster. “If he’s not talking about purely medical matters, he frequently forgets to take the time to think before speaking.” He ignored the look Daffyd directed at him, knowing the doctor wasn’t offended by a comment he had heard often enough in the past. “Is this your first case as a detective?” he asked.

“No, this will be my fifth, but it’s my first involving a body. The closest I’ve come before this is a home invasion where an old man was beaten up by a pair of burglars. That was pretty nasty, but he pulled through.”

Nathan accepted that with a nod. He was glad she wasn’t a complete novice at criminal investigations, he didn’t think he could have coped with that just now. “What do you like to be called?” he asked for a second time. He had no problem calling her Detective Georgius, if that was what she wanted, but since they were going to be working together, even if only for this case, it was better if he at least tried to find out how she preferred to be addressed.

“Georgie,” she answered after a brief hesitation. “I prefer to be called Georgie, sir.”

“Fair enough, Georgie it is,” Nathan said. He wondered idly why she didn’t like her first name, it was a nice enough name in his opinion. “You can call me Nathan, though not when we’re around the public or a senior officer.

“Right, now we’ve got that sorted, tell me what you make of this.” He gestured to the body, which she showed no sign of having a problem with being in the presence of - if she was concealing it, she was doing a much better job than he had the first time he had had to deal with a death.

“She’s a teen,” Georgie said after running her eyes over the body as Daffyd moved back a little to avoid obscuring her view. “I’d say seventeen. Takes care of her appearance, and she comes from a family with money. If they’re not rich, they’re at least well-off.”

Nathan nodded as she looked to him for approval. “What else?”

“There aren’t any houses nearby, at least none close enough for her to have walked here in those shoes.” She gestured to the girl’s feet, one of which was bare, while the other was shod with a heeled black shoe; the heel wasn’t all that large, but it was enough to make walking a distance an uncomfortable experience, and one to be avoided if possible. “She’s too young to have a driver’s license, a full one anyway, and there’s no car at either end of the road, at least none that don’t belong to us or to Mr Lowndes - he’s the elderly gentleman who found her. That means someone must have brought her here.”

Georgie fell silent for a while, but Nathan correctly guessed that she wasn’t finished, she was simply taking the time to examine the body further. Since that was the case he remained quiet, and gestured for Jones to do the same.

“I’d say from her clothes that she was meeting someone last night - I can’t imagine she’s been here any longer than that - a boyfriend probably, maybe someone she wanted as a boyfriend, certainly not a regular friend. Maybe the person she was meeting wasn’t the person she thought he was, or something happened on the way to meeting him.”

“Not bad,” Nathan said when he was sure his new partner had finished with her observations.