In Cold Blood

Chapter 4

4

A short while later, Caroline and Dexter stood at the edge of the inner cordon and watched as Dr Duncan carried out his examination. They didn’t know anybody — apart, perhaps, from Dr Duncan — who particularly wanted to look at dead bodies close-up.

One of the underlying principles of forensic evidence was that of contact. When Locard said that every contact left a trace, this became the foundation on which forensic evidence as a marker of guilt was based. It was incredibly unlikely that a murder suspect had the victim’s blood on their clothing because a police officer had forgotten to wash his hands after attending to the victim, then accidentally or otherwise smeared it all over the suspect’s jumper. But ‘incredibly unlikely’ still didn’t cut it in a court of law whose threshold for conviction was guilt beyond all reasonable doubt. Anything which allowed a defence lawyer to introduce the slightest level of doubt in a jury could be catastrophic.

After he’d concluded his initial observations, Dr Duncan skipped back over to Caroline and Dexter, looking more like a man who’d just proudly completed a particularly challenging jigsaw puzzle than someone who’d spent the last few minutes poking a dead body.

‘Very interesting!’ he said, beaming. ‘This one’ll keep you busy.’

‘Go on. How bad is it?’ Caroline asked.

‘Well, he’s dead,’ Dr Duncan replied. ‘So pretty bad, from his perspective. In terms of the cause of death, there’s a pretty clear blow to the skull, towards the back but slightly towards his left-hand side. Impossible to say just yet whether he was facing the person who did it, but if he was I’d put money on them being right-handed. The opposite, if they were behind him.’

‘He’s fallen backwards against the wall, though, so does that mean he was facing them?’ Dexter asked.

‘Ah, no. See, this is where things get interesting. There’s blood matting in his hair, but next to nothing on the brickwork he’s propped up against. Certainly nowhere near the amount we’d expect to see if he ended up there immediately after the blunt trauma. Having said that, there are also signs of strangulation. There’s petechial haemorrhaging in the eyes, for instance. So it’s entirely possible the blow happened earlier but didn’t kill him, and he was then strangled. We won’t be able to say for certain until we’ve got him on the table. But there really isn’t anything in the initial indications that suggest he put up a fight. No skin under the fingernails, no scratching. I did notice something suspicious, though.’

‘Go on,’ Caroline said.

‘After death the heart stops beating, and the blood descends according to gravity. If you die on your back, for example, you end up with some lovely purple bruising all over the back of your body. Now, when we look at our chap here, we see the vast majority appears on the backs of his legs, but there are signs of blood pooling on his left-hand side. Small, but noticeable. It seems to indicate to me he either died on his left-hand side or was laid on it shortly after, and was then moved into this sitting position.’

‘How long after are we talking?’ Caroline asked.

‘Difficult to say. Livor mortis can start in as little as twenty minutes, particularly in temperatures such as these. It might also mean the pooling on his left-hand side is more noticeable as a result. I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess, but considering the ambient temperatures there’s a decent chance he was moved within an hour of dying.’

Caroline nodded, trying to organise this information in her own mind. ‘So can we determine how long he’s been dead?’

Dr Duncan smiled. ‘I wondered how long it’d take before you asked me that. The million dollar question, eh? Well, the huge caveat here is the conditions. Temperatures were sub-zero overnight and still are. We had icy winds through the night, too. All that will have sped up the cooling of the body, but rectal temperatures are usually pretty accurate, even if he is sitting on frozen ground.’

‘Rather you than me,’ Dexter remarked.

‘To be honest, it’s nice to have somewhere warm to pop your hands for a few moments. In the case of our customer over here, rigor mortis is heavily apparent. We’d usually expect to see that level of onset over the first twelve hours or more, but again, look at the conditions. If you chucked a leg of lamb in the freezer you’d expect it to stiffen up pretty quickly, and human meat’s no different. It’s likely we’ve got some freezing of the bodily fluids and fat tissues adding to the stiffness. Not that there’s much fat on him. Looks like he was in pretty good shape.’

‘Would that have made a big difference?’ Caroline asked.

Dr Duncan shrugged. ‘Difficult to say. Not as much fat tissue to freeze, but he’d certainly cool down much quicker. Out here, I imagine rigor mortis would’ve been sped up somewhat.’

‘So are we talking overnight?’

‘It probably won’t surprise you that I wouldn’t want to put a specific time on it, but I’d probably be looking somewhere around there. Even from a non-scientific point of view, he’d have been spotted long before now if he’d been there during the day yesterday. The rectal temperature seems to indicate somewhere in the early part of the night, but I wouldn’t want to offer anything more specific just yet. Sorry.’

‘No. No, that’s fine. Thanks. Very helpful.’

Caroline and Dexter headed back towards the car, the bitter air cutting in through their clothes as they walked.

‘Got to say, I’m looking forward to a warm cuppa and a biscuit at Mrs Forbes’s house,’ Dexter remarked.

‘All that talk of rectal fingering got you peckish, has it?’

Dexter chuckled. ‘Something like that.’

‘Better hope that’s not her husband over there, then, hadn’t we?’ Caroline replied. ‘Otherwise I’m not sure PG Tips and a tin of Fox’s will be the first thoughts on her mind.’