Jack Be Nimble

Chapter 5

5

Albert Road was in the Victorian part of Mildenheath, amongst a collection of similar-looking streets constructed in the mid to late 1800s. The houses were mostly terraced, and parking was always an issue as accounting for two-car families had naturally not been an issue at the forefront of most Victorian architects’ minds. This, Culverhouse was finding out as he tried to find somewhere to leave his car in the early hours of that morning. In the end, he opted for the middle of the street, noting that the uniformed officers were closing off both ends shortly after he’d arrived anyway.

The alleyway through to George Street was almost all that broke up the monotony of terraced housing and it was in this alleyway that the body had been found. A uniformed officer greeted Culverhouse as the officer in charge and briefed him on what had been discovered.

‘It’s a woman, no identity at the moment but we’re working on that. Looks like the cause of death was a severe laceration to the side of her neck. It’s gone right down to the bone, by the look of things. Only thing is, there’s very little blood at the scene so it doesn’t look like she died there. Looks more like a dumping ground to me.’

‘I see,’ Culverhouse said, his earlier interaction with Helen having worn him out mentally. On any other day, he’d have made a comment to the young officer as he wasn’t keen on having what he saw as vague theories clouding his early judgement of a murder scene. As he approached the body, he recognised the familiar figure of Dr Janet Grey unpacking her box of tricks a few feet away.

‘We meet again,’ Culverhouse said as he reached her.

‘Indeed we do. And yet again it’s over a stiff. I’m starting to think you’re bad luck, Jack.’

Culverhouse let out a small chuckle. ‘I did apply to join the Fluffy Bunnies and Rainbows Division but they wouldn’t have me.’

‘Don’t blame them,’ Dr Grey replied, pulling on a rubber glove and snapping it against her wrist.

‘Any first impressions?’ Culverhouse asked, nodding to the body. Janet Grey was someone whose opinion he greatly valued, mainly because she was usually right.

‘Well, she’s definitely dead,’ Dr Grey said, smiling. ‘Judging by the wound on her neck and the fact that there’s practically no blood here, my only other presumption at the moment would be that she was killed somewhere else and dumped here.’

Culverhouse heard the satisfied chuckle from behind him and spun round to find the young officer stood only a few feet away. The look Culverhouse shot him soon wiped the smile off his face and he walked back off towards the police cordon.

‘Weird dumping ground, though,’ Dr Grey continued. ‘Usually when that happens the killer either hides the body away somewhere so no-one finds it or they leave it right out in the open so it’s discovered quickly and sends a message. This one’s odd. It’s kind of a halfway house.’

‘What about the injuries?’ Culverhouse asked.

‘Again, odd. Huge incision on the side of her neck, right down to the vertebrae. That’d leave a hell of a lot of blood, but her clothes seem pretty neat. They’re bloody, but I’d expect them to be absolutely covered. s***h marks to the abdomen, too. Difficult to say in this light, but looks like they were done from left to right. Oh, and the bruising to her cheek. Looks like she was punched in the face. Not sure that would have knocked her unconscious, though. Almost certainly not for long enough for our killer to have been able to mutilate her in this way.’

‘Any early instincts on what happened then?’ Culverhouse pretended to itch the underside of his nose, but in reality he was trying to mask his senses from the smell that was now starting to emanate from the dead body.

‘Difficult to say. Doesn’t look as though she’s been hacked at, though. In fact, it’s pretty precise work. Almost surgical. Whoever did it seemed to know where the major arteries were so she’d bleed out quickly. The abdominal lacerations seem a little more emotionally led but still quite considered. It’s the choice of dumping ground that concerns me, though. If she was killed somewhere else, then there’s a hell of a lot of blood lying around somewhere.’

What worried Culverhouse was that the site where the dead body lay was barely four hundred yards from Mildenheath Police Station, which sat directly opposite the far end of Albert Street. Not only that, but this was a densely populated area of town and, even at this ungodly hour, transporting and leaving a dead body here would’ve been a risky business to say the least.

Murder could usually be split into two distinct types: a rush of blood to the head in which one person kills another on the spot and the premeditated, planned type. If it was an unplanned, unexpected killing, there’d be far more to go on. The fact that the body had been moved and then left more or less in the open was what worried Culverhouse. That showed some level of forethought and planning. Leaving it out on display was the mark of an unplanned murder, but this body had been moved to this location. So why not go the whole hog and try to dispose of the body permanently? Why move it to a more visible location? It reeked of someone trying to send a message, but Culverhouse didn’t yet know who was sending the message, who they were sending it to or what the message was.

Crimes of passion and fights gone wrong were much easier to investigate. An impulsive killing would undoubtedly leave clues and quite possibly even witnesses, but a planned, premeditated murder was always far more daunting. Although he had very little to go on at this early stage, it seemed to DCI Jack Culverhouse as though this particular murder had been thought through very carefully indeed.