eyes, ears and mouth. ‘Death was within the last forty-five minutes, that’s the best I can do for now. I’d put money on the perpetrator – if it was one person acting alone – being male and very large. This took an absolutely extraordinary amount of strength and overwhelming rage. No weapon other than this furniture was required to cause these injuries. Whoever it is must be covered in blood though. They’ll be keeping out of sight until they’ve cleaned up. This blow to the face, you see the swelling and discoloration here,’ Ailsa pointed to the side of Helen Lott’s head, ‘probably fractured the cheekbone, maybe the jaw too, and would have put her on the floor so that the furniture could be pushed on top of her. The weight of the furniture forcing the air from her lungs, combined with the fractured jaw would have prevented her from screaming. That might have been incidental or planned, no way of knowing. It’s an unusual crime scene. Very personal. I’ve never seen a crushing death outside of a car or industrial accident before. And these blood spatters here and here,’ Ava followed Ailsa’s eyeline outwards from the chest of drawers along the carpets to the walls and wardrobe, ‘suggest to me that the crushing wasn’t a single continuous force.’
‘Meaning what?’ Ava asked.
‘Meaning, I’m afraid, that whoever did this jumped again and again, causing individual injuries and almost explosive bleeds each time they landed. When we’ve moved the furniture and the body, we’ll see a star shape coming out around her.’
‘Bastards,’ Ava said, hands on hips, hanging her head.
‘I bet you don’t let your mother hear you speak like that,’ Ailsa said, smiling gently. ‘Now let me take care of Mrs Lott.’
Ava went back down the stairs, turning each light on as she went, issuing orders through her radio. Technicians were carrying lights and sheets in before she’d even reached the kitchen door. Ava walked out onto the street and looked around. It was a quiet residential area, devoid of CCTV and not wealthy enough for any of the residents to have invested in their own surveillance systems. It would have been obvious that the house was occupied, so late at night with a car on the driveway. The burglar – if it was a burglary gone wrong – would have been cautious about the residents.
‘Officer,’ Ava called to the uniform she’d spoken to on the way in. ‘Is there anything obvious missing or any sign of ransacking?’
‘Handbag with purse in it still on the kitchen table, ma’am. Other than that we didn’t want to disturb too much.’
She went back to her car and dialled Begbie’s number.
‘Turner here. It’s a bad one, Chief. Female victim, living alone. Crushed to death with a piece of her own furniture.’
‘You’ve got to be bloody kidding me,’ Begbie sighed. Ava could almost see him scratching his head as he tapped his pen on the desk. He sounded exhausted. ‘Sexual assault?’
‘No idea. And we won’t have confirmation until Mrs Lott has been taken in for a full autopsy. The torso and two limbs have been pretty comprehensively flattened.’
‘Suspects?’
‘Nothing yet. Pathologist’s still with her. Everyone was over at The Meadows so it’s taken a bit longer than usual to get going. Almost certainly a male attacker. Not sure if there’s more than one. It’s brutal, a lot of force. We have a bootprint. Officers are with the neighbour taking a statement. After the incident at The Meadows, the press will—’
‘I know, I know,’ Begbie said. ‘But they’ll have to be told. They’ll find out soon enough anyway. Better from us.’ Ava could hear the Chief’s heavy breathing down the phone. His chest sounded as if it was chugging between words.
‘Sir, nothing else will happen tonight. Maybe you should just go home. Callanach and I are both available to take calls.’
‘Don’t you start too, Turner. If I wanted another woman nagging me, I’d have committed bigamy long ago. Just seal off the scene and bring back some useful bloody info. The very least I expect is one hundred per cent more than Callanach’s turned up from The Meadows. Not that that’s setting the bar very high, mind you.’
Callanach sat with an expressionless video editor, and tried to avoid the pile of newspapers that some helpful person had left on his desk. What he needed to do was sift through the footage from four different cameras and see if anything recorded might resemble a lead. Thankfully the timelines were such that the job, initially at least, was a limited one.
The first two tapes were from static cameras, no operators. They both covered the front areas of the crowd, and the place where Sim Thorburn had been standing was a distant blur. The remaining footage was more difficult to navigate. One camera operator had been moving around on the stage, intermittently filming the band and looking out at the crowd. The second camera operator had been on a cherry picker crane to give more dynamic angles. It was painfully slow to sit through, but finally the first glimpse of the thankfully tall Niek De Vries emerged amidst the masses.
‘Stop it there,’ Callanach said, leaning forward and peering hard at the screen. ‘That area, can you make the section larger?’
The editor pressed a few keys and leaned back, hands behind his head.
‘Is that it?’ Callanach asked. ‘It’s too blurry.’
‘Yeah, you know that stuff in films where they can suddenly zoom in and it all goes super-sharp and you can see inside people’s pockets and read what’s written on a note? That’s all bollocks,’ the editor said. ‘There’s one picture, it consists of a certain number of dots. You can see closer but then it gets less sharp. If I had a pound for every time I’ve had to explain that.’
‘Zoom back out then, left a bit,’ Callanach said. ‘That’s Sim,’ he said. ‘Play it from there.’
As the screen came to life, Callanach could see Sim bouncing up and down, in and out of the line of sight. It was sketchy, but unmistakably the victim. He was bare-chested, like many of the men in the crowd, having presumably shed his T-shirt in the heat of the sun and the crowd. Sim was singing along, one arm in the air pumping in time to the music. He looked relaxed and happy. Behind him and slightly to the right stood Merel De Vries.
‘He has absolutely no idea what’s coming,’ Callanach said to himself. The camera began to shift to the right, and Sim’s face edged towards the far side of the screen. ‘No,’ Callanach shouted. ‘It’s just about to happen. Freeze the frame or something.’ The editor tapped the space bar. Callanach searched the picture but found nothing new. ‘Let it play,’ he said. Another tap and away slid Sim’s face, about to shift fully out of frame as he seemed to bump into the body of someone passing in front of him. ‘Stop! Right there. That’s it.’
Callanach’s mind filled in the blanks. The subtle shift of a body through the crowd, slipping the knife out of a pocket, pulling off the sheath, sliding the razor-sharp blade along Sim’s naked stomach as they passed, ready with a cloth to clean up and avoid bloodying anyone else. Slipping quietly away before the victim had hit the floor. They would have moved in a zigzag through the crowd. Taking a straight course through the masses, directly out of the area, would have been too obvious.
‘Play it back again,’ Callanach ordered. On a second view, it was clearer that Sim’s head
