Deadly Alibi Read online

  A few moments later he had driven away, free from the wretched body in the bin. And he was going to remain free. The police wouldn’t be able to trace him. He risked being locked up for the rest of his life if he blundered. But he was going to be careful. In any case, the difficult part was over. There was just the chisel to dispose of, and he would be safe.

  They would never catch him.

  9

  Looking in her rear view mirror, Geraldine watched Helena stalk off and vanish in the grey drizzle. Any relief she might have felt at seeing her go was swallowed up by sour regret. She wondered whether she would ever see her sister again. Despite her disappointment, she remained wary. The risk of allowing Helena into her life could be considerable. Meanwhile, she had work to do. There was a crime scene waiting for her. She wondered if it was unnatural for her to feel more comfortable viewing a corpse than attempting to interact with her sister. As she drove away she realised that, to her shame, she hadn’t thought about her mother once since the funeral. Fixated on the twin she had just met for the first time, she had thought about nothing else. Admittedly she had only met her birth mother once, very briefly, but she felt guilty all the same.

  She found the Oxfam shop in Highgate High Street without any problem. It was easy to spot from a distance, with several police cars parked outside. A uniformed constable at the door gave Geraldine a respectful nod and stood aside for her to enter. Inside the shop, a grey-haired woman in a pink cardigan was hovering by the counter, an anxious expression on her powdered face. Her eyes looked slightly moist and she dabbed at them with a pink handkerchief as Geraldine introduced herself.

  ‘It was Stevie who found it,’ the woman said. ‘You can’t imagine how horrible it is. It’s still there, out the back.’ The woman shook her head. ‘I didn’t think it was real, not at first. I thought it was a shop mannequin. I mean, it’s not something you expect to see left in a rubbish bin outside an Oxfam shop, is it?’

  ‘Take a seat, and a constable will take your statement when you’re ready,’ Geraldine said.

  Clearly the woman had nothing to do with the murder. Geraldine turned away and a uniformed constable pointed her towards the back of the shop.

  ‘The young lad over there found the body,’ he muttered. ‘His name’s Steven, and to be honest, I don’t think he’s the sharpest tool in the box.’

  Geraldine turned her attention to a lanky youth who was leaning against the wall. She wondered if he was usually so pale.

  ‘Steven?’ she said.

  ‘Stevie. I’m called Stevie,’ he corrected her, blinking nervously.

  His dark hair was short, and sprinkled with dandruff.

  ‘Stevie, I’m Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel. Let’s sit down and then you can tell me everything that happened.’

  Stevie shrugged and told her he didn’t know what happened, only that he had pushed the wheelie bin into the store room at the back of the shop.

  ‘Moira asked me to take it to the store room. That’s where we sort out all the things people leave. I didn’t mind taking it there. It would’ve been too heavy for Moira to push. It was heavy even for me, and I’m strong. I’m very strong.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that. What happened when you pushed the bin into the store room?’

  Opening the large green bin, he had seen the dead woman.

  ‘Moira didn’t know it was a real body,’ he added. ‘She thought it was a doll, but I knew straight away, soon as I saw it. I told her it was a dead woman in there. But what I want to know,’ he went on earnestly, ‘is why she was put in a wheelie bin. Those bins are for rubbish, aren’t they? Why was she put in there? She was dead, wasn’t she? But she wasn’t rubbish. That’s not right, is it? It shows no respect for the dead. And why was she brought here?’ He screwed up his eyes. ‘I think it was a mistake. I don’t think anyone knew she was in there!’ He looked earnestly at Geraldine. ‘Do you think anyone knew she was in there?’

  Once she had gathered as much as she could about how the body had been discovered, Geraldine went to the store room where the body was still crammed inside the bin. The mortuary van was waiting to take it away. Not much of the dead woman was visible apart from the top of her head, but Geraldine wanted to have a look at the body exactly as it had been left there. She shone a torch inside the bin but could see little past the dead woman’s head, her fair hair stained with blood. She could not even be sure she was looking at a dead woman. It could just as easily have been the body of a man with long shaggy hair inside the bin.

  Geraldine straightened up and nodded. ‘There’s nothing to be gained from keeping the body inside that bin. You might as well take it away, and get going establishing an identity.’

  As a rule, Geraldine liked to observe dead bodies before they were removed from the scene of the crime. More often than not, such an examination revealed vital information about the killer. But in this case, there was nothing much to see, other than the bin. The sooner the dead body was taken away and examined, the better. Geraldine watched as the bin was wheeled out of the back of the shop. The body would be extracted and scrutinised, samples would be sent away for a toxicology report, and the bin would be examined for fingerprints and DNA. With any luck it would yield evidence that would reveal the killer’s identity straight away. She glanced around. There was an empty space in the cluttered store room where a few moments before the bin had been standing.

  It was puzzling that the body had been deposited outside a shop in a busy high street. It must have been left there during the night, when the area was deserted. Even so, there were CCTV cameras along the road, and outside the shops. She would set a team to work straight away, collecting whatever evidence was available. At least one camera must have a record of a vehicle stopping outside the shop. With luck they would have no problem tracing its owner.

  In the meantime, Geraldine needed to establish the identity of the woman who had been abandoned in a rubbish bin, like so much garbage. She felt a flicker of revulsion towards the killer. Of course it made no difference to his victim that her killer showed so little respect for the dead. But Geraldine was afraid such a murderer would show no respect for the living either. And such an attitude could make him very dangerous indeed.

  10

  Friday evening wasn’t the best time to request a post mortem, but the pathologist agreed to set to work first thing on Saturday morning, even though he hadn’t been expecting to work that weekend.

  ‘Not what you want to be doing with a hangover,’ he said when Geraldine phoned to see how he was getting on.

  ‘It’s not what I’d want to be doing at any time.’

  ‘I meant having to get up so early after a late night,’ he grumbled. ‘I wasn’t talking about conducting the post mortem per se. Examining bodies is the job I choose to do. It might not be your cup of tea, but I happen to find it interesting.’

  Geraldine extricated herself from the conversation as quickly as possible. Miles was clearly in a foul mood. By the time she visited the mortuary a couple of hours later, the pathologist had recovered his normal good humour. The skin around his hazel eyes crinkled in a smile above his mask as she entered the room. Returning his smile, Geraldine wondered where his enthusiasm for carving up cadavers might have led him, had he not found his niche as a Home Office pathologist. It was sobering to think the same question could be levelled at her, given her interest in the victims of violent murder. She dismissed such dark thoughts. Her mother’s funeral, and meeting her sister, had disturbed her.

  ‘So what can you tell me?’

  ‘Well,’ he hesitated. ‘What do we know about her?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve come here to find out. So far all I can tell you is that she’s dead, and she was found in a wheelie bin left outside the Oxfam shop along Highgate High Street. We’re trying to find out who left her there, and when, and who she is, but it’s going to take time. We�
��ve got a team studying CCTV footage from across the road.’

  ‘So you’ve no idea yet who she was? What her circumstances were?’

  ‘Other than that she’s dead, you mean?’

  ‘Well, yes, I gathered she’s dead. My training does count for something, you know.’

  Geraldine laughed. ‘What else? Can you tell me anything about her life before she was killed?’

  ‘I thought that was your job. Are you telling me you really have no idea who she was?’

  ‘Not yet. We haven’t identified her, but we’re working on it. No reports of missing women that match her description have been logged, but we should know who she is by Monday from her dental records, if we haven’t found out before then. So, in the meantime, what can you tell me?’

  Miles turned back to the body. ‘We’re looking at a woman of about forty.’

  ‘She looks younger.’

  ‘I know. At first glance she could be an adolescent, with her youthful face and her slim build. But she was around forty when she died.’

  Geraldine nodded. Small, flat-chested and quite skinny, the dead woman looked about sixteen.

  ‘So this is a woman in early middle age,’ Miles went on.

  Geraldine frowned. She didn’t think of herself as middle-aged, but at forty she could no longer get away with kidding herself she was still a young woman.

  ‘There’s an indentation from a ring on the third finger of her left hand, but she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring when she was brought in. She was not well-nourished, although there’s nothing to suggest she was sickly. My guess – and it is only an educated guess – is that she suffered from a subclinical eating disorder. In other words, she was borderline anorexic. Other than that, she seems to have been in reasonable health before she was killed, physically at least. I can’t comment on her mental state. There was a blood-drenched rug in the bin, crammed in beneath the body, that’s gone off for forensic examination. It looks as though she was standing on the rug when she was attacked. The rug was one of those shaggy ones, and it absorbed most of the blood that hadn’t soaked into her clothes before she was deposited in the bin, probably very soon after she was killed.’

  He fell silent and Geraldine stood gazing down at the corpse for a moment. It was hard to believe this lump of greyish flesh had once been a living breathing woman. She waited for the sense of urgency that consumed her whenever she saw a murder victim, the feeling that she had to see the killer punished. That was what gave her life a sense of purpose. For the first time, she felt only a cold indifference. It was a shock to realise she didn’t really care who had committed the murder. She took a step back, wondering what to do. If she had lost the passion for justice that had so far driven her on, she would never cope with the demands of her job. She stared at the body, willing herself to care, but felt only a debilitating tiredness. Everybody died. Did it really matter if the end came prematurely?

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Miles interrupted her gloomy reverie.

  ‘What was the time of death?’ she asked automatically.

  It was easier to follow procedure than come up with relevant questions. At least that way, there was no need to think.

  ‘Between eleven pm and midnight on Thursday. She was shoved into the bin fairly soon after, at least a couple of hours before rigor began to set in.’

  ‘If only you could talk,’ she muttered at the dead woman. ‘How was she killed?’

  Miles nodded, oblivious to the fact that she was just going through the motions. She didn’t care how or when the woman had died. She would have died one day anyway.

  ‘It’s just conceivable she fell and hit her head, but the nature of the impact makes it almost certain she was deliberately hit from above.’

  ‘With?’

  ‘A large sharp object, a blunt knife, the edge of a brick, it’s not easy to be precise as her skull caved in. She bled, so it’s possible any traces of the murder weapon, if there were any, could have been washed away, but my guess…’ He hesitated.

  ‘Go on,’ Geraldine urged him. ‘This is off the record. I understand it’s speculation, but it’s going to be based on your expertise and extensive experience.’

  ‘Oh, how can I resist such flattery? All right, but this is just a hypothesis. Guesswork, really. Just between us.’

  ‘Understood. This goes no further. My lips are sealed, and I don’t think she’s going to be breaking your confidence.’ She glanced down at the pale face on the slab.

  Geraldine had worked with Miles Fellowes on a number of cases, and she appreciated his willingness to share his conjectures with her. They both knew his unverified supposition bordered on unprofessional. As a pathologist, his job was restricted to reporting the facts he uncovered. Her discretion had earned his trust, and he was prepared to speculate off the record. While she was aware that he might be wrong, he had frequently come up with useful ideas for her to consider. More often than not, his theories proved correct. Wary of giving undue weight to his initial inference, she nodded her head to indicate she was listening.

  ‘My guess is that she was hit with considerable force from above so I’m guessing she was killed by a strong person who was taller than her – maybe six foot. Assuming I’m on the right lines, I’d say you’re looking for a man. He was wielding an object that was probably metal as it left no chips or dust behind that I’ve been able to find. I could be wrong on all counts. Forensic examination of the bone fragments and tissue will be able to tell us more.’

  ‘But you’re fairly confident she was hit by someone taller than her?’

  ‘Possibly. She could have been sitting down, or her attacker could have been standing over her, maybe on a step or something, but she’s barely five foot, so I’d say her killer could easily have been tall enough to swing the murder weapon from above her head. And it was just the one blow.’

  ‘Perhaps her attacker hit out in anger,’ Geraldine said. ‘In your expert guess, what would you say the murder weapon was?’

  ‘Bearing in mind that I am just guessing…’

  Geraldine gave an impatient nod.

  ‘It looks very much as though she was hit with a large knife, perhaps some sort of kitchen knife or cleaver. A bread knife could have done it. The blade was sharp enough to penetrate the skull before it shattered under the impact. There’s one clear incision here, that runs across the smaller fractures. But the blade that struck her was quite narrow.’

  ‘So that’s what killed her, the blow to the head?’

  ‘Without a doubt. I’m sure of that, at least. And she’d been in a fight before the fatal blow was struck.’ He raised the dead woman’s right hand and pointed out slight grazing on her knuckles.

  ‘A fight?’

  ‘Yes. You can ignore some of this weird pattern of bruising. That happened post mortem, when she was crammed into the wheelie bin. One of her arms was broken in the struggle to fit her inside, but like I said she was already dead by then. It’s just as well she was so slight or there might have been more damage.’

  ‘Just as well?’

  ‘For whoever was trying to dispose of her, I mean.’

  Geraldine nodded. ‘Well, it made no difference to her, anyway. If she was killed in the heat of the moment, I wonder if the bin was there, at the house, or did her killer take her away somewhere before putting her in it?’

  ‘If he brought the bin with him, that would be a bit weird, but it would be proof of premeditation.’

  ‘Once we know where she lived, we’ll know whether the killer used a bin that was already there, at the house.’

  ‘There was some household waste at the bottom of the bin – a bag of vegetable scraps in a bag.’

  Geraldine pulled a face. Somehow it seemed more disgusting that the dead woman had been shoved into a used bin. It was annoying that the bin had no identification on it.

 
‘Do you think she knew her attacker?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t say. But I can tell you it appears she tried to fight him off. There are a number of defence wounds, and traces of skin on her knuckles where she tried to hit whoever was assaulting her.’

  ‘And that’s not her own skin?’

  ‘I can’t say definitely until it’s gone off for analysis, but it’s probably not her own skin. It looks different under close examination, even just with the human eye.’

  Their eyes met in mutual understanding. That was a stroke of luck.

  ‘Not so lucky for her killer,’ Miles said, as though he could read her mind. ‘If it was her killer she was fighting with.’

  ‘Had she been drinking?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but we’ll get the full tox report on Monday. I’ll know more then.’

  Geraldine gazed down at the victim. The dead woman had large blue eyes and childlike features. With her white face and bloody hair, she looked like a ghost from a horror film.

  Geraldine sighed. ‘What happened to you?’ she whispered. ‘Who did this to you?’

  Overhearing her, Miles laughed. ‘If she could tell us that, we’d both be out of a job!’

  That evening Geraldine phoned her friend Ian, to check that he was all right.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I mean, I’m OK, but I don’t know what to do. I went to see Bev like you suggested, but there was no point. It’s over. Maybe I should just go ahead with a divorce.’

  ‘Don’t rush into anything. You need to talk to her properly. What if it turns out you’re the father, and she wants you back?’

  ‘To be honest, even if a paternity test showed the baby’s mine, I don’t think I’d want her back, not after the way she’s behaved. She left me to go and live with him. She said that was what she wanted. Even if the baby’s mine, it’s over between me and Bev. God knows how long their affair’s been going on. She told me the baby’s not mine. Even if it is, what difference does that make? I’ll never be able to trust her again, and if I can’t trust her, why would I want her back?’