CHAPTER 37
We were back in the office on January 3rd, and I spent the morning going through the parish notice e-mails, or, as we called them, after the head admin woman who issued them all, ‘Weller Deletes’. Open—scan—delete. Several were attached to a read receipt system, so I then took a while longer deleting the out-of-office auto-replies to the auto-replies to…

It filled the morning for me, between sessions of team brew-ups and runs out to the local supermarket for biscuits and muffins.

There was a little office gossip, a few salacious post-New Year’s Eve debauchery stories, something or other about football; a pretty quiet morning. We each had a pile of dross to work through, whether it be disclosure schedules, CCTV footage comparisons, timeline analysis, so on and so forth.

Sammy was with us in the big room that morning, looking ridiculously fresh and cheerful in comparison to some of my colleagues. Candice in particular seemed to have had the hangover from hell, so apart from leaving the occasional brew by her elbow we were all leaving her well alone.

Sammy’s mobile broke the near-silence.

“Patel!”

His face fell.

“Where and when?”

“CID teed up?”

“Ah. Yes, I know he does. Ah. We have access, need to know”

“Yes, I know, but with all due respect, sir, you don’t need to know, and I think it’s best that way”

“Full team today. Nothing that can’t be shelved for now”

He took the phone away from his ear, staring the ceiling for a few seconds while clearly choosing his words.

“Once again, with all due respect, that is hardly our role, sir. Why not SOCO or CID?”

What was coming back down the phone made him wince, and he started nodding, forgetting he was invisible to the caller.

“Fine, sir. Understood. I will brief them now”

He closed up his phone with a bang.

“Shit, fuck and fucking shitty bollocks! Team meeting, mates. Now, OK? Get a brew first. Lexie? White coffee, please”

He was sitting shaking his head as she passed him the cup, hot from our wonderful urn. The rest of us gathered round the desk he was sitting at, pulling chairs with us rather than perching on the edge of a table. There was a clear feeling this was going to be heavy.

Sammy took a sip, wincing at the heat, opening up his e-mails as we gathered. He nodded sharply, tapped some keys, read for a few seconds, then swore again.

“Mates, I need a quick sit-rep on diaries. Anything that’s planned for the next two weeks for starters, and in particular anything that can’t be postponed, with the reasons. Anyone?”

I spent a couple of minutes, as did the others, and there was nothing from anyone apart from two appointments to collect witness statements from members of the public.

“Right, mates. Ellen, Lexie? You clear everything apart from those. Your witnesses have been waiting long enough for a result, and I won’t give them any more grief than absolutely necessary. Here’s where we stand. CID are all tied up with annual leave, court, handy excuses like that, so this particular shit bomb is being dropped in our laps. Sorry. We have one particularly shitty job, so I will be asking for volunteers, and for once I really mean volunteers”

He paused to read what lurked on his screen, grimaced, and turned back to us.

“Alun, you still got those keys? LIO is on leave. We’ll need to get to his tats file. Jon? Sort us the digital camera and a clean memory card. Now…”

He paused, looking round the team, looking tired.

“Mates, this is a murder enquiry. Body pulled out of the Usk, near the mouth. Not far from the Alexandra docks, about four hundred yards downstream from the entrance. Yes, Jon?”

“Serious question, boss? Why murder? Why so specific?”

Sammy winced again.

“That’s she shitty bit, mate. Partially dismembered; missing head and hands”

Someone swore, I don’t know who, and Alun laughed without any seasoning of humour.

“Hence the tats file, Sammy?”

“Hence the tats file, mate. We’ll run DNA, of course, but this is the shitty job. Visit to the morgue, and pictures of the necessary. I have no intention of telling on this one. It will be a rough one”

I looked round at my friends, understanding exactly what he meant, and my mouth answered for me, just before Rhys nodded and said that he’d go with me.

Too eager for my own good. Blake squeezed my hand in recognition, and my telepathy picked up waves of gratitude from the others.

Rhys broke the mood before it could get too heavy.

“I’ll sort us a car, Di”

“Thanks, mate. Sammy: anything else at all, any other aspects we should look for?”

“This is going to sound daft, considering our new friend is missing his head, but cause and time of death would be nice”

I started to gather my kit together as Jon brought over the camera and a brand-new SD card. Sammy called over to me as I dragged on my coat.

“Di?”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t have to do this, you know. Body’s in shit state; it’ll be nasty”

“Sammy, I know you mean well, yeah? But this is a team. We pull together. Won’t be my first stiff, what with the time I spent with Traffic”

I had a sudden vision of Adam-as-was, and a still, small form in a baby seat, covered in a blanket, in a twinkling patch of glass fragments as a mother screamed and sobbed in an ambulance. Not now, DC Sutton. Police, Professional.

“OK, mate. SOCO are down near where the body was found, and we have Uniform working carefully along the bank. Good call, by the way”

“Eh?”

“Traffic. If anyone has an eye for the little bits of evidence we need, it’ll be them”

“Nice one, Sammy. Rhys?”

“Got the unmarked Beemer, Di”

“Nice one. You can drive. Where to, Sammy? Royal Gwent?”

“Aye, love. Stop at Addison’s and get some Vick’s”

“I’ve seen the films as well. How long in the water?”

“At least three days, they say. No idea where he was put in”

I looked up.

“Bloke, then?”

“Not any more. They took his cock and balls as well”

“Jesus!”

“Still sure you want to go?”

I gave a sharp nod before P,P failed.

“We’re off, then. Come on, Rhys, before I wimp out”

It was a steady drive across to Newport, Rhys saying very little until we were just about to enter the hospital.

“Di?”

“Yes?”

“You do the pictures. Trust me; it will give you something to think about rather than the state of the client”

“Thanks, love”

“Any time, girl. If it gets too much, we take a breather. Oh: I’ve brought a Dictaphone as well. Same system the forensic boys use; saves getting precious bodily fluids on your pocket book. Again, any worries, we walk out, take a break. No shame, aye?”

“None at all, Rhys. Let’s do this”

Into Reception, identify ourselves and wait. Eventually, we had a middle-aged man in what I thought of as ‘surgical scrubs’ from some book or film I had seen, and ‘Doctor Hancock, call me Matt’ took us down to the morgue after checking our IDs yet again.

It was cold. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but for some odd reason I had been expecting something Arctic, but it was just chilly. There was an array of what looked like left-luggage lockers on one wall, and I didn’t need to ask, as I only noticed in passing. My attention was elsewhere, though, drawn to the stainless-steel table with the gutters and raised edges that dominated the centre of the room.

Our man did not look good. That sounds silly, considering how many body parts he was missing, but it was my first thought. He looked an odd blue-grey, with multiple darker patches scattered over his legs and abdomen. My next thought was of a butcher’s shop.

His arms ended in raw flesh rolled back along the end of sharply-cut bone, and all I could see were pork joints ready for basting and roasting. His neck was a mess, but I only registered that ten minutes later, after I had returned from the sluice room and wiped my mouth. Rhys handed me the camera with a nod turning on his little recorder.

“Matt?”

“Er, um. Yeah. Subject is an adult male, I would estimate from what’s left as in their forties or early fifties. Height around six foot three, weight around eighteen stone. I am estimating the height because, well. I can give you the metric equivalents later, if you want. Cause of death could be one or more of several things”

Rhys kept up the professional end as I concentrated on fighting my stomach and mastering the camera.

“Missing head not the cause?”

“No, I don’t think so. This isn’t some jihadi nutter with a kitchen knife. See the wrists?”

Concentrate on the photos, DC Sutton. Mat was in full flow now.

“The hands were sawn off. I would guess a large hacksaw or similar; very even cuts. What I can see on the vertebral column looks much the same. I would say that the head and hands were removed post-mortem. Our man wasn’t fighting against it, from the marks. Different story elsewhere, I’m afraid. Do you mind if we don’t pull him about too much? My back’s a bit iffy these days”

“Different story?”

“Oh yes. There are three deep wounds in his back, one of them extending over the trapezius. See? Mixture of blunt force trauma and incised wound”

“Suggested cause, Matt?”

“Oh, I’ve seen that before, when I worked in Northumberland. Axe wounds. Someone hit him three times from behind with an axe. Or he had a really unlucky fall, then repeated it twice. The one you can see the top edge of shattered his right scapula. There are other wounds here… see? And a couple of contusions”

“Summary, Matt?”

“Oh, my best guess is that he was set on by more than one person, and the ones in front of him caught him with the flat of an axe blade. The bruising isn’t as concentrated or as linear as would be the case with a rod, something like an iron bar or baseball bat”

There were tattoos. I concentrated on the tattoos, which kept the visual stuff from freaking me out, but I could still hear.

“So, in essence, he was chopped up. Once dead, they removed his head and hands, and my estimate is that he went into the water around three days ago. Cause of death could have been from loss of blood, as the wounds are more than deep enough, but there’s another wound under the sternum and into the liver. Hepatic portal vein was opened. Thinner blade. Bayonet, kitchen knife or similar”

We did the necessary, and kept our time there as short as possible, but Matt wasn’t finished. As we emerged from the odd mixture of dark corners and overhead glare that was his kingdom, he dropped the last little nugget on us.

“Oh, one more thing. The missing genitalia?”

Rhys had to ask, and Matt smiled, with as little humour as had been held by Alun’s earlier laughter.

“That’s the thing, you see. The cuts are all rather ragged. He was alive and struggling when that happened”