“You have to be joking…”
Det Sgt Danster addressed this to the phone beside her alarm clock. The two instruments sat there, smugly colluding in this, a faintly luminous dial showing three twenty and the telephone demanding attention. Like an infant squalling to be picked up.
“What??” she snarled, conscious of the staleness of her own breath in the mouthpiece. “Know what time it is?”.
“Yes, my little sunbeam, I do. About forty minutes before I kiss this dump goodbye for my two off-days. Are you listening?”
Cartwright’s voice was cool and unruffled, reminding Danster how much she detested his sleek grooming. Probably gonna wash his hands after handling this call to me, she reflected sourly.
“Your inevitably dishevelled person is required, a little quicker than immediately. C’mon, duty standby homicide detective, wakey, wakey. Time is a-wasting.and there are bad people to catch. Really bad people in this case, I hope your excesses didn’t include a big meal, because this one’s going to give you the screaming heaves. Corner of Longton and Stowe. Can’t miss it with all those policemen and blue lights.”
There was no mistaking the pleasure in the mocking voice in Danster’s ear. “Rigby wants you. If you’re awake that is.”
Danster replaced the receiver with a groan ‘ What the hell did I drink last night?’ The arm across her forehead made her head hurt more, and she fumbled for the edge of the covers. For just one treacherous moment, she was going to pull it over her shoulder again, when the mention of Rigby stopped her. The Duty Officer could have been anyone else, but it had to be Rigby, didn’t it? Another of the many men she hated. He’d be striding up and down, blue eyes bulging and bulldog jaw squared at the audacity of someone committing murder while he was at his rest, probably barking every two minutes “Where the hell is that bloody idle thing, Danster ?” or whichever unfortunate CID detective was on call.
Danster had discovered that the shoe she couldn’t find was on her left foot, and set herself to getting into the other one. Other than that, she was fully dressed. Because that was how she had collapsed on her bed last night. She sat on the edge of the bed, gathering herself for a supreme effort. The small plastic bottle on the bedside table caught her eye, and with very little thought, she popped the stopper and studied the contents.
The tablets were small and cream-coloured. She tried to remember when she’d taken the last one. With that amount of gin on board last night, there should have been no need for sleeping pills. She had no idea how she’d got home, from wherever it was she’d been. She gave up as she did lately, with most things requiring memory. She stood up and retrieved a stained Burberry from its peg. It was just cool enough to justify wearing it and it would cover the sorry state of her clothes. Mind clearing slowly, she went down to her car and started up.
By the time she reached the intersection, she was functioning well enough and the mints she’d found in the console might have masked the smell of juniper berries. Rigby stalked towards her and stopped, goggling, “Good Lord, woman! Look at the state of you! Have you no conscience? Thank heavens its dark.” Danster ignored this pleasantry and went to where a white faced photographer was packing away his equipment. One of the few she didn’t mind.
“Two prints of each, Robby? Thanks.”
One for the docket and one for her to draw on and make notes on. Danster’s own peculiarity. A pair of man’s moccasined feet protruded from under a sheet. The body beneath it seemed shorter than one might expect. The other end of the covering was soaked in blood. A couple of young beat constables, one fat and one thin, stood guard over it and turned away abruptly as Danster drew the sheet aside. A truncated neck had stopped oozing, because there wasn’t a lot of blood left in the body. Certainly there was plenty on the street and pavement.
Danster replaced the sheet and said, “The head?”
The constables looked at each other and then shrugged as one.
Danster sighed “Where did you look? In the flowerbeds?, In the bins? Down the drains? Come on, lads!” The constables separated, glad to be away from the corpse, each hoping the other would be first to find the head.
A small, cheap suitcase open beside the body, Danster busied herself at her trade. Rigby left her alone, and without interruption, she was able to note the state of the clothing, take nail scrapings and fingerprints and fine-comb the immediate vicinity. An hour later, torch batteries and concentration exhausted, she packed away her tools. She’d lifted prints from the fake patent sling- bag that the body still clutched in rigor mortis and the accessory now sat in a plastic exhibit bag.
It was another thirty minutes before the body in its black cadaver bag went into the mortuary van and she gave a curt go-ahead gesture for the wide-eyed night cleaners to hose the pavement. The blood had coagulated in dark, viscous, lily-pads the size of omelettes and it took time before the pressure hoses pried the last free of the concrete. Like my life, thought Danster, moodily regarding the end of one more cigarette as the last disappeared down the nearest storm drain. Rigby had blustered off in his Range Rover and the two beat constables stood nearby, whispering to each other, shifting from foot to foot like chained circus elephants,
“OK lads, bugger off now. Nothing more to be done. Unless you’ve found the head and are saving the surprise for last?” She pointed at the rotund belly of the fat officer, who took longer than his skinny colleague to catch the grim joke. Danster drove to the station to book in the exhibits, before making her weary way back home to lie on her rumpled bed and stare at the ceiling. There didn’t seem much point in trying to sleep, and she daren’t take a pill at this late hour, but her eyes closed after a time and she woke with a start at after seven.
A hurried shower saw Danster at her desk by eight, feeling partially refreshed. She was glad she hadn’t taken a pill on top of the booze, remembering the warning on the label. Or had she? By the daily gathering at eight-thirty, she was functioning well enough, two near complete dockets under her arm for her report-back. ‘ Morning prayers’ they called it - an informal affair, with detectives standing round the walls of the Chief’s office and bringing him up to date with progress or obstacles encountered in their various case-loads.
The Chief listened, expressionless, to Danster’s reports on an armed robbery and a serious assault and then the account of last night’s murder. “Lucky you,” he growled “Finders keepers. Since you found it you can keep it - the docket that is, not the head!.” Sycophantic sniggers around the wall rewarded this witticism.
“Good luck. The media will be here at nine - like blowflies on this one - so I’d better find something coherent but evasive to say. OK, all …get on with it!”
Danster booked the sling-bag out of the exhibit room, put it on her desk and studied it through the plastic. Black and shiny, except for the clouding of last night’s print dusting, it was quite ordinary… and told her nothing. She took out her dusting kit, pulled on a glove and opened the exhibit bag. Another inspection of the outer surface, turning the sling-bag this way and that under the light, before unzipping it and carefully emptying the contents onto her desk.
Keys, a comb, a suede wallet, a modest amount of cash, some cards that confirmed Barry Fraser’s driver status, his banking and shopping preferences and habits and an ATM slip that showed a healthy balance. Healthier than Danster’s anyway. A couple of kids pulling faces from behind a transparent panel could have been anyone’s and any age now, but the green-backed ID book brought her face to face for the first time.
At least she now knew which head to look for, she thought wryly, registering that Fraser was forty-two, was married - at least when the document was issued, had voted twice and wasn’t licensed to own a firearm. The cigarette-case was matt-finish stainless steel, flipping open to expose the contents against a mirrored inside. Danster was about to discard it when the light caught two perfect prints in one corner of the mirror. She considered them without much interest and then reached for her dusting brush and the acetate lifting film. The prints lifted cleanly onto the Foilene and she noted their location on the investigation diary under “Fingerprints” adding them to last night’s evidential material.
A week later, Det Sgt Danster’s prints came back from classification, all attributable to the deceased. Except two. These did not match any known criminal on record, said the rectangular blue stamp over a neat signature at the bottom of the report. Danster stirred the pile of prints those off the mirror surfaced. She studied them – a girlfriend borrowing the mirror in some hasty touch-up job in a restaurant passage? Someone accepting an offered cigarette? Acquaintances, or people without their prints on record, anyway.
The prints seemed narrow for a man. Danster studied her own fingertips, first idly and then much more closely. She studied them for a long time before drawing the copper-clad pad and ink roller towards her and carefully refreshing the film of ink. For all the hundreds of fingerprints she’d taken from suspects, it was the first time she’d taken her own. She did it very carefully, although her hands were shaking. Transferred to the standard form, the prints were starkly defined against the white paper with no trace of smudging. There was no need for her to magnify either set. They were her prints.
Danster sat for some time. Then she sealed all the prints into a large envelope, stapled it, and locked it in her bottom drawer, before going out to the carpark. Thirty minutes later, she had driven past the address in Barry Fraser’s I.D. book for the second time and pulled into the kerb to think. There was nothing about the small, neat suburban house that jogged her memory. Seeing it meant nothing to her. She wondered how they’d received the death message.
She fumbled out the pill-bottle and considered, where had she got it from? That too was unclear. Somebody in the past week or so had pressed it on her for her sleeplessness (without any clear warnings on side-effects) somewhere in her regular tour of the watering-holes. When another headache started, she gave up thinking and drove back to the station.
Danster’s car was not the youngest in the fleet. Male pre-occupation with vehicle status had seen to that, and the wear and tear and incidental minor damages of police-work had aged it further. As she turned into the yard, a tell-tale pull on the steering confirmed what she’d suspected. The right front was half deflated and an exploratory hand over the heated, exposed surface of the tyre located the cause. She must have picked up the nail at the construction site down the road. Danster sighed as she contemplated changing a tyre in this midday heat, without help.
The remote boot release had long ceased to work and Danster carried what she used and needed near at hand – on the seats. So it was some time before her patient attempts to unlock the boot were finally met with success. When at last, the lid yielded and creaked open, the stench was unbelievable.
The discoloured face that stared up at Detective Sergeant Danster through half-shut and sightless eyes was still recognizable although time and summer heat had taken their toll and no amount of funeral make-up was going to make Barry Fraser look like the photograph in his identity document. It was then that Detective Sergeant Emily Danster started screaming, clawing for the little bottle of pills in her pocket.