“Ideally, yes,” Ben said. He leaned a little closer to the screen. “Are you alright?”
“Fine!” Shona chirped. “Just, you know, got carried away. Haven’t done an all-nighter in years, so I thought, nothing to do, nowhere to go, why not?”
“You could’ve gone home,” Tyler suggested, which caught the pathologist off guard.
“Um… Home. Yes. God. Yes, I could’ve done that. That would’ve made sense, going home. That would’ve prevented…” She gestured at herself. “…all this going on right now. Sorry.”
“You’re fine,” Ben said. “Maybe just give us the highlights, then go get some rest.”
“A fine plan! I agree. Great thinking,” Shona said. She winked, fired finger-guns at the camera, then became visibly self-conscious about doing both, and cleared her throat. “Right, so, your man, then. The victim. I don’t think he was burned.” She shook her head. “I mean, obviously he was burned. But not to death. He was already dead, is what I’m saying. Strangled with some sort of narrow gauge wire. Electrical wire, maybe. Something that cut into his neck.”
“So we’re definitely looking at murder, then?” Ben asked. He’d been expecting that, of course. They all had. But there was always room for hope.
“I’d say so, yes,” Shona confirmed. “No way he could’ve done that to himself. Did Geoff mention anything about any wire at the scene?”
“No,” Ben said.
“There you go, then. Killer must’ve taken it. Unless it burned up. It could’ve burned up. Forget I said anything,” Shona babbled. “Not about him being strangled, about the wire not being there. He was definitely strangled.” She tugged at the neck of her scrubs. “Is it hot in here? Or is it just me?”
“I mean…” Ben glanced back at Tyler and Hamza. “It’s not hot here. Are you sure you’re alright, Shona?”
“I’m grand. Just overdid the energy drinks and underdid the sleep. Be right as rain in the morning.” She frowned, and looked around at the windowless office. “Wait. It’s morning now, isn’t it? Ah, shite.”
Ben glanced up and to his right at Hamza, who appeared to be sharing many of the DI’s current concerns.
“Do you want to maybe just email over the report?” Ben suggested. “And then go and get some rest? I don’t want to keep you on this,”—he gestured at the laptop—“contraption if you’re not feeling up to it.”
“Oh no, I’m fine. I’m grand. Nice to have a bit of company,” Shona said. “Your man on the slab there wasn’t much for conversation. Not for want of me trying, mind you.”
She laughed at that until she snorted, then looked mortified and consulted the clipboard of notes that sat on the desk in front of her.
“Anyway, he was strangled. Well, garrotted with the wire. Then, an accelerant was poured over him—turpentine, Geoff thinks—and he was set alight.”
“Turps?” asked Ben. “Like for removing paint? That’s an accelerant, aye, but not the easiest to light.”
“It was mixed with petroleum jelly,” Shona said. “Apparently, that makes it easier. By the time the fire burned out, there wasn’t much left of him, which makes it harder to pin down when this happened, of course. A lot of what we’d usually rely on has, you know, melted.”
“Can you take an educated guess?” Ben asked.
“Well, going by insect infestation of the remains… the number of animal bites… general decomposition, I’d say we’re looking at two to three weeks. Can’t really be much more definite than that, I’m afraid. In fact, I can’t give you much more than that in general. Stomach contents were all gone.”
“Burned up?” asked Tyler.
“Partly. And partly eaten by a scavenging animal of some kind,” Shona replied. “Possibly a pine marten.”
Tyler grimaced. “Jesus. Sorry I asked.”
“I’m going to send him off for imaging to see if there’s anything I’ve missed. Carbonisation like his makes dissection difficult, so there’s always a chance the tomography will find more,” Shona explained. “What I would say, though, is that he fits the description of the suspected victim. Except, you know, a set-on-fire version of him. Male, about the right height, right age range. Based on what information we have, I’d say it’s more likely him than it isn’t.”
“Right. Well, I suppose that’s something,” Ben said. “Better to know who we’re dealing with, at least, than…”
He fell silent as, on screen, Shona flapped her hands like she was trying to take off, her face suddenly alive with excitement.
“Oh! Sorry for interrupting! I just remembered something,” she said.
She reached off-camera and returned with a large, neon-coloured can in one hand, and a small evidence bag in the other. She held up the bag to the camera while she took a big slurp from the can. A trickle of luminous orange liquid dribbled down her chin.
“What are we looking at?” asked Ben, squinting at the out-of-focus contents of the bag.
“It’s a ring. Gold,” Shona said. “Geoff must’ve missed it. No wonder, it was sort of fused with the flesh and blackened like the rest of the body.”
“Lovely,” Tyler remarked.
“It’s a wedding ring, I’d say, except it was on the wrong hand. Ring finger on the right hand instead of the left. I’m going to get someone from Geoff’s team to come over and collect it, and they can do their stuff on it.”
“Any markings? Engravings?” Ben asked.
“Address and phone number of his next of kin?” Hamza added.
“Not sure,” Shona admitted. “Probably not that last one, though. It’ll need cleaned up before we can get anything like that.”
From elsewhere in the station there came a knocking. A swift rat-a-tat-tat of someone at the door. Ben nudged Tyler and gave a little jerk of his head. “Better get that, son. There’s no one else in.”
“On it, boss,” said Tyler, who was secretly quite relieved to be getting away from the call. The nitty-gritty of the post-mortem procedure was generally not something he enjoyed digging into.
He left the room with a skip in his step, and pulled the Incident Room door closed behind him.
A moment later, before the conversation could go much further, he opened the door again, and leaned his head around it.
“Eh, I don’t know if it’s just my imagination,” he said. “But I think Jesus might be at the door.”
Shona knocked back another swig of her energy drink, then returned to the black rectangle on her screen which had, until just a moment ago, been a window filled with people she knew.
She watched it until she’d finished the can, quietly hoping that the call might resume, and they could pick up where they’d left off.
Besides, if it really was the Lord Jesus Christ who was at the door, she’d have quite liked to have said hello.
She added the empty can to the pyramid she was building on the floor by her desk, stood frozen for a few seconds while she waited to see if it would collapse, then she sat back in her chair, rocked it from side to side, and tapped her hands on her legs.
Ben was right, of course. She should go home. She needed to rest.
But she hadn’t been home on her own in a long, long time.
And she wasn’t about to start now.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN