Ryan could hardly see any difference between the swelling on the ankle in comparison with the rest of the body but he trusted that Pinter would explain the distinction.
“You can see that the flesh is starting to distend. Decay is most active around the open wound areas but the bruising around this area of swelling on the ankle could not have occurred post-mortem.”
“Which means it was twisted before she died?”
“Yes, that’s most likely,” Pinter agreed. “It’s sprained and the blood had to be circulating to pool in that area, which means it happened ante mortem.”
Ryan searched the skin for signs of other bruising and, this time, he saw beyond the discolouration to the darker patches.
“And the bruising here?” Ryan’s gloved finger hovered over the remaining skin of Alice’s upper arms.
“Yes, that’s quite telling,” Pinter came to stand beside Ryan, while Phillips kept a safe distance. “You can see quite clearly there are deep imprints on the upper arms, in a circular formation that I would normally associate with aggressive handling.”
Ryan folded his arms across his chest and thought of Alice Chapman’s last moments, spent in fear.
“I’m still running blood tests and I’ll put together my full report but I thought you’d want to see this straight away.”
Ryan gave Pinter a grateful slap on the back.
“You were right. Let us know as soon as the DNA results come in.”
He looked over his shoulder to where Phillips stood, a little green around the gills, and smiled fiercely.
“Looks like we’ve got a stupid killer on our hands, Frank.”
“Oh, goody. They’re my favourite kind.”
CHAPTER 19
Lowerson told himself not to be put out by the fact Melanie Yates had just achieved something unprecedented. She had worked her magic on an uncooperative compliance officer at Victor Swann’s bank, who had just sent through reams of personal account records without requiring a warrant of any kind. A mere thirty minutes earlier, Lowerson had ended a protracted phone call with the very same man without any success whatsoever.
Typical.
“Let’s have a look-see,” he declared, wriggling his fingers and then clicking open the files on his computer. He noticed Yates following suit at the desk cubicle beside him and they settled down to pore over Swann’s accounts.
The numbers only covered the last three months but Yates had been promised more backdated accounts later in the day. Even looking at the most recent data, the neat little columns made for interesting reading.
For a start, they confirmed what the team already suspected of Victor Swann’s character; namely, that he was a spendthrift, to the point of being completely profligate with money. Every week, there had been new luxury retail purchases—last week, he had spent over three thousand pounds on his costume for the party alone. That included a handmade suit, cut to the old Victorian style specifications, handmade Italian shoes, a Hermes silk tie and a bespoke hat from a well-known milliner in London. He’d also bought smaller trinkets, including expensive aftershave and toiletries she’d seen advertised in Vogue and recognised from the inventory taken at Victor’s house. Then there was fancy fine dining, antiques and flashy membership of a local spa and golf resort.
That was just the tip of the iceberg.
Yates thought of the average pensioner in their seventies or eighties, of winter fuel allowance and supermarket coupons, and wondered how it was that the man had been able to spend so much. That led her to track the deposits into his account, which also made for interesting reading. While he had been paid a generous salary by the Gilberts, it was nowhere near enough to fund the kind of lifestyle Victor Swann had enjoyed.
However, when they added up all the regular cash deposits, that more than made up for the shortfall. Several times a month, deposits had been made into his account ranging between ￡500 and ￡2,000 a pop. The dates varied and, because they were made in cash, there was no account listed as the source.
She looked up and across to where Lowerson sat, his face trained on the computer screen. Yates opened her mouth to speak but found herself watching him for a moment longer, liking the way the sunshine fell on his dark hair, casting his face into a stronger profile than she’d noticed previously.
She promptly told herself to get a grip.
“Hey, Jack, did you see those cash payments last week?”
“Yeah,” he replied, still preoccupied with the figures. “There are similar payments the week before and pretty much every week before that.”
Yates got up and wandered over to his desk, sipping a bottle of sparkling water that had gone warm and flat sometime during the morning.
“Where was he getting all that cash?” she wondered aloud. “Do you think he had some kind of cottage business?”
“I definitely think he had something going on but I doubt it was above board. The question is, what was he selling?”
“If his finances do relate to how he died and one of the people working on the estate was involved, we really need to look at their accounts to match up withdrawals with the cash deposits here.”
“Mm, yeah, we should contact the financial investigation unit first. We need to ask them to check their database to see if there are any suspicious activity reports listed against Swann.”
“Or any of them,” Yates added.
Lowerson nodded.
“Definitely. We can’t use any of it without a warrant or a production order, but it would be a good start if they could point us in the right direction.”
“I’ll get onto the FIU right now,” Yates offered.
“Check the National Database too,” Lowerson told her, and surprised himself at how quickly he was taking to the whole mentoring malarkey. “You never know, there might be a marker on there for one of them.”
“Will do, guv.”
Lowerson almost burst with pride at being called ‘guv’ for the first time in his professional career but he managed to keep a lid on it.
“While you’re doing that, I’m going to have a look at the old boy’s mortgage papers, insurance and pensions documents, everything we found at his house. If he had that much cash flowing through his account, he might have tried to launder some of it elsewhere.”
Yates blew out a long breath.
“We’ve stumbled onto something big here, haven’t we?”
Lowerson recognised the tone of voice, which was a mix of awe and gratitude at being able to get stuck into some real detective work.
“Let’s get cracking and see just how big.”