‘Even the most determined soul can’t bind both hands,’ Keats answered.
‘With help?’ Bryant asked. He’d heard of stranger assisted suicide cases than this.
‘Oh, he had help all right but I don’t think it was wanted. Look at the footprint between the shoulder blades.’
‘To hold him in place while the train passed by?’ Dawson asked, echoing his own thoughts.
Keats shook his head. ‘No, because the perpetrator would have been too close to the train.’
Bryant forced himself to look closely at the severed stump of the man’s neck above the shoulders. A pool of blood covered the gravel between the tracks where the head had been sliced off. He was reminded of the cheap magic tricks with a guillotine and a basket. Except this was no trick and the head to his left was not made of latex.
Keats then pointed to a length of green garden string enmeshed in the pasty white flesh.
‘To tie his neck in place?’ Bryant asked.
Keats nodded. ‘I suspect to make sure he was facing the right direction.’
He nodded east.
The track continued from the body approximately twenty metres before disappearing around a bend. The train driver would have had no hope of stopping the train.
‘He didn’t have a bloody chance,’ Dawson breathed. ‘Train needs more than two hundred metres to stop at just sixty miles an hour.’
Bryant shuddered. The victim would have heard the train in the distance, hurtling towards him, waiting for it to come into view, praying the driver would see him before it was too late. And then it would have been there, thundering towards him. All the time he had known what was coming.
He shuddered again and glanced sideways at his colleague, who had suddenly gone quiet.
He followed Dawson’s pensive gaze over the baggy, low slung jeans and bright orange trainers.
A colourful piece of cloth peeped out below the blue North Face padded jacket.
‘Kev, you okay?’
Dawson ignored him. ‘Keats, has the head been moved yet?’
‘No, it’s the next job,’ he said.
‘Can we do it now?’ Dawson asked, moving towards it.
‘Oh my, this new partner of yours poses it as a question,’ he said, nudging Bryant as he walked past. ‘This one’s a keeper.’
Bryant ignored the pathologist’s dig at his boss and followed in his colleague’s footsteps.
Like Dawson, he stared down at the severed head. The light brown hair ended unnaturally, like a blunt fringe turned upside down.
Keats beckoned one of his assistants and slowly they turned the head face up. The eyes were closed but the mouth was partially open. His peaceful expression did not reflect the barbaric horror of the last few seconds of his life. The ashen skin was covered in white chalk marks and grazes where the head had bounced along the gravel.
Bryant was surprised by the lack of blood on the pallid skin but his colleague appeared to be surprised by something else.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said, hoarsely. ‘I fucking know this kid.’
THIRTY-SIX
Stacey closed the door of the café and allowed the relief to wash over her. This was familiarity. This was normal. This was not out of her comfort zone, like going to people’s houses and invading their grief.
Mrs Reynolds had appeared satisfied that she had discovered the source of her son’s pain. Stacey was not so sure. It had been two years since the death of his father and sister. And although that was a loss that a teenager would never properly recover from, two years would have brought some level of healing.
Even so, Mrs Reynolds had allowed Stacey to take Justin’s computer away with her, which told Stacey there was an element of doubt still lingering in her mind.
She moved one place up the queue when a woman left after being told they’d stopped serving hot food.
Priscilla spied her in the queue and turned to place a teacake onto the grill. Stacey didn’t feel like eating but she appreciated the familiarity of the gesture.
By the time she reached the front of the queue, the steaming teacake and drink was waiting for her.
‘You okay?’ Priscilla asked.
‘Rough day,’ she said, turning around. She had hoped a seat would have become available, but the stragglers from market day still nursed lukewarm drinks before heading off in their product-laden vans.
‘Come with me,’ Priscilla said from beside her.
Stacey followed the woman just past the toilets to a single table by the ‘Staff Only’ door; currently it was covered in folders and paperwork.
Priscilla scooped it all into one pile.
‘It’s our break table. Have your teacake in peace.’
Stacey smiled gratefully as she folded herself into the cramped space.
She buttered the teacake before pushing the plate to the side. The golden mound turned to liquid and disappeared.
She placed Justin’s laptop on the table and opened the lid. Unfortunately, his mother had no clue to her son’s password but Stacey had extracted enough information about him to start with the obvious.
Despite online warnings about the strength of passwords, people still opted for something simple to remember using their own personal information. The most common was a derivation of the person’s name with digits added.
She tried Justin’s name and his date of birth but she got nothing.
She tried a few variations of both name and birthdate using capitals in key places.
Her hands flew over the keys. The more passwords needed the simpler the construction. Few people could recall numerous passwords to an array of social platforms. Shockingly, some people still opted for the word ‘password’ as their password.
She reached absently around the laptop for her drink as a hand clamped her shoulder.
The drink almost flew to the ground.
‘Fuck’s sake, Kev. What the?…’
‘Hey, easy tiger. I was just passing and saw you in here.’
‘Kev, you’re a liar,’ she said, as her heart began to slow down. ‘No one can see me back here.’
He looked around. ‘You ain’t kidding.’
‘So, what do you want?’ she asked, easing down the lid of the laptop.
He ignored the question.
‘And how was your day, Kev?’ he asked himself on her behalf. ‘Well, Stace, thanks for asking. We were called to the body of a young kid on the railway tracks. Pretty harrowing if you want the truth,’ he answered himself.
Stacey sat back and watched the show.
He continued. ‘A kid I recognised as well, since you ask.’ He stopped and looked down at her plate. ‘You eating that?’
She pushed the plate towards him. He lifted a piece and bit into it. Two chews and a swallow. Kevin Dawson ate the way he did everything else; quickly, eager to move on to the next thing.
‘Which clearly bothered you enormously,’ she said, pointedly. ‘So, other than my teacake, what do you want?’
‘You left in a hurry, earlier. Where did you go?’ he asked, glancing at the laptop.
‘None of your business. Now get lost, I’ve got goblins to kill,’ she said, following his gaze to the computer.