#YouToo Read online

  When Jo finally managed to get hold of Mike Parton, he wasn’t sure there was anything he could do. He told her that if there were any concerns about the death it would be up to the Coroner to voice them at the inquest, or to ask for further evidence before hand, but Jo knew the inquest was unlikely to be in the next month or two, so by the time the Coroner expressed a concern, it would be too late to do any further investigation. Feeling that it had to be properly checked out before that, she rang Miller to tell him of her concerns, and to her surprise he suggested they meet later for a coffee to discuss it. He clearly wanted an excuse to get out of the office on a nice sunny day.

  It was nearly half past three before she managed to finish the visits and get away from her day job, so she arrived at their agreed meeting place late, to find Miller leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, soaking up the spring sunshine at a table outside The Old Custom House.

  ‘Sorry, I got caught up.’ She didn’t say how, hoping he would as- sume it was with a patient, and not because she had almost reached the café before realising that she had left the post mortem reports on her desk, and had had to go back and fetch them, seeing as how they were her excuse for dragging him out.

  He lazily opened his eyes, squinting in the harsh sunlight, and be- latedly shaded them with his hand.

  ‘Should have remembered my sunglasses.’ He sat upright and moved his chair round so that he wasn’t looking directly into the sun. ‘You could always buy a pair at one of these kiosks.’ She looked over at a display of garish hats, toys and bumper stickers with rude and inane slogans, and pointed at a rack of sparkly children’s glasses.

  ‘I think the pink pair would suit you best.’

  ‘I’ll get them so long as you promise to get the flashing bunny ears.’ ‘Absolutely no chance.’ She sat in the chair opposite him and pointed to his cup, still half-full of frothy cappuccino. ‘Want another?’

  ‘No thanks, don’t want to be buzzing for the rest of the day.’

  ‘I thought policemen thrived on a diet of caffeine, booze and cigarettes.’

  ‘Not since The Sweeney, they haven’t. Well, not the caffeine, any- way.’

  Jo tied to catch the eye of the waiter who was far more interested in a pair of chavvy girls with dyed blonde hair and crop tops displaying belly bars and fake tan covered love-handles.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she said firmly after a couple of failed attempts, and he finally came over to take her order.

  ‘I’ll have an Americano with cold skimmed milk on the side,’ she told the waiter, who grinned and nodded. He didn’t need to write it down; Jo always ordered the same thing.

  ‘Now, what did you really want to talk to me about? I know it can’t be the post mortem report on that Adrian Cole because I’ve seen it, and it really isn’t that interesting.’

  ‘Well, that’s where you are wrong, Detective Inspector Miller.’ He looked at her with a degree of resignation on his face. ‘Don’t tell me you are going to disagree with the pathologist?’

  ‘No, not at all, in so far as she goes, but it’s more about digging into the whys and hows.’

  ‘Oh.’ Miller still seemed unconvinced. ‘He didn’t leave a suicide note, did he?’

  ‘Not that we’ve found, but you know that a lot of suicides don’t-’ ‘Of course,’ she interrupted impatiently. ‘But he also didn’t take a

  fatal dose of drugs.’

  ‘Maybe it was a cry for help. Hoped he’d be found.’ ‘By the man who sacked him?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘And how did he get there?’ ‘By car.’

  ‘I know by car, but how did he manage to drive?’ Jo thought he was being deliberately obtuse. ‘He would have been seriously impaired by the drugs in his system.’

  ‘Maybe he took them there?’

  ‘Then where are the containers? He couldn’t have just had the pills in his pocket, he was naked, remember?’

  ‘He might have chucked them in a hedge or something, and we just haven’t found them yet.’

  ‘Or he took them earlier and someone else drove him there.’ ‘That’s ridiculous. Why would they do that? And where did they

  go?’ Miller sighed, ‘Look, I honestly think he drove there himself after taking them. You know as well as I do that different people respond differently to drugs. He might have been a long-term Ketamine user and was tolerant of quite high levels.’

  ‘Will you ask for the tests to see if he was? Maybe even ask his friends and family? See if there is some evidence of this Ketamine use?’ Miller realised he had dug himself into a hole, just as Jo had in-

  tended.

  ‘Plus, we need to test the dirt in his wounds and compare to the samples from around the pool.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m not convinced it got into his wounds when he was pulled from the pool ‘

  ‘But you agreed that it was post mortem.’

  ‘Exactly. Which would mean that he drowned elsewhere and was dragged through the bushes and dumped in the pool.’ He didn’t seem convinced. ‘The Coroner will need answers to these questions as well you know,’ she added, just to make sure he agreed.

  ‘Which is why it’s Mike who needs to put the request in. It’s not a CID case.’ She was about to object but he stopped her. ‘But I take your point and I will speak to Mike and get him to do it. No, no, don’t say anymore, because that’s the best you are going to get, and if Mike objects to my interference, I’ll say it was you who asked for the tests, so you can take the flak.’

  Jo knew that this was really all about money. Both the Coroner’s Officer and Miller agreed the tests should be done, but it was a ques- tion of whose budget would be used. Both wanted it to be someone else’s and she understood that, and she also knew that now she had pushed it with them both, they would sort it out between themselves. They would never hear the end of it from her, and probably not from the Coroner either, if they didn’t.

  Miller sighed and rubbed his eyes tiredly. He was looking distract- ed and worried, and Jo wondered if everything was all right at home. Miller’s wife, Lizzie, was in the early stages of pregnancy and refusing to take the drugs she normally took to control her bipolar disorder, on the very reasonable grounds that they were harmful for the foetus. But no medication plus the hormonal aspects of pregnancy, Jo thought, were likely to be playing havoc with her moods.

  ‘Is everything all right with you, Steve? At home, I mean?’ she asked, not entirely sure what she was hoping the answer would be.

  ‘Yes, well,’ he hesitated, ‘No, not really.’ His answer was as con- fused as he looked and Jo wondered if Lizzie had had another relapse.

  ‘Is the pregnancy going okay?’

  ‘Yes, yes, the baby seems to be just fine. She had a scan last week and everything was just perfect.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Jo said, reassuringly, because he didn’t seem to be all that happy about it. ‘How far on is she?’

  ‘Twenty weeks.’

  ‘Half way then.’

  Steve rubbed his face with his hand, still reluctant to come out with it.

  ‘Yeah. Only half way.’

  ‘She’s going off?’

  He nodded.

  ‘At first, when we were just trying, she was a bit manic, buying stuff we didn’t need, madly rushing about, accusing me of all sorts and even putting the house on the market, but I managed to sort that out, and for a while, in the early stages she seemed to stabilise, but now she’s just crashed, really depressed, it’s just awful. I hate seeing her like this.’ Jo put her hand over his and said nothing. In truth there was noth-

  ing really to say.

  ‘The psychiatrist said that patients were normally not too bad during pregnancy, that it was after the birth that she would be most at risk. How can I stand by and let her do it to herself?’

  ‘One thing I’ve learned from all my years as a GP, is that no two patients are the same.’

  ‘That’s pretty much what the psychiatrist sa
id. But if she’s like this now-’

  ‘At least once she’s had the baby she can go back on her meds.’ Jo held her hand up to stop the response Miller was about to make, ‘I know they can pass through breast milk, but this is one of the cases where she should absolutely not feel guilty about bottle feeding.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ he smiled. ‘Now I’ve just got to persuade Liz- zie of that.’

  ‘I’m sure you will have help with -’

  Jo stopped as Miller’s phone began to ring and he hurriedly brought it out and answered it.

  ‘DI Miller.’

  He stood and walked away from her as he spoke, leaving Jo to signal to the waiter for their bill. She was just paying when he came rushing back.

  ‘That was forensics.’

  ‘I said there was something iffy about Cole’s death.’ Jo felt ridicu- lously pleased that her worries had proved right.

  ‘No, not his, not that I know about anyway. But Giles Townsend’s was. C’mon. Let’s go and see what they’ve found.’

  She was so surprised that he was inviting her along that she didn’t move for a moment.

  ‘You don’t want to come?’ he was surprised.

  ‘Don’t be silly, of course I do.’ She said, grabbed her bag and almost ran after him.

  Chapter 9

  As she saw who was waiting for them in the reception area of the pri- vate laboratory which now handled all Sussex police forensic analysis work, Jo’s heart sank. She should have realised that it was Bob Jeffries who called Miller and here he was, talking to a young man in a white coat. Jeffries didn’t look overly pleased to see Jo either.

  ‘Boss, Doc.’ He nodded at them both.

  The man in the white coat looked at Jeffries and then realised he wasn’t going to be introduced.

  ‘How do you do?’ He held his hand out to Miller. ‘My name is Soh Ng and I am the senior technician here,’ he said in clear and precise English.

  Jo and Miller shook Soh’s hand and introduced themselves and he led them through to a small office where the auto-asphyxiation harness had been laid out ready on a table.

  ‘It has been forensically processed already, photographs, fingerprints etcetera.’ Soh explained, ‘So we can touch.’

  He went over to the table and once they were all gathered around he started his demonstration.

  ‘This harness is designed to support the user whilst he hangs from a fixed point. I understand from the photographs that in this case it was a door frame.’ He looked at Miller who nodded his agreement.

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘It has straps that go around the upper thighs and under the groin, coming up to these around the shoulders and chest. This harness will stop the user from falling to the floor.’

  ‘It’s a bit like a parachute harness,’ Miller commented.

  ‘Exactly, except for this bit here.’ Soh indicated a leather studded strap about ten centimetres wide that hung down from the top of the harness and chain that in turn attached to the door frame. Jo shuddered slightly as she remembered how it had looked in situ, with Giles Townsend’s body hanging from it.

  ‘This collar goes around the neck and is tightened and released like this.’ He demonstrated the mechanism to them.

  ‘Doesn’t look easy,’ Jeffries commented. ‘Not when you’re in the moment, so to speak.’

  Soh looked at Jeffries and nodded.

  ‘That is correct, which is why this harness is designed also with a quick release mechanism here.’ He pointed to a thin red loop of cord attached to a metal catch. ‘The user has this around his left wrist.’

  ‘Leaving his right hand free to-.’ Jeffries used a gesture which adequately conveyed what he thought the right hand would be doing.

  ‘Indeed.’ Soh was completely unfazed by Jeffries. ‘And then, when he wants to free himself, he pulls on the cord and it releases the catch. Also, if the user loses consciousness, the weight of his arm on the cord would be enough to release it and he would be safe. It is a very clever design.’

  He looked at the equipment appreciatively.

  ‘What went wrong?’ Jo asked.

  ‘Ah yes.’ Soh nodded and pulled the red cord. They all looked expectantly, but nothing happened. ‘You see here?’ He pointed to the catch and they all looked closely. ‘It is very hard to see but it has ethyl 2-cyanoacrylate in the catch.’ They all looked at him blankly.

  ‘Superglue,’ he said and they understood.

  Once outside the lab, they stopped to discuss the events for a moment. ‘Thank you for requesting the extra tests on Adrian Cole.’ Jo was pleased that Miller had found time to ask Soh for these and had even signed the forms so that payment would be from his budget despite the comment of: ‘One suspicious death at a time not enough for you,

  Doc?’ from Jeffries.

  ‘I don’t want anything else to come back and bite me. Why didn’t they get around to checking Townsend’s contraption earlier?’ Miller was incensed. ‘It’s bloody late to be going back and investigating his death now.’

  ‘I think they may have got the equipment a bit late,’ Jo added tentatively. ‘The pathologist didn’t send it over until Mike intervened.’

  ‘What? Doesn’t she understand the importance of time? How many people will have been in the flat since he died?’

  ‘Crime scene will have done a pretty thorough job before Mike re- leased the scene. You know what a petty, nit-picking arsehole he can be,’ Jeffries commented.

  ‘Not as thorough as they would have done if we had known it was murder.’ Miller was not going to be placated that easily.

  ‘But is it, though?’ Jeffries countered. ‘Couldn’t it be suicide? I mean, what a way to go!’

  Both Jo and Miller gave that some thought, but, much as she could see Jeffries’ point of view, she didn’t believe anyone would really do that – but who was she to know?

  ‘Why would he kill himself, though?’ Miller asked. ‘We’ll have to look at possible reasons now. Damn it to hell, we are way off speed with this one.’

  Jo wondered if she ought to tell him the information she had heard about Townsend and the possibility of his having been referred to the bar council, but it was only gossip at this stage and Jo really didn’t want to hear Jeffries’ view on sexual harassment; he probably thought women should be grateful anyone thought they were worth harassing. As nothing had been confirmed, she felt that it was perhaps better to wait and see if she could get any definite details. Maybe Kate had heard something back from her internet trawl? Only when she had some- thing concrete would she take it to Miller, she decided, and it wasn’t hard to stick to her decision as Miller drove her back into town, because he spent the entire journey shouting orders into his hands-free mobile as he drove.

  Yes, she thought, it was definitely better to wait until he had got this investigation running on the right lines before telling him the gos- sip. In the meantime, she would arrange to meet Kate in The Stag to see where she had got to with her search.

  The question of why the young woman who worked for the law firm had been the one to find the body niggled. It seemed to support the rumours about Giles Townsend getting junior staff to his flat and once Miller had dropped her in town and continued on his way back to the police station, Jo decided to walk past the law firm. She was pleased to see that she had timed it right and it looked as if they were just closing for the day. She went in just as Penny, the receptionist Jo remembered had reported finding Giles Townsend’s body, was switching off her computer, ready to leave.

  ‘Glad I caught you,’ Jo said, not really sure what she was going to say next, and winging it, hoping she wouldn’t regret not having thought it through better. ‘I’m Dr Hughes, with the police; do you re- member seeing me at Mr Townsend’s flat? The day he died?’

  Penny nodded, but said nothing, Jo was going to have to try harder.

  ‘So, how are you doing?’ was the best Jo could come up with as an opening gambit. ‘I just wanted to check
up on you, because finding a body can be deeply distressing.’

  To her relief, this was enough to get Penny talking to the extent that Jo began to wonder if she was ever going to get her to stop.

  ‘It was just awful,’ Penny started, before looking round to make sure no one else was listening, which would have been hard as there was no one else in the room. ‘They don’t understand round here; I should have been given a couple of weeks off, offered counselling, all that, but have they done any of it?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Have they heck as like! They don’t care, that’s their problem and that snotty Ms Hersham, with her “Pull yourself together, Penny” isn’t any help at all. Who does she think she is?’

  Jo never got to find out who Antonia Hersham thought she was because at that moment, the lady herself came into the room.

  ‘Still here, Penny?’ she asked. ‘That is unlike you.’ Sarcasm dripped from her voice, but her intonation changed only slightly as she turned her attention to Jo.

  ‘You’re the police doctor, aren’t you? Can I help at all?’