Songbird: A Kings Lake Investigation by Grainger Peter

Author:Grainger, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

As does attention to detail – he’d had that drummed into him often enough. Waters sat down, took out an A4 pad and opened on his screen the file of forensics results. He intended to read it all meticulously, line by line, and to make notes for himself of key points. Death had been caused by asphyxia resulting from strangulation, leading to cerebral hypoxemia. The strangulation was almost certainly manual because any implement or materials used would have left their mark. The bruising on and in the throat was consistent with considerable and sustained pressure; the vertebrae were intact but there was significant internal damage to the trachea, blood vessels and nerve structures. In other words, whoever had carried out the attack meant business.

Dr Robinson had been right in his guess that there might be a hairline fracture to the right cheekbone – it was slight but was very likely to have resulted from the heavy blow she received to the face. Waters underlined “the right zygomatic bone” once in his notes and then double underlined the word “right”. Then he sat back and thought. Personally, he had never punched anyone in the face – the situation had never arisen, it was as simple as that. He had been punched in the face, of course, not long after he began working with DC. The two events were undoubtedly linked in some odd, orphic way… But the point was that it had been a really heavy punch in the face that had broken his nose. Instinctively he felt it now with his fingers, feeling the little protrusion of bone where the kink was. So how hard did you have to hit someone to fracture their cheekbone, the zygomatic one? With a single blow – the post-mortem results stated clearly that there was evidence of just one blow. He returned to the picture of Oliver Salmon sitting on the bench in the cell, the one in his head that had been haunting him since he first saw it.

Was it conceivable a boy, that boy, had delivered such a blow? Was there sufficient power in those arms and rounded shoulders to knock down Michelle Simms? And then in those fingers, to close them around her windpipe and deprive her brain of oxygen for what – three, four, five minutes?

No evidence of sexual assault other than the fact her clothing had been pulled about – and that, obviously, was not evidence of any such thing. It was cause for speculation, though. The killer might have derived some satisfaction from exposing her, from looking at her, but if he had then gratified himself – as some do, he knew this from his rather gruesome wider reading – then Sally Lonsdale would not have missed the proof of it. Maybe a killer who liked to look but not to gratify himself? It takes all sorts, Waters. Or, as they had already discussed, perhaps this killer wanted her to look as if she had been molested. But if you go that way, he told himself again, you’re into a whole new ballgame.

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