Free Over the Edge by Stuart Pawson Page A

these phone calls.’
    The PC looked disappointed that I hadn’t rushed in to the crime scene, so I explained to him. We’d sent for the pathologist, who could tell us time and cause of death, and the SOCOs who would look for microscopic evidence. Neither of them wanted me blundering over the landscape. Anything I could deduce from a cursory examination of the body and its immediate surroundings, which I grandly referred to as the overview, would usually wait until they had finished. Not always, but usually. The secret is to know when to act swiftly and when to be patient.
    Slowly the scene changed as people arrived to contribute their own special fields of knowledge in a process that would build up a picture of the victim and his death, and ultimately lead to his killer. I told the PC to record everybody who visited, and Dave wandered off to do his own investigation, knocking on the doors of the nearest neighbours. It was a black night, and everybody was working by torchlight. There was a danger that we’d overlook something obvious, lying in the herbaceous border, and were destroying evidence by trampling over the scene, so I decided to move the body, seal off the area and do a thorough examination in daylight. Aphotographer did his best to record the site in stills and video and a SOCO made a preliminary walk-through search, holding his flashlight close to the ground so that anything down there would cast a long shadow.
    It was nearly two o’clock when the undertaker’s van arrived and the pathologist told them where he wanted the body taking.
    ‘I want to see it before you put it on the gurney,’ I insisted.
    ‘C’mon, then, Charlie,’ the pathologist said. ‘I have to say, you’ve been very patient. What we have is a male, about 45 or 50, killed by a single, determined blow sometime between 21:00 and 22:30 last evening. His body temp is down by about two degrees and hypostasis has hardly started.’ Dave had rejoined me and we followed the pathologist through the gates and round the side of the house, along a path delineated by blue tape and then on raised metal stepping plates laid by the SOCOs.
    The light of our torches flickered over the gravel, and shadows of plants loomed and swayed around us. I could smell wet compost, cut grass and, I imagined, the heavy scent of late roses like the ones Rosie grew. I wondered what she was doing. A pale cat strolled across our pool of light, emerging from the gloom like a spectre before mewing at our trespass onto his territory and moving off into theenveloping blackness again. Into his forests of the night. Oh, to know what you know, I thought. Not far away a leftover firework exploded, startling us all.
    ‘There he is,’ the professor said, pinning the body with the beam of his torch. It was lying face downwards, legs towards us, one arm flung above the head and the other out sideways, as if he’d been about to make a right turn on a bicycle. A wooden shaft stood almost vertically away from it, the lower end firmly rooted in the skull.
    It’s always a shock when you see a dead body. None of us shows it, but I’m sure we all give a shudder and think about our own mortality. Those who don’t probably never admired a sunset or were moved by an Elgar concerto. I stepped off the plates and Dave followed me, neither of us speaking. The head lay in a pool of blood which was black when our torches weren’t directly on it, but startlingly red when they were. The victim’s long hair was matted with it, pasted to the ground. I sank down to sit on my heels and reached a tentative hand towards the head, feeling under it for the chin. Dave kept his torch beam steady on where I was working. I grasped the chin and turned the head slightly until I could confirm what I already thought.
    Dave said: ‘Well, bugger me.’
    I turned to the pathologist as I rose up again,saying: ‘That’s his ID sorted, Prof. He’s called Tony Krabbe.’
    ‘Tony Krabbe? You mean…the