Local Gone Missing(44)
Elise
The light bounced off the whiteboard like an aura behind Hugh when he sat behind his desk.
There was a buzz in the room where the press conference was being held when he walked in and the cameras started clicking. It always made Elise smile when that happened to her. Why were they bothering? A hundred shots of police officers taking their seats. Was it just for their bosses watching in the newsrooms? To prove they were working?
It’s like those idiots who shout pointless questions at politicians as they walk past, she thought.
“Are you going to resign, Prime Minister?”
“Did you lie to the select committee?”
Just noise.
Hugh cleared his throat like he always did when he was nervous. He looked up at the cameras and she was suddenly looking into his eyes. She prickled with embarrassment for a second.
It was all textbook stuff. Hugh appealed for witnesses to Charlie Perry’s last movements—“How and when did Mr. Perry get home? Did anyone give him a lift the night of the festival? Or at any time over the weekend? Or see him walking?”
Kiki Nunn was in the second row of chairs. She had her back to the cameras but Elise recognized the glasses perched like a cat’s ears on her head. She waited while the local TV and papers asked their questions, then piped up: “Hi, I’m from Sussex Today. DI Ward, do you know how Charles Perry died? Was he murdered?”
“Er, we are still investigating the exact circumstances of this unexplained death.”
“Okay, do you know when he died?”
Hugh looked blank for a moment. What is going on with you? Elise said to herself. You’re sharp as a tack normally.
“Erm, no, not precisely,” he stuttered. “Our last confirmed sighting is Friday night at around nine thirty, at the festival, but the deceased’s wife said she had a brief phone call from a man she believed was her husband early Monday morning,” Hugh got back into his stride. “The caller said he was okay but gave no details of his whereabouts.”
“So just a couple of hours before his body was found?” Kiki was like a terrier with a bone but Elise knew she was asking all the right questions.
“As I say”—Hugh tried to wrench the bone off her—“the Home Office pathologist is continuing to work on time of death but it’s a complex calculation because of the temperatures we’ve been experiencing—it was quite hot on Saturday and Sunday—and the circumstances in which we found the body.”
“Yes, I imagine it must have been much cooler in the cellar. So Mr. Perry could have died at any time between the last witness seeing him on Friday night and Monday morning?”
“That is why we are appealing for witnesses—as I’ve said, we have no further sightings after he left the festival at the Old Vicarage.”
“What about the witness who said he was up by the workers’ village later on Friday night?”
All press heads turned to look at her.
Her twelve-year-old news editor must be pumping the air with his fist.
“We are still in the process of confirming that sighting,” Hugh said, but some of the reporters were getting out of their seats.
The hare would be running now—all the laborers would be pounced on by the media before Elise’s lot had got their car keys out. They were so fast—and potentially damaging. Like a plague of locusts, Caro said. Stripping whole communities of information. But people talked to the press when they didn’t always talk to the police. Sometimes, they just had too much to lose.
I bet some of the laborers don’t have visas. They’ll prefer to talk anonymously to Kiki. Let’s see what she and the pack get.
Elise turned the telly off and sat for a bit, thinking about the last time she’d seen Charlie. His blackened face. And the blowflies. She flicked her laptop on to remind herself of their life cycle with seasonal and ambient temperature variations. It was all there online for the amateur entomologist. First eggs are laid by flies on a corpse, especially on wounds or around openings like eyes, ears, and noses within minutes of death. Then the maggots hatch—within twenty-four to forty-eight hours—and start feeding.
The team had a sixty-hour window from the last sighting alive. So if Charlie had died on Friday night, the pathologist should have found second-stage maggots of about one centimeter in length.
If he died in the twenty-four hours before Elise found him, there should have been no maggots, just eggs.
Thirty-four
TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019
Elise
At two thirty, Elise was standing outside Southfold police station with Ronnie in close attendance.
“Are you sure you want to stay? You’ll have to sit in the waiting room. I can get them to drop me back at home.”
“No, I’m happy to mingle with the criminals.”
Caro came and fetched Elise, walking her down the tiled corridor to the interview suite. Elise breathed it in—the rough-edged disinfectant, the dark hint of meat stewed to shreds in the canteen. It was like opening an Egyptian tomb and smelling the air that had been shut in millennia ago. Another life.
“I see you’ve brought your new partner.” Caro grinned. “It’s all getting a bit cozy, isn’t it? What does her hubby think? Is it developing into a bizarre ménage à trois?”