The Moor (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #11)(63)

“How big?” Phillips asked. “Large enough for someone to slip through?”

“For an average-sized person, yes, it’s more than big enough. However, it was locked from the inside.”

Ryan digested that bit of information.

“Anything else?”

“Well, there was only one set of prints on the gun, and they belonged to Charlie,” Faulkner said. “His hand also displayed some gunshot residue, consistent with him having fired the pistol—which we’ve identified as an old Russian-made Biakal pistol. It’s an obsolete weapon, originally a low-powered gas pistol, but it appears to have been adapted to fire live ammunition.”

“I’m guessing it’s unregistered,” Phillips said, and Faulkner nodded.

“It’s not on the system,” he said. “I’d have said this was a gang weapon, not the kind of thing an ordinary person with a legitimate firearms license would own.”

Ryan nodded, and his eye strayed across to the opposite wall, where Lowerson had tacked up three images in his own murder investigation.

“The question is how it came to be in O’Neill’s possession,” he said.

“That’s not all,” Faulkner said. “There was no gunshot residue found in any of the other samples we took from the hands and arms of people who were in the vicinity last night, which reduces the likelihood of it having been some other person who fired the shot.”

“But not impossible,” Ryan murmured. “What about on the body?”

“Pinter’s going over it now, but we’ve taken all the usual samples, so we’ll get through it all as soon as we can.”

Faulkner paused, considering how much to say without having the complete picture to hand.

“Something struck me, last night,” he said slowly. “Looking at the position of the body in relation to the blood spatter, and the direction of the exit wound.”

“Go on,” Ryan said, thinking that he’d experienced a similar feeling of unease. It was why he’d refused to rubber-stamp it as a suicide.

“It’s statistically less likely for someone to shoot themselves standing up,” Faulkner said, echoing Ryan’s thoughts the previous evening. “But, equally, it’s not outside the realms of possibility, so let’s set that aside, for now. I’m still concerned by the unusual spatter formation. Ordinarily, I’d expect a wide arc, spreading across a larger area at the general height of the deceased. That would reflect the height and direction, as he fell.”

He paused, referring to the drawing he’d made of it, the previous evening. Faulkner was adept at using the most up-to-date forensic tools on the market and was a pretty decent photographer, thanks to all his years snapping death shots, but sometimes the act of committing a scene to paper was the most useful in helping to visualise a murder.

Because, like Ryan, that’s what he firmly believed it was.

“In this case, there was a much smaller arc of blood spatter, concentrated in a much smaller area and at a height of less than a metre above the floor.”

Phillips cast his mind back to the caravan the previous evening, and nodded.

“You said something about the exit wound?”

“Yes, that struck me as unusual, too,” Faulkner said. “But the pathologist is really the man to ask—”

“Oh, bollocks to that,” Phillips said roundly. “You’ve been doing this job for as many years…if you’ve seen something, spit it out.”

Faulkner laughed.

“Fair enough. In that case, I’ll say the angle of the head wound looked all wrong. The pistol was found beside the victim’s right hand, as though it had fallen after the shot was fired—in fact, it should have fallen a lot further, given usual trajectories and recoil. But, let’s say the victim is right-handed, you’d expect him to raise the pistol to his mouth like this,” Faulkner held up his right hand, two fingers fashioned to look like a gun. “We could say Charlie O’Neill was in a highly agitated state, that he was disordered, but whichever way you try it, the direction of the shot would have gone straight through the back of his head, or slightly to his left.”

Ryan nodded his agreement.

“The wound was on Charlie’s right-hand side, elevated to the crown area. It would have been difficult for him to have angled the pistol in that direction, whilst still firing in the ordinary way with the forefinger of his right hand.”

“And that’s the print we found on the pistol,” Faulkner assured him. “I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how it got there.”

But they would, Ryan thought, and before the week was done.

If they were right, and Charlie O’Neill’s body had been staged to look like a suicide, somebody had gone to an awful lot of trouble to make it look that way.

The question was, why had nobody heard a gunshot?





CHAPTER 35


Corbridge was a historic market town nestled in the scenic Tyne Valley, twenty miles to the west of the city and on the way to Cumbria. It was a pleasant drive as the motorway wound its way through Northumberland and, as they passed over the peaks and troughs of the valley, Lowerson reflected that it was an incongruous choice for the girlfriend of one of the rising stars of the criminal underworld.

“What do we know about Bobby Singh?” he asked Yates, who’d insisted on doing the driving, this time.