Page 64 of Her Last Breath

Day Four

Chapter 41

Jane was in the office by 6.30 a.m. Unable to sleep, fuelled by tea, she had dragged herself into the shower, then hurried to work. She didn’t want to think about the day before, the depth of dishonesty that had kept a stranglehold over her for decades. She tapped hard on her keyboard, shutting it all out, her mind doing what it did best: distraction through work.

Before her team came in, she wanted to have a complete briefing written and rehearsed. They were at a sensitive stage of their investigation, they couldn’t allow any mistakes or delays. At 7 a.m. she got a text from Dr Lydia, telling her she was in HQ and wanted to stop by. Urgently. Moments later, the blustery figure was in Jane’s office, handing over a file.

‘You look like shit!’ Lydia declared.

‘Thanks.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing I want to discuss at the moment. What was so pressing?’

‘I followed your instruction, to review suicide cases from the last six months. I have a pile of them which I would say we can maybe consider, although they seem legitimate to be classed as self-inflicted. My team shall do the checks. Except for this one.’

Jane picked up the file that Dr Lydia had passed over to her, reading the name on the cover, before raising a quizzical eyebrow at the pathologist.

‘Bill Hargreaves, fifty-nine years old. Lorry driver by profession. He was found hanged at his home, on the fourteenth of August, by his cleaning lady. The original post-mortem estimated he had been dead approximately twenty-four hours by then.’

Jane studied the pictures of Hargreaves. His driving licence photo showed a much younger man. Depressing in itself that there were no informal photos of him in the file, only pictures taken at the crime scene by the CSI team. Images showing him asphyxiated in his home, a rope tied to the banister of his staircase, his body limp on the stairs.

‘He killed himself by using the gravity from his body to pull against the ligature tied to the banisters, by pushing his body down the staircase. The force was strong enough to apply pressure to his carotid sinus and cause compression of the carotid arteries and cerebral ischaemia. There is also evidence of jugular venous occlusion.’

Close-up shots showed injuries to Bill’s neck, the ligature marks on the skin from the rope as it strangled him, shutting off all oxygen and blood supply to the brain. A shot of the rope, a slipknot rather than a fixed loop.

Immediately, Jane wondered how her Uncle Phil had hung himself, picturing his lifeless form hanging in his cell. It felt too good for him. She felt angry that he didn’t suffer enough but pushed the image and her frustration away.

‘You agree then that he took his own life in this manner?’ Jane said. ‘Why flag it for me?’

‘The pictures and the exterior tell only part of this story. The full story, including examination of internal injuries, shows something else.’

‘Which is?’

‘The damage to his neck is not consistent in terms of the manner in which he inflicted this on himself. Notice the ligature marks only rise on one side. Because of the way he positioned his body, I would expect the gravitational pull to give him two marks rising upwards. The ligature is too horizontal, instead of what I will expect, which is oblique.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

Dr Lydia knotted her eyebrows. ‘Only that I cannot be sure this man definitely died from hanging this way.’

Jane considered what she was seeing, while reading through the notes. ‘Why the comments on his fingernails?’

‘They are damaged, with threads from the rope scraped from underneath them. In suicides there is scarcely time to fight. With strangulation, you will fight.’

The next picture showed Bill’s eyes, with circles around the red bloodspots that had formed on them.

‘Petechial haemorrhages, or pinpoint haemorrhages.’

‘Classic sign of strangulation.’

‘Yes. Subtle in the case of Mr Hargreaves. Still, they are present.’

Jane rifled through the file again, her heart speeding up with the adrenaline that always came with an exciting breakthrough. Could this be a third case related to the same killer? More importantly, was the body count going to keep on increasing?

‘The original pathologist reported these to the officer in charge of the investigation. However, given Mr Hargreaves’ personal life and the fact his body was found in this position, it was not pursued further.’

‘Could these pinpoint haemorrhages happen in a hanging?’