I take in a long, deep breath as I brace myself to look at the body. The day I stop doing this little ritual is the day I should give the job up. It never gets any easier.
He’s lying on his back, his arms lightly outstretched either side of his body, and he’s bare-chested. There’s a large, dark, teardrop-shaped puncture wound above his heart. You can see it’s deep – it’s practically a hole – and the blood is still glistening fresh and oozing from it.
The rest of him looks untouched at a cursory glance though; no clear injuries, no bruising or defensive wounds. I crouch down with a sigh beside him and whisper his name aloud.
‘Milo… Milo Harrison…’
His eyes are open, fixed in a look of surprised confusion, like he wasn’t expecting what happened to him to have happened at all. A chill tickles my spine. It’s never pleasant viewing a dead body, not least one with their eyes wide open, grimacing in a death mask. Like I say, I’m not particularly superstitious, but it has been said that the dead capture their final moment in their eyes like a snapshot, and that if you look deep enough into them, you can see it. The only thing I see, however, when I fix mine upon his, is my own convex reflection from the fancy hanging light above.
I think it’s a fair observation to note that Milo Harrison was a good-looking guy. He’s got that dark five o’clock shadow thing going on, and judging by his defined torso, he wasn’t shy arounda gym either. I don’t know his story yet. Is he a domestic abuser who got a taste of his own medicine? I stare at the deep black hole in his chest, at the blood that is only now just beginning to coagulate. It doesn’t look like a frenzied attack. There’s only one stab wound, albeit a fatal one. Tilly Ward’s initial account could be plausible. She hasn’t fled the scene, and she called for help promptly, though a post-mortem will give us more insight.
I let out a long breath.
Whatever has happened here reeks of tragedy already. Every domestic always does. Statistically though, the body I’m staring at would be more likely to be Milly than Milo.
‘Ah! The famous DCI Riley!’ Vic Leyton appears behind me. She’s holding up a copy of a newspaper in her hand. I groan. Archer – Superintendent Gwen Archer – my boss, had recently talked me into doing an in-depth profile piece on ‘a week in the life of a homicide detective in the capital’ for theStandard Lifenewspaper,and it was published this week. I was a reluctant interviewee – I’m much more comfortable asking questions than I am answering them – but I knew by Archer’s tone that I wasn’t going to get out of it.
‘It’ll be good for PR, Dan,’ she’d said. ‘And you’re the best looking out of a bad bunch.’
Flattery got her everywhere. And it got my mugshot plastered all over social media.
‘Great photo, Dan.’ Vic arches an eyebrow from beneath her PPE. ‘You look…’ she pauses, thoughtfully, ‘…distinguished!’
‘I’ll take that.’ I smile at her, try to disguise my discomfort about it all.
As always, it’s a pleasure to see Dr Victoria Leyton, and yet every time I do, we’re united by the worst kind of circumstance, which makes it a strange and unique relationship in that respect.
She casts her eyes at the body on the kitchen floor with a sigh of her own.
‘A domestic?’
‘Looks that way,’ I say, adding the caveat, ‘on the surface at least.’
‘Well, if it is, then I hope he deserved it.’
I look down at Mr Harrison, at his young, fit and healthy-looking body surrounded by a large dark red pool of his own blood, and wonder if anyone really does.
‘Well, it looks as if he was standing when he was struck by the knife. I can tell by the position of the body, how he’s fallen.’ She crouches down next to him on the kitchen floor, and I watch with a certain awe as her eyes scan him in detail. After a moment she looks up at me.
‘I suspect the assailant is left-handed, or that they held the weapon in their left hand when they struck the blow.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘You see the direction of the dots of blood, how the splatter appears to get bigger at the top of the wound?’
I crouch down next to her again and she points to the hole in his chest.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I think so.’
‘Well, for each hand, the starting point of entry wound is different.’
‘Is that so?’
Every day is a school day with Vic. I’ve learned more about the human body from her than I ever did in any biology lesson. If she’d been one of the teachers at my school, I would definitely have had a crush on her.
‘Right-handed wounds start right and end left, but in this handsome chap’s case, it’s the reverse, which suggests the assailant held the weapon in their left hand. It’s not conclusive, of course, but in my experience…’
Davis appears in the doorway.
