Thus comforted, he slipped away into the long, warm darkness of the endless night.
It was the duty staff at the ICU in the Royal London. She had tried the Dover nick, but Burns had earlier given the ICU his personal number for emergency calls.
‘DI Burns? Royal London. I am sorry to have to inform you that the patient you were interested in – the unidentified man in intensive care – he died at ten past six this morning.’
Jack Burns put down the phone facing another full day. He now had a murder case. At least it would go straight up the priority ladder. There would be a post-mortem and he would have to attend it. The two animals in the Ville would have to be brought back to Highbury and recharged.
That meant that the Clerk to the Magistrates would have to be informed, and the defending solicitor, Lou Slade. Procedures, more procedures, but they had to be done and done right. There could be no question of Price and Cornish walking away on a technicality discovered by a clever-dick lawyer. Burns wanted them inside grey stone walls for years and years to come.
The Royal London has its own small mortuary and pathology department, and it was here that the PM took place at midday. It was conducted by Home Office pathologist Mr Laurence Hamilton.
Odd birds, forensic pathologists, was Burns’s private opinion. They did a job that disgusted him. Some were effulgently cheerful, given to light banter as they cut and sawed a body into bits. Others were more professorial, regarding what they found with boyish enthusiasm, as a lepidopterist finding an amazing new butterfly. Others were dour and spoke in monosyllables. Mr Hamilton was of the first variety. For him, life could not be better nor his job more wonderful.
Jack Burns had attended several in his career, but the smell of ether and formaldehyde almost always made him gag. When the disc saw bit into the skull he turned away and looked at the charts on the wall.
‘Good Lord, he’s taken a beating,’ said Hamilton as they surveyed the pale and bruise-covered body lying face up on the slab.
‘Kicked to death. Last Tuesday,’ said Burns. ‘Just took him six days to die.’
‘Unfortunately “death by kicking” is not quite the result I shall have to produce,’ said Hamilton genially. He began to cut, dictating what he found to his theatre sister and the microphone linked to a tape recorder that she held out to him as he moved around the table.
It took a good hour. There was a lot of damage and Mr Hamilton spent time on the old wound, the right femur and hip shattered long ago, held together with steel pins, which had caused the man to limp for the rest of his life.
‘Looks as if he was hit by a truck,’ said Hamilton. ‘Terrific damage.’ He pointed out the scars where the bones had come through the flesh and the neater one where the surgeon had opened the victim to get access to the damage.
Everything else, and there was much, stemmed from the previous Tuesday: crunched left hand, stamped into the pavement, smashed front teeth, three cracked ribs, broken cheekbone. Burns checked the right fist, but Carl Bateman had been right. There was no damage. Puzzling.
‘Cause of death?’ he asked at length.
‘Well, Mr Burns, it will all be in my o
fficial report.’ Of course. He would be a major prosecution witness at the trial. ‘But between you and me, massive axonal damage to the brain. The neurosurgeon did all he could, but he would not have seen this. It doesn’t show on a scan. Assisted by general trauma due to multiple injuries which, though not individually life-threatening, would have had a collective effect. I’ll put him back together for the relatives. Are there relatives?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Burns. ‘I don’t even know who he was.’
He spent the afternoon covering all the formalities for the next day: the Clerk to the Magistrates, Pentonville Prison. Lou Slade was suitably regretful. His Legal Aid had come through and he had spent the morning trying to find a barrister to take the case. Like Burns, he had run into the August syndrome; half the people he rang were away. But he thought he had a young junior from King’s Bench Walk who would take it. At least with a murder he would now excite more interest. It is an ill wind . . .
‘I still have to defend them,’ he said.
‘Don’t try too hard, Mr Slade,’ said Burns and put the phone down.
There was bad news in the afternoon, but it was superseded by the good news. Chivvied by Detective Chief Superintendent Parfitt to hurry up, forensics came back with their results. There was nothing in the way of blood or fibre samples on the clothes of Price and Cornish to link them physically with the dead man. The blood on the T-shirt was uniquely from one source, and that was its owner, Price.
Burns was philosophical. If the men had wrestled body to body there would have been fibre traces passing from fabric to fabric. Price and Cornish would have been too stupid to be aware of the extraordinary advances in forensic technology of the past twenty years. Clues showed up nowadays that could never have been seen when Burns was a copper on the beat at Paignton.
But the limping man had been felled by a punch and a kick behind the knee. On the ground only toecaps had hammered into his body and after twenty-four hours the boots removed from Price and Cornish had been scuffed and dust-covered by a day’s extra use, and yielded nothing that would stand up in court.
But the call from Fingerprints made up for it all. There was the dog saliva and three sets of prints. One matched those of the dead man, clearly the owner of the wallet. One set matched those of Mr Whittaker, who had dutifully agreed to have his prints taken after making his statement. The third set were those of Harry Cornish. Burns was so excited that he stood up, phone in hand.
‘You’re sure? No chance of error?’
‘Jack, I need sixteen points of similarity for a perfect match. I’ve got twenty-one. It’s over a hundred per cent.’
The technician from Fingerprints would also be a crucial trial witness. Burns thanked him and put the phone down.
‘Gotcha, you bastard,’ he told the potted plant.
There was still one remaining problem and it nagged him. Who was the dead man? What brought him to Edmonton? Was it just to put cheap flowers on the grave of a woman long dead? Did he have family, perhaps away at the coast like his own Jenny? Did he have a job and colleagues? Why had no-one noticed him missing? How could he deliver such a smashing blow to Price’s nose and sustain no bruising to the knuckles? And why did he fight back at all, for a miserable wallet with at most a few notes in it?