No Place to Hide. Jack Slater
have picked up a stack of magazines from in there.’
‘OK. I’ve got all that. I’ll pass it on to the team and they’ll be there as soon as they can. Are you currently on-site?’
‘Yes, but I won’t necessarily be when they arrive. If not, I’ll have an officer stationed here for security.’
‘OK. And the address?’
Pete gave it, then phoned the station.
‘Andy? Pete Gayle. I need a uniform out here to a crime scene. The fire in Whipton.’
When the duty officer had confirmed he would send someone, Pete went back into the living room where he pulled the curtains carefully back and checked for signs of disturbance. There was nothing obvious. A few magazines remained on the coffee table. He glanced through them then checked the DVD collection. The guy seemed to like comedies and action movies. He glanced around the room again, but saw nothing out of the ordinary, apart from the abandoned plate of food.
Closing the curtains, he headed upstairs.
The upstairs front room was utterly destroyed and open to the elements. Nothing remained in there but charred wreckage that stank of burning. Pete was searching the room next to it when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He drew it out and checked the screen.
Chambers.
He pressed the button to take the call and lifted it to his ear. ‘Hey, Doc. You got something?’
‘I take it you mean apart from backache and sore fingers?’
‘I was hoping.’
‘The answer is, yes, I have. I’ve just finished with the other relevant body that’s still here and found a single needle mark.’
‘Another overdose?’
‘Not in the sense you’re thinking and we certainly won’t get a measurement now, but I did a vitreous glucose analysis. The vitreous humour, the fluid in the eye, is about the only reliable source for biochemical levels in the minutes and hours leading up to death. The blood begins to degrade almost immediately post-mortem, so normal constituent levels in it wouldn’t be reliable. The result was 0.4. The only way to get that low is with an insulin overdose.’
‘And I’m guessing your victim wasn’t a diabetic?’
‘Exactly.’
Pete let go a long sigh. ‘Best send me the particulars, then, Doc. Victim file and your report.’
‘Will do.’
Pete chose not to tell Chambers of Silverstone’s reluctance to accept his theory without further evidence. There was no point now. ‘What about the other cases you mentioned?’
‘All in the ground or cremated by now, I’m afraid. I’ll check which is which, but we’ll need exhumation orders to pursue any of them.’
‘OK. Keep me posted.’
‘Of course.’
Pete returned the phone to his pocket.
Two cases didn’t make a serial killer, but they certainly started to look like one. And that was the last thing he needed to get tied up with right now.
*
‘Andrew Michaels was thirty-four years old, five foot nine and weighed seventeen and a half stones,’ Pete read from Doc Chamber’s report to his assembled team a little over an hour later.
Dick Feeney ran a hand down his cheek, skin rasping on dark stubble. ‘Big lad, then.’
‘You really are going have to reset your body clock, mate,’ Dave told him.
‘Eh?’ Jane frowned.
‘Well, look at him. If that’s not a five o’clock shadow, I don’t know what is. And it’s only . . .’ He made a show of checking his watch. ‘Twenty past one.’
‘Damn, no wonder I was feeling peckish,’ Jane said. ‘It’s feeding time.’
‘Talking of food and getting back to the matter at hand,’ Pete said, ‘Michaels worked for eighteen months in a bakery, ending in 2001. He’d been on the dole since then, living at home with his parents. He collapsed in the High Street; keeled over suddenly from a seat across from the Princesshay Shopping Centre. The attending paramedics said that witnesses reported nothing abnormal leading up to the collapse. He had just been sitting there quietly one minute and slumped on the ground the next.’
‘Presumably not from a heart attack from being a lazy, fat bastard,’ Dave said. ‘Or we wouldn’t be talking about him.’
‘Exactly.’ Pete stuck his photo – taken on the steel mortuary table – on the board alongside Jerry Tyler’s. ‘But you’re right about the intended impression. Victim two in the doc’s theorised series. In this case, the needle mark was in the back of his upper arm, the triceps muscle.’
‘So, what was it?’ asked Jane.
‘Insulin, based on the guy’s glucose level, as determined from the fluid in his eye.’
‘Ouch.’ Jill Evans cringed.
‘Why the eye?’ asked Ben Myers, across from her.
Dave glanced at him. ‘You a poet and didn’t know it?’
‘Because,’ Pete said, ignoring him, ‘it’s the one place in the body where levels of several blood constituents are stable for a time after death. It’s a filtrate of the blood serum, but it’s isolated from the bloodstream after death, so it’s not affected by the early stages of decomposition like the blood is. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help us with the actual insulin because that’s only stable for a few hours.’
‘And there’s nothing else that could cause the glucose level the doc found?’ Dave asked.
‘No. In the blood, it would drop to that kind of level fairly quickly after death, apparently, but not in the eye fluid.’
‘So, insulin jab, staged accident . . .. We’re talking about a fairly sophisticated perp, here.’
‘And one with access to insulin.’ Jane added. ‘Which suggests a diabetic. Or at least one in the family.’
‘Or peer group,’ Ben put in. ‘He could have borrowed or nicked a dose.’
Pete nodded. ‘We should check GP surgeries, the hospital and the ambulance trust – see if any thefts have been reported. It could have come from one of them as well as a friend or family member.’
‘That’s a big old job,’ said Dave.
‘I’ll do it,’ Ben offered. ‘What about vets?’
Pete frowned. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll find out.’
‘Will you never learn, Spike?’ Dave asked.
‘What?’
‘Never volunteer,’ Dick told him.
‘Right.’ Pete grabbed his coat off the back of his chair. ‘Jill can give you a hand if you need it, Ben. Dick, check out the victim and see if he’s got a record of any kind. I doubt it, but you never know. Jane, you and I’ll go see his parents, see what we can get from them. Come on.’ He headed for the door, Jane’s heels clipping on the lino as she hurried to catch up.
*
Michaels had clearly inherited his height from his father and his girth from his mother. Brian and Kathy sat uneasily in the two armchairs in their lounge, leaving Pete and Jane on the sofa, the TV muted but not switched off in the corner.
‘So, why are the police interested in our Andrew all of a sudden?’ the dead man’s father asked, his hands clasped in his lap as he leaned forward in his chair.
‘The pathologist