PC Kapoor stood next to a paramedic who was hunched over a woman sitting in the back of the ambulance.
The nineteenth-century manor house stood proudly on the vast landscape and its gardens were the envy of many similar properties. This one had survived agricultural depressions and increased taxation during the early twentieth century. It had not only survived, it had been owned all this time by the Harris’s of Cleevesford. Since the renovations, it had been a hub for the local community, a place for the well off to get married and the best venue for an award-winning cream tea. Gina wondered if numbers of people coming for a cream tea would drop for a while when news of a murder got out.
‘Bernard is just sealing off the scene and PC Smith is herding everyone into the function room,’ Briggs said as he stood by her car door.
‘Who’s that?’ Gina pointed to the woman in the ambulance.
‘That’s Francesca Carter. She’s one of the bridesmaids.’
‘So it’s a wedding?’
‘A wedding reception. The couple got married in Crete and were having a party at the manor for everyone that didn’t go abroad. We’re trying to find out more and PC Smith is collecting a list of names, while finding out how everyone is related to or acquainted with the bride and groom. The couple are Kerry and Edward Powell.’
‘And the victim? Do we know who she is?’
‘She’s been identified as twenty-five-year-old Holly Long. She was one of the bridesmaids. We should be able to go up as soon as the scene is secure.’ He rubbed his emerging five o’clock shadow. ‘How are you doing? I haven’t seen much of you lately.’
‘Good.’ That was all she had to say. Now wasn’t the time to share her thoughts. She wasn’t going to go into the fact that she felt like she was balancing on a tightrope now that he knew some of her most intimate secrets, she wasn’t going to tell him that her daughter was probably going to give her the silent treatment for cutting short their time together and she wasn’t going to tell him how much she hated weddings. The thought of them made her teeth itch. The commitment, the feeling of suffocation as the words ‘I do’ are uttered. She scratched away the nervous prickles that were forming under her scalp.
Gina glanced around. Blue lights flashed across the front of the manor house. ‘Have you spoken to Francesca Carter yet?’
Briggs shook his head. ‘The paramedics are still treating her. She passed out when she found the body. Although, I think the whole ordeal has sobered her up a little.’
Gina headed into the building and glanced through the open doors of the function room. Small pockets of people were being ushered around by officers. A familiar face caught her attention – Samuel Avery, landlord of the Angel Arms. His ashen, troubled face had creased around the mouth and his eyes made him look a little older than his late fifties now the house lights were on. Gina couldn’t understand what women saw in him.
Samuel moved his hand away from a crying woman’s backside, her long blonde hair stuck to her face. Gina shook her head. They didn’t always see much in him at all, he just took advantage. There was no look of sympathy on his face as he comforted the young woman, just a leer that suggested he was hoping that she would extend her need for sympathy to the bedroom if he pressured her hard enough. That was his game. She knew him all too well. As he turned, she caught him tucking the back of his shirt into his trousers. Gina would come back to Samuel later, once she’d checked out what was happening in the victim’s room.
In the corridor, the mother and father of the bride were hugging their daughter and offering the teary young woman some reassurance. Her fluffed up dress had been torn at the side and a chunk of bread roll was caught in her large braided bun.
As Gina turned the corner to the staircase, the scene was well mapped out by the forensics team coming and going, all suited up, carrying boxes upon boxes up the steps, ready to start extracting and cataloguing all potential evidence from the scene.
She swallowed as she followed the action. Only an hour ago, she had been lying on the settee watching the end of a film with her family. So much had happened already. She was accustomed to being called out to handle a case but Hannah had never got used to it. When Hannah was a child, Gina had often bundled her daughter into the car and dropped her off at friends’ houses so that she could work. Gina knew exactly where Hannah’s resentment had come from.
‘Here you go,’ Bernard said as he passed her a forensics suit, a pair of gloves, hair cover and shoe covers. ‘Put these on before we go any further and avoid the middle of the corridor.’
‘Thanks.’ She slipped the suit over her trousers and light jumper. As she followed him, she snapped the gloves on. Several evidence markers had been placed around the room already. Gina glanced at the one on the chest of drawers, identifying the blood that was smeared along the top. A trail of stepping plates marked the route they could all tread. A flash lit up the room as a suited body snapped away at the corpse, taking photos that would be emailed to Gina later.
There was nothing unusual about the room. It looked like a regular country hotel room. A brochure on the table in front of the window, a shelf containing tea-making facilities and a bathroom off to the right. Gina poked her head in; it looked as if it hadn’t been used at all. A crime scene assistant passed her with several sample envelopes, a vial of liquid and some swab packs.
Gina’s head began to throb as her gaze rested on the pasty-bodied woman. The woman looked to be in her early twenties. Her satin dress was dotted with blood and the blood from her nose injury had smeared across the pillow and was tangled in her flame coloured hair. There was something about the way she lay, her neck slightly up, not resting naturally on the pillow. She’d been placed there with her hands resting on her torso. A few white specks had been sprinkled around the pillow. She stepped in a little closer and could see that the specks were flower petals. It was then that Gina spotted the torn flowers on the floor, a mix of red and white carnation heads.
‘Was the window locked?’ Gina asked, but no one replied. Talking through a face mask wasn’t easy. She repeated herself in a louder voice.
Bernard looked away from the evidence log. ‘Yes, I checked that as soon as we’d set up. The catch was firmly on the sash window. The door had been left open.’
Gina visualised a featureless body and face entering through the door. Was the door left open by a drunken Holly or had she got out of bed to open the door? They glanced at the blood spatter. The smear on the chest of drawers had led Gina’s eye to the fine spray on the pale grey wall by the door. Gina was no expert in blood spatter analysis, but she knew that one of the woman’s injuries had occurred at the door, unless the perpetrator was bleeding too. Maybe Holly had put up a fight.
Gina’s gaze fixed on the victim’s nose as she worked through a theory in her head. Maybe Holly had answered the door to a knock and had been instantly hit, causing the blood to spray the wall as the instrument used to hurt her was drawn back. Was there a weapon or had she been hit with a fist?
‘Any sign of the weapon used to hit her?’
Bernard mumbled through his mask. ‘I can’t be sure at the moment.’
Just as she suspected. They were midway through working a crime scene and she wanted all the information they hadn’t collated yet, and she wanted it now. More markers went down, one for a clump of hair on the carpet and another for a sock behind the door. Again, Gina was drawn to the young woman’s corpse. Most of her hair had tangled around her neck except one long strand leading from her head to her mouth. Her skin was almost translucent. Eyes, stark and open. Bed sheets tangled around her legs and body, an indentation left on the other side of the bed in the linen suggesting that another person had been lying next to her at some point.