‘Has she been moved?’ Kim asked the pathologist.
Keats shook his head as he motioned towards the plain black handbag lying by her side.
‘Opened the flap to find ID. Her name is Katrina Nock, and this is her address,’ he said, handing a small piece of paper to Bryant. ‘Twenty-five years old.’
Kim was guessing he’d got the information from the driving licence, which would now be packaged up with the handbag and all its contents and sent off to the lab.
Kim walked around the body noting the position.
The woman’s torso was face forward; her front was pressing into the ground. Her legs were bent at the knee and the right side of her face flat against the earth amongst half-house bricks and clumps of grey plaster. Nail and screw debris littered the area. Kim felt the anger begin to build in her stomach; the woman had been killed and left amongst decay and rubbish – the guts of a building that no one wanted – in an area now abandoned and unused. That fact alone told her plenty about the person who had killed her.
‘Obvious injuries?’ she asked, pushing the thoughts away. They would not help her victim now. There were no stab wounds or pools of blood and no trauma that she could see. The woman looked as though she’d just lain down for a nap amongst the strewn building materials.
Keats shook his head. ‘I think her neck has been broken. I’ll be able to confirm once I get her back to the morgue.’
Kim looked again at the position of the body and visualised the woman kneeling, the murderer behind. One good, strong twist. Immediate death and then her lifeless form falling to the ground.
A quick, functional kill that lacked the frenzy of a crime of passion. There was no presence of multiple stab wounds or cuts and bruises. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The woman’s clothes appeared all in order.
Where was the feeling? Where was the emotion? Where was the motive for killing a young mother out shopping with her child?
‘I’d estimate two to five hours,’ Keats offered even though she hadn’t asked. She’d been able to work that out for herself.
As it was late afternoon, Kim guessed the post-mortem would take place the following day.
‘First thing,’ he said, reading her thoughts.
‘Oh, Jesus, I know that frown,’ Bryant said as they headed towards the car. ‘What’s up?’
‘She didn’t need to die,’ Kim said, and then wondered where those exact words had come from.
‘Well, someone wanted her dead cos she didn’t break her own—’
‘I can’t explain it,’ she said, turning to look back at the scene. ‘It’s all so throwaway, Bryant. There was no passion, no hate, no frenzy, no message, no statement and she was just left amongst all this shit. Unless Katrina Nock was leading some kind of double life away from being a wife and mother, I really have the feeling that this woman didn’t need to die.’
Kim’s thoughts returned once more to the small child whose life was now changed for ever. It was down to her to deliver the bad news.
Eight
Kate Sewell closed the car door and glanced at her Hermes handbag, bought courtesy of her commission on the book deal brokered between her client and one of the big five publishing houses.
Tyra Brooks was not her normal type of client, and the back of beyond in the Black Country was not where she’d seen herself in her late thirties, but needs must, she told herself.
The two of them had needed each other.
At twenty-eight years of age, Tyra’s glamour modelling days had been numbered. Waning interest in her physical attributes had led to her being dropped by the agency that had represented her for ten years. Right at the time Kate had lost her last high-paying client, who had been poached by a swanky agency, promising to take his mediocre acting talent to another level and make him a household name. Good luck with that, she thought. Ryan Hardwick was a handsome, arrogant man whose delusions far outweighed his ability. He was also a self-sabotager, scared of success and increased his alcohol intake at the first sign of a decent role. It hadn’t been her holding him back, it had been himself, but she’d let them discover that on their own.
Regardless of his shortcomings, Ryan’s piecemeal work had kept her business going, along with the other half-dozen clients she had left, and her hands were still full because Tyra was almost as delusional as Ryan had been.
The only person who hadn’t known Tyra’s career was on the decline was Tyra herself. Even though fuller lips and bigger boobs hadn’t reignited the interest, she still felt that it was only a matter of time before she was back on top. A blip. A dry spell. What Tyra hadn’t realised was that each surgery was making her look less like herself, and that the gigantic boobs had turned her into a novelty fixture. When approaching Tyra to represent her interests, Kate had envisaged a year or two of minor bookings, eking out the last dregs of the woman’s career, to help pay her mortgage until she secured a couple of high-paying clients.
That was until Tyra had revealed she’d accidentally slept with a well-known footballer after a drunken night in a Birmingham club. Kate had been unsure about the accidental part. How did one accidentally sleep with someone else, she had wondered, but she’d seen the financial opportunities straight away.
Together they’d devised a plan to maximise exposure and had started a marketing campaign of teasing out the information, dropping hints via social media and her YouTube channel. With the sniff of scandal in the air, Tyra’s followers on all platforms had tripled, and Kate had chosen the perfect moment for the identity of the footballer to be revealed. His denial had been met with photos from Tyra’s phone of the two of them, and social media had exploded. Hashtags placed carefully had kept the story trending for days. The offers had started rolling in: TV appearances, radio interviews, podcasts. An interview with a national newspaper had been followed by three publishing houses bidding for her tell-all, especially once Tyra alluded to the fact he wasn’t the only celebrity who had graced her bed. The deal had been secured, and Tyra’s memories had been turned into a book by a ghost writer Kate had used before.
It had been hard going. She’d worked seventeen-hour days for months. She’d spent many hours of that time massaging the ever-inflating ego of her client, who was relishing the limelight and eager to wring every last bit of drama from the situation.
But the tide had begun to turn. Kate could feel it. The dignified silence of the wife who had been wronged was damaging the campaign. An all-out bitch fight would have been better.
Oblivious to the change in tone to some of the messages, Tyra was milking the situation for every hour it had left in it, but more and more trolls were coming out of the woodwork and the name-calling had turned meaner. The idle death threats from the keyboard warriors were met with the same response: ignored and blocked. They were vague, vitriolic, violent and forgotten by the sender minutes later. It was par for the course. Anyone in the public eye was a magnet for the haters.
It wasn’t a situation she hadn’t been in before, but human nature dictated that hateful characters made more money.
In the meeting, she’d been asked if there was any direct threat to Tyra Brooks and she had said no.
She glanced towards her mobile phone sitting in the hands-free cradle.