Guilty Conscious by Oliver Davies (best ereader for students .txt) 📗

coat swishing around her knees as she bent towards a coffee machine that whirred and clunked as it poured out a watery cup.

“You know you can go upstairs,” I told her as we joined her. “Get a decent brew.”

She rolled her eyes at me, blowing the steam away and taking a tentative sip. “That’s a lot of stairs,” she informed me, leading us down the hallway and into her lab. The walls were lined with glass and metal shelves, cupboards that were locked tight and others that couldn’t be seen into. Our shoes clicked on the cold, hard floor as she walked us over to the table in the middle of the room, a shrouded body lying still.

Dr Crowe dumped her folder and coffee on her desk and pulled a pair of gloves on with an audible flourish, standing at the head of the body with her hands on her hips, staring at me.

“I hear you left early yesterday. All well?”

“Elsie’s sick,” I told her, and she gave me a sympathetic smile, moving swiftly on and pulling the sheet back from Edward Vinson’s body.

I held in a grimace looking down at him.

He’d been cleaned up, the blood mopped away from his face and body, but that meant we could see the mangled state of him. A large cut ran across his head, stitched up now, his forehead dented with the weight of it. A few more cuts and dents were scattered along his head, his hair shaved back in parts so that Crowe could assess them each. Ugly bruises still smattered his skin, and where he wasn’t green and purple, he was as white as the sheet surrounding him. His eyes were slightly swollen, black bruises surrounding them. Dr Crowe folded the sheet just below his neck and let us take a moment to take it all in.

“Ready when you are, Lena,” I told her.

“Well, as you can see, he’s been fairly battered. This wound…” She traced a finger over the large, stitched cut that ran across his forehead. “This is the one that likely killed him. Blunt trauma would have gone right through, and it’s where we got most of the blood loss. All the others mean that our killer didn’t know where to aim, so this is definitely a hack job.”

“Someone with not much coordination?” Mills asked her, likely thinking of Mr Helman.

“Maybe. Or someone not very strong needed to go a few times to make an impact. The angles are interesting,” Crowe went on, leaning closer to the body. “This one,” the main injury, “runs horizontally. He was hit likely from the side.” She reached over and pretended to knock me in a similar way. “After that, these all come straight in, so he was on his knees or his back when they hit him again, probably from above.”

I winced at the image.

“Which is also why they haven’t cut as much. I’m guessing the object had an edge and a flat surface. The edges and corners left the cuts, but the flat side worked more like a battering ram.”

Mills muttered a curse, earning a tut from our pathologist, and he nodded to Edward’s face. “That’s how the nose got broken then.”

“This time around,” Crowe told us with some mild excitement. “It’s been broken before and badly set.” She ran a finger around a ridge on his nose, not far from where a new cut lay across it. “He’d had it broken before and not very long ago from the look of it. A few weeks of healing, maybe.”

“He plays rugby,” Mills recalled. “Could have got it bashed in a game.”

“Would explain the rather slapdash resetting of it.” Crowe gave him a nod that had him standing straighter, a look of pride on his face.

“Or someone punched him,” I muttered. “Are we still working in the six to seven window for time of death?”

Another nod from Lena. “He was still fresh when we got to him, so it hadn’t been long. Closer to seven, I’d say if you pressured me.”

I nodded, thinking about the weapon itself. Something with a flat edge, but with corners and edges. My mind was, disappointingly, blank of ideas.

“Would the weapon have been heavy?” I asked.

Dr Crowe, leaning against her desk now to sip her coffee loudly, dipped her chin in a nod. “Weighted, I think. Gave them a good swing. And not wooden,” she added, walking back over. “He’s got no splinters to be found, so my guess is it was metal. Here.” She pulled the sheet further down, leaving it at his hips so we could see his hands. They were broken at the wrists, bent horribly, the fingernails broken, and I could picture them covered in blood.

“Looks like he tried to defend himself,” Mills murmured, looking down at his hands.

“Not for long,” Crowe told us. “A clean break, so he took one hit, then he would have dropped his arms.”

“So, he knew he was being attacked,” I muttered. “Would have likely seen who it was as well.”

I tried to picture it. The blow to the head that had him falling to his knees, the next blow he tried to stop with his hands probably had him on the floor, and the last few batters for good measure. It would have been desperate, frenzied, and panicked. No wonder the killer didn’t linger long. It also would have been as bloody as the scene had been, so how they made it from the room without being seen was a head-scratcher.

I wanted a closer time of death, one that meant we could start ruling people out, one that wasn’t subject to people having cars or enough time to get there and back. An hour was a relatively small space of time, but it gave enough leeway for people to be difficult to pin down.

“Let’s head to the campus,” I decided. “Start off at Professor Altman’s office and see how long it takes us to get to Edward’s room.”

I also wanted to see what we