Chill Factor by Stuart Pawson Page A

She was reluctant to come over to ID him because she has young children, and showed little interest in knowing when the funeral might be. Eventually we asked a neighbour, Mrs Watson, who was friendly with him, and she positively identified him.”
    “Any other next of kin?” I asked.
    “His mother in Chippenham, if she’s still alive. She vacated her last known address to move into a nursing home, but we’re trying to find her.”
    “Thanks Gareth. We might as well do the other one now,” I said. “Any volunteers?”
    A uniformed constable raised his hand and uncoiled from his chair. He’d taken Mr Silkstone to the mortuary at the General Hospital, he told us, where Silkstone had positively identified the body of a woman as being that of his wife, Margaret. I thanked him and he sat down.
    “Was he suitably grief stricken?” I asked him.
    “Yes sir.”
    Gareth Adey rose to his feet, saying: “Point of order, Mr Priest.”
    I was expecting it. Asking a murderer to identify an associated body was a trifle unusual, if not bizarre. “Yes, Gareth,” I said.
    “Do you not think, Mr Priest,” he waffled, “that we might be leaving ourselves open to criticism by inviting the accused to ID a body allegedly murdered by the victim of his revenge killing?”
    “Good point, Gareth,” I told him. “We need a second opinion. Could I leave that with you, and I’d be grateful if you’d do the usual with next of kin.”
    He smiled contentedly and sat down.
    “Cause of death,” I said, pointing to Annette.
    She was wearing jeans and a white blouse, her jacket draped over the back of the chair. She stood up, unsmiling,and brushed her hair off her face. “Peter Latham was killed by a single knife-wound to the heart,” she told us. “The knife found in him would be identical to the one missing from the set in his kitchen. The blade entered his chest between the fifth and sixth ribs on an upward trajectory, puncturing the left ventricle. This indicates an underhand blow from someone of approximately the same height. Latham was only a hundred and sixty-eight centimetres tall. That’s five feet six inches. The blade missed the ribs and unusual force would not be required.”
    “Time of death?” I asked.
    “Between three and six p.m.,” Annette replied.
    “We can narrow that down,” I declared. “Silkstone rang nine-double-nine at seventeen ten hours, saying he’d done it. Let’s call it between three and five.” Doc Evans had said between four and five, I remembered, and he was on the scene quite quickly. The professor was working from a cold cadaver, sixteen hours after the event. “On second thoughts, make it between four and five,” I told them. Sometimes, knowing the precise time of death can be crucial.
    Annette had taken her seat again, but I said: “Go on, Annette, you might as well tell us about the other one.”
    She rose, brushing the offending hair aside, and launched straight into it. She was a young attractive woman, one of only four in a room with thirty men, and I wondered if I’d been fair, sending her to the post-mortems. She said: “Margaret Silkstone died as a result of strangulation. There was a pair of tights knotted around her throat but there was also bruising caused by manual strangulation, apparently from behind. She’d recently had anal and vaginal intercourse , and semen samples have been recovered and sent for analysis.”
    “How recently,” I asked.
    “At about the time of death,” she replied. “The professor’s preliminary conclusions are that vaginal intercourse took place before death, and anal possibly after, but he wantsto do a more considered examination.”
    “And when was the time of death?”
    “Between two and six p.m.”
    “Right. Thanks for doing the gory stuff, Annette,” I told her. “I appreciate it.”
    She gave me the briefest of smiles and sat down. After that I invited the team to let us know what they had discovered about the background of the