Page 51 of No Safe Place
Field held the phone up to Young, so she could read it without needing to change gloves. ‘It makes sense.Body-focused repetitive behaviours are often classed under OCD, although not all clinicians agree.’
‘When I spoke to Callum Mulligan last night, he confirmed he’d been in the Maudsley with Sam,’ Field said.
Until that moment, she hadn’t thought about piecing together which of the five they each were. They were so focused on finding the names, but they also had to match them to the symptoms described in the paper.
Young turned back to Sam. ‘It was a severe case of dermatillomania, judging by the scarring. There are much larger patches on her shoulders. There’s also these—’
Field leaned in. Sam had a line of small round scars on her left wrist.
Young went on. ‘Over a decade old, I’d say. About the right size to be cigarette burns.’
‘Could she have been abused, then?’ Field asked. She had met plenty of damaged adults, with physical and mental scars from childhood torture.
‘It’s a possibility,’ Young said, quietly. ‘But they’re only on her left arm. If she’s right-handed, then it’s more likely they were the result of self-harm.’
Young got to her feet. ‘There’s one more thing.’
‘Love it when you say that.’ Field stood up too.
She took a deep breath, and a last look down at the battered body of their victim, before they stepped out into the slightly fresher air. ‘Tell me you’ve saved the best until last.’
Young had stopped just outside the tent, moving the fabric slightly for a better look at the dried bloodstains on the road.
Field stared down at them with her hands on her hips.
‘It’s this.’ Young pointed at two parallel smears of blood, maybe the length of Field’s palm. Young’s brow was creased with concentration, and Field could sense her brain firing connections and calculating possibilities.
‘Right.’ Field waited for the mark on the tarmac to reveal its secrets to her, but it just looked like a smudge.
‘That’s a shoe mark, believe it or not,’ Young said. ‘Specifically, it’s a shoe dragging through the blood as someone gets to their feet.’
The penny dropped. They weren’t two parallel, separate stains. The toe of a shoe, or the tip of a sole, had streaked through the blood.
‘We know the first two wounds were designed to get the victim to the ground—’ Young stood in front of Field, then grabbed onto the front of her forensics suit. ‘What if she pulled her attacker down on top of her?’
Field pictured it in her mind, trying not to dwell on the image of Sam’s terrified face.
Young was working her way up to her point.
‘If Sam pulled her attacker to the ground with her, and they didn’t stand up until there was a significant pool of blood, it explains why the wounds to her side are so close together, compared to David’s. If you’re kneeling over someone, there’s a lot less room to swing.’
‘Could the shoe mark have been a paramedic?’ Field reasoned. ‘One of our officers maybe—’
Young was already shaking her head. ‘I’ve checked their shoes, even the knees of their uniforms. The paramedics’ boots are all bagged.’
Field didn’t have the same fizz of excitement yet. ‘Okay, so we’ve got an absence in the blood caused by a shoe, which we can match to our victim when we find our killer.’
‘If he fell on top of her—’ Young turned to Field, eyes bright. ‘Then we could have contact DNA on the body, sweat maybe. But there’s also this—’
Field should have known there was more.
More turned out to be tiny droplets of blood. ‘These dropletsof blood fell from a height, onto the ground,’ Young announced, triumphant. ‘I think they belong to your killer, and they cut themselves when they fell.’
‘Will we get DNA from the blood?’ Field asked.
‘There’s a good chance, but you’ll have to send them to Teddington.’ Young blew out a breath. ‘We’ll do everything we can.’
The Met’s new lab in Lambeth could run basic tests quickly, but the complex stuff had to be outsourced to labs in Teddington. It could take a few days, even fast-tracked.
