Page 22 of The Scene of the Crime
She then moved on to the plush main bedroom, where the tall double-glazed Victorian windows filled the room with natural light. Taff was kneeling on the carpet by the dressing table, aboutto use a small electrostatic dust lifter to retrieve any invisible shoe impressions. He placed a sheet of Myler film on the carpet.
‘I hate using the ESLA. It gave me a bad electric shock once . . . felt like I’d been hit with a taser,’ Taff frowned.
‘That’s why I get you to do it,’ Jessica said with a grin. Having used ESLA herself, she knew it was a high-voltage power source used to create a static electric charge. This charge attracted dust and loose particles to form a shoe impression on the black side of the Myler sheet. If your hand accidentally made contact with the sheet during the process, you would get a nasty shock, though it was unlikely to be life-threatening unless you had a heart condition.
Taff grimaced as he slowly turned up the electric charge on the ESLA. The Myler film was gradually drawn down to the surface of the carpet, and he carefully used a wooden-handled foam brush to flatten out any areas that had creased or bubbled. Turning the ESLA off, he carefully lifted the sheet and shone some ultraviolet light on it, revealing a clear shoe mark. He held it up for Jessica to see. ‘I didn’t find any traces of blood in here, and this footmark doesn’t look like the ones in the kitchen and hallway. I’ll check it against De Klerk’s shoes in the wardrobe. If there isn’t a match, it could be that two people broke in.’
‘Yes,’ Jessica agreed. ‘Do you know where the jewellery box is?’
Taff leaned to one side, picked up an exhibit bag and handed it to her. Inside was a brown nine-by-five-inch mahogany box. ‘It was on top of the dressing table.’
‘Open or closed?’ she asked.
‘Closed but empty. Although the carpet in here is very soft, an intruder would be taking a big risk entering while De Klerk was asleep,’ Taff suggested.
Jessica looked at the king-size bed. The left side of the duvet and pillows looked undisturbed, but on the right, it was creasedand folded over to one side, as one would do when getting out of bed. One pillow was on the floor but upright against the bedside cabinet, as if it had been deliberately placed there, and the other pillow was creased and slept-on looking. It seemed that only one person had been sleeping in the bed.
While Taff continued looking for more footprints, Jessica took some iPad photographs of the room, particularly the bed and side cabinet, on which there was a bottle of water and an iPhone charging cable plugged into a lamp with a built-in USB socket. She looked in the other dressing table drawer and found a lady’s hairbrush, which she put in an exhibit bag. If Mrs De Klerk had been kidnapped, they’d need it to raise a DNA profile from her hair. A matching two-seater sofa was also in the room, with a pair of trousers, shirt and underpants over the armrest and some socks and shoes on the floor beside it. Jessica assumed it was Johan De Klerk’s clothing and checked the pockets of the trousers. Inside the right pocket was a wallet containing cash and credit cards in Johan De Klerk’s name. She picked up one of the shoes, looked at the sole, and handed it to Taff. He compared it to the first ESLA lift. ‘Yep, same shoe,’ he said.
‘OK, it looks like De Klerk was woken by the intruder and went downstairs to confront him.’
‘That fits,’ Taff agreed.
There were no closets or chests of drawers in the room, but there was a large walk-in dressing room. She looked inside the closets, but nothing appeared to have been disturbed.
The en suite bathroom was expensively decorated with two sinks, a large walk-in shower and a Jacuzzi bath. There were his and hers cabinets containing personal hygiene products and medicines. Johan’s cabinet contained various health vitamins, ibuprofen and other over-the-counter painkillers. Jessica noticed a plastic bottle with melatonin written on it. She knew it was used to help aid sleep and was only available on prescriptionin the UK. This bottle had a red heart and CVS Health written on it. Jessica googled it and discovered that melatonin was available over the counter at pharmacies in America. She took a picture of the bottle and wondered if Johan had taken some melatonin before he went to bed the previous night.
Jessica then went down to the living room and looked at the contents of the cabinet drawers scattered around the room. She also deduced that the coffee table had been pushed or knocked to one side from the four visible indentation marks on the carpet. On the floor beside the table were two magazines and two remote controls, one for the television and the other for the lighting and window blinds, suggesting a struggle had taken place in the living room between De Klerk and his assailant, during which the coffee table had been moved and the controls knocked to the floor.
As she made more notes on her iPad, she heard Diane laughing. She had an infectious laugh, which made others join in, even at the most inappropriate times.
‘How’s it going?’ Jessica asked as she stood by the archway entrance.
‘I’ve done the 3D photography and nearly finished with the blood swabbing,’ Diane said, recovering herself. ‘Mike was just telling me a funny story about when he was a probationer PC . . . go on, tell Jessica.’
‘It’s not that funny,’ he said hesitantly.
‘Di clearly thought it was,’ Jessica said. ‘And we share the same sense of humour.’
Chapman held his hands up in surrender. ‘OK, I was with an old sweat PC at a murder scene. A big pool of blood was on the parquet floor, and a cat was sleeping in an armchair. I was told to get the cat in case it woke up and walked in the blood. When I touched the cat, it lashed out and scratched my hand. I lost my balance and fell in the blood . . . and to top it off, the catran off through it as well, leaving a trail of bloody paw marks everywhere.’
Jessica laughed as she envisioned it happening. ‘I bet the crime scene manager wasn’t impressed.’
‘He was livid, as was the SIO. They took my clothing at the scene and left me to find my way back to the station. I had to walk two miles wearing a white crime scene suit and shoe covers over my bare feet. The looks I got along the way made it even more embarrassing. When I got back to the station, everyone started meowing.’
Jessica smiled and felt herself warming to him. ‘I think Mrs De Klerk might be away or abroad, as her passport wasn’t in the folder with her husband’s,’ she said, getting back to the business in hand.
‘Let’s hope so,’ Chapman replied. ‘I’ll tell Anderson.’
‘Any initial thoughts on the course of events in here?’ she asked Diane.
‘Visually, the blood distribution suggests a violent struggle, which is no surprise. I think the first injury to his head occurred over there.’ She pointed to the corner of the marble worktop with an overturned knife block. ‘I’ll come to my thoughts on the knife block in a second, but they are the same make as the one Taff retrieved from the hospital. As you can see, there are circular blood droplets on the tiled floor which have fallen from a height, suggesting the victim was standing up at the time with his back to the assailant when he was initially hit. This blow caused the first wound on his head, resulting in the blood drops on the floor.’
‘He wouldn’t have seen him coming then,’ Chapman remarked.
‘As odd as it seems, he may have,’ she said. ‘There are two scenarios . . . firstly, De Klerk saw the assailant coming towards him, turned, and hurriedly attempted to, or did, pull theeightinch knife from the block, thus causing the block to fall on its side. Before, or as De Klerk grabbed the knife, the assailant struck him on the back of his head, possibly with the jemmy used on the safe. His head splits open and starts to bleed. He turns, and a struggle ensues. He stumbles forward and falls to the ground a few feet away. He is now face down and is repeatedly struck again on the back of the head while prone on the floor . . .’
‘How do you work that out?’ Chapman interrupted.
