Death of an Expert Witness by P. D. James Read Free Book Online Page B

fastidious. Or perhaps she had been in too much of a hurry to change. And now the intimate clothes which she had put on so unthinkingly on the day of her death would be smoothed out by strange hands, scrutinized under ultraviolet light, perhaps be handed up, neatly docketed, to the judge and jury in the Crown Court.
    Brenda knew that she would never again be able to wear her own panties, their prettiness contaminated forever by the memory of this dead unknown girl. Perhaps they had even bought them together in the same store, on the same day. She could recall the excitement of spending for the first time money she had actually earned. It had been a Saturday afternoon and there had been a crush round the lingerie counter, eager hands rummaging among the panties. She had liked the pair with the sprays of pink machine-embroidered flowers across the front. So, too, had this unknown girl. Perhaps their hands had touched.
    She cried: “Inspector. Isn’t death terrible?”
    “Murder is. Death isn’t; at least, no more than birth is. You couldn’t have one without the other or there’d be no room for us all. I reckon I won’t worry overmuch when my time comes.”
    “But that policeman who brought in the exhibits said that she was only eighteen. That’s my age.”
    He was making out the folder for the new case, meticulously transferring details from the police form to the file. And his head, with the cropped dry hair which reminded her so of corn stubble, was bent low over the page so that she could not see his face. Suddenly she remembered being told that he had lost an only daughter, killed by a hit-and-run driver, and she wished the words unsaid. Her face flared and she turned her eyes away. But when he replied his voice was perfectly steady.
    “Aye, poor lass. Led him on, I dare say. They never learn. What’s that you’ve got?”
    “It’s the bag of male clothes, suit, shoes and underwear. Do you think these belong to the chief suspect?”
    “They’ll be the husband’s, likely as not.”
    “But what can they prove? She was strangled, wasn’t she?”
    “No telling for certain until we get Dr. Kerrison’s report. But they usually examine the chief suspect’s clothes. There might be a trace of blood, a grain of sand or earth, paint, minute fibres from the victim’s clothes, a trace of her saliva even. Or she could have been raped. All that bundle will go into the Biology Search Room with the victim’s clothes.”
    “But the policeman didn’t say anything about rape! I thought you said this bundle belongs to the husband.”
    “You don’t want to let it worry you. You have to learn to be like a doctor or a nurse, detached, isn’t it?”
    “Is that how forensic scientists feel?”
    “Likely as not. It’s their job. They don’t think about victims or suspects. That’s for the police. They’re only concerned with scientific facts.”
    He was right, thought Brenda. She remembered the time only three days previously when the Senior Scientific Officer of the instrument section had let her look into the giant scanning electron microscope and watch the image of a minute pill of putty burst instantaneously into an exotic incandescent flower. He had explained.
    “It’s a coccolith, magnified six thousand times.”
    “A what?”
    “The skeleton of a micro-organism which lived in the ancient seas from which the chalk in the putty was deposited. They’re different, depending on where the chalk was quarried. That’s how you can differentiate one sample of putty from another.”
    She had exclaimed: “But it’s so lovely!”
    He had taken her place at the eyepiece of the instrument. “Yes, nice, isn’t it?”
    But she had known that, while she looked back in wonder across a million years, his mind was on the minute scrape of putty from the heel of the suspect’s shoe, the trace which mightprove a man was a rapist or a murderer. And yet, she had thought, he doesn’t really mind. All he cares about is