The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [110]
“Yes. I handed it to Jess on my way to collect her clothes so that she could check the pockets. He’d put her knickers in the flap, but I thought he might have taken her bra as well. He was that kind of pervert.”
“Do you remember what she did with it?”
“I think she left it on the chair.”
“Did either of you take anything out of it?”
“I can’t speak for Jess, but I didn’t.” I stubbed out my cigarette. “I should have done. My father’s binoculars and mobile were in it. Why do you ask?”
“Just tying up loose ends.” He saw my frown. “The SOCOs found your imprints on the office floor, but none that matched those by the front door. We wondered why, since you and Dr. Coleman both said the bag was by the desk.”
He was very thorough, I thought. “Have you found the bag? Why did you think we might have removed something?”
“It was a hope, Ms. Burns. If you’d kept something of MacKenzie’s we’d have a better chance of extracting some DNA.”
“Oh, I see.”
“We have foot- and fingerprints but nothing else. There might have been saliva traces on your father’s mobile or an eyelash on the binoculars, although the most likely source would have been your clothes, since you came into contact with him when you tied him up. If Ms. Derbyshire’s dogs had drawn blood or the axe had broken his skin—” he shrugged.
“What about Jess’s clothes or Peter’s clothes?”
He shook his head. “If you’d left Ms. Derbyshire’s untouched, we might have found a rogue hair, but there was too much moving and handling…and Dr. Coleman lost anything on his way back to his house.”
“Do you need DNA evidence if you have his fingerprints? Peter and I can both identify him.”
Bagley smiled rather grimly. “It depends if he’s recognizable when we find him, Ms. Burns.”
CHAOS FOLLOWED hard on the arrival of the police and the ambulance. I remember the terrible clamour as the sirens wailed into the drive, and the ensuing confusion as Peter tried to explain that the “patient” had vanished. We all had different priorities. Mine was to find out what had happened to my parents, Jess’s was her dogs, and the police wanted a clear picture of events before they did anything at all.
In the first instance, they wanted to know whose blood was all over the floor and why it had been trodden in so freely, and they weren’t prepared to accept that it had all come from Bertie. Neither could I when I looked at it through the objective eyes of startled newcomers. What the dogs hadn’t flicked around in the immediate aftermath of Bertie’s death, Peter, Jess and I had tracked across the flagstones in our movements to and fro. It looked like a bloodbath and felt like a bloodbath, and the police chose to view it as one until tests proved different.
We learnt later that Bertie suffered massive haemorrhaging from his carotid artery where MacKenzie had slashed the flick knife across one side of his throat. Jess’s grief was that he didn’t die immediately but continued to pump blood until his heart gave up. Mine was that I hadn’t used the axe sooner to split MacKenzie’s head open. In the great scheme of things, Bertie’s contribution to life, liberty and happiness so outweighed MacKenzie’s that there was no contest between which of them deserved to live and which deserved to die.
Much to Jess’s and my annoyance, we were relegated to second place behind Peter. While he was invited into the dusty dining-room to give the first account of what had happened, we were instructed to wait in the kitchen under the eagle eyes of a WPC. By that time, several more police cars had arrived and the house and garden were being scoured for MacKenzie. I kept trying to raise the issue of my parents but no one wanted to hear. “One thing at a time,” I was told. In the end Jess threatened to punch the WPC if she didn’t whip up some action, and instructions were finally given to alert the Metropolitan police.
Inspector Bagley was curious about why I hadn’t used my mobile to contact my parents myself. If they were such a priority, he argued, I’d have headed for the attic as soon as Peter left the house. “You could have phoned