evidence

..and when the police eventually found his body there were many suspicious signs, strong indications that there was likely to be foul play at hand. The first was that he was alone, isolated in a way that seemed unnatural to the investigating officers. Then the fact that he was totally undressed, naked, and cold, his limbs though strangely peaceful, almost posed by an experienced fashion photographer in love with a sub-culture that believed that one’s body position could betray an inner happiness, arranging limbs in such a way that it ensured eternal joy and ecstasy.

But what concerned Inspector No Name most was the heavy, purplish bruising on the upper left-side of the victim’s chest. There was enough sub-cutaneous bleeding to convince him that the forensics team had to be brought onto the case immediately as he could not, as a layman, fathom why it would appear that blood seemed to be seeping upwards and outwards, especially as he could not find any gunshot wounds, or any sign of a blade entering the affected area. He went on to his knees, carefully avoiding any disturbance of the victim’s rigor mortis position,  and used his new reading glasses to try and find any tell-tale marks, he even looked for the inconspicuous dots left behind by the stabbing with a sharpened bicycle wheel spoke, a favourite method used in trains and buses to stab a victim when his/her arm was lifted, hanging on a strap in a crowded bus for instance, a swift jab into the arm pit, straight into the heart, but causing so little pain that the victim hardly reacted or realised that he/she had just been given a fatal jab.

After a day or so the forensic investigation was concluded and the local crime lab sent in its normal Form 00z to the Inspector’s detective sergeant, DS Even Less, and reported that they could not find any external wounds, that the internal bleeding was caused by an inexplicable heart defect (the autopsy could not, despite vigorous, and repeated efforts of the coroner, reveal any obvious, normal heart diseases or defects) and that a full scan for poisonous substances or drugs also revealed nothing significant, except that at the bottom of the form the DS saw a hastily scribbled note by a trainee coroner’s assistant in which she noted that she had however found chemical traces of an unknown substance around the eyes of the victim, a substance which did not fit in with any known chemical pattern search or traces, and though she could offer no scientific proof, she felt that it might have been traces of tears.