Page 76 of The Bridesmaid
He has swapped his usual deck shoes for sports sneakers that appear to be new out of the box, and wears pressed tan shorts, and a deep navy T-shirt that fits around his muscular biceps in a way the designer would be delighted by. I can see how the GQ nickname stuck.
‘Any word on the autopsy?’ I ask.
Fitzwilliam watches as I feed a vacuum plastic pocket into the machine, and shakes his head, frowning, as if deciding not to attempt to fathom my strange behavior.
He nods. ‘Only what I heard in the staff quarters. The conclusion is Silky’s death was a heroin overdose. Accidental or suicide. No suggestion anyone forcibly injected her, and the drugs she was injecting were very pure.’
I nod, pressing another button on the machine. ‘Sounds right.I took a good look. Aside from the mouth secretions, there was no abdominal distention or purpling of the skin consistent with drowning.’ I glance up.
‘You seem very sure.’
‘None of this is my personal opinion. I’m just a translator for data. But … when you see a lot of the same data it builds a certain picture. And I’ve seen more than my fair share of overdoses, even before I began work as a forensic.’ I feed another page through the vacuum packer.
‘You did?’ Fitzwilliam’s pale blue eyes seem to be struggling with this notion.
‘I grew up in a bohemian squat, which is a nice way of saying opium den. Silky looked like every other heroin overdose I’ve seen.’ I press the vacuum packer button. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t think Silky was murdered. My hunch is she somehow got close to what Simone meant to film out here. Or someone thought she did. That’s what I’m investigating.’
‘Which is why you came to the kitchens to … What are you doing, by the way?’
I pause to wipe sweat with the back of my hand, noticing he eyes the gesture uncomfortably.
‘The documents we found floating in the water, near Silky’s body. The most likely scenario would be if she was holding them when she was washed out on the tide. Theywerecompletely illegible,’ I conclude proudly. ‘But, take a look.’ I hold up one of the vacuum-packed envelopes to display a document inside.
‘Luckily for us, this is a state-of-the-art catering facility,’ I explain. ‘First, I put them in the blast chiller – that took a while,’ I add. ‘It only fits seven pages at once. Then, I made use of their sous vide machine. That’s basically a vacuum packer with heat.It expels the frozen water out of the documents as vapor, while retaining the print. It’s not as good as using the proper equipment, but you can read a lot more than when we first found them.’
I glance up, and to my surprise, Fitzwilliam is staring at me with a wide grin.
‘Holly Stone,’ he says, ‘you’re a genius.’
‘Thanks,’ I give him a confused smile in return. ‘I’m just using well-documented forensic processes,’ I add. ‘Really you should thank Sandra Hemsted.’
‘Who?’
‘She’s the first forensic to pioneer … never mind.’ I step back from the sous vide machine. ‘So what do you think?’ I ask Fitzwilliam, as he leafs through successive papers, sealed in their flat plastic. ‘It looks to me like the transcript from a court case.’
‘Right.’ He frowns, turning them. ‘Or a legal file, maybe.’
‘I’ve already read a few of the more legible pages,’ I explain. ‘It seems to be a print-out of the entire court case between Silky and Kensington Manor School.’
‘Why would Silky have that?’
‘I don’t know. But from the parts I read, it’s an unsettling account of neglect, and a culture of institutional bullying.’
‘But she lost in court, right?’
‘Yeah,’ I sift plastic pages and lift one. ‘This is Silky’s statement,’ I explain, reading. ‘She says: “We lived in fear of the older girls coming. There was no supervision. They did what they wanted to us.”’
Fitzwilliam visibly shudders. ‘Any mention of Trinity?’
I nod. ‘Seems like Trinity was … a character, kind of. More like a legend, maybe. Trinity would come and snatch you in the night, if you didn’t behave. Take your three best things. Cut youinto three pieces. But … Trinity was just a story. When the defense asked Silky outright about physical abuse, her answers were bizarre. She talked on and on about a particular piece of graffiti on the wall. Behind one of the beds. Something that had been there since the school began.’
‘Graffiti? How can that be a case for neglect or abuse?’
‘The jury agreed. But in Silky’s mind, the school had failed in a duty of care not having this particular wall scrubbed clean. There was a picture on it that scared all the girls, apparently.’
‘What kind of picture?’
‘I don’t know. There’s a bunch of documents that seem to pertain to it,’ I add. ‘They’re just coming out of the vacuum-packer now.’
