Page 90 of Dissection of a Murder
“DCI Brady, could I ask you to look again at the photos of Mr. Millman which were taken when he was brought into police custody?”
He shuffles the photos around, and the jury too can be heard flicking pages to find the ones I’m talking about. He finds them, then faces me without saying anything. God, he looks pissed off.
“Mr. Millman has a swelling to the right side of his face there,does he not?” I ask, leading everyone to look at the redness just to the side of Jack’s right eye.
“I suppose.” He shrugs. This man doesn’t take me seriously. “That could have come from anywhere.”
“Do you remember if that swelling was there when you arrived on the scene at his flat?”
“I don’t recall seeing it, no.”
“So, you’re saying it wasn’t there?”
“I didn’t say that,” he answers back defiantly, putting his hands on each side of the witness box.
“You made no mention of it in your evidence just now. Why not?”
“I didn’t think it was important.”
“You didn’t think it was important to mention that a man accused of murder had bruises beginning to form on his face potentially hours after the alleged murder had been committed, who now denies committing that act?”
“It wasn’t immediately obvious.” He sighs.
“It’s right, isn’t it, that Mr. Smythe was left-hand dominant?”
“So I’m told, yes.”
“If Mr. Millman claimed he had been assaulted by someone who was left-hand dominant, his injuries would be consistent with that?”
“Is he saying that?”
“I’m asking you.”
DCI Brady directs a steely glare my way, and I can tell he does not like me.
“I suppose it would, but that wasn’t immediately obvious when the defendant was arrested.”
The way he speaks is defensive.
“Was it immediately obvious what the murder weapon was when you arrived at the flat?”
“No,” he replies, “it wasn’t. It was difficult to understand what had happened at all because, outwardly, Mr. Smythe didn’t display many injuries. Just the bleeding from the nose, which made me think he’d been hit with something heavy.”
“You said in your evidence just now that it was an ‘odd’ decision to place the kettlebell back to its doorstop position. Can you explain this, please?”
“I’ve worked in criminal investigations for twenty years, mostly murder scenes. Some of these crime scenes are well thought out. Others aren’t. You can spot the rookie ones a mile off. The ones who panic and make stupid split-second decisions that end up getting them caught. The kettlebell is one of them.”
“How so?”
He glances at the jury, then directs his attention back to me.
“To use an object to kill someone, then return it to its place?” he says to me slowly, as if I’m stupid. “It had Anton’s DNA all over it. We were obviously going to find it.”
“No one attempted to hide it, throw it out, remove it from the flat?”
“I’d argue that by returning it to the door, he was trying to get away with it, ignorant of how the scene would be scrutinized by a criminal court. An amateurish move.”
“To be clear, you’re saying only someone who had no intimate knowledge of how crime scenes work would make such an unsophisticated mistake?”
