Page 12 of The Scene of the Crime (Jessica Russell #1)
He whistled. ‘The wine business must be doing well.’ She showed him the photos of the striation marks on the safe. ‘Could be from a jemmy,’ he said. ‘Lots of detail, which is good. Moving the safe won’t be easy, though. It must weigh over 200 kilos.’
‘You’re right. But the big question is, what was inside it?’
‘Cash and jewellery is what you’d normally expect,’ Taff said.
‘Makes me wonder if the intruder already knew it was down here,’ Jessica said as she stood by the bay window and looked up towards the street.
‘If the assailant had scoped the house out first, they could have seen the safe through the window. Can you please get me some nylon accelerant bags from the van?’
Taff, wondering if he was missing something, took a few good sniffs but couldn’t smell any form of accelerant. Jessica saw his quizzical expression. ‘The safe shelves are lined with carpet. I’m going to remove it and put them in the nylon bags to preserve any drugs residue for testing at the lab.’
‘You think De Klerk was dealing drugs?’
‘I don’t know, but we have to cover every possibility. How’s Diane getting on in the kitchen?’
‘She’s still working on it. Chapman is helping her. Do you want me to video and photograph the rear garden?’
‘Yes, please.’
Taff started to leave, then turned around. ‘There’s a laptop on the kitchen table. I’ll take it for fingerprinting and a digital examination.’
‘Fingerprinting is fine, but if it’s the victim’s, we might need his permission or a warrant to examine it. There’s a technical support section at the lab. We’ll have to ask them to do it as none of us are experienced enough in that field of forensics,’ Jessica added.
Taff left, and Jessica opened the filing cabinet.
Looking through the contents, she removed an A4 folder labelled ‘J one was a water buffalo, and the other was a cheetah.
She leaned over and sniffed each glass. One smelt different from the other, but she couldn’t tell what had been in them.
She took some photos, went out and got some airtight plastic containers from the van, then came back and put the tumblers in them for fingerprint and DNA examination.
Before going to the main bedroom, Jessica quickly checked the others.
There were two fully furnished double bedrooms with built-in cupboards and a chest of drawers, which did not appear to have been disturbed.
The fourth bedroom, a single room, was only partially decorated.
The floor was bare untreated wood, but the walls had safari animal print wallpaper.
A cardboard boxed cot and nappy changing cabinet were propped up against the wall, which made Jessica wonder if Michelle De Klerk was pregnant.
The thought that she and her unborn child might be dead was disturbing.
She then moved on to the plush main bedroom, where the tall double-glazed Victorian windows filled the room with natural light.
Taff was kneeling on the carpet by the dressing table, about to use a small electrostatic dust lifter to retrieve any invisible shoe impressions.
He placed a sheet of Myler film on the carpet.
‘I hate using the ESLA. It gave me a bad electric shock once . . . felt like I’d been hit with a taser,’ Taff frowned.
‘That’s why I get you to do it,’ Jessica said with a grin.
Having used ESLA herself, she knew it was a high-voltage power source used to create a static electric charge.
This charge attracted dust and loose particles to form a shoe impression on the black side of the Myler sheet.
If your hand accidentally made contact with the sheet during the process, you would get a nasty shock, though it was unlikely to be life-threatening unless you had a heart condition.
Taff grimaced as he slowly turned up the electric charge on the ESLA.
The Myler film was gradually drawn down to the surface of the carpet, and he carefully used a wooden-handled foam brush to flatten out any areas that had creased or bubbled.
Turning the ESLA off, he carefully lifted the sheet and shone some ultraviolet light on it, revealing a clear shoe mark.
He held it up for Jessica to see. ‘I didn’t find any traces of blood in here, and this footmark doesn’t look like the ones in the kitchen and hallway.
I’ll check it against De Klerk’s shoes in the wardrobe.
If there isn’t a match, it could be that two people broke in. ’
‘Yes,’ Jessica agreed. ‘Do you know where the jewellery box is?’
Taff leaned to one side, picked up an exhibit bag and handed it to her. Inside was a brown nine-by-five-inch mahogany box. ‘It was on top of the dressing table.’
‘Open or closed?’ she asked.
‘Closed but empty. Although the carpet in here is very soft, an intruder would be taking a big risk entering while De Klerk was asleep,’ Taff suggested.
Jessica looked at the king-size bed. The left side of the duvet and pillows looked undisturbed, but on the right, it was creased and folded over to one side, as one would do when getting out of bed.
One pillow was on the floor but upright against the bedside cabinet, as if it had been deliberately placed there, and the other pillow was creased and slept-on looking.
It seemed that only one person had been sleeping in the bed.
While Taff continued looking for more footprints, Jessica took some iPad photographs of the room, particularly the bed and side cabinet, on which there was a bottle of water and an iPhone charging cable plugged into a lamp with a built-in USB socket.
She looked in the other dressing table drawer and found a lady’s hairbrush, which she put in an exhibit bag.
If Mrs De Klerk had been kidnapped, they’d need it to raise a DNA profile from her hair.
A matching two-seater sofa was also in the room, with a pair of trousers, shirt and underpants over the armrest and some socks and shoes on the floor beside it.
Jessica assumed it was Johan De Klerk’s clothing and checked the pockets of the trousers.
Inside the right pocket was a wallet containing cash and credit cards in Johan De Klerk’s name.
She picked up one of the shoes, looked at the sole, and handed it to Taff.
He compared it to the first ESLA lift. ‘Yep, same shoe,’ he said.
‘OK, it looks like De Klerk was woken by the intruder and went downstairs to confront him.’
‘That fits,’ Taff agreed.
There were no closets or chests of drawers in the room, but there was a large walk-in dressing room. She looked inside the closets, but nothing appeared to have been disturbed.