by Vanda Symon
I felt huge admiration for Tamsin as she went about the job of swabbing. It can’t have been pleasant.
She paused over one of the hands. ‘You might be able to get a fingerprint from that,’ she said, gesturing to a shred of plastic-looking stuff in the bottom of a sample bag. ‘The skin’s slipped off, and it looks like it could be from the fingertip.’ If she was right and it was usable, it would be a huge boost to our chances of identifying the body.
‘Fantastic,’ I said, and leaned over for a look. ‘They’ll be able to do that creepy human glove thing.’ I was glad it wasn’t my job to insert a finger into the sloughed off skin of a dead person, although it was a fascinating concept in a ghoulish kind of a way.
My body must have been adjusting to the pitch and roll of the boat, as I was starting to feel a little better, despite the putrid smell. I risked a closer look at what was left of the face. The remaining tissue had the strangest appearance, mottled white and almost soap-like, especially the cheeks. ‘Do submerged corpses always look like that – so waxy?’ I asked.
‘Not always,’ Tamsin said, as she carefully labelled her last swab and put it in the chilly bin. ‘They can sometimes saponify, where the body fats literally turn into a soaplike substance, but that takes quite a while – months – so I doubt it has happened here. Sometimes just the fact that all the skin has slipped off and they’ve been decomposing underwater makes them look like that.’
I watched as she recorded the time, air and water temperatures, and the 100 per cent humidity, and made other observations of the light and situation. The body had been photographed, had visible details recorded and now, finally, could be closed up in its body bag. The divers had taken video footage of the whole process, above and below water, capturing every piece of useful information possible in a constantly mobile and changing environment. At last we were done.
Despite not being the religious sort, I felt compelled to offer up a choked ‘God bless, rest in peace’ as the zipper slid across the ravaged face.
I hoped I would never have to see anything like that ever again.
16
The first thing I did once I’d fulfilled my official duties as officer in charge of the body was text Maggie. After the deep-seated chill this morning’s effort had injected into my bones, I felt the need for bright light, strong coffee, good food and friendly company. A late, late lunch was better than no lunch. Despite the borderline obsessive skin scrubbing and frantic hair washing, I was sure I could still catch a whiff of dead-man stench.
‘If I’d known you were going to talk about grotesque stuff like that when I’m trying to eat, I wouldn’t have agreed to meet,’ Maggie said, her face screwed up with distaste.
‘Sorry,’ I said around a mouthful of lamb salad. I swallowed it down, appreciating the salty tang of feta. The visual image the cheese conjured up was not so great, though. ‘It’s just that it was indescribably awful.’
‘I don’t know, you were doing a pretty good job of trying to describe it. And you don’t smell so good.’ We were in one of our favourite haunts, The Good Oil. The tables were quite close together, and Maggie’s comment made me feel self-conscious – concerned the people on either side of us would be wondering who had the personal hygiene problem. I took some surreptitious sniffs, which unfortunately confirmed her allegations. Shit, I’d have to have another shower when I got home. All I’d wanted was to go somewhere cosy, and with damn good coffee, to try and brighten my day. Apart from the pong paranoia, it was working so far. The raspberry and coconut cake helped too. With cream, not yoghurt. Yoghurt was for wimps.
‘So, to change the subject from the uncomfortably yucky, to the plain uncomfortable,’ Maggie said, as she waved her fork at me. ‘What’s going on with you and Paul?’
‘Do we have to talk about that now?’ I asked, partly because I didn’t want to talk about it, but mostly because I had no idea how I felt. My feelings seemed to lurch from one extreme to the other. How could I express what I couldn’t fathom? ‘Couldn’t we just make inane small talk? My, what lovely weather we’re having today.’
She smiled at my diversionary tactics. ‘Yeah, if you’re a duck. No, come on. Last I heard before you headed to your folks’, you’d panicked because he wanted to get a job over here and you left him hanging. Where are you two at now?’
‘I didn’t panic, thank you very much.’
‘You practically ripped his throat out, stomped on him and left him bleeding to death on the floor.’
‘You make me sound like a heartless cow. Thanks.’ I downed the last of my flat white. ‘Well, it was his fault. He shouldn’t have sprung it on me like that. You have to admit, it was a rather large decision for him to make – unilaterally, I might add; not only did he neglect to talk with me about it first, he had really, really bad timing. I was not at my best.’
‘He should have known not to corner a wounded animal, huh?’
‘Something like that.’
I’d only arrived back in Dunedin from the olds’ the previous night, and Maggs had been out at the movies with her latest stud muffin, Rudy. She’d found herself a bona fide aristocrat from France, one of the poor-but-noble variety. After the last few loser boyfriends she’d had, this seemed like a good’un and, I had to admit, hot. In fact the French accent tipped him into the realm of seriously hot. Due to the fact she’d still had a guest this morning and had been slightly preoccupied, we hadn’t had the chance for a decent catch-up.
‘Paul came down to the farm to see me, so of course, the olds were all over him like a rash. We didn’t actually get a second to ourselves. It felt like being a chaperoned sixteen-year-old all over again, with them following us around, gushing.’
My parents had a tendency to fall in love with my boyfriends. This was great, until the inevitable split, and then, invariably, they sided with the guy. Dad would be all long-faced and sad because he’d lost a mate, and Mum would usually interrogate me at great length as to what dreadful thing I’d done to lose or drive the man away this time. It was just another pressure to bear in mind when entering into relationships. It certainly wasn’t helping the situation with Paul.
‘But you’d have talked with him since then.’
‘Well, not really.’
She gave me one of those looks. ‘How the hell do you think you’re going to sort it out if you won’t even talk to him? How old are you?’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. It’s not the sort of thing you can get all deep and meaningful about over the phone, is it? He’s coming up this weekend. I’ll deal with it then, when we’re face to face.’
‘Well make sure you do. And don’t stuff it up. He’s a great guy.’
17
‘Shephard!’ DI Johns hollered around the corner of the squad room door.
As usual, I jumped. So, I noted, did Smithy. ‘Sir?’
‘You haven’t finished your job from this morning yet.’
‘But I’ve signed the body over to the morgue, everything’s in order.’
His perfect teeth glinted in the fluorescent light. ‘The post-mortem starts in an hour. Be there.’
I could feel the blood draining from my face.
18
‘I’ll talk you through it. If you start to feel a bit woozy or think you’re going to be sick, just walk away and take some deep breaths. Crouch down. No one’s going to laugh at you; we’ve all been there.’
I was grateful that Alistair was the pathologist doing the honours at this post-mortem. He’d been an itinerant part of our family for years. Back in our school days he was in my older brother’s class at Southland Boys High. His parents were of the well-endowed-with-brains-but-not-so-endowed-with-time-or-empathy category and, consequently, when the school booted the boarders out for the holidays, he came home with us, to bask in that special kind of love and attention only my mother could give.
It was a relief that an old friend could guide me through my first post-mortem. Alistair had very kindly offered to take car
e of that other first time, down in the hay shed, when I’d turned sixteen. I’d politely declined him then. He continued to offer his services in that department to this day. He was considerate like that.
‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ I said to him. I didn’t sound that convincing.
Stephanie, the morgue technician, was already decked out in her blue disposable jumpsuit. It was a stark contrast to this morning’s skirt, designer tights, knee-length heeled boots, v-necked purple knit top and something classy and expensive-looking around her neck. She wasn’t what you’d expect for someone who worked with dead people all day. She took me to the girls’ room and waited while I got myself into the sterile suit. I glanced in the mirror and marvelled at the ability of my skin to look translucent. With the remnants of yellow around my eye, and in my eye, it was a particularly fetching effect.
‘I’ll warn you now,’ she said. ‘The marine ones are always really bad, and the smell can kind of stick to you.’
The stench and I had already been formally introduced.
‘It might take a few showers and hair washes to get rid of it, and I hope those are old undies you’ve got on, you’ll be tempted to throw them out afterwards.’ I didn’t actually possess any flash undies, so that wasn’t an issue, and judging by how much the smell had clung to me before, these ones were definitely destined for the wheelie bin.
‘We don’t normally get on to post-mortems this quickly, but in the case of marine decomposition like this, it’s best to get it over and done with as soon as possible so we can seal the remains.’
‘If I’d known I was going to be doing this, I would have skipped lunch,’ I said as we headed towards the door.
‘It’s better with food in your system. Otherwise you end up faint from hunger, not just faint from nerves. Anyway, I’d prefer to throw up with some substance than to retch on nothing.’
‘Thanks for that.’
It was odd, but seeing the body up on the stainless-steel table, surrounded by the various tools and cutting implements in the glaring, concreted, impersonal environment of the morgue, made it seem less human than it had on the boat. The butterflies that had been careening around in my stomach since the dreaded news of attending a post-mortem had begun to settle as fascination with the process took over. Even the stench seemed somehow less overwhelming in this place. To distract myself from the nerves and horror of it all I was taking copious notes. Hopefully the paper wouldn’t prove to be too odour absorbent. I watched and marvelled at the calm efficiency with which Alistair and Stephanie worked. I listened to Alistair’s familiar lazy drawl as he delivered a running commentary of his observations.
‘The individual is a male.’ I could now definitively think ‘he’, rather than the neutral ‘they’, although we’d suspected all along it must be a guy as he had been wearing a man’s wetsuit.
‘There is marked animal predation of the body to areas of exposed flesh not covered by the wetsuit, and where the tear was along the right buttock and thigh.’ He continued to describe the physical state and injuries with a calm, even voice. The sound had a settling effect on me, counteracting the rather negative effects of the visual and olfactory stimuli.
Tamsin would have been pleased to know she was right – that it was a piece of slipped fingertip skin, as she’d thought. I’d buy her a beer for that call. It was carefully bagged to go to the environmental science and research experts in Christchurch for fingerprinting.
Initial observations done, it was time to remove what remained of the wetsuit. Stephanie used heavy-duty scissors to cut away and then gently lift off the neoprene. The swirling sensation in my stomach became a bit more insistent. This was where he started to look more human again, and I knew it would soon be time to open him up – the bit I really wasn’t looking forward to. With a sideways glance I looked at the marbled and mottled skin of his bloated abdomen and chest. The wetsuit didn’t seem to have protected him that much from the sea life.
‘Sam?’ Alistair said, after a few moments’ observation. ‘Did you say that this was thought to be a diving accident?’
‘Yes, looks that way. Why?’
‘You might want to rethink that. Those are contusions, a lot of them. This man’s been assaulted.’
19
Our squad room was packed to the gunwales. As well as its usual CIB inhabitants, there were people from the uniform branch taking up every available space and surface. It was one of the strange things about being in the CIB: I didn’t know what to call my other colleagues now. To call them ‘ordinary police’ seemed too condescending, just ‘police’ seemed like I was being exclusive, and ‘uniform branch’ was too formal. As I wasn’t into being exclusive or condescending, formal usually won by default.
I was up the front, waiting to give my report, while DI Johns filled everyone in on the discovery of the body. To avoid looking at the boss I studied some of the faces before me, before becoming so unnerved by the number of them staring back I took to studying the carpet instead.
‘Detective Constable Shephard will now give you a summary of the preliminary post-mortem findings.’
We swapped positions, and I politely said ‘thank you’, secretly enjoying the fact that he had to hand over to me. Judging by the nasty vibe he was giving off and his clipped consonants, it did not sit well. When you considered that the only reason I was here was because his sick idea of a joke had backfired and left me as a pivotal part of the murder investigation, it wasn’t a surprise he was a bit tetchy. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. His Royal Bastardness wouldn’t be able to find a way to demote me to the shitty jobs now. I suppressed a grin.
‘Good morning, everyone. The victim is a young male. Age is estimated to be early twenties. As the DI said, his body was found at sea after a fisherman dragged up a human foot.’ What anyone was doing fishing early on that grotty day made no sense to me. And it wasn’t like the man even had to make a living from it; this guy had been purely recreational. ‘The body was quite decomposed and had marked predation by sea life.’ A number of faces grimaced with that piece of information. Humans liked their place at the top of the food chain; we didn’t like the thought of being something else’s dinner. I didn’t tell them the dive-squad guys had initially thought the body was draped in seaweed, then realised the seething mass wasn’t kelp but eels. ‘It was initially thought to be death by drowning as a result of a diving accident, but the post-mortem has indicated the victim was assaulted: he had numerous contusions to his upper body. He had also suffered a broken nose, fractured skull and broken ribs. The provisional cause of death is blunt-force trauma to the head.’ I talked further about the injuries to the body and the evidence of assault.
‘Indications are the victim was killed on land before being dumped at sea. There were signs of livor mortis along his left side, on his arm, thigh and calf, indicating he had been on his side – we can speculate he was curled up in a foetal position, perhaps being transported in the back of a vehicle. The pathologist said that drowned and submerged victims usually show signs of livor in their hands, feet and face, as bodies naturally orient themselves into a prone position in water, and gravity pools the blood into the lower extremities.’
There was one last detail that had come through that morning from the trusty lab technicians at ESR, and it made this case even more curious. ‘Indications are the victim was already dead when put into the wetsuit, as there were no traces of urine present.’ Divers didn’t bother going through the hassle of getting out of a wetsuit to pee, and just relieved themselves in the suit. I supposed it warmed them up nicely too. The victim’s wetsuit was pee-free. Of course, being submerged in water for a long period may have reduced traces of urine, or he may have been in there only a short time and not needed to relieve himself, but when looked at in the context of the injuries he sustained, there was the very real possibility of his being stuffed in after death.
This meant that someone had gone to an awful lot of trouble to make it
look like a diving accident. It was hard enough for a warm, live and willing body to squeeze into a wetsuit – it was almost considered an extra event in a triathlon. But my mind boggled at how they could possibly have managed to force a corpse into one. You’d have to do it before rigor mortis set in, which only allowed a small window of opportunity – just a few hours, if my memory served me right. I’d check that later. Perhaps the perpetrator thought the sea would take care of the evidence, and if the body did happen to pop up, people would think it was just another diving accident. God knows they happened often enough. They clearly had no idea about decomposition though, otherwise they’d have known the wetsuit would slow the whole process down and reduce the chances of the sea hiding the evidence of their crime.
The wetsuit had been a mistake.
20
A search of our files had come up with four young men in our victim’s age group who had been reported missing from the Otago area within the last two months. Two of those had gang affiliations and were part of an active investigation into a large drug ring. They were peddling the blight that was methamphetamine, AKA ice, P or crystal meth. Nothing fucked up lives quite like it. A glance at their photos made me discount both of them as our victim. Both were Māori and heavily tattooed. Their tattooists must have provided photos of their work, as the men’s files contained full torso shots as well as the snapshots given by family and police photos from prior arrests. Some of the tattoos were quite beautiful – the professional ones, not the pin and ink badges of prisonhood. It wasn’t something I could do, permanently marking my body like that. I couldn’t even bring myself to get a tasteful little dolphin or butterfly hidden on a hip or butt cheek. And most certainly not one of those god-awful tramp stamps some young women liked to show off, poking out between a crop top and hipster jeans, and accompanied by a whale-tail G-string. Maggie had a small, stylised flower on her right shoulder blade, and had called me a wuss when I declined to get something at the same time. It suited her. Somehow it would just look silly on me. Even the temporary ones looked dorky on me.