by Will North
“Haven’t a clue, doc; that’s for your detective friends to discover.”
IN THE WHITE-TILED autopsy room of the ground floor mortuary at the back of the Royal Cornwall Hospital, Rafe Barnes confirmed that the seal on the body bag returned from Radiology had not been tampered with. The bag and its contents lay on a stainless-steel weighing trolley and Duncan nodded to mortuary manager Scotty Thomas to open it and take the victim’s measure.
“Big boy, this one; almost a hundred kilos,” Thomas said after removing the bag.
“What’s that in real numbers?” Duncan said as she adjusted her light green surgical gown.
Thomas laughed. “Two hundred twenty pounds.”
“Jesus, that’s twice me.”
“But not nearly as lovely…”
“As a muck-covered cadaver? Thank you.”
“Let me get record photos before you move him,” Barnes interrupted. He’d been standing beside the trolley. Terry Bates had just arrived and now stood beside him. Like Duncan, they were all wearing hospital coveralls, blue paper booties, and matching head bonnets. They were in the sterile zone.
“Right, he’s all yours doc,” Rafe said when he finished.
“Not unless you help Scotty shift that gorilla over here. And gloves please.”
They transferred the body to one of the three old but still functional waist-high white porcelain autopsy tables in the big, brightly lit room. Each was supported by a single porcelain pedestal thick as a tree trunk. The table’s basin was shoulder broad at one end and ankle narrow at the other. Moving carefully and studying each piece, she cut off the victim’s clothes and passed them to Barnes to bag, mark, and seal individually. They would be examined later, after they had dried. They’d kept the body cold to slow rigor, but now it was advancing and Duncan moved quickly. Thomas stood opposite the pathologist at the rimmed table, gloved hands clasped behind his back. Despite the grime, they could see that the victim’s chest and arms were heavily tattooed.
“Let’s get the preliminaries done before we clean him up,” Duncan said. “To get this chap’s prints I’ll need tissue building solution; his fingers are too puckered from being in water. Scotty?”
“On it.”
Thomas brought the kit and syringe. Duncan filled the fingertips, waited, and then inked and printed each one. Next, using cotton-tipped swabs, she wiped out what was left of the inside of the nasal cavity and throat for DNA. Finally, she clipped off the fingernails so the lab could look for scrapings that might indicate whether the victim had been involved in a struggle. One by one she passed the samples to Roger Morris, SOCO’s exhibits manager.
Morris, small-boned, wiry, and nearly bald, sat apart at a stainless-steel table arranging vials and slides. He seldom looked up, as if he were trying to hide his face from the others. It was pocked like a minefield from adolescent acne, but this disfigurement was no longer something the others noticed; he was held in high esteem and affection for the simple reason that he was as meticulous as a scientist. The SOCO team’s task was limited but crucial: collect and protect all evidence. Though a part of the police, their first loyalty was to the county coroner and, ultimately, the Crown Prosecution Service: tainted evidence, weakened case. Morris bagged and marked the samples, saying nothing.
Using magnifying goggles, Duncan peered closely at the victim’s chest and spoke into the digital recorder clipped to her sterile gown: “There is no evidence of gunshot residue at the entry wound. There are a few fibers to be analyzed but I suspect they will be consistent with the victim’s garment. There is no evidence of dried blood either, but all that may be due to the watery environment from which the victim was removed. Clothing analysis may reveal more. The abrasion collar is partly inverted, though there are out-turning fringes….”
“Abrasion collar?” Bates asked.
Duncan looked up and smiled. “I forgot that you’re new at this. Come here and I’ll explain.”
Bates hesitated.
“Come on now, he won’t bite…”
The detective took a position next to Thomas as the two of them peered at the wound. Bates avoided looking at the head.
“So when a bullet penetrates the skin it drags the skin immediately around it inward. That’s the inverted abrasion collar. At the same time, though, any projectile is preceded by a shock wave and sometimes that shock wave will generate a reverse force. It’s like when you drop a rock into water: there is a reverse splash upward, right? It’s the same here; if you look closely there’s a sort of flange, like a crown. This entry wound is slightly teardrop-shaped, suggesting the shot wasn’t straight on.” She paused and sighed. “Still, this tells us nothing about what position the victim was in when he was shot.”
“Why would that matter?”
“Because your job, and Rafe’s, is to try to understand the situation in which this event occurred. Was it someone facing him? Was there a struggle? Was he on the ground? Backing away? Knowing the position can help.”
Terry nodded once and returned to her high stool by the wall. She wished her boss, Morgan, were here in her stead, but she was determined to keep her head…and stomach. Rafe joined her. In essence, it was SOCO’s body and the pathologist effectively worked for him. The autopsy was SOCO’s responsibility to observe and verify in the end.
Duncan returned to her task and her recorder, scrutinizing now the head: “I observe multiple scars on the victim’s shaved skull: older, healed scars with some evidence of stitching, and fresh puncture wounds, presumably from the talons of the hawk reportedly found perched on the head. Here too there is virtually no evidence of bleeding. I’m going to say that the victim was dead well before the hawk found him—a mercy because eyes, nose, and most of the soft tissue of the face are torn away.”
Finally, she grabbed a pull-down spray faucet that hung above the table and began gently to rinse away the bog muck, in the process looking for any abrasions or other evidence of a fight. Carefully, she removed the blowfly eggs from the face and continued to speak into her recorder.
“As noted at the scene, the blowfly evidence demonstrates that the victim could not have been in the mire more than twenty-four hours. There are no larvae yet.”
Then, with Thomas’s help she tipped the corpse and washed the back as well. The peaty brown slurry swirled into the drain at the foot of the dissecting table.
“The exit wound is larger than the entry wound; this would have been a fairly high caliber weapon. I’ll be able to have a better sense of the trajectory of the bullet when I open him up.” She tipped the body on its back again.
Middle-aged, bearded, and burly, Scotty Thomas bent over the rinsed chest.
“Back off, Bear; I don’t want any of your facial hair contaminating this specimen.”
Thomas was trying to make sense of the tattoos. On the cleaned body, they were even more vivid. They covered both the chest and arms and were bizarrely menacing: grinning skeleton’s heads, snarling faces as if in a crowd. Many of the images were overlain by a lattice of diamond-shaped black lines.
Barnes took more record photos. “The man was a walking advert,” he said.
“Yes, but for what?”
“Not a clue, doc.”
“I am not a connoisseur of this particular art form, but I do see a fair number of tattoos in this line of work. Nothing like this, though. Nothing.”
She stared at the body for a few moments, sighed, and picked up a scalpel. “Right then,” she said, as if to herself, “let’s have a look inside…”
She made the customary Y-shaped incision descending from each shoulder, meeting at the sternum, and continuing all the way to the pubic bone. Duncan considered the entry wound again. Her first task was to learn the bullet’s angle of entry and track.
“I proceed with a layered dissection of the left side of the chest,” she said to the recorder. Then, slicing shallowly, she carefully reflected the skin back to reveal the chest muscle beneath. She did the same for the chest muscle itself
, reflecting it, too, and leaving the rib cage exposed.
Duncan saw the autopsy of a shooting victim as a sort of treasure hunt; her objective was to reveal, layer by layer, the route of the bullet. Only by doing so could she speculate as to the direction and angle of the shot.
On examining the rib cage she confirmed what the scan had suggested: that the bullet had passed between the ribs and directly through the heart, nicking one rib before exiting. It was the cleanest, most instantaneously lethal shot she’d ever encountered. This explained why there was so little bleeding at the site of the entry wound; the heart had stopped immediately, shutting down the entire circulatory system.
“There is some gunshot residue in the wound tract itself,” she dictated.
Next, using scalpel and shears, she separated the top of the rib cage and lifted it free, revealing the chest cavity. Scotty Thomas set the arced structure aside.
“The chest cavity is only slightly filled; the blood is viscous,” she said into the recorder. Using a long-handled stainless-steel ladle, as if serving up a thick soup, she lifted out the blood, measured it, and set it aside. Roger Morris took samples for the lab.
When the cavity was finally cleared, she examined the organs in situ—lungs, major vessels, pericardial sac. The sac would be expected to be engorged, the heart normally having continued to pump for some moments after being penetrated by a bullet, but it was not. Cutting into the sac, she removed what little blood it held and exposed the heart. Then, returning the ribs, chest muscle, and skin to their rightful positions, she inserted a long, stainless steel probe into the entry wound and followed the damage track directly into the heart and out through the back.
“The bullet penetrated the left ventricle before exiting. I wish we had the bullet but I’m still thinking relatively large caliber. And the track and wound shape suggest an upward shot.”
The rest of the procedure was routine, but with surprises:
“There are tears in both the liver and spleen,” Duncan said to Barnes and Bates. “Like the fractures, that would be consistent with some kind of accident or brute trauma. The fact that there is no evidence of bleeding in the region of the fractures and no blood associated with these organ tears has me even more convinced that the event—whatever it was—was post-mortem. Sorry, that’s the best I can do.”
“Maybe he fell from the summit of Showery Tor after he was shot?” Barnes asked.
“Good thought, Rafe,” Terry said, “except that anything thrown, dropped, or fallen from that tor would end up on the slope below. It wouldn’t reach the mire; he’d have needed to be moved.”
“Which tells me I need to get my team back on that tor slope to search for evidence of transport.”
It was late afternoon by the time Duncan passed the body back to Thomas to be repacked and re-sewn and joined Barnes and Bates in the tiny staff room. She sank into one of the mismatched upholstered chairs, which looked as if they’d been salvaged from someone’s attic, and Barnes passed her a cup of coffee.
“I should very much prefer a gin and tonic, Rafe, or a glass of wine. White please; I’ve had enough of red for one day.”
Barnes bowed: “You shall have anything you wish, madam, anything at all…so long as it is very bad coffee.”
“You must be famished, Jen,” Terry Bates said. “You’ve had no lunch. And no break.” She and Rafe had shared a couple of very stale scones.
“I have a Cadbury fruit and nut bar; that will hold me. Morris is taking the tissue, prints, and blood samples up to the lab. We should have toxicology results for you in a few days but given the obvious cause of death I don’t imagine that will get especially high priority. On the other hand, I gather the woman who found the victim is related to your DCI, so maybe he can prevail upon the lab…”
“Speaking of whom, I’ve had a text from the boss; he’s got an incident room set up at the Bodmin Hub,” Terry said. “Major Crime Investigative Team meeting tomorrow at nine. Will you be heading north again for home, Jennifer?”
“And miss our ‘Mister’ in action? Not a chance.”
Day Three
Six
ARTHUR PENWARREN WATCHED the light on the fields strengthen. It was barely half seven Wednesday morning. His stand-up desk faced the tall windows in his office, the only DCI desk in the building that wasn’t in the “power position” facing its office door. He relished the view; it calmed him. And in any event, he could see whoever entered his office in the window reflection. He stood because he wanted to, but also because he had to. The brass in Exeter did not know the extent to which his increasingly arthritic spine had begun to limit him, and he had no intention of letting on. He preferred that they think him eccentric with his high desk. A lanky and imposing figure just shy of six and a half feet tall, his posture was always erect, as if perpetually called to attention. This was thanks largely to the aid of an elastic back brace hidden beneath his customary starched white shirt, tie, and plainclothes Harris Tweed jacket. His sharp-boned, angular physique, and his long, non-regulation, swept back, slivering hair gave him the look of an aristocratic landowner, not a cop. His own Major Crime Investigative Team staff called him “Mister” amongst themselves, out of loyalty and respect, but even they did not know the extent of his disability. He’d always been the sort of leader who preferred to guide rather than command. He empowered his team and urged them to stretch themselves. And, of course, this strategy limited the number of times he needed to be called out to crawl around examining a murder scene.
Penwarren was a mystery to his boss up in Exeter, Detective Chief Superintendent Malcolm Crawley. This confusion was in large part because, unlike Crawley, Penwarren was almost pathologically averse to the limelight. Puffed up like a balloon himself, this reticence was beyond Crawley’s ken but suited him fine: Penwarren and his team solved murders and Crawley was happy to lead the press briefings and take the credit with Penwarren in the background. It galled Crawley that questions were invariably directed to Penwarren, but he hurried to answer them himself anyway, sometimes with disastrous results, as he seldom knew or remembered the facts.
Crawley had spent no small amount of his tenure working to ensure that Penwarren would never advance beyond detective chief inspector and be a rival. Penwarren knew this and couldn’t have cared less; he lived to solve cases in his native Cornwall. He didn’t need the higher pay, and a fancy office at the Exeter headquarters up in Devon was his idea of a living death. It amused him that investigations portrayed in the ever-popular detective dramas on the telly invariably were headed by a detective chief superintendent, if not a commander, when in fact the only time the big brass ever left headquarters during the day was to go to lunch.
Penwarren fiddled with paperwork he’d been ignoring but his mind was elsewhere. He’d been troubled ever since returning from Bodmin Moor the day before. It wasn’t anything to do with the investigation or his people; it was to do with his former brother-in-law. They’d stayed on friendly terms long after Rebecca had divorced him, but yesterday Randall Cuthbertson had been distant, almost hostile, as if the discovery of the body on his land were a personal insult and the police investigation some sort of territorial violation. Perhaps, Penwarren thought, it was because he himself hadn’t come running when Cuthbertson’s daughter reported the corpse, or that he hadn’t personally led the recovery of the body and initial field investigation until he was summoned. There was always a delicate balance between the personal and the procedural in such cases. He’d tried to remain at a discrete distance. Now, more out of curiosity than guilt, he’d resolved to pay Cuthbertson a visit after the MCIT meeting.
WHEN PENWARREN WALKED into the incident room on the top floor of the Bodmin Police Hub at nine it was already humming—uniformed and civilian staff setting up computers, cables snaking across the floor. Novak was posting photos of the body on one of the evidence boards. It all seemed premature—“sound and fury signifying nothing”—because they had nothing yet to go on.
He
had barely had time to take a seat at the pale birch conference table, however, when a husky voice boomed through the room: “You weren’t going to start without us, were you, boss?” Heads swiveled in the direction of the door and everyone stood—everyone but Penwarren. He’d seen her first and was shaking his head in disbelief.
“Morgan!” Terry exclaimed.
Morgan Davies strode in and settled her substantial self in a chair opposite Penwarren.
“You’re supposed to be on leave,” he said.
“I wish to take leave of my leave, please,” she countered. “And so does he,” she added, jerking her spiked blond head toward the door.
Moving gingerly, smiling sheepishly like a boy caught out doing something naughty, Calum West also stepped into the room. It was his first post-operative venture and Penwarren could see it wasn’t easy.
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest…?” Penwarren mumbled to himself.
“Henry II, if memory serves,” West said, taking a seat beside Davies, “but is the reference to the murder of Thomas a Becket to do with Detective Inspector Davies or myself…Sir?”
Penwarren ignored this. “Why are you both here?”
“We heard there was a body!” Morgan answered, grinning and bouncing in her chair like a child presented with a gift.
He looked around the room for the informant but got only shrugs. He should have known the two would be told.
He nodded to Terry to begin and she summarized what they knew. Jennifer described the post-mortem results adding, “This was a particularly accomplished or very lucky shot.”
“No face, eh? Well, that’s a bother,” Morgan said. “Reconstructive facial modeling?”
“Not in the budget.”
“Exhibits, Rafe?” West asked his deputy.
“Just photographs right now, Calum, and clothing; Roger Morris is managing the autopsy samples. They’re at the lab. Results as soon as.”
“Radiology got dental x-rays,” Jennifer Duncan reported. “Rafe’s sent them on to Oleg,” referring to Oleg Kaminsky, the forensic odontologist the force had under contract. “If this poor chap had dental work with the National Health Service, Oleg will find it.”