by P. D. James
The phone rang. It was Kate. She was going back to her flat to change. AD had been called to the Yard. They would both see Daniel at the mortuary.
33
The local authority mortuary had recently been modernized but the exterior remained unaltered. It was a single-storey building of grey London brick approached from a short cul-de-sac, the forecourt bounded by an eight-foot wall. Neither noticeboard nor street number proclaimed its function; those who had business there knew how to find it. It presented to the curious an impression of some dull and not particularly flourishing enterprise where goods were delivered in plain vans and unpacked with discretion. To the right of the door was a garage, large enough to accommodate two undertaker’s vans, from which double doors led to a small reception area with a waiting room to the left. Here Dalgliesh, arriving a minute before 6.30, found Kate and Daniel already waiting. An attempt had been made to make the waiting-room welcoming with a low round table, four comfortable chairs, and a large TV set which Dalgliesh had never found turned off. Perhaps its purpose was less entertainment than therapy; the lab technicians in their unpredictable spells of leisure needed to exchange, however momentarily, the silent corruption of death for the bright ephemeral images of the living world.
He saw that Kate had exchanged her usual tweed jacket and trousers for denim jeans and jacket, and that her thick plait of blonde hair had been tucked inside a peaked jockey cap. He knew why. He too was informally dressed. The half-sweet, half-citrus smell of the disinfectant became almost unnoticeable after the first half hour but lingered for days in the clothes, permeating his wardrobe with the smell of death. He had early learned to wear nothing that couldn’t be thrown into the washing machine, while he obsessively showered, lifting his face under the power-jet as if the sting of the water could physically wash away more than the smell and the sights of the last two hours. He was due to meet the Commissioner at the Minister’s room in the House of Commons at eight o’clock. Somehow he must find time to get back to his Queenhithe flat to shower before then.
He remembered vividly – how could he not? – the second post-mortem he had attended as a young detective constable. The murder victim had been a twenty-two-year-old prostitute and there had, he recalled, been difficulty over the formal identification of the body since the police had been unable to trace either relatives or close friends. The white undernourished body stretched out on the tray, with the weals of the lash purple as stigmata, had seemed in its pale frigidity the ultimate mute witness to male inhumanity. Looking round at the crowded PΜ room, the phalanx of officialdom, he had reflected that Theresa Burns was receiving in death a great deal more attention from the agents of the state than she had received in life. The pathologist then had been Doc McGregor, one of the old school of egregious individualists, a rigid Presbyterian who had insisted on conducting all his post-mortems in the spiritual, if not the physical, odour of sanctity. Dalgliesh remembered his rebuke to a technician who had responded with a brief laugh to a colleague’s muttered witticism. ‘I’ll have no laughter in my mortuary. It’s no a frog I’m dissecting here.’
Doc McGregor would have no secular music while he worked and had a preference for the metrical psalms whose lugubrious tempo tended to slow down the speed of the work as well as depressing the spirits. But it had been one of McGregor’s post-mortems – that of a murdered child – accompanied by Fauré’s Pie Jesu that had given Dalgliesh one of his best poems, and he supposed that for this he should be grateful. Wardle cared little what music was played while he worked, so long as it wasn’t pop, and today they were to listen to the familiar anodyne melodies of Classic FM.
There were two post-mortem rooms, one with four dissecting tables and a single room. It was this which Reginald Wardle preferred for murder cases, but the room was small and there was the inevitable crush as the experts in violent death jostled for space: the pathologist and his assistant, the two mortuary technicians, four police officers, the laboratory liaison officer, the photographer and assistant, the scene-of-crime officer and fingerprint men, and a trainee pathologist whom Dr Wardle introduced as Dr Manning and announced would take the notes. He had a dislike of using the overhead microphone. In their fawn cotton overalls the group looked, thought Dalgliesh, like a cluster of dilatory removal men. Only the plastic overshoes suggested that theirs might be a more sinister assignment. The technicians were wearing their head-straps but with the visors still up. Later when they received the organs into the bucket and weighed them the visors would be down, protection against AIDS and the more common risk of hepatitis B. Dr Wardle as usual wore only his pale green apron over slacks and shirtsleeves. Like most forensic pathologists he was cavalier about his own safety.
The body, parcelled and sealed in its plastic shroud, lay on the trolley in the outer room. At a word from Dalgliesh the technicians slashed the plastic and tore it aside. There was a small explosion of air like an expelling sigh, and the plastic crackled like a charge of electricity. The body lay exposed like the contents of some great Christmas cracker. The eyes were duller now; only the snake taped to the cheek, its head gagging the mouth, seemed to have life or vitality. Dalgliesh was visited by a strong desire to see it removed – only then could the body be restored to some dignity – and he wondered briefly why it was that he had been insistent it remain in place until the autopsy. It was all he could do to prevent himself from reaching down and tearing it away. Instead he made his formal identification establishing the chain of evidence.
‘This is the body I first saw at 9.48 on Friday the 15th of October at Innocent House, Innocent Walk, Wapping.’
Dalgliesh had a considerable respect for Marcus and Len, both as men and as mortuary technicians. There were some people, a number of them police officers, who found it difficult to believe that a man could voluntarily work in a mortuary unless to satisfy some eccentric if not sinister psychological compulsion, but Marcus and Len seemed blessedly free even from the crude graveyard humour which some professionals used as a defence against horror or distaste, and did their work with a matter-of-fact competence, quietness and dignity which he found impressive. He had seen, too, how much trouble they took to make a body presentable before the next of kin came to view. Many of the bodies they watched being clinically dismembered would be those of the old, diseased or dead by natural causes, small tragedies, perhaps, to a loved one, but hardly a cause for distress to a stranger. But how, he wondered, did they cope psychologically with the murdered young, the violated, the victims of accident or violence? In an age when every sorrow, even those natural to the human condition, could not apparently be endured without counselling who, if anyone, counselled Marcus and Len? But at least they would be free from the temptation to deify the popular, the rich and the famous. Here in the mortuary was the final equality. What mattered to Marcus and Len was not the number of eminent doctors who had clustered around the deathbed, nor the splendour of the planned obsequies, but the state of decay and whether the corpse would need to be accommodated in the obese refrigerator.
The tray holding the now naked body had been placed on the floor so that the photographer could more easily move around it. When he nodded his satisfaction with the first shots the two technicians gently turned the corpse over, taking care not to dislodge the snake. Finally, with the body face-upwards, the tray was lifted and placed on the supports at the foot of the dissecting table, the round hole over the drain. Doc Wardle made his usual general examination of the body, then turned his attention to the head. He stripped away the tape, gently removed the snake as if it were a biological specimen of extraordinary interest, and began his examination of the mouth, looking, thought Dalgliesh, like an over-enthusiastic dentist. He remembered what Kate Miskin had once confided to him when she had first started working for him and confidence came more easily to her; that it was this part of the autopsy, not the later systematic removal and weighing of all the main organs, that made her squeamish, as if the dead nerves were merely quiescent and could stil
l react as they had in life to the gloved, probing fingers. He was aware of Kate standing a little behind him, but did not glance at her. He could be sure that she wouldn’t faint, either now or later, but he guessed that, like him, she was feeling something more than a professional interest in the dismemberment of what had been a young and healthy man – and felt again a small ache of regret that police work demanded so much of gentleness and innocence.
Suddenly Doc Wardle gave a low grunt that was almost a growl, his distinctive noise when he found something of interest.
‘Take a look at this, Adam. On the roof of the mouth. A distinct scratch. Post-mortem by the look of it.’
At the scene it had been ‘Commander’ but now, king of his domain, at ease as always with his work, he had reverted to Dalgliesh’s Christian name.
Dalgliesh bent low. He said: ‘It looks as if something sharp-edged was forced in or out of the mouth after death. I’d say out by the look of the mark.’
‘Difficult to be 100 per cent sure, of course, but that’s what it looks like to me. The direction of the scratch is from the back of the palate almost to the top teeth.’ Doc Wardle stood aside so that Kate and Daniel could take their turn at peering into the mouth. He added: ‘Impossible to say exactly when it happened, of course, except that it was after death. Etienne may have put the thing – whatever it was – in his mouth but someone else took it out.’
Dalgliesh said: ‘And with some force, and possibly in a hurry. If it had happened before rigor mortis set in the removal would have been quicker and easier. How much strength would it take to force open the jaw after rigor was established?’
‘It’s not difficult, of course, and easier if the mouth were partly open and he could get his fingers in and use both hands. A child couldn’t do it, but then you aren’t looking for a child.’
Kate said: ‘If the snake-head was pushed in immediately the sharp object was removed and soon after death couldn’t we expect some visible blood stain on the fabric? How much seeping of blood would there have been after death?’
Doc Wardle said: ‘Immediately after death? Not a lot. But he wasn’t alive when that mark was made.’
They peered at the snake’s head together. Dalgliesh said: ‘This thing has been played about with at Innocent House for nearly five years. It’s easier to imagine a stain than to see it. There’s no obvious blood. The lab may give us something. If it was placed in the mouth as soon as the object was pulled out there should be some biological evidence.’
Daniel asked: ‘Any idea, Doc, of the kind of object?’
‘Well, there are no other marks on the soft tissues or the back of the teeth that I can see, which suggests that it was something that he could fairly easily fit into his mouth, though why the hell he would have wanted to beats me. Still, that’s your department.’
Daniel said: ‘If it was something he wanted to conceal, why not slip it into his trouser pocket? Hiding it in his mouth meant keeping silent. He could hardly speak normally even with a small object between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. But suppose he knew that he was going to die. Suppose he was trapped in that room with the gas pouring out, the key to the gas tap missing, a window he couldn’t open …’
Kate broke in: ‘But the object would be found on the body later even if he only put it in his pocket.’
‘Unless his murderer knew it was there and came back for it. Then hiding it in the mouth made sense, even if it was something the murderer didn’t know existed. Putting it in his mouth made sure that it would be found at the PM if not before.’
Kate said: ‘But he did know – the murderer I mean. He came back to look for it and I think he found it. He forced open the jaw to get it out, then used the snake to make it look like the work of the practical joker.’
She and Daniel were concentrated on each other. The room could have been empty except for those two. Daniel said: ‘But could he really expect that we wouldn’t find the scrape?’
‘Oh come on, Daniel. He didn’t know that he’d scratched the mouth. What he did know was that he had to break the rigor and that we wouldn’t miss that. So he used the snake. And if it hadn’t been for that scratch we would have fallen for it. We’re looking for a murderer who knew something about the timing of rigor and expected the body to be found relatively soon. If the body was to lie undisturbed for another day the snake wouldn’t have been necessary.’
They were, Dalgliesh knew, in danger of theorizing in advance of all the facts. The autopsy hadn’t yet been completed. There was still no confirmation of the cause of death but he felt reasonably sure, and so, he knew, did Doc Wardle, what the cause of death would prove to be.
Kate asked: ‘What kind of object? Something small, sharp-edged? A key? A bunch of keys? A small metal box?’
Dalgliesh said quietly, ‘Or the cassette of a small tape recorder?’
Dalgliesh left before the post-mortem was completed. Doc Wardle was explaining to his assistant that the blood samples for the lab must be taken from the femoral vein, not the heart, and why. Dalgliesh doubted whether there was anything further to learn from the autopsy, and if there was he would be told soon enough. There were papers he needed to look over before the meeting at eight o’clock in the House and time was tight. It would have been pointless to go first to the Yard before going to his flat and his driver, William, had collected his briefcase from his office and was waiting now in the forecourt, his amiable chubby face displaying carefully controlled anxiety.
The heavy rain of the afternoon had abated to a thin continuous drizzle and with the window half open he tasted the salt tang of the Thames. The traffic lights on the Embankment smudged the air with crimson and, waiting for them to change, a police horse, its flanks gleaming, stamped its delicate hoofs on the shining tarmac. Darkness had come striding over the city, transforming it into a phantasmagoria of light in which the streets and squares shivered into moving necklaces of white, red and green. He opened his briefcase and drew out his papers for a quick reading of the salient arguments. It was time to shift the gears of his mind to a more immediate – and perhaps in the end more important – preoccupation. Usually he did not find this difficult, but now the earlier images of the mortuary persisted.
Something small, something sharp, had been wrenched out of Etienne’s mouth after rigor had set in in the top part of the body. It was possible that object had been a cassette; the removal of the tape recorder certainly suggested that possibility. The inference was that Etienne had dictated the name of his murderer and the killer had later returned to remove the evidence. But his mind rejected this simple hypothesis. Etienne’s murderer had taken care that nothing should remain in the room which would enable him to leave a message. The floor and the mantelpiece had been cleaned, all the papers had been removed, Etienne’s diary with the gold pencil attached had been stolen the day before. The killer had thought even of that. Etienne hadn’t even been able to scrawl his or her name on the bare wooden floor. Why then should the murderer have been so stupid as to leave a tape recorder ready for his victim’s use?
There was, of course, another explanation. The tape recorder could have been there for a specific purpose, and if it had been then the case promised to be even more puzzling and more intriguing than it had at first appeared.
34
It was after 10.30 when Dalgliesh returned to the Wapping incident room and Robbins had been sent off duty. Kate and Daniel had bought sandwiches on their drive back from the mortuary and made do with them and coffee as the night wore on. They had already worked a twelve-hour day but it wasn’t over yet. Dalgliesh would want to assess progress and have a clear idea where they were going before they entered on the next stage of the inquiry.
He sat for ten minutes studying the papers Daniel had brought from Gerard Etienne’s study, then, closing the file without comment, looked at his watch then said: ‘Right. So what tentative conclusions have you reached from the facts as far as we know them?’
Daniel broke in
immediately as Kate had expected him to. That didn’t worry her. They were of equal rank but she had seniority in service and felt no need to emphasize it. There was an advantage in going first; it prevented other people from taking credit for your ideas and showed keenness. On the other hand, there was a certain wisdom in biding one’s time. Daniel was taking care over his spiel; probably, she thought, he had been mentally practising it since their return from the mortuary.
He said: ‘Natural death, suicide, accident or murder? The first two are out. We don’t need the laboratory reports to be sure that this was carbon-monoxide poisoning, the post-mortem told us that. Told us too that, otherwise, he died healthy. There is absolutely nothing to indicate suicide, so I don’t think we need waste time on that.
‘So we come to accident. If this is an accidental death, what are we expected to believe? That Etienne decided for some reason to work up in the archives office, left his jacket on the chair downstairs and his keys in his desk drawer. That he felt cold, lit the fire with matches which we’ve no evidence he had on him, then got so engrossed in his work that he didn’t realize that the fire had started to malfunction until too late. Apart from the obvious inconsistencies, if it happened that way, I suggest that he’d have been found slumped over the table, not lying half-naked on his back with his head towards the fire. At this stage I’m not taking account of the snake. I think we have to make a clear distinction between what happened at the time of death and what happened to the body afterwards. Obviously someone found him after rigor had set in to the top part of the body, but there’s no evidence that the person who stuffed the snake in his mouth took off his shirt or moved him from the table to where he was found.’