Everyone Lies

by D. , Garrett, A.

  Forensic Pathologist Dr David Cooper, already in theatre blues, met them at the door of the mortuary, trim and bearded, standing five foot four in his three-inch Cuban heels.

  ‘I should’ve known it was you when Kate told me you’d worked out the penicillin connection from the stats.’ Dr Cooper had lived the past fifteen years in the more refined air of Knutsford, twenty miles south of Manchester, but his vowels still carried the smoky tones of the city.

  Fennimore grinned and offered his hand. ‘Kate’s tame pathologist.’

  Dr Cooper squinted up at him. ‘Wild and free, mate – always will be.’

  Kate Simms looked from Fennimore to Cooper. ‘You two know each other?’

  ‘We worked on a miscarriage of justice case, two years back,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Still going all Rainman about the numbers, Fenn?’

  ‘Still wearing the lifts, Coop?’

  ‘I hope this isn’t going to turn nasty,’ Kate said, but lazily, like she might enjoy a scrap between two geeks.

  Cooper angled his foot and gazed appreciatively at his boot. ‘These beauties’ve saved my deltoids from untold agonies. Adjustable tables are fine and good, but if it wasn’t for these heels, I’d be walking around looking like the Honey Monster’s short-arsed uncle.’

  Kate stifled a laugh, which Fennimore guessed was what Cooper had been aiming for all along. ‘DCI Simms said you have a body we should see?’

  ‘Get yourselves booted and suited. I’ll walk you through my findings.’

  He plucked a pair of elasticated booties from the shelves to the left of the post-mortem room and slipped them over his heels while they struggled into gowns, caps and booties of their own.

  ‘What makes you think this is linked to Kate’s deaths?’ Fennimore asked.

  ‘The victim’s urine smelled of penicillin,’ Cooper said. ‘CSIs found a cling film wrap near her body. Preliminary analysis of the contents suggested the same composition as StayC’s drugs stash – two key components being diamorphine and, yup, you guessed it, penicillin.’

  ‘So it is another anaphylaxis victim?’ Simms threw Fennimore an apologetic glance. ‘You said it was murder.’

  Cooper smiled. ‘You missed the PM, but I thought you’d want to take a look anyhow.’ He pushed through the door and held it, releasing the unmistakable whiff of sanitized decay.

  The body on the table was bleached white by the surgical lamps. There were bands of paler, shiny flesh on her fingers and toes. Reddish bruising showed on her ribs and abdomen. The T-incision – which Cooper preferred to the Y-incision popularized by TV pathologists – had been stitched closed with thick green thread, strong enough to bind the seams of a canvas duffle bag. Fennimore knew that the internal organs were packed in leak-proof bags under the stitching.

  The face was almost gone.

  Simms stepped around him to get a full view of the body. ‘My God,’ she whispered.

  Impossible to guess what this woman looked like in life; her nose was mashed flat, bent to one side, her jaw, her cheekbones, the right orbit, all crushed. Whoever had done this had beaten her flesh to the consistency of ground meat.

  For half a minute, they stood there like mourners around a coffin, breathing the cool air of the mortuary. The ventilation system’s downdraught dragged most of the smells away, but no ventilation system could ever completely eradicate the perfume of disinfectant and slowly putrefying flesh.

  Cooper was first to break the silence. ‘Fingerprints came back negative – she’s not on the system and there’s no missing person report. Early- to mid-twenties, dumped in an alley at the back of a city-centre hotel, sometime Thursday night or early Friday morning. She was naked. The only item still on the body was a tongue stud – her mouth was so full of blood the killer must have missed it when he took the rest. As you can see, someone gave her a thorough going-over.’

  Simms pulled her gaze from the woman’s ruined face. ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t an overdose,’ Cooper said. ‘Among other injuries, she had a ruptured spleen, fragments of the orbital socket embedded in the brain, and her liver, kidneys and lungs had all haemorrhaged.’ He leaned back against the bench that ran along one wall; behind him, a whiteboard. ‘But my report will say she drowned.’ Simms crinkled her brow in question and he said, ‘In her own blood. It was in her stomach, trachea and lungs. I found clots of the stuff in her larynx.’

  ‘Pure rage,’ Simms breathed.

  Fennimore doubted that rage could ever be pure. But he had seen enough of death to recognize the attack on this young woman as distilled, uncontrolled hatred – whether that hatred was for this one woman, or all of womankind, time would tell.

  Cooper strode to the door, his boot heels clumping on the tiles despite the muffling effect of his booties. He bumped the door open with his backside and roared, ‘ALI!’

  A few moments later, a middle-aged woman appeared, still fastening the back of her gown. ‘Will you stop bloody doing that?’ she said.

  Cooper pointed left and right. ‘DCI Simms, Professor Fennimore.’ He turned to the mortuary technician. ‘Ali.’

  She scowled, ignoring their guests. ‘Near gave me a heart attack.’

  ‘Can you give me a hand with this?’ Cooper said, returning to the far side of the table.

  ‘I’m only in the next room. I mean would it be too bloody much to just bloody knock?’ She continued muttering as they turned the body face down.

  The buttocks were criss-crossed with fine wheals, white in the centre, with reddish lines either side, like a railway track. Where the tracks crossed, there were pinpricks of blood.

  Fennimore winced.

  ‘A riding crop,’ Cooper said. ‘Or something similar, but I’d go with riding crop. It’s the instrument of choice in S&M interplay.’ He shot a look across the table at Kate Simms. ‘So I’m told.’

  Kate fixed him with a stony stare. ‘I understand the bruising, but what caused the white lines?’

  ‘The blood gets forced to the sides by the impact of the rod – or whatever – so bruising occurs either side of the line of contact. The cross-hatching is particularly painful. The stripes are precise. The darker lines indicate slightly older bruising.’ He followed the line of one of the darker tracks with his pinkie finger.

  ‘How much older?’ Something about those marks niggled Fennimore.

  ‘Maybe an hour or two. She was also raped, choked with a wide strap and resuscitated several times,’ Cooper said. ‘Analysis indicates that the morphine was administered quite late on – whoever did this wanted her to feel every blow. Oh, and speaking of blow …’ He lifted the body’s right arm, turning it so that they could see a puncture mark on the inside crease of the elbow. ‘I found only one site of injection – and I was very thorough – nothing in the armpits or groin, in the finger knuckles, ankles or between the toes. I’d be willing to bet that hair analysis will confirm this young lady was not a regular user.’

  ‘A prostitute without a drug habit. I suppose it’s possible,’ Fennimore said, doubtfully.

  Cooper set the arm down with surprising gentleness. ‘What makes you think she’s a prostitute?’

  ‘Small holes in both nipples, probably from rings or studs,’ Fennimore explained. ‘Slight chafe marks or indents on the third and fourth toes, indicating toe rings. And of the thirteen penicillin victims, all the women except StayC funded their habits with sex work – statistically, it’s likely she did, too.’

  ‘Except this one didn’t have a habit – at least not a drug habit,’ Cooper said. He bent closer to the corpse. ‘Here’s another interesting thing.’ He circled a small patch of skin an inch below the victim’s left shoulder blade, a faint red mark, slightly curved.

  ‘Bruising?’ Simms said. ‘A fingernail, maybe?’

  Cooper picked up a small black box from the bench behind him. He pressed a button and it flickered for a second, then flooded the area immediately in front of i
t with bright light. ‘Ali, could you get the overheads?’

  The technician moved to the light switches and, a second later, the room was in darkness, except for the violet-tinged light from the box.

  Cooper played the light over the mark and the faint red blemish became a jagged circular outline in purple, as though the skin had been imprinted with dye. ‘Forensic light sources – you’ve got to love ’em,’ Cooper said, grinning like a schoolboy with a new Xbox. The saliva on his teeth luminesced yellowish-green.

  ‘The edges look crimped,’ Simms said.

  ‘A beer bottle top?’ Fennimore suggested.

  ‘Precisely. Funny thing is, the CSIs didn’t find anything like it at the scene.’ Cooper shone the light on the purple coronet of bruising again. ‘There was nothing under the body or within thirty feet of it that could have left that mark.’

  ‘So she was killed somewhere else,’ Fennimore said.

  ‘The investigating officer disagrees,’ Cooper said. ‘He thinks she’s just another druggie prostitute who went for a twenty-quid jump behind the wheelie bins with the wrong punter.’

  ‘One injection site, and we’re supposed to think she’s a hard-core addict?’

  ‘I didn’t say I believed it. If she was a prostitute, she was high class, so she wouldn’t need to sell it cheap in a filthy back alley. She was tortured and this is supposed to’ve happened behind a hotel on a Thursday night? Do me a favour – you’d’ve heard the screams from Piccadilly to Deansgate. Added to that, there was no blood spatter – in fact, there was hardly any blood at the scene. The hotel was the dump site.’

  Simms stared hard at the pathologist. ‘The SIO does know all this?’

  ‘I told him what I’ve just told you, and he had the additional benefit of being at the post-mortem.’ Cooper watched Simms, testing her reaction. ‘But his head was jammed so far up his arse he didn’t seem to hear a word I said.’

  ‘You’re pissed off,’ Simms said, folding her arms. ‘I can see why you would be, but I don’t know what you expect me to do. All we’ve got so far is a tenuous link to my penicillin deaths.’

  Fennimore looked again at the body. There was something else – something he’d missed, something about the injuries. He glanced at the whiteboard on the wall behind the bench, his fingers itching to pick up a pen and start doodling.

  ‘D’you mind?’ he said.

  Cooper shrugged. ‘Go for it.’ He nodded to the tech and the spotlights flickered on.

  Fennimore took a red marker pen from the trough at the base of the board and sketched a body outline at the centre. He marked it ‘VICTIM’, in block capitals. From that, he drew a main branch and labelled it ‘KNOWNS’.

  ‘You’re not about to do a Donald Rumsfeld, are you, mate?’

  Fennimore gave Cooper a dusty look. ‘We know that she was early- to mid-twenties, natural blonde. Height?’

  ‘Five seven,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Last meal?’

  ‘She’d had a surf ’n’ turf meal four hours before she died,’ Cooper told him.

  Fennimore added that to the diagram. ‘Possibly a sex worker.’ He added sub-branches to the diagram as he spoke. ‘COD – drowned in her own blood.’

  A ripple of emotion passed across Simms’s face – revulsion, or something more complex – then she seemed to brace up. ‘She was raped, flogged and beaten.’

  ‘Ligature marks on the wrists and ankles,’ Cooper added, nodding, now, seeing the point of the exercise. ‘And she was healthy – no signs of addiction.’

  ‘Okay.’ Fennimore capped the pen and replaced it with green. ‘I’m calling that an anomaly.’ He drew a new main branch on the left of the diagram, and labelled it.

  As he wrote, Simms said, ‘Addict or not, she had been injected with the same drug mix that killed our penicillin vics.’

  He noted that and added a circle to the top of the board. Inside it, he wrote ‘PENICILLIN DEATHS’ and connected it to the body outline with a wavy line. It floated like a thought balloon over the rest and he stared at it, until Simms said, ‘Earth to Fennimore.’

  ‘I was just thinking, this case is rife with anomalies, isn’t it? Her good health and lack of addiction suggest she would have people who cared about her, but there’s no MisPer report, and then there’s the location. All due respect to the investigating officer, it doesn’t fit a stranger murder, does it?’

  ‘Girls do get dragged off the street,’ Cooper said, playing devil’s advocate.

  ‘Yes, but an opportunistic attack is what it says,’ Fennimore countered. ‘It’s unplanned, disorganized. You would expect the assailant to attack, then flee. There were four hours between her last meal and the moment this girl died. Like you said, her killer took his time: he tortured her; raped her; he moved the body; he removed things from the body. All of that takes planning, organization.’

  He swiftly sketched a new sub-branch and labelled it ‘ORGANIZED ELEMENTS’. ‘The flogging would have to’ve taken place elsewhere. It would involve physical restraint, which is controlled, organized. He cleaned up afterwards – no blood, no spatter, no jewellery.’

  ‘Except for the tongue stud,’ Cooper said.

  ‘But he missed that because he’d smashed her face to a pulp,’ Kate added. ‘That’s not controlled, Nick.’

  ‘Another anomaly,’ he agreed.

  Cooper raised a finger. ‘Should have said – the nipple studs were unscrewed or unclipped. Deaths like this, they’re usually torn out.’

  ‘He breaks her jaw and crushes her orbital socket into her brain, but he carefully unscrews her nipple studs.’ Fennimore added it to ‘ORGANIZED ELEMENTS’, and immediately an alternative came to him: ‘Unless she only wore them for work, and this was a nice quiet meal with a friend … Any more new and interesting gems you’d like to contribute, Coop?’

  ‘Oh, I’m a superhighway of info, Nick, mate. Ali …’ He picked up the box again and the mortuary technician lifted her chin in acknowledgement. But she kept her eyes on the diagram, watching Fennimore add new lines, new key words, as she moved to the light console.

  ‘If we’re looking at anomalies … ’ Cooper nodded to Ali and the room went dark again. He directed the eerie glow of the lamp over the victim’s shoulders.

  Fennimore moved closer. In the penetrating light of the UV source, he saw other faint areas of bruising. ‘Bites?’ he said.

  Simms frowned. ‘That’s hardly unusual in a sex attack.’

  ‘No, but these don’t look right to me – they’re faint. Almost tentative.’ Cooper tracked down the body, and purple bruising, invisible in normal wavelengths, appeared and faded, appeared and faded, like objects in a car’s headlamps. He stopped at the striations on the victim’s buttocks, and the cuts of the riding crop showed in cruel detail. ‘And tentative doesn’t seem to fit with this guy, does it?’ he said.

  ‘Are you thinking there were two assailants?’ Fennimore said. ‘One more confident – and more sadistic – than the other?’

  ‘Don’t ask me about psychology,’ Cooper said. ‘I’m an evidence man. You asked for anomalies, I’m giving you an anomaly.’

  ‘I’ve thought of something else,’ Simms said. ‘None of the penicillin victims died violently, but this—’ She looked at the body on the table as if she was seeing it for the first time. ‘This is ultra-violent.’

  Fennimore followed her line of sight; the hairs at the base of his scalp prickled and again he experienced that niggling sensation that he’d missed something. Suddenly, he had it. The waffle effect of the whipping – he’d seen it before. He fished out his mobile phone and speed dialled the RGU faculty office manager. She gave her name and title in slow, precise Aberdonian.

  ‘Joan. Can you do me a favour?’

  ‘Would that be another one?’ she said. ‘Because you do know I’m already typing up the report you left with me when you swanned off on your little field trip?’

  ‘Joan, you know I couldn’t function without your organizational bri
lliance.’

  She sniffed, always suspicious of a compliment.

  ‘DCI Simms sent me a bundle of coroners’ reports—’

  ‘Is that the lassie from Manchester police? Such nice manners.’

  He’d wondered how Kate had got his mobile phone number – and the details of his lecture at Manchester Met – now he knew.

  ‘I’m with her now,’ he said. Kate raised her eyebrows and he added, ‘She sends her regards. Those reports,’ he went on, before Joan could engage him in a swapping of pleasantries. ‘They’re in my office. You couldn’t just …’

  She complained, but that was Joan – never truly happy unless she had something to complain about. Within minutes, she was in his office and had dragged the relevant box from under his desk.

  ‘You’re looking for Rika – that’s R-I-K-A – no surname.’

  ‘I have it,’ she said.

  ‘Excellent. Can you look at the pathologist’s report – about halfway down the second page. I think it’s para five.’ He could visualize the layout and paragraphing of the report almost as clearly as if it was in front of him.

  ‘You know I don’t like looking at these things,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right, Joan, there are no photographs. Only a description.’

  ‘As if that makes it any better,’ she grumbled. ‘Here it is—’

  ‘Wait a minute – I’m putting you on speaker.’

  ‘“There are recent whip marks on both buttocks,”’ she read, in her high flutey voice. ‘“Thin white ‘rail-track’ wheals, with purple bruising either side. Bruising shows characteristic waffle effect, probably caused by subsequent application of—”’ She broke off. ‘For heaven’s sake.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Joan,’ Fennimore said, ‘but it’s important.’

  She drew breath and began again mid-sentence: ‘“… probably caused by subsequent application of riding crop at right angles to the first wounds. Older bruises are present under the rest.”’

  They all looked at each other.

  ‘Well, thank you so very much for spoiling my morning,’ Joan said. When nobody sympathized or apologized, she said, ‘Is that it? Because I do have a mountain of work waiting to be dealt with.’