A Cut-Like Wound

by Anita Nair

  ‘No wonder the eunuchs I talked to denied knowing anything about the one with the earring. She wasn’t one of them.’

  ‘Well,’ Gowda said, taking a sip of water, ‘even if they recognized her, they wouldn’t admit to it. They are very loyal. Besides, you haven’t been to the house in Hennur, have you? You need to speak to them as well…’

  ‘So, where do we start looking for this criminal? It could be any man out there.’

  ‘No, you forget we have some idea of what the murderer looks like. We have a photograph even if it is hazy and you have seen her, even if from a distance… I am going to have to tell Stanley. He’ll be able to get a portrait drawn from what we have. We’ll have more than just a shadowy image of the murderer.’

  ‘And then?’ Santosh asked curiously.

  ‘And then, we’ll have to see,’ Gowda said, getting into the Bolero. Santosh followed, his mind buzzing.

  What if he had followed the eunuch’s companion? He would have apprehended the murderer before another murder had been committed.

  For a moment Santosh fell into a reverie: of having his photo in the newspapers as the man who had caught the murderer. He imagined the calls of congratulation. The adulation and ceremony. A promotion. More cases to solve. Of climbing up the ladder in giant leaps.

  Gowda turned his head. ‘Do you know the story of the egg seller who built castles in the air as she walked to the market? I’ll sell my eggs and buy a chicken. I’ll breed the chicken and sell them to buy a goat. Then a cow, then a house, then a husband. That’s who you remind me of now. Remember what happened to her?’

  Santosh felt broken eggs drip down his face. Look where you are going, the shards whispered, piercing his skin.

  They sized him up. Santosh felt their eyes run over him, pause at every hair follicle and linger at each mole. Their gaze stripped him of every shred of clothing and probed the darkest recesses of his mind. Then they looked at each other and burst into laughter.

  ‘So, Inspector sir, what can we do for you?’ one of them asked, moving close to him. Santosh recoiled. He looked at Gajendra helplessly. They were mocking him. They knew that he was uneasy in their presence and wanted him to know they knew. Their resentment frightened him.

  Gajendra opened a notebook and spoke sternly. ‘Quit teasing him. One of these days he’ll become a big shot in the police force and he’ll flay your arse mercilessly.’

  The eunuch giggled. ‘If only…’

  ‘Stop it, Ruku. We need to ask you a few questions. If you answer them quickly, we can go on with our lives and you with yours,’ said Gajendra.

  The eunuchs sat on a bench. ‘Go on, ask us.’ Sarita, the one sitting next to Ruku, batted her eyelashes.

  Santosh looked away. ‘Why can’t we call them over?’ he had demanded of Gajendra again as they drove to the mother house. Gowda had insisted Santosh go back in the afternoon before they headed to the mortuary.

  Gajendra had shuddered. ‘Are you mad? Bringing them into the station is inviting trouble. They’ll pull their clothes off, scream and shout and make such a commotion that you would think they were being gang-raped. And you can be sure some human rights people will arrive on the spot, and on their heels, the media! No way! We’ll go to them.’

  ‘Last night,’ Santosh said. ‘Someone came here…’

  ‘Someone?’ Sarita opened her eyes wide and peered into his face. ‘So many people come here.’

  ‘One of you,’ Santosh said helplessly. ‘Tall, hefty, dark and elderly.’

  He took a deep breath and said, ‘She was wearing a dark-blue sari with a yellow border.’

  ‘Akka!’ Sarita laughed. ‘Wait till she hears how you described her. Tall, hefty, dark and elderly. She will be livid.’

  ‘What were you doing trailing her?’ Ruku glared at him.

  ‘None of your business,’ Gajendra snapped.

  ‘What do you want to know about her?’ Ruku grimaced to show what she thought of them.

  ‘What’s her connection with Corporator Ravikumar?’ Santosh’s voice was silky.

  ‘She’s his housekeeper,’ Ruku replied.

  ‘That’s unusual,’ Gajendra said, frowning.

  ‘Some years ago, he was beaten to an inch of his life and left near a railway track. Akka found him and nursed him back to health. When the corporator’s mother died, he asked her to become their housekeeper,’ Ruku said.

  ‘Right,’ Santosh said. ‘There’s something else.’

  He held up a printout of the photograph from the exhibition.

  ‘Do you know this wo… er… person?’ he asked.

  They looked at the printout. ‘No,’ they said in unison. ‘We don’t know who this is! Or any of the others.’

  Ruku peered at it again. ‘The thing is, we don’t have to know every single hijra in town.’

  ‘And sometimes they come from other places too,’ Sarita added.

  Santosh’s stare hardened. ‘I suppose your Akka will know.’

  The eunuchs shrugged. ‘Why don’t you ask her?’

  Santosh stomped out, furious with them and with himself for not being able to prise out of them what he was certain they knew: the identity of the woman with the earring.

  They would have to bring in the elderly eunuch for questioning. There was no other way. He would leave it to Gowda to sort that out. ACP Stanley Sagayaraj seemed to be eating out of his hands anyway.

  ‘Do you want to come in?’ Gowda asked Santosh.

  They were at the mortuary. Santosh hadn’t forgotten his last visit here. Bile crawled up his mouth, but he swallowed it determinedly.

  ‘I’d like to, sir,’ he said.

  Stanley looked away and smiled. He had seen it before. Gowda and his acolytes, who would walk to the ends of the world if they thought it would please him. The boy didn’t look like he had the stomach to handle the sight of a body being cut open. He decided it would be prudent to stand behind Santosh, away from the trajectory of his vomit and in place to catch him if he were to faint.

  The smell hit Gowda’s nostrils even as he walked in. The smell of raw meat. After his first visit to the mortuary, Gowda had gone off meat for a while. He couldn’t walk into the butcher’s shop without wanting to throw up. Man or goat, we smell the same when slaughtered, he had thought. Mamtha had smiled when he said this and made sure that he never saw or smelt raw meat again. And slowly he began eating meat again. Now it didn’t bother him at all.

  ‘This is Dr N. Reddy,’ Stanley introduced the surgeon to Gowda. ‘I asked for him specifically. He’s the best,’ he said, patting the young doctor’s arm in an avuncular manner.

  Gowda nodded. The doctor looked abashed. Then he slipped on a pair of gloves. As he put on his mask, he paused. ‘Perhaps you may like to put one of these on,’ he suggested.

  Santosh reached for a mask with relief. Some of that stench, the mixing of ether and putrefying flesh, the damp from sluiced floors and the chill of death would be less intense with a mask covering his nose and mouth. He watched Gowda and Stanley pull on masks too.

  The body was placed on a stainless steel rectangular autopsy table.

  The doctor began his external examination. Gowda and Stanley watched patiently. Dr Reddy was meticulous. Saliva swabs. Scrapings from the T-shirt and jeans the deceased was wearing. Samples of hair, both cut and pulled from six different areas of the scalp. Ten envelopes, one for each finger. Dr Reddy ran the apex of a twice-folded filter paper under each nail, holding the envelope under the finger.

  Gowda glanced at Stanley.

  ‘He is old-fashioned despite his youth and that makes him meticulous,’ Stanley whispered.

  Flakes of a beige material fell into the open mouth of the envelope. And something else that looked like lint from a soft rope. Dr Reddy used fine forceps to pull out tiny particles of glass dust from the tips of the fingers. Gowda and Stanley exchanged glances. So far the post-mortem had validated what they knew and had expected to see. Gowda caught Santosh’s eye. He nod
ded briefly.

  More notes. List of clothing, general condition of skin. Moles. Marks. Deformities.

  Two of the mortuary attendants closed in on the body. They reeked of cheap liquor. ‘Sir, shall we?’ the shorter of the two men asked. He blinked as to if bring into focus the body that lay on the cold steel table and the service they were usually called upon to provide.

  ‘We do it all the time,’ the tall man with the face of a cadaver and bloodshot eyes mumbled. ‘Why get your hands… and clothes dirty? Opening up a body is not for the faint-hearted.’

  Santosh blanched.

  ‘No, I’ll do it,’ the doctor said.

  The two men looked at each other quizzically. Who was this character? No civil surgeon actually ever got his hands dirty. That’s why there were men like them. To deal with the cutting and sawing, the blood and plasma, the piss and shit… they were so used to it that they didn’t even hold their breath to stem the stench. And then there was the alcohol. It deadened the senses and calmed the nerve ends. When brandy sang in the veins, it helped them forget that this was who they were – butchers of a human abattoir. The slaughtering was done by someone else. No cries echoed in their ears. Instead, what they heard was a constant gurgling in their ears, blood gurgling even after death. But the brandy settled that too.

  ‘Just wait here. I may need your help.’ The doctor smiled at them.

  They went into the shadows, puzzled. Who smiled in a mortuary? Was he a ghoul in human disguise? Or perhaps he was on drugs. They saw a great deal of that too.

  ‘The body can reveal a great deal,’ Dr Reddy said, rolling up his sleeves. He pulled out a smock he had brought in a plastic shopping bag. ‘You just need to know where and how to look for it.’

  Gowda rolled his eyes at Stanley to ask: Who is this enthu cutlet leaping out of the pan?

  Dr Reddy looked at Stanley and Gowda. ‘If you are squeamish, it would be best to leave now. What I have to do is not very pleasant.’

  Gowda sighed. ‘We realize that, doctor, please continue.’

  More swabs. Anal and penile region. Pubic hair combed through. Samples taken. Dr Reddy was doing a textbook post-mortem, and slowly, as the evening turned to night, a picture emerged.

  When Dr Reddy paused at the neck, Gowda moved closer. ‘This is interesting,’ the surgeon said, almost as if to himself. ‘Do you see this?’ He pointed to the edges of the wound. There were bruises, a reddish discolouration and blood dots around a gaping wound that opened like a smile on the neck.

  ‘It’s a cut-like wound. Look at this,’ he said, pointing to the edges. ‘It isn’t a clean incision. This is a laceration. It seems to me that the ligature was used to saw through. See this, the irregular serrated edges of the wound. The epidermis is like an onion. It’s built layer upon layer. The murder weapon sliced through the first layer.’

  Dr Reddy looked up, his eyes glittering behind his spectacles. ‘The human body is amazing. The skin resists that initial attempt to cut through. It knows it has to protect what lies within. Do you know the epidermis has five layers in itself? But after a point, it opens onto the next layer and the next layer… The pressure was so great that it crushed the voice box and fractured it.’

  The doctor probed the wound and then, using a pair of tweezers, pulled out shards of glass. ‘This is interesting. Bits of glass…’ Abruptly, the doctor turned the body over. He examined the skin around the neck. ‘Fine, I understand it now.’

  ‘What do you think the murder weapon could be?’ Gowda asked.

  ‘A ligature. This is classic ligature marking. See this…’ He ran his finger just above the brown groove in the skin of the neck. ‘It is transverse, completely encircling the neck.’ Dr Reddy moved away and stood with his hands on his hips as Gowda and Stanley examined the bruising on the edges of the ligature mark.

  ‘The victim was seated when the assailant tightened the ligature by pulling on the cross ends. Do you see this?’ He pointed to the marks at different levels. ‘This oblique marking is a definite indication that the assailant was behind him when applying the ligature. Backwards and upward force.’

  Gowda felt a strange sense of déjà vu. Many years ago Dr Khan had said as much.

  ‘Your murderer is a cautious creature. Let me explain to you. His ligature, made of soft rope, has also been encrusted with glass bits, almost as if it were a manja thread. It has been used to strangle, but with the pressure it also fractures the thyroid, larynx and trachea, and slices through the carotid artery. So, in a couple of minutes, the victim would lose consciousness because the brain has been deprived of oxygen. When the victim ceases to struggle, the assailant tightens the knots. So we will never know at what precise moment death occurred and if it was asphyxia or haemorrhage that finally caused it. Clever son of a bitch!’

  Santosh, who had been listening carefully, leaned forward. ‘How do you know it is a man?’

  ‘In those one or two minutes before death occurs, the victim will struggle to free himself with an almost manic strength. Not many women would be able to retain their grip on the ligature while this happens. Look at this victim. He is a hundred and eighty-four centimetres tall and should weigh about seventy-two kilos at least. He wouldn’t have been easy to handle in the last few minutes.’

  ‘What if he had been struck on his head?’ Gowda asked, thinking of Ranganathan and all the others.

  ‘I was just getting there.’ The doctor smiled with the affability of a TV chef putting final touches to a dish concocted in ten minutes. ‘I was going to say, let’s look to see if there is any evidence of that,’ he said, moving back to the table.

  He parted the hair and examined the scalp. ‘I am going to have to shave the hair to give you a precise report. But for now, we can clearly see blunt force trauma. There are contusions,’ he said, pointing to a side of the skull, ‘and here is a depressed fracture.’

  A wolfish smile of knowing.

  ‘This, my friends, is called a fracture a la signature. Or the signature fracture in English. The pattern almost always resembles the weapon used. Something heavy, with a small striking surface, was used to inflict a tangential blow. It’s a localized fracture. Enough to disorient a man. And then, in a matter of seconds, the ligature is used to slice and strangle.’

  Gowda nodded. Dr Khan had said as much many years ago. Gowda peered at the scalp. ‘Would you be able to indicate what the weapon could have been?’

  ‘Something hard, small and rounded … a hammer would splinter the surface differently. Imagine a coconut being swung against a man’s head. But this isn’t anything as big as a coconut. A ball of some sort is my initial reading…’

  Gowda slipped off the mask. ‘Thank you, doctor,’ he said, beginning to move to the door.

  ‘I am going to do the internal examination now. Don’t you want to see what that throws up?’

  ‘I need to step outside,’ Gowda said. ‘I need to make a few urgent phone calls.’

  Gowda was still lost in thought when Stanley walked out a little later.

  ‘What happened? Why did you leave?’ Stanley asked curiously, watching Gowda light up.

  ‘I needed to sort out my thoughts. There’s something very obvious that I am not seeing and I know it’s staring me in my face, but for the life of me, I can’t seem to…’ Gowda said, staring into the middle distance. He took a deep drag of his cigarette.

  ‘The post-mortem report is going to be crucial,’ Stanley said.

  The sun had set and the veranda was wreathed in long shadows. Stanley glanced at Gowda and felt a great weariness. They had a bigger case to sort out. Counterfeit 1000-rupee notes were being unloaded in the state and they needed to be working on that. The impact it would have on the country’s stability was frightening. Sure, there was a serial killer at work here. But this was, after all, a scum on scum murder. Should he just leave it to Gowda? Stanley wondered. He would need to speak to his bosses first.

  Dr Reddy stepped out into the veranda. ‘You said he’
s from Kerala, didn’t you?’ he asked Stanley.

  Stanley nodded.

  ‘Can I bum a cigarette?’ The doctor turned to Gowda with a sheepish smile.

  ‘Sure,’ Gowda said. He pulled out his pack of India Kings, flicked the top back and offered it. The doctor took a cigarette. Gowda turned to Stanley. ‘C’mon, have a smoke. I can see you are dying for one.’

  A wry smile lit up Stanley’s face. ‘I guess one cigarette’s not going to kill me,’ he said, pulling out a cigarette and tapping it against his palm.

  Gowda lit a match and held the flame for both men to light up. He watched the two of them draw in the smoke with a hiss of satisfaction as the nicotine flooded their bloodstreams.

  ‘Why did you ask if the deceased was from Kerala?’ Gowda asked suddenly.

  ‘I just had a look at his stomach contents,’ Dr Reddy said, tapping ash into the ground. ‘It looks like his last meal was from a Kerala restaurant. I could see bits of undigested food. Parota, and he probably had some meat with it. Which means, given the state of the stomach contents, his last meal was eaten at about ten p.m. and the estimated time of death would be between eleven and eleven thirty.’

  A few minutes later, he added, ‘One other thing. It will be in my report but I may as well tell you now. Your man liked to fuck in the ass. He’s cleaned himself up after the act or his sexual partner did it for him, but I could still see some traces of faecal matter on his penis.’

  ‘When will you be able to give us the final report?’ Gowda asked.

  ‘I’ll pick it up from you first thing in the morning,’ Stanley said, turning towards Dr Reddy. ‘The forensic lab will take time to process the information, but your PM report will be enough for us to start giving direction to our investigations.’

  Gowda’s jaws clamped. He could see the case slipping away from him.

  Later that night, Gowda and Stanley went back to Gowda’s home. Gowda brought out a bottle of Old Monk rum and two glasses. ‘Soda and ice or Coke?’ he asked as he poured Stanley a double large.

  ‘Jesus, Gowda, are you trying to get me drunk or what?’ Stanley demanded at the sight of his near-full glass of raw spirit.