The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “I trust you have switched off your mobile phones?” I take care not to look directly at the gentleman with the knitted headgear. “Last time, someone forgot. The ring tone was so loud my knife slipped and . . .” I hold up my bandaged finger so they can see the damage, then carefully pull on a pair of disposable gloves.

  In fact, it didn’t happen quite like that – I don’t even remember how I got the cut, only that there was a lot of blood – but it gets their attention and I’m gratified to see them all check their phones, reluctantly cutting themselves off from their lifelines. Young people seem to think that their electronic devices are a kind of umbilical cord and that without them they will die.

  When the flutter of activity has settled down I peer over my half-moon glasses, looking straight at the boy this time. “You – the one with the woolly hat – take it off.”

  “But it’s cold in here,” he whines.

  “What do you expect? This is a mortuary, not an overheated seminar room. Can you imagine the smell if we had full central heating?”

  “Whatever.” He pulls the hat off with a flourish, revealing his premature baldness. “Happy now?”

  I note the telltale nodules of fat around his eyes. High cholesterol. He’ll be dead of a heart attack before he’s fifty. “Ecstatic.”

  Titters of laughter flare up, die away. They won’t be laughing soon.

  The time has come.

  “Like you, I have never seen this specimen before. Normally I read the notes first.” I indicate a manila folder lying on the bench behind me. “But I’m under great pressure at the moment – so much to deal with.” I grind my teeth, a habit I’ve got into lately. “So together, our job will be to find the cause of death.”

  There is complete hush as I peel back the sheet. The cadaver lies supine, quiet and obedient. That’s something I admire about the dead, their beautiful quiescence. Most of the corpses I use for demonstrations, after several days in a chilled drawer, have a musty metallic smell, like thawing meat. But this one is fresh and has an odour of the sea – ozone and tissue salts in their last frantic throes of activity. Its recent demise suggests this might be an urgent police matter. Perhaps I should have read the notes after all . . .

  I detect movement to my left, something twitching or flickering just out of vision. I jerk my head round but there’s nothing. It must be that damn tic in my left eyelid that has plagued me for a couple of weeks now. Tiredness, that’s all it is. I haven’t been sleeping well.

  “Right. What do we have here?” I cast a professional glance over the specimen. “Female. Late thirties, I’d say. Any initial observations?”

  No one answers. I’m an expert at silences. Some are thick with embarrassment from sheer lack of knowledge. Others are syrupy and lazy, the speciality of the can’t be bothered merchants. This one twangs with hostility, a reaction no doubt to my firm handling of Mr Woolly Hat. I suspect they have the answers, but they are going to make me extract them by force, like pulling teeth.

  “Come on. Come on. That’s the easiest question you’ll get all afternoon. If you can’t answer that, it’s going to be a very long session indeed.”

  I can hear the drip from a tap, the distant buzz of a fly. I note that the bare feet of the girl in the mini skirt have turned a mottled mauve that perfectly matches the lividity of the skin six hours after death. She sees me staring, which must be what prompts her to speak up.

  “She dyed her hair?”

  I wait until the muffled laughter has run its course.

  “She dyed her hair . . .” I glance down. I really should have cleaned my spectacles – they are smeared with dust and fingerprints. Squinting, I see that the woman’s hair, now dulled by death, had once been a theatrical shade of red. A long strand of it has caught across her neck like a wound. I look away. Julia was a redhead too. Did she dye her hair? That’s a question I cannot answer. “This is the School of Forensic Medicine,” I say sharply. “You’ll find Beauty Therapy at the Further Education College down the road.”

  The corners of the girl’s mouth turn down like those of a petulant five-year-old. She mutters something I don’t catch. There are low mutters, shuffling of feet.

  “Can we see any external signs of the cause of death? Is there evidence of disease? Any open wounds, operation scars, swellings, needle marks?”

  They stare at me open-mouthed. I can see I’m rolling a ball uphill with this lot. Perhaps their silence is the ignorant kind after all. I’ve credited them with far too much intelligence. I won’t make that mistake again.

  “No external signs, then.”

  Woolly Hat raises his hand. “But what about the—?”

  “Please don’t interrupt.” I’m beginning to find him as irritating as that fly buzzing somewhere in the room. “So how do we proceed?”

  No response. Quelle surprise.

  “I intend to start at the top.” I move to the end of the table and stand behind the head.

  My instruments are laid out neatly on a trolley beside me. With an electric shaver I remove a circular area of the woman’s hair, like a monk’s tonsure. “Now I’m going to use a saw in order to trepan the skull. Some pathologists use an electric one with oscillating safety blades, but I prefer the old-fashioned manual kind.” I pick up the fine-toothed instrument and begin to score through the skull cap. Once I’ve cut all the way round, I use a cranium chisel to lift off the bowl-shaped section of bone.

  “Now watch how I sever the nerves and the blood vessels so that I can remove the brain.”

  I enjoy the mesmerized looks on their faces as I lift the organ out. No shuffling of feet now, no laughter, barely any breathing.

  “Look at it. Just a wrinkled pile of jelly. Yet hidden within is the most sophisticated circuitry in the universe.” I strike a pose. I always relish this bit. “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle towards my hand? Come let me clutch thee: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still . . . Art thou a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”

  I have been known to get a round of applause at this point, but there is dead silence.

  “No doubt you all recognize the quote?”

  It seems not.

  “It’s from Macbeth. By William Shakespeare,” I add drily.

  “Personally I prefer Rumble in the Bronx,” mumbles Woolly Hat.

  “What’s that? Speak up.”

  “You know, the Jackie Chan film?”

  “Jackie Chan? I’ve never heard of her.”

  The boy with the blonde spikes covers his mouth. Is he going to be sick?

  “You.” I glower at him, holding out the brain. “Take it.”

  “What for?”

  I nod towards the scales that hang above the dissecting table. “We weigh every organ and record the weight. Put some gloves on and get on with it.”

  Grimacing, he tips the mass of jelly into the steel pan while I address the other members of the group. “A woman’s brain is slightly smaller than a man’s. No less effective, of course. In fact, in many ways, more devious and cunning. Take Lady Macbeth.”

  I retrieve the brain from the cream-faced poltroon, and selecting a knife with a twelve-inch blade, dissect the organ in half.

  “Any abnormalities?”

  They stare dumbly.

  “I’ll tell you then. The answer is no.”

  Woolly Hat is craving attention again, his hand flapping like a flag in the wind. “But there are tiny—”

  “Be quiet! I was rather hoping for a tumour, perhaps an astro-cytoma grade four. A swift and silent killer that may have explained this specimen’s untimely end. But no such luck. So what do we do next?”

  A spotty youth raises a tentative hand. “Cut her open?”

  “I assume you mean make an incision?”

  The boy’s skin flares up as if his whole face is covered with acne rosacea. “I suppose so.”

  “Splendid. But what kind of incision?”

  He shrugs his
puny shoulders. Bad diet. Too much refined carbohydrate. A candidate for diabetes if ever I saw one.

  “We have three choices. We can use a T-shaped or a Y-shaped cut. These give easy access to the body cavity. But who wants to take the easy way? I favour the single straight cut, right down the middle. Like so . . .”

  The knife slices through the chilly flesh, which in a refrigerated specimen has the consistency of soft leather. But a fresh corpse retains its springy muscle tone, and because the bones are not yet dry and brittle, they can be surprisingly resistant.

  “Unseamed him from the nave to the chaps. That’s how Shakespeare describes Macbeth’s favourite method of despatch. We go in the other direction, starting at the neck, taking a brief detour round the tough tissue of the navel and ending up at the pubis . . . There we are. Done.” I wave the knife two-handedly like a claymore. “With his brandished steel that smoked with bloody execution.”

  I contemplate them over my spectacles, but I have failed to make a dent in the lumpen demeanour of the group. Surely some of them must have studied the Scottish play at school? Or even – radical thought – seen it performed in the theatre?

  Apparently not.

  “Of course, Macbeth was a violent man, a killer. I’m a mere pathologist. Generally speaking, I only unseam those who are already dead.”

  Someone – I can’t see who – mutters, “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  I ignore the impertinence and plough on. “It’s an interesting fact that the real Macbeth, a tenth-century Scottish king, was an exemplary ruler, not a tyrant at all.” Despite the cold, my face feels clammy. “Another interesting fact: I met my wife at a performance of the Scottish play. We got talking during the interval. I was enthusiastic about the production. Julia wasn’t so sure – too violent, she said. In the final scene she had to cover her eyes when they brandished Macbeth’s severed head, dripping with blood. Excellent stuff.” I wipe my sleeve across my damp brow. Maybe I’ve caught something, probably from one of the students. Walking germ carriers, most of them.

  “Now where was I?” The body has been slit open to reveal the bright yellow subcutaneous fat, the salmon-coloured muscle. “Now I need my bone cutters . . .” I turn to the trolley. My hand falls on an instrument. I pick it up. A pair of forceps. Damn.

  “Some pathologists prefer scissors to cut the ribs,” I tell them, to cover my undignified scramble amongst the steel blades. “But I favour a good pair of bone cutters.” I hold them aloft in triumph.

  There is a satisfying crack as the first rib snaps. Without glancing up from my work I say, “I’ve known students to faint at this point. I think it’s the noise.” I let a few heavy seconds pass. But there is no telltale thud as a body hits the floor. “Splendid,” I say, though in truth, I’m rather disappointed.

  “Now I can remove the chest plate and expose the internal organs . . . And there they are. Packed in like a box of chocolates, the assorted kind, all shapes and sizes. The arrangement never fails to amaze me, such an excellent use of space.” I wipe my forehead again. “Talking of chocolate, a word to the wise. I prefer dark chocolate. If funds allow, go for the best, with a minimum of seventy per cent cocoa butter. But no end of term presents of that hideous milky stuff, or, god help us, white chocolate.”

  I’m breathing faster than normal. It’s surprisingly hard work, dealing with a dead body. “My wife was very fond of white chocolate.” There’s a buzzing in my brain as if that damned fly has got inside. I shake my head violently to dislodge the infernal noise. “So plain chocolate every time. Understood?”

  Fortunately I’ve given up expecting a response.

  “Let’s get on. What am I holding now?”

  “Lungs?” The serious-looking female, the one with the unflattering glasses.

  “Good heavens, someone spoke. And a correct answer to boot. The lungs indeed. Think of them as a couple of flabby balloons inflated by the heart. Tireless workers, the lungs. The heart gets all the headlines, but where would it be without these backroom boys?”

  Just as I’m chalking the weight of the lungs on the board I hear the thud I’ve been waiting for. Who is it? I turn round. The girl in the skimpy skirt? No. She’s shivering with cold, but upright. Blondie? No, he’s still standing too. The girl with the glasses? That attention-seeking baldie? No, both present and correct.

  Ah, now I see. It’s Spotty. His colleagues cluster round him, unbuttoning his shirt, placing a rolled-up white coat under his head.

  “Leave him alone! Let him lie there until he wakes up. He won’t come to any harm, not unless someone steps on him.”

  They stare at me with what seems like one unified malevolent eye.

  Feeling almost jolly I continue the post-mortem. I even start to hum. I’m on a roll now.

  “The lungs are a little distended, but there’s no sign of disease. She obviously wasn’t a smoker.”

  “And the pinhead haemorrhages?” Woolly Hat doesn’t even bother to raise his hand this time.

  “Did I ask for a comment? Moving on to the heart.” Although I’m sweating profusely I begin to shiver with cold. My fingers feel stiff and clumsy as they wield the knife to slice through the connecting blood vessels. But finally I lift out the heart and hold it in the palm of one hand.

  “Notice that the Valentine cards get it all wrong. It’s basically nothing more than a bicycle pump. It’s the colour of uncooked liver and shaped like a builder’s backside. And as you can see, it’s a heavy, floppy blood-congested lump of flesh that might well ache – angina is the usual culprit – but can never be described as broken.”

  Angina . . . perhaps that’s what’s wrong with me. That heaviness in my chest like someone standing on it, the tiredness, the shortness of breath, the restless nights.

  “Nothing sentimental about it. Can’t bear sentimentality. My wife took me to the ballet on my birthday a fortnight ago. Never again. Sickly saccharine stuff. She gave me a rather splendid present though – a large bottle of what they used to call Kensington Gore, the artificial blood they use in the theatre, now known rather more prosaically as Pro Blood. A leaving present, she said. After all those years together . . . Out, out, brief candle . . .”

  Someone coughs.

  Where am I? Of course – the mortuary, the cadaver on the dissecting table, the woman with dyed red hair. Straight hair. Julia’s had a natural and untameable kink, sprouting tendrils of copper wire when the light was behind her.

  “Time’s getting on. Who can tell me what this is? You – the boy with the blonde spikes.”

  “The oesophagus?” he asks sullenly.

  I sigh deeply. “Where were you during basic anatomy? No doubt doing unspeakable things with your girlfriend in some grubby squat?”

  He doesn’t deny it.

  “No, it is not the oesophagus. It is the trachea. This is the oesophagus. Now for the abdominal organs.”

  As each body part is removed I check it for disease, weigh it, record the weight. First the liver, then the stomach and the kidneys. And the pesky little thing known as the gall bladder, which can cause no end of trouble.

  “Now we come to the uterus. The womb. From whence we all came. This remarkable organ resists putrefaction longer than any other. Women, it would appear, are more durable than men.” I tip the surprisingly small pear-shaped organ into the bucket under the table with all the rest. I doubt this woman had any children. Nor did Julia. And now she never will.

  My glasses are misty with sweat. “So, cause of death. I’m tending towards sudden unexplained heart failure. Any other theories?”

  True to form, Woolly Hat’s arm snakes up like a cobra rising from its basket.

  “Could the ligature mark around her neck have anything to do with it?”

  Ligature mark?

  I squint at the corpse, barely able to see through the smeared lenses. Surely it’s a strand of red hair? I touch it. A groove in the flesh. Damn him.

  “I was wondering when someone would notice that. What
does it suggest?”

  “Death by hanging?” offers Miss Flip-Flop.

  “Suicide,” says the studious girl.

  I nod approvingly. Suicide, of course. No signs of disease or trauma elsewhere. An excellent theory.

  “Or murder made to look like suicide,” says Woolly Hat.

  I take up the challenge. “Let’s examine the hyoid bone, shall we?” I point to a spot under the chin. “It’s so fragile it breaks during strangulation, but not when the body has been hanged. Take a close look.”

  The bald one comes round to my side of the table. He leans over the corpse and prods the bone.

  “Is it broken?”

  “No,” he admits. “But look at the ligature mark. No sign of inflammation.”

  “Therefore?”

  “She was dead before the rope was put around her neck.”

  “Now you’re being melodramatic.”

  “Why won’t you admit what’s staring you in the face?” he shouts.

  “Staring . . .?” I glance down at the body but the eyes are closed, thank god.

  “The woman’s face is blue.”

  “It’s cold in here,” I insist.

  “And there are tiny haemorrhages in her brain and her lungs.”

  “Exactly. Consistent with lack of oxygen, caused by self-inflicted hanging.”

  “So where’s the inflammation round the neck?”

  “We’ve been through this. The hyoid bone is unbroken. So it cannot be murder.”

  That shuts him up.

  Suddenly his features change. It’s like watching Toshiro Mifune in that particularly savage Japanese version of Macbeth. His face becomes taut, his eyes narrow to slits. He thrusts out his hands, one in front of the other, the sharp edges facing me like blades. He springs at me like someone demented. One hand stops dead at the side of my neck. If he’d gone just a millimetre further . . .

  “Pressure on the vagus nerve stops the heart,” he says quietly. “Look in the police file. I bet her partner was ex-army, SAS probably, or some sort of survival freak.” He reels his hands backwards. “Or a karate expert. Like Jackie Chan.”

  I remove my half-moon spectacles and place them in the top pocket of my coat. “You could have killed me. What’s your name? Who’s your personal tutor? I intend to report you!”