by Gavin Smith
“So,” began Ogilvy, eyes still sharp behind spectacles and thick protective safety glasses, “apparent death by fire but we should rule nothing out. We may yet again discover a life history of private and unutterable vileness. I may even have to forego my planned sojourn to the links.”
Suzanne Murphy stared curiously at the dazzling array of lights suspended from the walls and ceiling of the chamber of pastel-green concrete and gleaming steel. The glint in her dead eyes, the blush in her cold cheeks and the jut of her jaw seemed to anticipate the final, insensate indignity to come. Harkness caught himself. It was too easy to graft rage, regret, relief or horror onto the faces of the dead to give the living the comfort of meaning.
Besides, this process was necessary, a mutilation in a higher cause. The unwilling atheist in him knew and mourned the fact that no part of this woman’s true self remained to know or care about how and in what form her remains were disposed of. Everything she had, or would ever have, had been taken, burned to ashes and cast into nothingness. Her facial expression owed much to the block raising her head from the examination table, with its moulded furrows and drainage holes.
“Look lively, Ken,” said Ogilvy. “Not going to faint on me like a neophyte beat plod, are you?”
“Long night with too many medicinal toxins and not enough sleep. I promise I won’t redecorate the place.”
“What you need is a nice hearty breakfast,” chuckled Ogilvy. “Runny eggs, fatty bacon, sticky black pudding, capers, gallons of brown sauce, all bobbing merrily around in liquefied animal fat.”
“Your bedside manner is unique,” said Harkness, cold sweat prickling his forehead.
“Why do you think I do this? My slab-side manner attracts few complaints. The trolley if you will, Graham.”
The assistant wheeled in a glistening assortment of blades and saws - some powered, some not – as well as scissors, needles and clamps. Not for the first time, Harkness decided he would die at an advanced age, of natural causes and in the presence of his own GP to avoid the messy infractions of a post mortem.
This one hadn’t even begun and he was already jittery. Blood and guts hadn’t troubled him in the past. An old grief swelled in his chest with the realisation that the only post mortem that truly troubled him was one he didn’t attend, couldn’t have attended, but should have been made to endure.
Diligently laying out a logging sheet, evidence bags and labels on a side table, Slowey turned to stare.
“Stop swaying,” he said. “You’ll make a proper mess if you fall over.”
Harkness gestured vaguely, scurried into the gents and braced himself face-down in a stall. Nothing came but the smoker’s cough he thought he’d parted with. A minute of watching a cigarette butt bobbing against the stained porcelain in time with his lengthening breaths persuaded him that the clutching, burning presence in his guts couldn’t be vomited away.
Having found the mortuary assistant’s galley kitchen, he returned briskly to the chamber moments later clutching sugary coffees for Slowey and himself. The assistant’s eyebrows flexed in disapproval. Slowey nodded his appreciation as he bagged the latest in a sequence of preliminary samples; hair and nail cuttings, nail scrapings and DNA swabs.
“You haven’t missed much,” said Ogilvy. “No worrying external injuries beyond the bruises you’ve already seen, which could suggest domestic violence. I’ll mull that one over ‘til I’ve had a good look inside. Some people genuinely do bruise easily. She doesn’t look it, but she’s a bit underweight for her height and build. Want to take the pictures? You can exhibit the files yourself for a change.”
“You sure you can manage this menial task, oh captain my captain?” said Slowey, proffering the office digital camera.
“I’ll do it this once, while you’re under the weather,” he replied, inspecting the device. “Cheap bastards. Only room on here for 60 shots. I didn’t know memory cards came that small.”
The body that had once framed a thinking, feeling being lay inert and exposed beneath harsh lights and professional eyes. A ruby birthmark deepening the clavicle notch, a thickening of skin where a pierced navel had healed, the furrowed track of a caesarean scar – intimate traces now matters of merely evidential interest.
Harkness set about photographing the intact cadaver from every angle, taking close-ups of peeling lips stained lilac, smuts staining the nose and split, bloody fingernails. He motioned to the assistant to turn the body and captured the reddish pink tinge of pooled blood and a series of bruises as angry as gathering thunderclouds on the buttocks and outer thighs, from below the waistline to above a modest hemline. Other petal-shaped bruises, perhaps matching the digits of a supposedly loving hand, marked the back of the biceps.
“There’s a respectable degree of haematoma there,” volunteered Ogilvy, “that has nothing to do with the post-mortem hypostasis. I’d say this was repeated blunt trauma, preceding last night’s events by a good few days. Plenty of fluid in those bruises. Must have been a tad tender to sit on.”
“Reminds me of my tae-kwon-do days,” mumbled the assistant, squinting through his safety glasses. “Used to practice blocking without protection. To toughen up. My shins and forearms looked like that for months.”
“Let’s keep this clinical please, gents,” urged Ogilvy.
“Whoever knocked her about did just that,” added Harkness. “None of this would be visible in a skirt and blouse.”
Then the dismantling began in earnest. As Ogilvy muttered into his dictaphone, the assistant pierced the woman’s shoulder with a scalpel, an impartial act of bloodless violence. He carved the familiar ‘y’ shape, two bone-deep incisions from either shoulder to the sternum, then one from the sternum to the pubis. Flaps of flesh, with their strata of scarlet muscle and yellow fat, opened to reveal ribs and organs.
The assistant reached for surgical shears bearing more than a passing resemblance to bolt croppers. He paused at a signal from Ogilvy, who drew Harkness’s attention to the rib-cage.
“Interesting this, not a happy tale at all.” Ogilvy’s index finger traced the crooked lines of malformed ribs. “Some breaks and cracks here that have healed somewhat out of kilter. Either this lady was a pugilist, or she fell down the proverbial stairs a few times.”
More photographs were taken, more threads plucked from the tapestry. The sternum was cracked and split in half with shears to expose heart and lungs. One by one, every organ save the lungs was removed, weighed and set aside, the time and salient details noted faithfully by Slowey while Ogilvy murmured a commentary for his dictaphone. The throat was opened next, the flesh of the neck and face peeled up and over the head, the last pretence of identity gone, Suzanne Murphy now simply the sum of her evidential parts.
“One doesn’t like to jump to conclusions,” said Ogilvy, beckoning Harkness closer and pointing out the open trachea, raw blistered and flecked with black. “But the cause of death is looking pretty clear. As you saw for yourself, cyanosis was suggestive of hypoxia. There were minor burns to the nose and mouth. Here we’re seeing constriction and burns to the mucosal surfaces of the upper airway, with sooty deposits to boot. I’ll open up the lungs later but there’s a fair chance I’ll find all the signs of hypoxia with chemical injury.”
The assistant shifted the corrugated fabric of the face and used a circular saw to remove the top of the skull, describing a neat line around the crown and taking care to leave a triangular notch at the back so that the section could be neatly reattached. Tiny flecks of bone speckled Harkness’s safety glasses and he took a long step back.
The assistant eased out the wrinkled, grey mass of the brain and cut it free from the optic nerves and brain stem. Ogilvy cursorily examined the naked brain, grunted his approval and passed it back to be placed with the other organs in an efficient forensic check-out process.
Catching sight of the outsize needle and thread that lay alongside the sharp and jagged steel on the assistant’s tray, Harkness was reminded of leather-wor
kers he’d once seen in Tunisia on a high-season package holiday that had seemed a good idea at the time. He’d strayed from the tourist trail of bootleg DVDs and stuffed camels and found himself in a fly-blown alley of butcher’s wares, with its array of bovine heads dangling gore, dogs snarling over entrails, and sides of mutton glistening pink with ripples of fat and a frantic speckling of insects.
Nauseous from the heat and the reek, he’d retreated to the musty shade of a covered bazaar, where men squatted, intent on their ancient crafts, barely disturbed by light or tourists. A heartbeat away from the butcher’s cleaver, skins that had been flayed from livestock then treated until they were the workable, walnut tone of the craftsmen’s own skin, were being changed.
Thick blades were produced, the skins punctured and fibres ripped until the forms of animals became outlines of handbags, panels for ottomans, uppers for shoes. Then cow-gut twine and a thick needle would be used to knit the shreds of altered flesh into new wares for tourists enticed in by the pungent aroma and the novelty of craftsmanship.
Might Suzanne Murphy be served in like manner, he thought, suddenly light-headed and remote from his own body in this space of uncoiled life, harsh light, odours of blood, bleach and torn entrails. She had been rendered down and worked into a pattern of evidence. She would then be reworked, stitched into a form of assumed decency for relatives and undertakers to peruse.
“You’re swaying.” Slowey’s voice. Light glinted of three sets of safety glasses as their wearers glanced up at him.
“Not me,” said Harkness, grabbing a trolley for support. “I think there was a minor earthquake.”
“Look,” said Ogilvy, “unless you want to hang around for a few more hours watching me play with internal organs, you may as well bugger off and do something more useful than trying not to faint. I’m sure your colleague can handle the kids unsupervised.” He gestured towards the meagre, sheeted shapes waiting their turn in a shaded corner.
Slowey scanned his paperwork and shrugged his acquiescence. “One pair of hands is plenty here. Go do something useful in the fresh air. I won’t tell anyone you couldn’t handle blood and guts. You big girl.”
“You’re right you won’t. Fine. That works for me. So, can I assume the preliminary report will say death by asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation?”
“Close enough,” said Ogilvy.
“They say it’s painless, like going to sleep.”
“They do say that.”
“Are they wrong?”
“Depends on how you feel about panic and confusion,” said Ogilvy. “Then there’s the sensation of burning in the inside of your nose, throat and lungs. Not forgetting that you’ll then be gagging and choking on carbonaceous sputum, while your life is crushed to a tiny point of fading light.
“I only speak for myself when I say that’s not my usual experience of going to sleep. But I am old-fashioned. Some people seem to like that sort of thing. You know, pop stars, politicians and so forth.”
“Slowey, almost forgot,” said Harkness. “Get me elimination prints from all of them. I’ll want to know who touched what.”
“Will do, on condition that you start answering your bloody phone,” said Slowey as Harkness dumped his overalls in the bin by the exit.
The air outside was anything but fresh and the Mondeo was dying piece by piece. The electric windows would open no more than an inch and the ventilation system simply drew in more warm, sticky air from outside. Worse, the car squirmed under braking and under-steered with a hysterical squeal through the mildest of corners, suggesting the cat-related prang had done more than superficial damage.
The sun hung fat in a sulphurous sky, its disc distinct and dull even at its zenith. Harkness briefly enjoyed the novelty of staring without protection at the nearest star as he parked on Marne Close, dumped his jacket and plucked the moist fabric of his shirt away from his collar and armpits.
He’d briefed Biddle by phone on the preliminary post-mortem findings. Biddle either had no news for Harkness or wasn’t inclined to reciprocate. A glimpse of the crime scene in daylight had seemed a worthwhile detour en route to lunch and whatever joys the enquiry office held for him.
A yawning PCSO, face flushed and slick with sweat, recorded his details in the scene log without making eye contact and lifted the cordon tape for him. The soot cladding much of the Murphys’ home had cooled and cracked in places. Metal panels had been nailed to ground-floor windows. The workman responsible sat munching a sausage roll and reading a newspaper in the cab of his van, waiting for the emergency services circus to clear off so he could seal the door and finish the job.
A SOCO leaned on his own van, hood of his white sterile suit down and hair plastered to his skull in damp stripes. He greedily sucked on a cigarette and slowly became aware of Harkness staring at the stubs at his feet.
“Rob.”
“Mr Wenban.”
“Yes, they are mine. Don’t fret. I’ll get rid of ‘em shortly.”
“Remember that bloke who used to do lectures to recruits on crime scene integrity? Who was that again?”
“You’re a mardy bastard today,” said the SOCO, stooping to scoop up the stubs.
“I know you’re not a complete pillock,” said Harkness, “so I’m going to assume this isn’t a high-yield crime scene.”
“Yep, ‘fraid so. Nothing much to add to the first sweep. No petrol cans, footprints, blood, spit or semen. Oh, and still no window or door keys. No problem proving malicious ignition. Got plenty of samples.”
“Such as?”
“Trace samples of what might be accelerant. Fingerprints from inner and outer surfaces of doors and windows, where we could find any worth sampling. Forget the smoke alarm – no smooth surfaces there. Loads of control samples.”
“Elimination samples?”
“What, as in samples from actual real people? Not been tasked with that. Door to door team have been and gone.”
“Who were they?”
“Tactical Support from another division. Finished an hour ago. Spoke to nearly everyone. Late turn will be tasked with the rest. Don’t know if they took dabs and spit. Haven’t you seen them yourself?”
“That would entail going back to DHQ.”
“Didn’t you get promoted? Why are you fannying around doing legwork? Aren’t people supposed to do your bidding while you sip coffee in a slightly bigger chair?”
Harkness grunted and cast his eyes around Marne Close. The Braxtons’ house had an incongruous air of absence; all curtains open, all windows closed, no smoke from the kitchen, no din from the TV. He couldn’t even hear the slavering fury of the chained pit-bull he assumed the Braxtons owned, ready for its daily helping of inquisitive child or postman’s trousers. At least he still had his full, regulation issue of social stereotypes.
The Jennings’ house was just as still, save for the bespectacled man with a hard-hat and clip-board taking notes from garden gate.
“Who’s that?” asked Harkness.
“Insurance assessor,” replied Wenban. “Had a chat earlier. Owners desperate to get back in. We told him not to go in ‘til the fire boys say so. Their investigator is still rooting around inside.”
“Why’s he wearing a hard hat outdoors?”
The SOCO shrugged. “’Cause he’s inspecting a dangerous property and them’s the rules. Why’s that PCSO sweating his nipples off in body armour and a jumper?”
“Similar reason, I suppose. Why are you sucking down hot, poisonous gas at the scene of a lethal house fire?”
“They’re low tar.”
“No criticism intended. I’m a fellow sinner. But low tar? Next you’ll tell me you like diet coke.”
“How fat would I be if I didn’t?”
“I’ll help you burn off that sugar with all the petty enquiries I’ll be punting your way this week.”
“You’ve changed. Power’s gone to your head.”
Harkness leaned against the shaded side of the SOCO van and toyed
with the idea of cadging a smoke from Wenban. It would give him a momentary surge of pleasure and clarity, and it would hardly compare with the cocktail of lung-shredding poisons he must have inhaled last night. “Who’s that?” said Wenban. “He’s in a right state. Do you know him?”
Harkness followed Wenban’s gaze. A shambling form had appeared at the cordon, shifting anxiously from foot to foot, eyes fixed on the Murphys’ house. The meagrest layer of flesh clung to the naked torso of the 6’2” frame, a living, breathing anatomy class. The shoulders appeared to bow under some invisible weight. The hair had grown; once a close-cropped haze of ginger, it was now a thick, greasy mop under which the darting green eyes hid like finches in a hedgerow. The limp was new and unpractised, each dragging motion of the left leg accompanied by clenched teeth and a gasp. The prison tattoo was just visible under one of many fresh bruises, faded blue under vivid purple.
“Firth. That’s bloody Firth. Cheeky bastard,” Harkness muttered, shrugging off his jacket and handing it to Wenban, leaving the harness with his baton, cuffs and gas visible.
Could Firth really be brazen enough to kill three people with his morbid hobby then return to spectate at his own crime scene? Could this case really boil down to the simple expression of an inexplicable urge? If he’d really done it, it was all because he hadn’t served enough time for the last arson attack Harkness had charged him with.
“If he runs, call it in,” he said to Wenban.
Crouching, he moved quickly around the various vans clogging the street, trying to stay out of Firth’s eye-line until he was close enough to stop him running. Something balled in his stomach. His temples were throbbing and a bead of sweat fell from his bunched fist to dissolve in the scum of fire-retardant foam riming the gutter.
He peered through a windscreen as he gathered his breath. Firth clutched the cordon tape, still intent on the house and chewing his lower lip. Glimpsing up from finally dropping his body armour to the pavement, the PCSO noticed Harkness’s skulking bulk behind a car and scowled. Harkness raised a finger to his lips but knew he was about to be flushed from cover. Firth casually followed the PCSO’s glance, his eyes drawn to Harkness’s eyes almost instantly.