‘As I said just now about questions and answers, Mr King. And we’re not out of the wood yet.’
‘No?’ King was both intrigued and disappointed. He enjoyed a challenge but he was beginning to feel this to be over-perplexing.
‘No. You see, if a body drowns at sea, which is what we are talking about here, or so it seems, then three things happen.’
King began to scribble, for his own edification as much as anything and once more he sensed Reynolds relaxing, as if getting into his stride, as if delivering a familiar lecture to undergraduates. ‘First, the body will tend to float face downwards and gravity will then pull the blood to the lowest points of the body where it will settle and congeal and cause a distinctive reddening in those areas. It’s called hypostasis. So in drowning victims we find hypostasis to the anterior, the face, the front of the chest, and the lower legs and feet. In this instance it is to her back and sides. People seldom float on their backs, unless they have a life-jacket holding them that way, and they never float on their side.
‘The second thing that happens is that there is often damage to the skin, everything from cuts and grazes to tears in the fingernails as the victim clings on to something for dear life, to lumps torn from the flesh where creatures of the deep have come up for a taste. Mackerel in the Clyde, for example, will leave a swimmer alone, but that swimmer has to be dead for only a few minutes—within the hour that we have mentioned—before a shoal of mackerel will attack him as voraciously as Amazon piranhas will attack a living man. In this case, there is not a blemish on the skin save for rope marks to the neck, wrists and ankles, none of which contributed to her death.
‘And finally, there are the diatoms, or more appropriately in this case, there are not the diatoms.’
‘Diatoms?’
‘Plankton.’
‘The stuff that whales eat?’
‘The very same. You see, as the victim takes mouthfuls and lungfuls and then stomachfuls of sea-water, he also takes in the plankton, algae, and plant fibres which are collectively known as diatoms. Diatoms are tough, gutsy wee beasties and work their wee way into the bone marrow, especially the marrow of the long bones. And they do this very quickly. The point is that they are not present in the bone marrow of the deceased in question.’
‘Ah.’ King put his ballpoint down. It rolled off his pad and on to the desktop with a hollow rattle. ‘I’d like to get this right. Inspector Donoghue will be in at nine a.m. sharp. I’d like him to grasp the nuts and bolts. He can only do that if I have grasped the nuts and bolts.’
‘Yes, good man, Donoghue, very good man.’
‘The deceased drowned in sea-water?’
‘Yes. As I said, the salinity reading of three per cent indicates sea-water.’
‘But there’s no corroborative evidence to support that she was actually in the sea?’
‘That’s a good way of putting it, Mr King. No, there is no damage to the skin, and no indication that she floated face down. She died face upwards and slightly on her side. At least, she stiffened in that position.’
‘Strange,’ said King.
‘Very. It accords not with all previous observations of death by drowning. I’ll be turning my thoughts to that over the next day or two, Mr King.’ Reynolds paused. ‘That’s the findings in respect of the cause of death. There are one or two other things that I can tell you. She was active sexually, but there were no semen traces on the vaginal swab so she hadn’t slept with anyone for a day or two prior to death.’
‘The sex act was not significant in her death?’
‘No. She wasn’t murdered by someone who had just raped her, for example.’
King picked up his pen and scribbled.
‘She had not been eating. Her stomach contained no food at all and the state of her body indicated that her body was beginning to feed on itself.’
‘Starvation?’
‘In a word, yes. The fat deposits had been consumed by the body. That can be replaced, but the tissue in the muscles had begun to deteriorate. The body was beginning to eat its own protein. That sort of damage can’t be remedied. Starvation, as you say.’
‘Could you guess as to the time lapse between last meal and exhaustion of the fat supply?’
‘Four days, five.’
‘About the age of the rope bruises to the wrists and ankles.’
‘About that period,’ Reynolds conceded. ‘Now, the state of the kidneys are of interest.’
‘She’s a drinker?’
‘No. Quite the opposite. In fact she was close to renal collapse because of fluid deprivation. Not only had she had nothing to eat for four or five days before she drowned, she had had nothing to drink either.’
‘She was starving and dying of thirst?’
‘Yes. Another twenty-four hours, or forty-eight at the outside, would have finished her.’
‘She drowned in sea-water.’
‘Yes.’
‘But perhaps not at sea, as such.’
‘Your department, that one.’
‘And was then buried in a field.’
‘That’s where I met her. Again, that’s a question you and your colleagues must solve. Dreadful way to end one’s life.’
‘Or have it ended for her.’
‘Or have it ended for her.’ Reynolds glanced out of his office window at the spire of the cathedral standing out against the backdrop of a calm, balmy midsummer’s evening that was settling caringly, it seemed to him, and cossetingly, over Glasgow town. He decided that upon completion of the phone call to DC King he’d drive home, take Gustav for a walk; a walk to the hotel for a whisky, just one: a nightcap. It had been a busy day. Two cadavers. The first, a young man still in his twenties, died while walking jauntily along the pavement, his light cotton jacket slung over his shoulder. He had collapsed suddenly, no preamble, no loss of strength in his legs, one minute he was walking confident, young, healthy, the next he was prostrate with people kneeling over him anxiously or looking on with detached curiosity. A careful examination would reveal no cause for death and Reynolds had recorded a finding of ‘Sudden Death Syndrome’. Such things occur from time to time. He had thought the finding was highly unsatisfactory but it was all that the present extent of medical knowledge permitted him to record. A man walks jauntily down the street, thinking of his girl, his plans, his future, pondering a chilled lager in a chrome and velvet downtown bar, and in an instant, life is snuffed out of him; death by a means which brings no warning and which leaves no trace. Until medical science took another leap forward all that Reynolds and pathologists like him could record was S.D.S. Later he had eaten tasteless salad in the hospital canteen and had then been asked to attend a locus in Lanarkshire, a young woman in a shallow grave in a field. It transpired to have been death by drowning, but not prior to starvation and fluid deprivation and apparent unlawful custody, judging by the rope marks on the ankles and wrists of the deceased.
‘Or have it ended for her,’ he repeated.
A pause.
In his office King sat, pencil poised over notepad.
In his office Reynolds glanced about him, he found his surroundings to be untidy in a homely sort of way. Plants, files protruding from metal drawers; a window to the east, the cathedral spire catching a glow from the dying sun to the west.
‘You see—’ Reynolds pulled his thoughts back on to the tracks ‘—from a medical point of view, from what I have been able to obtain by pure scientific observation, there is only one sign here that would point to foul play and that is the state of her kidneys.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, leaving aside the matter of the unlawful disposal of the body which is a police matter, all I can say is that the cause of death was drowning and that the drowning fluid was sea-water, we may presume the Clyde estuary, but her death by drowning could be accidental. The bruising to the neck was not fatal even though it seems to be contemporary with the time of death. The rope marks to the wrists and ankles are older than the ti
me of death. On an elderly person or a child they might in themselves be sinister, but on a sexually active woman of her age they could have been caused by her voluntarily entering into a sex game that I personally wouldn’t play, but life is life and people get their pleasures in ways strange and wondrous.’ Reynolds paused and relished Richard King’s restrained chuckling. ‘The starvation. Again, this could be voluntary. She could have been convinced she was grotesquely overweight and had, as a result, entered into a anorexic state. You see, Mr King, there is nothing so far which points to murder, from a purely scientific point of view, until, that is, until we consider the state of her kidneys.’
‘People will deprive themselves of food, but never of fluid.’
‘Exactly. The human body needs fluid, but not food, not in the quantities that we in the West are given to packing away. Thirst on the other hand is, unlike hunger, increasingly painful, and associated with panic. A fear leading on to panic, a phobia, sets in if a human is deprived of fluid. I’ve experienced it; so, I’m sure, have you. I’ve downed tools in the middle of a post-mortem to get a cup of water but have happily worked on with a rumbling stomach. Thirst will prevent concentration; hunger won’t. People who have been dying of thirst will be driven to drink anything, their own urine, petrol siphoned from cars, poisoned brackish water, anything, but people have to be in an advanced state of starvation before they lose discretion to that extent. Brackish water can look good after only a few hours of fluid deprivation, but it takes days of food deprivation before rotten meat or a wriggling insect looks inviting.’
‘I see your point, sir.’ King scribbled. ‘The renal failure, near collapse, I think you said, is very significant indeed. It’s the only medical observation which indicates foul play, but even so, it didn’t kill her.’
‘That’s correct.’
A walk with Gustav, a whisky. A warm bath before bed. A quiet summer’s evening in the well-set south side. Reynolds began to itch to put the phone down just so he could pick it up again, just to tell his delectable wife, the delicious Janet, that he was sorry for having to work late but that he’d be home within half an hour or so.
‘What do you think happened, sir?’
Reynolds smiled. King was like a terrier with a bone. ‘I’d like to indulge you, Mr King, but I can only report the facts and perhaps comment on the likely cause of injuries.’
‘I won’t record it, sir. It’s just for my edification and nothing else.’
‘And my indulgence, Mr King.’ Reynolds leaned forward, anxious now to terminate the call. ‘She was, I think, held hostage for a number of days during which period she was restrained with rope. She was then drowned, probably held under water with her assailant’s hands round her neck, or holding her using the rope around her neck. She was still bound at this time because otherwise her fingers would have indications that she had clawed at something. During her captivity she was given neither food nor drink. Horrific cruelty. Her captor was a man of great evil. Go and talk to a psychiatrist, he’ll help you with a psychological profile of the person you’re after. But that’s just between you and me. Those observations won’t appear in my report.’
‘Understood, sir.’
‘Which will be typed up tomorrow morning and faxed, as I said, before lunch. To whom shall I send it?’
‘To Inspector Donoghue, please, sir.’
‘Yes, good man, Donoghue. He’ll be back tomorrow, then?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good.’
Reynolds replaced the receiver and picked it up again rapidly; so rapidly that he heard King replacing his receiver. He hadn’t severed the line. He replaced the receiver for a second time and for a second time picked it up.
‘Switchboard.’ A crisp female voice.
‘Outside line, please.’
‘Extension, please?’
Reynolds told her and then replaced the receiver. A few seconds elapsed and then the phone rang. He grabbed the receiver impatiently and listened to the soft purring of the outside line. He thought it a primitive system, symptomatic of the all but dead National Health Service. It was a procedure insisted upon by the Administration largely to prevent student nurses phoning their great-aunts in Cornwall, and justified on the risky grounds that an emergency call would not be made from the hospital. Reynolds could only hope that the Administrator would continue to be proved right. He dialled his home number, he was permitted personal local calls, and told Janet that he would be home in ‘about’ half an hour. Having told her, he then replaced the receiver a lot more gently than he had replaced it after talking to Richard King, charming and affable and efficient as Mr King might be.
King for his part had indeed thought that Reynolds had put the phone down on him a little brusquely and thought that he had heard the line clicking just as he replaced his handset. But that, he thought, is the pecking order of the professions: pathologists put the phone down on the police, the police put the phone down on social workers, and social workers put the phone down on each other.
He sat back on his chair and glanced out of the window. The sun was setting in a burning crimson sheet somewhere over Loch Lomond. Somewhere a little boy might be dead, or he might still be alive. Somewhere a mother or father, sister or brother, did not yet know the body of their missing daughter or sister had been found and in the most sinister of circumstances. And at some point the body would have to be identified. Never, ever easy. King pulled himself forward and reached for a wad of recording sheets and began to write the nuts and bolts of Dr Reynolds’s findings in a report format as reported to him on 17/7, at—he glanced at his watch—21.40 approx.
This done, he replaced the recording on the file and pondered the next move. He thought of Inspector Donoghue, a mild-mannered man, a gentleman. King had found, a man of quiet authority who held King in awe of his cold stare and raised eyebrow.
King pondered. He picked up the phone and dialled a two-figure internal number.
‘Collator.’ A crisp punctilious voice.
‘DC King. Reference a missing person.’
‘Very well, sir.’
‘A female.’ King heard the soft tapping of a computer keyboard being punched. ‘Early twenties…could you widen that to late teens…Caucasian…brown hair, eyes blue, no apparent distinguishing features…probably missing for a week now…’
‘I’ll go back to the beginning of the month, sir. I’ll have the files on any likely candidates sent up to you.’
‘I’d appreciate it.’ King replaced the phone, picked it up and then replaced it again. No. Sussock had told him that Bothwell couldn’t dust the car for prints until the morning, he had informed him of that when he had returned to the station to sign off and hand over. The car had been identified as having been stolen from the grounds of Yorkhill Hospital one week earlier. The owner had been contacted. He wanted his car back and understandably was ‘not best pleased’, as Sussock said, when told he couldn’t have it, not so soon, anyway.
King drummed his fingers on the desktop. He couldn’t proceed with the car, even it if was linked to the murder. There was still the possibility that the car’s presence at the locus was nothing other than a coincidence. He leafed through the thin but growing file on the deceased and noted that a ‘t’ had not been crossed, or an ‘i’ dotted: he consulted the file and phoned the home of the car owner.
‘He’s no in,’ said a woman’s voice; a child cried in the background, a wailing sound. An infant teething? ‘When are we going to have our car back, my man’s got a terrible journey to work and back without the car, so he has.’
‘As soon as we’ve finished with it, madam.’ King spoke soothingly. ‘Where is your husband?’
‘At his work.’
‘Which is?’
‘Springburn Depot. British Rail.’
King phoned Springburn Depot.
‘Driver Nicol? Yes, he’s working at the moment. Where? Somewhere between Queen Street and Stirling. Yes, he was on duty yesterday evening.’
‘No,’ said King, in answer to a question which he thought was more of an invasion of privacy than anything else. ‘No, there’s no problem at all. Mr Nicol is under no suspicion at all. Thank you.’ He replaced the phone and entered the call in the continuation sheet. The owner of the vehicle, Mr Nicol, was driving a locomotive between Queen Street and Stirling at the likely time of the burial of the body in a Lanarkshire field. Even if the car was connected with the murder, its owner could be eliminated from inquiries. It was something he had contributed, small negative in a sense, but neat, he felt. An ‘i’ dotted, a ‘t’ crossed.
There was a tap on the door of the CID room. King looked up. A young fresh-faced constable stood on the threshold, files in his arms. He seemed to King to be nervous, as if still finding his feet, at that stage where everything is still new. King recalled when he was like that.
‘The files,’ the young constable said. ‘The collator asked me to bring them to you, sir.’
King smiled. He held out his hands, the young constable stepped forward and handed the files to him and withdrew, nervously. King laid the files on his desk, seven in all. He began to read them, writing the names of the missing females as he came to each file, and then finding a detail or a fact that enabled him to eliminate the possibility that this one of the missing girl was the girl whose body was taken from a shallow grave earlier that day, he scored the name off the list. One girl was Asian; another had given birth by Caesarean section, something that Dr Reynolds would not have overlooked. Two had the wrong colour of hair. He was left with four possible victims, four girls, four young women who had been reported as missing over the last eleven days, all of whom were the same age group and similar overall appearances as the girl who lay in a steel drawer in the mortuary of the GRI.
In each file was a photograph of the missing person, with the name of the missing person written on the rear of the photograph in a neat hand. King took each photograph and placed it in a brown paper envelope and sat back in his chair. The next step could take the inquiry forward most handsomely, but it was a step he found himself reluctant to take. If one of the photographs was that of the deceased, then one of the missing persons was dead, one family could give up hope and start to grieve. One family would have a knock on the door, perhaps close to midnight, be asked to accompany the police to the mortuary. Then he sat forward. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said to himself. So loud that his voice echoed in the empty room, but none the less he said it to himself.
Long Day Monday Page 6