by Mike Craven
Wait until the bone saw buzzes into life and the top of the head comes off.
In those situations, people sometimes gave up and left. Fluke had experienced it, the embarrassed pause while the person walked out. It shouldn’t be, but it was a walk of shame. She appeared determined to stay, however. She was making notes, pages of them, by the look of it. Sowerby had let her have a look at the body before he started with the external examination, and she’d stated there were no signs of insect activity. Fluke would give her a call the next day, find out how she was and what ‘no insect activity’ meant in her world. He suspected it meant that the victim had been either stuffed in the bag immediately or it had been too cold. It was probably both.
Sowerby glanced up, saw where Fluke was looking and gave him a slight nod of approval.
He bent back down. ‘Gotcha,’ he said quietly. ‘Avison, come over here and have a look.’
Fluke bent over to see what he was pointing at.
‘Shit,’ he said. The room seemed to get colder.
The bullet hole was in the back of her skull; partially covered by hair but still visible. There was some surrounding blood on the wound which had clotted and was almost black.
‘There is a hole in the occipital bone,’ Sowerby said for the recorder. ‘Possible GSW. Photographs, please.’
The technician moved round with his camera.
Fluke knew Sowerby would say nothing definite until he had cold, hard facts to support it but they all knew; she’d been shot.
Execution style, he thought.
A bullet hole ruled out someone covering up an accidental death. It had been a long shot anyway. FMIT officially had what Fluke had known since midday; a murder to investigate.
Fluke also knew that the bullet hole could reveal a lot more than simply the cause of death. It could reveal the manner by which it was inflicted. It was covered on the SIO course, one of those modules that was fascinating and disturbing at the same time.
Bullets entering from an angle leave an oval-shaped entrance wound. When the gun is held against the body, the wound will be round and have burn marks from the muzzle flame. Short-range shots will leave powder residue tattooed into the skin. Longer-range shots will leave no burns or powder but the hole will be smaller than the bullet calibre, due to the skin’s elastic properties. When a gun is pressed against bone and fired, the bone slows the gasses down, forcing them backwards against the skin leaving a star-shaped wound.
Despite the dry blood and hair, the bullet hole was clearly star-shaped.
It was also a small hole.
This wound meant only one thing, Fluke thought. A small calibre gun pressed against the back of his victim’s head and fired. Not enough power to go straight through the head or they would have seen the exit wound. The bullet would have bounced round the inside of the skull, shredding the brain. Haemorrhaging the eyes.
A professional killer’s weapon.
A professional killer’s technique.
No noise, no mess, no chance of survival.
After Sowerby had carefully shaved the surrounding area and measured and photographed the wound, he shouted across to the technician, ‘Are those X-rays ready yet, boy?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Get them on the damned light board, man. Stop wasting time.’
The technician ignored the fact he’d been shouted at unfairly and put up the slide of the head.
There was no bullet.
‘I don’t understand,’ Lucy said frowning and craning forward. ‘It must be in there.’
‘Bullets don’t follow straight lines. It could be anywhere. Get the next slide up,’ Sowerby said.
‘Saw someone shot in the knee in Somalia, once. Bullet came out his arse. Funny as fuck,’ Towler said to no one in particular.
‘Sergeant Towler,’ Fluke said.
‘Boss?’
‘Shut it.’
Towler grinned and winked at Lucy but didn’t say anything more.
They found it on the third plate. In the abdomen.
‘There you go, Lucy. Bullet’s probably bounced off the inside of the skull, through the roof of the mouth, down the oesophagus into the stomach and into the duodenum. We’ll get it later,’ Sowerby said.
Despite the spree killer Derek Bird skewing their statistics, Cumbria saw very little crime involving firearms. For Sowerby, who covered Manchester and Liverpool as well as Cumbria, it was routine. ‘Right, let’s get back to it,’ he said.
After the external examination was completed, it was time for the internal. The body was turned back over, the head raised by a body block. Sowerby was going against standard routine and starting at the head rather than the body cavity. He had a probable cause of death and would move quickly to confirm it. He knew Fluke could use the extra time the shortcut would give him.
Fluke was sure he knew what the COD and MOD would be. Cause of death would be the brain injury; manner of death would be a gunshot wound. It was more than they had that morning, although it raised more questions than it answered.
Sowerby picked up a scalpel and made an incision behind one ear, cutting across the top of the head to behind the other ear. As if the victim had been wearing a face mask, he peeled the skin away from the skull in two directions. The front was pulled down, exposing the top of the skull and the face, the other he pulled back, exposing the rear. The skull was bloody but bare.
Fluke knew that Sowerby would remove a wedge-shaped section of the skull to get access to the brain. He turned away not wanting to watch. Once was enough for anyone. He found he didn’t want to stay anymore.
There was going to be some routine procedures for the next hour. He’d nip out and see if Doctor Cooper was back so he could apologise for leaving so abruptly the day before.
‘Boss?’ Towler called after him.
‘I need to see someone,’ Fluke replied, without turning.
As the Stryker saw buzzed into life, Fluke knew that the pitch would turn into a sickening shriek as it bit into bone. He sped up and was out of earshot before it happened.
Before Fluke had even left the mortuary he’d changed his mind. He wasn’t going to be in a position to have more plasma until after the PM anyway. He decided to grab a brew from Costa Coffee in the main foyer rather than have a fight with his haematologist about his disappearing act the day before.
He was in the queue and just about to place his order, when his phone rang. It was Towler. Fluke had only been out of the mortuary for five minutes. ‘We’ve found something,’ Towler said.
‘In the brain?’
‘In the golf bag,’ Towler replied.
Fluke sighed, smiled ruefully at the waiting barista and headed back towards the mortuary.
The ‘something’ was a small notebook.
‘SOCO found it in an internal pocket of the bag. There’s some other stuff, electronics mainly: a phone, a tablet and a laptop. All smashed to bits and there’s no SIM in the phone. The notebook’s empty but it looks like the top page has been torn off,’ Towler said. ‘It could have been already there, I suppose, but despite it being covered in shit, the bag looks brand new to me. If the notebook was put there by the killer then it wasn’t meant to be found.’
Fluke didn’t know if it was evidence or not but he wasn’t taking any chances. ‘Right, I want the full works. Tell the lab I’m pre-authorising all the tests they want to do. Get them there tonight. Proper chain of evidence. If there’s anything, I want to know by tomorrow at the latest, today if possible. Get uniform to drive them down.’
As Towler went off to arrange a fast-track forensic examination, Fluke turned to Sowerby who was just starting with the ‘Y’ incision.
‘Anything else, Henry?’ he asked.
‘Nothing really, Avison. We’ve taken all our external samples now: hair, pubic hair, swabs, the lot. Got prints for you as well. The brown substance under her nails looks like it may have also found its way into the turn-ups of her trousers according to your SOCO man there
. The lab will tell you if they’re the same. Can’t say what it is.’
‘Cause of death the gun shot wound then?’
‘Technically the cause of death can’t be officially determined until I’ve finished. But yes, the bullet seems to have ricocheted around the inside of the skull causing massive trauma to the brain. That’ll almost certainly be the COD. I’ll have the bullet with you in five minutes if you can wait.’
‘Here till the end bitter end, Doc,’ Fluke replied.
‘Don’t you have an appointment with Leah Cooper?’
‘What? No. Yes. How did you know?’ Fluke said, all semblance of composure gone. He looked round.
‘Don’t worry, no one heard, Avison. No, I popped into in haematology before I came down here; the professor there is an old friend of mine. Leah asked if you were the senior investigating officer.’
‘She seem angry?’
‘Not especially, not with you anyway. She told me not to keep you too long, said you had a blood test to do before the day was out. Told her it would take as long as it damn well took. She nearly tore my head off,’ he grinned.
If she wasn’t angry about the day before he may as well go and get checked now. ‘Look, this bit is going to take about two hours, am I right? I’ll go and get it over with; Towler’ll ring if anything urgent crops up.’
Sowerby didn’t look up but waved a hand to let him know it was fine.
Fluke got to the haematology ward and asked for Leah, only to be told by the staff nurse that she’d just left.
‘Okay,’ he said, relieved. ‘Can you leave a message and say I called in, as she asked. I’ll come back later.’
‘Not happening, Mr Fluke. She left clear instructions that you have to have another blood test today. Very clear instructions. I’ll take the blood and run it straight away. You can go after one of the registrars has had a look at it. Unless they say you can’t, obviously,’ she said.
‘Obviously,’ he repeated, a bit too sharply.
Two minutes later, Fluke had a doctor trying to stick a cannula in the back of his hand. The first two attempts missed.
Fluke hated cannulas. Doctors always struggled to find veins, a legacy of his treatment. On the odd occasion he was having blood taken by someone who wasn’t familiar with his medical history, he always ended up giving an explanation. The most common reason for poor veins was intravenous drug use and Fluke felt compelled to tell them his condition was due to chemotherapy, not heroin.
His hand would be stiff in the morning. It was getting to the point that every time he had his bloods taken, his hand froze up during the night. Or it could just be that I’m getting old, he thought. Today it was the turn of a small Asian doctor he’d seen around on the ward but had never spoken to, one of the multitude of junior doctors hospitals seemed to spawn.
‘Sharp scratch,’ she said, as she tried again.
Chapter 8
‘Sharp scratch.’
Fluke vividly remembered the first time he’d heard that phrase. It was at the Patterdale Ward in West Cumberland Hospital nearly two years ago. He’d thought then what an odd phrase it was, to describe a needle puncturing flesh as a scratch, and he still thought it now. And they all said it: doctors, nurses, phlebotomists, the lot. He assumed it was part of some blood-letting course. Or it could be the same as detectives picking up evidence up with pens. Monkey see, monkey do. The first doctor to say it had no idea he’d started a global phenomenon.
At the time, the only thing on Fluke’s mind had been getting out of a relationship that had run its course. Hayley, a nice woman, recently divorced and trying to rediscover her youth, but she needed someone younger. Someone who still wanted to go out Friday and Saturday nights. Fluke wasn’t that man.
She’d phoned earlier asking if they could go out and Fluke had lied, saying he wasn’t feeling well. He’d reheated the previous night’s corned beef hash and settled down in front of the TV for the night. And in truth, he’d been feeling a bit unwell; a sore stomach that had been bothering him for some time. Not enough for painkillers, but enough for him to go and see his GP.
But she’d called his bluff and turned up anyway. She took one look and called the emergency doctor’s number. Fluke would never know whether she’d been trying to make a point or she genuinely thought he looked ill. He’d been using the ‘too ill’ excuse more and more to get out of things.
Whatever her real motivation, he’d been given an immediate appointment. Despite living in Carlisle, the out-of-hours appointment was thirty-five miles away at the old Workington Hospital. Trapped in his own lie, he’d no choice but to play along and attend. She’d even driven him there.
Lying on a bed in a ward that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Hammer Horror film, Fluke had been expecting the standard ‘I can’t find anything, see your GP if it persists’, medical terminology for ‘fuck off and stop wasting our time’.
That wasn’t what was in Fluke’s immediate future, however – the doctor found something. And he hadn’t had to look too hard either. His lower right abdomen was as hard as iron. When he felt it, he was amazed he hadn’t noticed it himself. Looking back he remembered small things though; favouring the same side when he slept, not being hungry, heartburn.
Small things, big problems.
Admitted to hospital that same night, he was nil-by-mouth and subjected to a battery of tests. Ultra-sound, X-Ray, endoscopy, colonoscopy, bloods, urine, Fluke had the lot while the doctors stood round scratching their heads – they knew something was wrong but they didn’t know what.
It wasn’t solved until they rolled out the big gun. The dark mass the MRI found was obvious, even to the untrained eye. A dark mass that had insidiously wrapped itself round one of his kidneys and part of his bowel.
To Fluke’s amazement, he was then discharged, booked in for a biopsy a week later and told not to worry in the meantime. At a loss what to do, he went back to work.
A week later, he was back, signing consent forms allowing a surgeon to basically do what he felt was best if a biopsy wasn’t going to be enough when he opened him up. He confirmed to the anaesthesiologist he wasn’t allergic to anything then went into surgery.
As with any other surgery he had no idea how long he had been under, but when Fluke woke he was told he’d undergone an eight-hour operation involving two surgical teams. With the anaesthetics starting to wear off, the pain began and it was through a cocktail of painkilling medication that Fluke learned he no longer had a right kidney, part of his bowel had been cut out and that a grapefruit-sized tumour had been removed. His wound stretched from the centre of chest to his navel and had over fifty staples holding it together. It looked like an eighteen-inch crude zip.
Two days in intensive care for pain management, two weeks on the gastro ward with a group of old men, an argument with the hospital social worker which ended with her in tears after he told her to mind her own business, and he was discharged.
While waiting for the biopsy results, during one of the daily visits from the district nurse to look after the wound, he’d begun vomiting – uncontrollable vomiting that lasted for two days – nothing stayed down, not water, not the painkillers he tried to take to manage the terrible headache the dehydration was causing. The district nurse finally had enough and called an ambulance.
That’s when Doctor Leah Cooper came into his life. She introduced herself as his oncologist and that she was in charge of his treatment. A serious woman doing a serious job, she sat next to the raised bed and told him what he already knew; he had cancer. A classic case of Burkitt’s Lymphoma, she’d told him. Usually confined to the jaws of children on the African continent, it was very rare in the Western world.
At least they’d heard of it, he’d thought. Nobody wanted an illness with no name. Ah, Mr Jones, you have a bad case of Fluke’s Disease.
There was good and bad news. Because it was such an aggressive cancer, paradoxically, it was curable. The faster they grow the faster they can kill it,
Doctor Cooper told him. The bad news was that the treatment was the worst there was. There was a very real chance that it would kill him. And it had to be delivered, as an inpatient, in an isolation ward.
Fluke remembered barely batting an eyelid. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t expecting her to say, ‘Take two of these and go home.’ Cancer was a word that struck dread into even the calmest of people, yet Fluke’s reaction, she admitted much later, had surprised her.
‘Okay, now what?’ he’d said.
She’d explained that due to the complexity of the treatment, he’d have to be transferred to Newcastle, where the haematologist had a full support team of specialist registrars, house doctors and senior fellows. Cumbria just didn’t have the resources or the need for a team that size. She’d remain his consultant but the treatment would be delivered by others. She’d attend fortnightly case meetings, be consulted on his care and, if he survived, would deliver his aftercare for the next ten years.
‘So when do I go?’ he’d asked, wondering how long he’d have to tie up loose ends at work.
‘An hour. They’re expecting you by six and you’ll start your chemotherapy tonight.’
‘Hang on,’ he’d protested, before she cut him off.
‘No arguments. The tumour we removed a fortnight ago has already grown back to the size of a tennis ball. That’s why you’ve been vomiting. It’s wrapped round your small intestine.’ There was a finality to what she said next. ‘We start fighting this thing now.’
A taxi drove him the hour and a half to the Royal Victoria Infirmary, known locally as the RVI, and there he’d stayed for five months.
For five months, he’d taken everything they threw at him: chemotherapy drugs that were bright green and made his hair fall out; drugs that were light sensitive and had to be kept in a bag; drugs that ruined his nerve endings through weekly intrathecal injections into the base of his spine. Some of the drugs were so complex, they needed drugs of their own to work.