‘Vomit?’ Dougie asked.
Iain waved at the pair to let them know he was ready. Harriet showed the photographer where they kept the wellies, then how to step over the half wall blocking the doorway to the autopsy suite. On the other side was a basin on the floor filled with disinfecting solution for them to walk through.
Dougie watched Harriet roll a disposable plastic apron off a spool and tie it over her scrubs, then motion for him to do the same. ‘Does everyone vomit?’
‘Either that or they faint,’ Iain said. ‘If you don’t do either then you’re a sociopath.’
‘Great,’ Dougie said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small container of mentholated chest rub to ward against a wave of stench.
Iain spotted the snapper about to dab some of the gel under his nose. ‘Och, you don’t want to be doing that,’ he said. ‘That’s a myth. It doesn’t help with the smell.’ Dougie looked at him doubtfully. ‘Makes it worse,’ Iain nodded. ‘Instead of getting delightful overtones of corpse à la carte, you’re now getting full on corpse plus noxious top notes of pine cleaner. You’ll wantae boak in no time.’ Iain stared hard until Dougie pocketed the chest rub.
‘Not what you thought it would be is it?’ The kid shook his head. ‘Nah,’ Iain said, half to Dougie and half to himself. He had seen enough trainee police and university students wander through, especially in the last ten years or so, hoping for something more technological, more glamorous than the reality the mortuary offered. ‘Not like the television is it. Too bright in here,’ he said, indicating the tube lights suspended across the length of the room. He gestured at his own faded scrubs and plastic apron. ‘And none of the fit emo lasses they tell you work in all the morgues.’
Dougie laughed in spite of his churning stomach. ‘No, I guess not.’
Nothing had changed at the Cameron Bridge morgue in all the time that Iain had worked there. There was no need for change. People died the same ways they always had and were autopsied in the same way it always happened. If there was lab work they sent it to the police or to a university.
Iain popped a fresh CD in the boom box and hit play. Screeching guitars and an apocalypse of drums blasted through the morgue.
‘Iain, do you mind?’ Harriet scowled. ‘We have a guest.’ She smiled at Dougie as if to apologise. ‘If it gets too much, I keep earplugs in the changing room,’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ Iain said and turned the volume down a notch.
Dougie picked up the CD case and looked at the illustration, a photo from what appeared to be the scene of a death. ‘That was a belter,’ Iain said. ‘Rescue helicopter snagged the bloke on a tree and had to cut the line or else the Sea King would have crashed with six crew on board.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
Iain nodded. ‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘Or it might be more accurate to say gravity is the fella responsible.’ He pointed at the picture with one gloved finger. ‘The body bounced twice on the way down and landed next to Scouts on a camping trip. I don’t know about them, but if a man fell out of the sky and landed in the middle of my campfire, Jesus is probably the last person I would be calling on.’
The photographer gulped again. ‘Isn’t this a little disrespectful?’ he said.
‘Disrespectful,’ Iain considered this. He watched the young man’s eyes dart from spot to spot in the morgue, unsure where to land, as if looking at anything too long might be contagious. The stainless steel counters with autoclaved instruments lined up ready for the autopsy; the worn and chipped lino on the floor; the rolls of cotton batting, the stereo blasting music. It didn’t add up, he would be thinking, as they all did. What about respect? What about dignity? But there is no dignity in death, only the end, and what gets done for the living.
Iain shrugged at the young photographer. ‘Depends on your definition of respect, I suppose.’ He turned to Harriet. ‘Speaking of which, Professor Hitchin?’
‘Doctor,’ she corrected him.
‘Right, doctor. Not professor. My mistake. So, I was listening to the news and it seems like someone let slip to the press that our friend here was found in a bag.’
Harriet’s frown seemed exaggerated, for show. ‘Oh? Is that a problem?’
‘It just occurs to me possibly the police would have wanted to hold that back,’ he said.
Harriet nodded, but didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Someone should really have a word with those Coast Guard boys,’ she said. ‘They won’t know how we normally do things around here.’
Iain nodded sceptically. ‘No, probably not. I’m sure whoever it was won’t do it again.’
‘What’s the deal with the press?’ Dougie said.
‘In a word?’ Iain said. ‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’ The young man looked confused.
‘Don’t talk to them. It’s always bad news. Best to say nothing at all, even if they get it wrong. Especially in your job. The police have media advisors. Let them handle how and when information is released. We’re just here to do a job,’ he said, and looked pointedly at Harriet. ‘Not seek attention for ourselves.’
Harriet shifted nervously from one foot to the other. ‘Gents? Please? Can we get on with this?’ She didn’t like to spend more time in the suite than she had to.
‘Sorry,’ Iain said.
‘So we’re looking for an ID here – who is this man,’ Harriet stated matter-of-factly. ‘Then it’s how did he die. And then: can we say how long he’s been dead.’
Iain rubbed his gloved finger over the darkened fabric of the sports bag to reveal some kind of pattern showing through. He moistened a wad of gauze and wiped it across the surface, revealing a Union Jack print. ‘So possibly not a local, then,’ he said. ‘Or at least not one on the right side of the independence debate.’
‘Iain, give it a rest,’ Harriet rolled her eyes. ‘The referendum is old news.’
‘Maybe to you,’ he said.
‘Could the bag itself lead to someone?’ Dougie asked.
‘Might do,’ Iain said. ‘I like your instinct.’ He cut through the seams of the bag, careful not to nick any of the dead man’s flesh. ‘But could also be the kind of tat you might buy at any souvenir shop in England.’ A puddle of fetid liquid pooled from the bag, some of it seawater, some of it brown purge fluid from the body itself.
Slowly the thick canvas fabric was peeled away from the skin. Iain’s crablike hands moved over the surfaces gently, with great skill. In some places the skin and fabric seemed almost fused, like soft cheese stuck in a sieve. It took him half an hour to arrange what was left of the corpse onto the slab, lying on its side.
Anyone who knew the man in life would have been hard pressed to recognise him now. Even freed from the bag the body was still wrenched into unnatural angles, the legs folded up against his chest, the arms twisted behind his back. The skin had started slipping away from the underlying tissues like a badly fitting suit of clothes. Large sections of the body bore the impression of the inside of the bag, its seams and the zip. The colour of his flesh varied from waxy pale to purple-red. The bag hadn’t stayed completely closed, at least not near the end of the aquatic journey, and his eyelids and lips had been eaten away by insects and fish. Something had chewed away the flesh of his penis.
The dead man’s eye sockets and lipless grimace looked out at the room like a caricature of someone laughing. But with no cock, no eyelids and no lips, this fellow’s laughing days were over.
‘Fuck,’ Dougie repeated weakly. ‘How long do you think he was in?’
Harriet wrinkled her nose. ‘Difficult to say.’ She had no fondness for any case she couldn’t swan in and out of. ‘He probably stayed down for some time, then the gases built up until the bag floated.’
‘Weeks,’ Iain said. ‘This early in the year, when the water is cold? Let’s say a month or six weeks, if we were taking bets.’
‘Waxy,’ Iain said, his gloved finger passing over the body’s midsection. ‘Bit like a candle?’ Dougie nodded. ‘That’s because he is, or would have been if he had been under the water much longer. You see here, these spots around the fat of his belly where it’s smooth and pale? This is adipocere. Grave wax, they used to call it. The chemistry is complex, but in short this man was starting to turn into soap. Happens when the body isn’t exposed to air. Only a little bit now, but give it another year or so and most of his soft tissue would have turned into this.’
Iain whistled low as he looked more closely at the corpse. ‘It gets better,’ he said. ‘Or worse, if you’re this poor sod.’ Whoever had put the body in the bag had trussed the man up first. Iain gestured to Dougie to come over and indicated where the hands had been tied behind the back. ‘What’s this – some kind of jewellery?’ Iain asked.
‘Looks that way,’ Harriet said. The photographer leaned in and started snapping away.
‘Well, what do we have here,’ he said and held the object up to the light. It was a braided length of leather with metal ornaments – possibly silver, though tarnished and mottled. ‘Some kind of jewellery,’ he said. ‘That is probably more use to us than wherever the bag came from.’
‘Did that happen . . . I mean, do you think he was tied up before . . . or after?’ Dougie said.
‘You mean was he tortured?’ Iain thought for a moment. ‘Could have been. Difficult to tell in this state.’ Evidence of struggle might indicate that, if they were able to find defensive wounds on the body. Or if there were other signs, like broken bones that had happened perimortem – around the time of death. Damage to internal organs might be a clue – ruptured kidneys or liver sometimes pointed to extreme beating. But all of that would depend on what survived the decomposition.
Iain arranged the freed arms in a more natural position now. The wrists were marked from where they had been tied. The skin had come away from the flesh underneath, making it look as if the man was wearing a pair of thick latex gloves. ‘That’s his skin,’ Iain said. ‘Fingerprinting not impossible, but a chore.’
‘How’d you do that, then?’ Dougie asked. His eyes were narrowed, as if he was trying to let as little of what he was seeing in as possible.
‘Couple of ways,’ Iain said. ‘You need to fill out where it’s gone slack to pick up the fingerprint ridges.’ They sometimes had luck injecting the slipped skin with saline. ‘Or we might be able to peel it off and stick it on Alastair’s hand like a glove.’ He laughed, his teeth bared; they were like crooked tombstones in an old cemetery ground. The photographer looked like he wished he never asked.
According to MacLean, the people who had found the body were camping out on the north end of Raasay when it was discovered. Some English couple up on a holiday. The woman was fine but the man was a shattered wreck after seeing it. ‘Going tae cost us a fortune in Victim Support,’ Alastair had grumbled, as if police budgetary concerns were more important than a potential murder investigation.
Harriet read over the notes from the scene and the interview with the couple. Not much information there – two kayakers, no other witnesses to the discovery. The bag was caught on the underside of a boat when they came to shore. The woman had a forensic science degree, so knew not to move or touch anything, and radioed for help straightaway. Unless it was some elaborate double bluff, they probably had nothing to do with it. She noted that no one had thought to take DNA samples from them anyway. One more thing to follow up on later . . .
‘Race?’ she asked Iain.
‘Mmm, probably white, but let’s wait and see,’ Iain said. He caught the photographer’s curious look. ‘This far along, the skin can do all sorts of things. And what time doesn’t do, water will. I’ve seen black men bleached white and white people so far gone you’d swear they were from Africa. Until we have an ID, no way to know, but judging on his features and where we are, probably white.’
Iain plucked a nail clipper from the rack of sterilised instruments and picked up one of the dead man’s hands. He carefully trimmed the middle three nails and put the clippings in a plastic envelope, then chucked it at the kid. ‘Make sure Alastair logs that and gets it to the lab,’ he said.
‘Bet you twenty pence you get nothing off those,’ Harriet said. ‘The guy was in the water for weeks. Any genetic evidence is long gone.’
‘Twenty pence? You’re on,’ Iain said. He turned to the kid and winked. ‘You never know what you might turn up. There was one time, we had a ten-year-old pit of burned bone shards in Cerska—’
‘Iain, no one’s interested in hearing your RNA extraction story again,’ Harriet sighed. ‘That was ages ago.’ She turned to the photographer. ‘The way he goes on you would think he judged the tribunal himself.’
Iain tipped the corpse’s head back on a plastic block. ‘Get some pictures of his wallies,’ he said, and pointed to the teeth, exposed from the absence of lips. The teeth were big and square and mostly straight. Iain pulled gently down on the mandible and peered inside. No obvious fillings, no denture. ‘Not much to go on here,’ he said to Harriet, who nodded. ‘Dental records probably won’t help much.’
Harriet Hitchin frowned at the body. ‘So, apart from the bag I don’t see anything that absolutely excludes the possibility that the death was natural or self-inflicted . . .’ she said.
Iain raised his eyebrows. ‘You mean apart from the tie on his hands?’
Harriet glanced at it. ‘Could have been an autoerotic accident,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen more extreme.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ he said. ‘But in a bag?’
‘Remember that spy?’ Harriet said. ‘The one who zipped himself in a locked suitcase in the bath? This guy isn’t even locked in.’
‘Aye, sure. But I’m betting that fellow didn’t also have a cut neck,’ Iain said.
‘What cut neck?’
Iain ran his finger across the stiff’s chin, brushing where a deep gouge spanned the neck from ear to ear. The edges were nibbled just as the lips and eyelids had been, but it was clearly a cut made by a knife. The photographer raised the camera to his face and started snapping.
Iain smirked at the doctor. ‘See? Even the kid can see the cut,’ he said. ‘First day and all.’
‘Uh, well,’ Harriet said. ‘Hard to tell when decomp sets in.’
‘The body’s in bad shape, but not that bad,’ Iain said.
‘It could still be self-inflicted,’ she said.
Iain shook his head. ‘Man ties himself up, cuts his own throat, then zips himself in a bag and throws himself in the sea. Possible? Sure. Likely? Nae chance.’
Harriet crossed her arms. ‘Iain, who’s the pathologist again?’
‘You are, Professor,’ Iain said. She wasn’t a professor any more, not after an inquiry into poor record keeping in Leeds threw her expert witness statements into question. It hadn’t been enough for her to lose her license, but her career would never recover. If she went back to England, it was unlikely the Home Office would have her as one of their pathologists again.
‘It’s Doctor, please,’ she corrected.
‘Of course, Doctor,’ Iain said, and smiled. He hadn’t forgotten. Her reputation for sloppy work preceded her, and even if it hadn’t, a simple Internet search would have revealed it. Harriet Hitchin never spotted the windup. Nae sense of humour.
‘Right, enough of what we can see; now let’s get to what we can’t see. Will you open up?’ she asked.
Iain nodded. The pathologist was meant to do this part but he didn’t mind getting on with it. First he made a y-shaped cut below the neck and down the chest. He loosened the skin and fat from the abdomen by wiggling his finger underneath; the layers separated from the muscle easily. There was no need for the rib shears today. The sternum and fronts of the ribs, s
ofter than they would have been in a fresh body, came away easily using a bread knife.
Iain’s tattooed arms sunk in the opening he had created and freed the organs. He kept a large PM-40 scalpel handy to loosen the connective tissues, but it was unnecessary and they pulled free with ease. Even so, the organs were in better shape than he expected – from the cold water, probably. He took out the heart and lungs together, then the liver, stomach and kidneys in another block. It all went into a washing-up basin.
He went back to the body and prised the skin of the neck away from the muscles, slowly and carefully excising the trachea and tongue. The cause of death was clear: the deep and fatal cuts to the throat. Iain put a white plastic ruler for scale next to the cuts. He guided Dougie to the shredded trachea to make sure there was a photographic record of the damage that had gone deep into the tissue.
‘Oh, now that’s interesting . . .’ Iain wormed his little finger under a thin arch of bone.
‘What’s that?’ Dougie’s voice grew high and thin. Iain hid a smirk. He knew the tone of voice well; by his estimation they would be mopping up vomit or peeling the newbie off the floor in five minutes’ time, ten at most.
‘The hyoid bone,’ Iain said. ‘It didn’t look fractured at first, but it is.’
‘Which means what?’
‘Well,’ Iain crossed his arms over his aproned chest, seemingly unaware of the brown fluid dripping off his gloves over his front, ‘we often see them broken in strangulations. So, this could be a strangulation gone wrong.’
‘Could be. Or . . . ?’ Dougie gulped.
‘Or, it could have happened when whoever was getting rid of the body stuffed him into the bag. Tough to tell either way.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘It’s a thin bone, and the fracture point is pretty high in post-mortems where violence is involved,’ he said. ‘Not being connected to anything makes it more vulnerable to breaking.’
The Turning Tide Page 5