The Chemistry of Death dh-1

by Simon Beckett

  Thrust into them, giving the body the look of a fallen, decaying angel, were white swan wings.

  Set against the decaying skin, the effect was shockingly obscene. I looked at them for a while longer, then studied the body itself. Maggots spilled like rice from the wounds. Not just the two large ones on the shoulder blades but from numerous smaller gashes on the back, arms and legs. The decomposition was well advanced. Heat and humidity would have accelerated the process, and animals and insects speed it further. But each factor would have its own story to tell, each one helping to provide a timetable of how long it had lain there.

  The last three photographs were of the body after it had been turned over. There were the same small cuts on the body and limbs, and the face was a shapeless mess of splintered bone. Below it the exposed cartilage of the throat, harder and slower to decompose than the softer tissue that had covered it, gaped wide where it had been slashed open. I thought about Bess, Sally's Border collie. The dog's throat had also been cut. I went through the photographs one more time. When I found myself looking for anything recognizable about the body, I put the photographs down. I was still sitting there when a rap sounded on the door.

  It was Henry. 'Janice told me the police had been. Locals been buggering the livestock again?'

  'It was just about yesterday.'

  'Ah.' He sobered. 'Any problem?'

  'Not really.'

  Which wasn't really the truth. I felt uncomfortable keeping anything from Henry, but I hadn't gone into all the details about my background. While he knew I'd been an anthropologist, it was a broad enough field to cover any number of sins. The forensic aspect of my work, and my involvement in police investigations, I'd kept to myself. It hadn't been something I'd wanted to talk about.

  It still wasn't.

  His eyes went to the photographs lying on the desk. He was too far away to make out any detail, but I felt as though I'd been caught out, all the same. He raised his eyebrows as I put them back in the envelope.

  'Can we talk about it later?' I said.

  'Of course. I didn't mean to pry.'

  'You weren't. It's just… there are a few things I need to think about right now.'

  'Are you OK? You seem a little… preoccupied.'

  'No, I'm fine.'

  He nodded, but the look of concern didn't fade. 'How about taking the dinghy out some time? Bit of exercise will do us both good.'

  Although he needed help getting in and out of the boat, Henry's disability didn't prevent him from rowing or sailing once he was on board. 'You're on. But give me a few days.'

  I could tell he wanted to ask more, but thought better of it. He wheeled himself back to the door. 'Just say the word. You know where I am.'

  When he'd gone I sat back in the chair and closed my eyes. I didn't want this. But then, nobody did. Least of all the dead woman. I thought about the pictures I'd just seen, and realized that, like her, I didn't have a choice.

  Mackenzie had left his card with the photographs. But I couldn't reach him on either his office number or mobile. I left messages to call me on both and hung up. I couldn't say I felt better for reaching a decision, but some of the weight seemed to lift from me.

  After that, there were the morning's visits to do. Only two, and neither was serious; a child with mumps, and a bedridden elderly man who was refusing to eat. By the time I'd finished it was lunchtime. I was on my way back, debating whether to go home or to the pub, when my phone rang.

  I grabbed it, but it was only Janice to tell me that the school had called. They were worried about Sam Yates, and could I go to see him? I said I would. I was glad to do something constructive while I waited for Mackenzie to call.

  Back in Manham, the presence of police officers on the streets was a sobering reminder of what had happened. Their uniforms were a stark contrast to the gaiety of the flowers brightening the churchyard and green, and there was a sense of muted but unmistakable excitement about the village. But the school, at least, seemed normal. Although the older children had to travel five miles to the nearest comprehensive, Manham still had its own small primary school. A former chapel, its playground was colour-fully noisy in the bright sunshine. This was the last week of term before the long summer holiday, and the knowledge seemed to give an extra edge to the usual lunchtime hysteria. A little girl bounced off my legs as she dodged another who was chasing her. Giggling, they ran off, so preoccupied in their game that they barely noticed my presence.

  I felt the familiar hollowness as I went into the school office. Betty, the secretary, gave me a bright smile as I knocked on the open door.

  'Hello, there. You here to see Sam?'

  She was a tiny, warm-faced woman who'd lived in the village all her life. Never married, she lived with her brother and treated the schoolchildren as her extended family.

  'How is he?' I asked. She wrinkled her nose.

  'Bit upset. He's next door in the sick bay. Just go straight in.'

  'Sick bay' was a rather grand title for what was in effect a small room with a sink, a couch and a first-aid cabinet. Sam was sitting on the couch, head down and feet dangling. He looked peaky and close to tears.

  A young woman was sitting next to him, talking in soothing tones as she showed him a book. She broke off, looking relieved when I walked in.

  'Hi, I'm Dr Hunter,' I said to her, then gave the boy a smile. 'How you doing, Sam?'

  'He's a bit tired,' the young woman answered for him. 'Apparently he had bad dreams last night. Didn't you, Sam?'

  She sounded matter-of-fact, calm without seeming condescending. I guessed she was his teacher, but I hadn't seen her before and her accent was too slight for her to be local. Sam had dropped his chin onto his chest. I squatted down so I was on his eye level.

  'That right, Sam? What sort of nightmares?' After seeing the photographs, I could guess. He kept his head down, saying nothing. 'OK, let's take a look at you.'

  I didn't expect there to be anything physically wrong with him, and there wasn't. Temperature a little high, perhaps, but that was all. I ruffled his hair as I stood up.

  'Strong as an ox. Will you be OK while I have a word with your teacher?'

  'No!' he said, panicked.

  She gave him a reassuring smile. 'It's all right, we'll be right outside. I'll even leave the door open, and then I'll come right back.

  OK?'

  She gave him the book. After a second he took it, sullenly. I followed her into the corridor. She left the door ajar, as promised, but stood far enough away so we were out of earshot.

  'Sorry you had to come out. I didn't know what else to do,' she said in a low voice. 'He got completely hysterical earlier. Not like him at all.'

  I thought again about the photographs. 'I suppose you've heard about what happened yesterday?'

  She grimaced. 'Everybody's heard. That's the trouble. All the other kids wanted to hear about it. It just got too much for him.'

  'Have you sent for his parents?'

  'Tried to. Can't get hold of them at any of the contact numbers we have.' She shrugged, apologetically. 'That's why I thought we'd better send for you. I was really worried about him.'

  I could see she meant it. I'd have put her in her late twenties or early thirties. Her short-cropped blond hair looked natural, but it was several shades lighter than the dark eyebrows that, at the moment, held an anxious crease. Her face was lightly dusted with freckles, brought out by a faint tan.

  'He's had a bad shock. It might take him a while to get over it,' I said.

  'Poor Sam. Just when he's got the school holidays coming up as well.' She glanced towards the open door. 'Do you think he's going to need counselling?'

  I'd been wondering that myself. If he was no better in a day or two then I'd have to refer him. But I'd been down that route myself, and knew that sometimes picking at a wound only made it bleed all the more. Not a fashionable view, perhaps, but I'd rather give Sam a chance to recover by himself.

  'Let's see how he goes. B
y the end of the week he might be up and running again.'

  'I hope so.'

  'I think the best thing for now is to get him home,' I told her. 'Have you tried his brother's school? They might know how to get in touch with their parents.'

  'No. No-one thought of that.' She looked annoyed with herself.

  'Can someone stay with him till they get here?'

  'I will. I'll get someone to cover my class.' Her eyes widened. 'Oh, sorry, I should have said! I'm his teacher!'

  I smiled. 'I sort of guessed that.'

  'God, I've not introduced myself at all, have I?' A blush made her freckles more prominent. 'Jenny. Jenny Hammond.'

  She held out her hand, self-consciously. It was warm and dry. I remembered hearing that a new teacher had started earlier that year, but this was the first I'd seen of her. Or so I thought.

  'I've seen you in the Lamb once or twice, I think,' she said.

  'That's more than possible. The night-life's a bit limited around here.'

  She grinned. 'I noticed. Still, that's why you come somewhere like this, isn't it? Get away from it all.' My face must have registered something. 'Sorry, you don't sound local, so I thought…'

  'It's all right, I'm not.'

  She looked only slightly relieved. 'I'd better get back to Sam, anyway.'

  I went back in with her to say goodbye to him and make sure he didn't need a sedative. I would check on him that evening, tell his mother to keep him off school for a few more days, until the raw memory of what he'd seen had sufficiently scabbed over to resist the pokings of his schoolmates.

  I was back at the Land Rover when my phone rang. This time it was Mackenzie.

  'You left a message,' he said, bluntly.

  I spoke in a rush, in a hurry to get rid of the words. 'I'll help you identify the body. But that's all. I'm not going to get involved beyond that, OK?'

  'Whatever you like.' He didn't sound exactly gracious, but then neither was my offer. 'So how do you want to play it?'

  'I need to see where they found the body.'

  'It's already been taken to the mortuary, but I can meet you there in an hour-'

  'No, I don't want to see the body itself. Just where it was found.'

  I could feel his exasperation down the line. 'Why? What good's that going to do?'

  My mouth was dry. 'I'm going to look for leaves.'

  6

  The heron drifted lazily above the marsh, sliding across the gelid air. It looked too big to be able to stay aloft, a giant compared to the smaller waterfowl its shadow passed over. Angling its wings, it banked down towards the lake, giving two breaking flaps as it landed. With an arrogant shake of its head it picked its way deliberately across the shallows before standing immobile, a fossilized statue on its reed-thin legs.

  I turned reluctantly away from it as I heard Mackenzie approach. 'Here,' he said, holding out a sealed plastic bag. 'Put these on.'

  I took the white paper overalls from the bag and stepped into them, careful not to rip the flimsy fabric as I tugged them over shoes and trousers. As soon as I zipped them up I could feel myself beginning to sweat. The humid discomfort was disturbingly familiar.

  It was like stepping back in time.

  I'd been unable to shake a sense of deja vu ever since I'd met Mackenzie at the same stretch of road where I'd brought the two policemen the day before. Now it was lined with police cars and the big trailers that functioned as mobile incident rooms. After I'd put on the overalls and paper shoes, we walked in silence on the track across the marsh, our route marked by parallel ribbons of police tape. I knew he wanted to ask what I was planning to do, knew also that he thought it was a sign of weakness to let me see his curiosity. But I wasn't holding back out of any misplaced desire to play power games. I was just putting off the moment when I'd have to face up to why I was here.

  The area where the body had been found was cordoned off with more tape. Inside it crime scene investigators swarmed over the grass, anonymous and identical in their white overalls. The sight brought another unwelcome jolt of memory.

  'Where's the bloody Vicks?' Mackenzie asked no-one in particular.

  A woman held out a jar of vapour rub. He put a smear under his nose and offered it to me.

  'It's still a bit ripe in there even though the body's gone.'

  There had been a time when I was so used to the smells inherent in my work I no longer worried about them. But that was then. I daubed the menthol-smelling Vicks on my top lip and wriggled my hands into a pair of surgical rubber gloves.

  'There's a mask if you want it,' Mackenzie said. I shook my head automatically. I'd never liked wearing masks unless I had to. 'Come on then.'

  He ducked under the tape. I followed him. The officers on the crime scene team were combing the ground inside. A few small markers stuck into the earth indicated where potential trace evidence had been found. I knew most would turn out to be irrelevant – sweet wrappers, cigarette ends and fragments of animal bone that would have nothing to do with what they were looking for. But at this stage they had no idea what was important and what wasn't. Everything would be bagged and taken away for examination.

  We received one or two curious glances, but my attention was on the patch of ground in the centre. The grass here was blackened and dead, almost as if there had been a fire. But it wasn't heat that had killed it. And now something else was noticeable: an unmistakable smell that cut through even the concealing smear of menthol.

  Mackenzie flipped a mint into his mouth, put the packet away without offering it. 'This is Dr Hunter,' he told the other officers, teeth cracking the sweet. 'He's a forensic anthropologist. He's going to help us try to identify the body.'

  'Well, he's going to have to try harder than this,' one of them said. 'It isn't here.'

  There was laughter. This was their job, and they resented anyone else encroaching on it. Especially a civilian. It was an attitude I'd encountered before.

  'Dr Hunter's here at the request of Detective Superintendent Ryan. You'll obviously give him any assistance he needs.' There was an edge to Mackenzie's voice. I could see from the suddenly closed faces that it hadn't been well received. It didn't bother me. I was already crouching down by the patch of dead grass.

  It held the vague shape of the body that had been lying on it, a silhouette of rot. A few maggots still squirmed, and white feathers were scattered like snowfall on the black and flattened stalks.

  I examined one of the feathers. 'Were the wings definitely from a swan?'

  'We think so,' one of the crime scene officers said. 'We've sent them to an ornithologist to find out.'

  'How about soil samples?'

  'Already at the lab.'

  The iron content of the soil could be checked to see how much blood it had absorbed. If the victim's throat had been cut where the body was found, the iron content would be high; if not, then either the wound had been made after she was dead, or she'd been killed somewhere else and her body dumped here later.

  'What about insects?' I asked.

  'We have done this before, you know.'

  'I know. I'm just trying to find out how far you've got.'

  He gave an exaggerated sigh. 'Yes, we've taken insect samples.'

  'What did you find?'

  'They're called maggots.'

  It raised a few snorts. I looked at him.

  'What about pupae?'

  'What about them?'

  'What colour were they? Pale? Dark? Were there empty shells?'

  He just blinked at me, sullenly. There was no laughter now.

  'How about beetles? Were there many on the body?'

  He stared at me as though I were mad. 'This is a murder inquiry, not a school biology project!'

  He was one of the old school. The new breed of crime scene investigators were keen to learn new techniques, open to any knowledge that might help them. But there were still a few who were resistant to anything that didn't fit into their proscribed experience. I'd come across t
hem every now and again. It seemed there were still some around.

  I turned to Mackenzie. 'Different insects have different life-cycles. The larvae here are mainly blowfly. Bluebottles and greenbottles. With the open wounds on the body we can expect insects to have been attracted straight away. They'll have started laying eggs within an hour if it was daylight.'

  I poked about in the soil and picked up an unmoving maggot. I held it out on my palm. 'This is about to pupate. The older they are the darker they get. By the look of this I'd say it was seven or eight days old. I can't see any husk fragments lying about, which mean no pupae have hatched yet. The blowfly's full life-cycle takes fourteen days, so that suggests the body hasn't been here that long.'

  I dropped the pupa back into the grass. The other officers had stopped work to listen now.

  'OK, so from basic insect activity you're looking at a preliminary time-since-death interval of between one and two weeks. I take it you know what this stuff here is?' I asked, indicating the traces of yellow-white substance clinging to some of the grass.

  'It's a by-product of decomposition,' the crime scene officer said, stiffly.

  'That's right,' I said. 'It's called adipocere. Grave wax, as it used to be known. It's basically soap formed from the body's fatty acids as the muscle proteins break down. That makes the soil highly alkaline, which is what kills the grass. And if you look at this white stuff you'll see it's brittle and crumbly. That suggests a fairly rapid decomposition, because if it's slow the adipocere tends to be softer. Which fits in with what you'd expect for a body lying outdoors in hot weather, and with a lot of open wounds for bacteria to invade. Even so, there isn't much of it yet, which again fits with a time-since-death of less than two weeks.'

  There was silence. 'How much less?' Mackenzie asked, breaking it.