by Neil White
Laura tried to stop a smile. ‘For a big tough thing, you’re a bit of a softy.’
Pete harrumphed and walked ahead. ‘Yeah, well, whatever. You better be right on this.’
Laura didn’t respond. She was angry still, concerned about whether she would be accused of being too close to the press, but what if the photographs showed the truth, that Eric couldn’t have hanged himself? A visit to the pathologist would clear up the mystery, but she was scared of being wrong.
They turned the corner and almost bumped into Egan, who looked preoccupied and angry.
‘Everything okay, sir?’ said Laura.
He looked up, was about to say something, and then walked off, his head down.
Pete and Laura exchanged glances and raised their eyebrows.
‘Doesn’t look good,’ said Pete.
‘Maybe things worked out like I said,’ replied Laura, before they carried on down the steps.
They were in the basement of an old Victorian hospital on the way out of the town centre, just used for the maternity ward and the morgue now that the new hospital had been built. An odd mix, thought Laura, just deaths and births. A lift provided a quick route down for the corpses, but Pete wanted to walk down. The lift felt like there had been too many bad memories in it. The walls of the corridor were tiled in the same way as the stairs, but they were even more yellowed by age.
Pete went through the double doors which took him into an outer room, where the pathologists got scrubbed and ready. There was someone already in there.
‘Doctor Pratt,’ said Pete, trying too hard to be cheerful. ‘Good to see you again.’
The doctor turned round to look at Pete, but then turned straight back to the sink, where he was washing his hands and arms.
‘I’m not changing my mind,’ he said. ‘I’ve just told your inspector that.’
Laura looked at Pete quizzically but he nodded, just slight enough for her to see.
‘We’re not here for that,’ said Laura.
The doctor turned around slowly and looked down at her over his glasses.
‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ he said. His voice was rich and deep, the accent betraying an expensive education.
‘DC McGanity,’ she said. ‘I’m working on the Jess Goldie murder, and we think the deaths of Eric Randle and Kyle might be connected to it.’
‘The young lady who had her eyes taken out?’
Laura nodded.
Doctor Pratt shook his head. ‘That was a bad one,’ but Laura sensed some pleasure in his voice. Pathologists were crazy, Laura knew that, every one she had ever met had been wild in some way. Doctor Pratt nodded towards the doors leading into the post-mortem room. ‘But why do you think they are connected?’
Pete looked at Laura, who took the cue.
‘We don’t think Eric Randle died by hanging,’ Laura replied.
Pratt’s hands stopped moving in the towel, and then he began to smile. ‘Tell me why ever not.’
Laura took a breath. She realised that she might be on the verge of embarrassing herself.
‘I don’t think Eric Randle was tall enough,’ she said. ‘He couldn’t have got his head in the noose.’
Doctor Pratt nodded, and then sighed, his hands on his hips.
‘C’mon, DC McGanity,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
The doctor turned to go into the post-mortem room. When Pete and Laura didn’t follow immediately, he turned to them. ‘C’mon, children, you’re going to learn something.’
When they got into the room, Laura heard Pete take a sharp intake of breath. The post mortems had been done on Eric and Kyle, both bodies stitched back together, the Y-shaped incisions ugly across their chests. For Laura, it was the sight of the young boy that gave her a kick to her gut. He looked so small and pale against Eric Randle, too young to be cold and grey in the morgue.
She tried to stop herself but she knew it would come: an image of Bobby on the slab. She shut her eyes and tried to mentally shake it away. She remembered all the jibes at the police station about Kyle’s mother. She had been to prison for shoplifting a few times, just twenty-eight-day turnarounds, broken only by nights working the streets. Kyle was the offspring of that career, but Laura had heard too many snipes from people who had just got a bit luckier. All Laura saw was a dead little boy whose life had been spread out before him, good or bad. And his mother would hurt just as much. This wasn’t just another twist of fate. This was something beyond anything Laura could comprehend.
She looked away from Kyle when she saw that Pete and Doctor Pratt were standing by Eric Randle. As Laura looked down at him, she saw how peaceful he looked, his facial muscles relaxed now, no longer the tense bundle she had seen in life just a few days before. And then she noticed the marks around the neck. She began to doubt herself. She had raced to the morgue just to tell a trained pathologist what she thought, based upon Jack’s guesswork from photographs and a matching chair.
She glanced up at Pete. Laura thought she detected a glazed look in his eyes, and from the clenching of his jaw she knew that he was doing his best to stop himself from fainting.
‘Sorry, Pete,’ she said quietly. ‘Looks like I might have got it wrong.’
‘Why is that?’ the doctor asked, his deep bass bringing Pete round for a second.
Laura pointed at the marks on Eric’s neck. ‘I can see where the rope dug in?’
The doctor started to grin, and then he stood up, pompous and full of himself. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It looks like you are right.’
Laura looked confused for a moment, and then she looked again at Eric’s neck. ‘Why?’
‘Did you see the rope?’ the doctor asked.
Laura shook her head, and then thrust her hand into her pocket. ‘We’ve just got the photos,’ and she held up the photos she had been given earlier.
The doctor nodded. ‘That’s good, because if you look closely you will see that the knot in the rope is a fixed knot.’
Laura peered into the photograph and then looked up. ‘I can’t tell.’
Doctor Pratt nodded. ‘Well, I saw it, and I can tell you it was.’
‘And that makes a difference?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, enjoying the audience. Even Pete was looking more interested. ‘There are two types of knot: fixed and sliding. If you imagine a fixed knot, where the knot won’t move, death is caused by the weight of the body against the rope. A sliding knot, however, closes against the neck as the weight takes effect, so it’s the tightening of the rope that causes death.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Laura, sounding confused. ‘That sounds like the same thing to me.’
Doctor Pratt shook his head and smiled. ‘Oh no, Detective, they are very different. Think about the actions of the rope on the neck. In a fixed-knot hanging, the rope will dig deep into the skin of the neck as the body weight takes hold, but the weight of the body will always force the rope upwards until it hits the jaw.’ He paused for effect, checking that Laura was still with him. ‘The rope will make deep furrows into the neck, but they will always follow the jawline, as the jawbone acts as a brake, to keep the rope around the neck.’
‘And a sliding knot?’ she asked.
‘Ah, much different,’ he said, his eyes wide with excitement. ‘In a sliding knot, the knot just closes the rope as tight as possible around the neck, so that it doesn’t get anywhere near the jawbone. The weight of the body actually tightens the knot, and causes the rope to literally throttle someone to death.’
Laura bent down to Eric’s neck. She could see a deep furrow underneath Eric’s jaw.
‘So it was a fixed knot that killed him,’ she said. ‘I can see the line there.’
Doctor Pratt nodded. ‘That is a fixed-knot mark,’ he said, ‘and a fixed knot was found at the scene. But is that the only mark you can see around his neck?’
Laura looked closer. And then she saw it. There was a narrower groove around the neck, deeper and lower down. She looked back at Doct
or Pratt.
‘That’s the one,’ he said, nodding. ‘It wouldn’t have been very noticeable at first, very pale, but later on grooves like that become brown and dry. That’s why I left him until this morning.’ He pointed to Eric’s neck. ‘That’s the mark from a sliding knot, pulled tight from behind. It was death by strangulation, my girl, not hanging.’
‘How do you know it was from behind?’
He pointed down to some tiny marks just above the narrow groove around Eric’s neck. ‘Scratch marks, made by Eric Randle as he tried to pull the rope away. The person would have to be behind him for Eric to get his fingers to the front of his neck like that.’
Laura stood up. ‘So he was throttled to death using a sliding knot, but when it came to hanging Eric Randle, the killer didn’t appreciate that there would be a difference and used a fixed knot. He tried to make it look like a suicide and bungled it.’
Doctor Pratt nodded. ‘It looks that way.’
‘And then he throws in the chair, just to complete the illusion,’ said Pete, his interest distracting him from the two corpses.
Doctor Pratt said, ‘That would be my guess, but that’s your job.’ He winked at Laura. ‘Maybe your inspector should learn to keep his mouth shut before I’ve finished mine.’
Laura and Pete both understood now why Egan had looked so angry. He had proclaimed to the world that the Summer Snatcher was dead, but it seemed now like he was very much alive. And he was killing people, those who he thought could identify him.
Laura turned to Kyle. She felt her stomach turn. Kyle’s life would have been bad, she guessed that. Police, drugs, jail. Maybe he wouldn’t have got past forty, and he would have created victims along the way, but he had lost the chance to make it different. And even if it had been bad, it was still his life.
‘What about Kyle?’
Doctor Pratt looked less happy about that. He sighed. Laura guessed that he had children of his own.
‘My guess is morphine overdose. Accidental.’
‘Why do you say “accidental”?’
Doctor Pratt paused for a moment, and then said, ‘Because I can’t find anything else. The blood’s been sent to the lab, so we’ll just have to see, but do you see that?’ and he pointed to a small square patch of brown skin on Kyle’s arm.
Laura looked closely and then looked back at Doctor Pratt.
‘That’s adhesive,’ he said, ‘from some kind of analgesic patch. A common one would be fentanyl.’
‘What do they do?’
‘They release morphine into the bloodstream at an even and steady rate, so it can act as a strong painkiller for a few days at a time.’
‘Or even knock someone out?’ she asked.
Doctor Pratt nodded. ‘If the dose was strong enough, it could knock someone out for just as long.’
‘But can you overdose on them?’
Doctor Pratt nodded again, taking his glasses off. ‘Oh yes. These aren’t like nicotine patches. They are strong anaesthetics, designed for people who are in real pain, and they do their job well. But,’ and he looked thoughtful for a moment as he sought to get his words right, ‘if something happens to accelerate the intake of morphine, or if the dose is wrong, then the patient can receive too much of it over a long period of time.’
‘What can cause this?’ asked Laura. ‘A faulty patch?’
Doctor Pratt shook his head. ‘More likely a faulty application by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing. These patches come in different dosages. You have to apply the correct patch for the size and age of the patient. This boy was nine, so any patch would have been too much. Maybe whoever took him thought he was older and put on a bigger patch. Heat can also be a factor.’
‘Heat?’
‘Yes. If a patient decides to park themselves in front of a fire or next to a radiator, the heat will make the patch work much quicker, so the body absorbs the morphine at a faster rate.’
‘Do you think that might have happened here?’
‘Possibly. The nights are getting colder. Maybe he thought he needed to keep the boy warmer. It might be that he was getting too much morphine because he was too young, so he seemed cold, his body starting to shut down. Any attempt to keep him warm will have accelerated the morphine intake and made it worse.’
Laura stepped away. She teased at her hair with her fingers, just a distraction as she thought it through.
‘But I don’t remember any of the other abducted children having patches on their arms, or their blood being full of morphine.’
Doctor Pratt smiled. ‘That was living tissue, and living blood. If you want my opinion, it’s that the children will have been released when the last patch he put on was wearing off. These things don’t stick on like superglue. Once it is off for a couple of hours, the skin recovers, and the fact that the children who were returned alive were awake when they were found points to the fact that the morphine effect of the patch had worn off.’ He pointed down at Kyle. ‘This poor little mite is dead, so he never had the chance to recover. His skin still has the adhesive on it, there is still a slight mark where the patch was taken off, just where the skin stretched, and the blood will still be full of morphine.’
Laura exhaled. ‘And you told Egan all of this?’
Doctor Pratt nodded. ‘I don’t know if he was convinced. He wasn’t happy, I know that,’ and then he chuckled. ‘It looks like he has made a fool of himself
Pete smiled and then he stopped as he thought of something else. ‘Who would have access to strong painkillers?’
Laura looked puzzled for a moment. Then she realised what Pete meant.
‘Someone with an ill relative,’ she said, comprehension dawning.
Pete nodded, his face stern now. ‘C’mon, we’re going to see Billy Hunt again. Let’s not have a second suspect slip away.’
Chapter Forty-nine
Sam pushed open the door into Harry’s office. Harry looked up, startled.
‘I’m going to the police.’
Harry didn’t respond at first. He sat at his desk, his fingers steepled and resting just under his chin. His cheeks looked flushed, pensive.
He looked up at Sam slowly, had to refocus as he watched him.
‘What did you say?’ He said it like he was irritated.
Sam shut the door behind him.
‘Terry McKay. I’m going to the police.’
‘And what would you say?’ Harry asked wearily.
‘That Terry threatened to expose Jimmy King and had arranged to meet him.’
Harry shook his head slowly. ‘And I’ll say the opposite. Jimmy King was with me when Terry McKay was hurt.’
‘And Luke?’
Harry nodded. ‘Luke too.’
Sam shook his head angrily. ‘I was there,’ he said, his voice loud. ‘I saw Terry. I saw what Jimmy King did to him.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Were you there, Harry?’
When Harry didn’t respond, Sam sat down and stared at him. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve lied for Jimmy, would it?’
Harry swallowed and then replied, ‘Think like a lawyer, Sam. That’s what you are, remember. What chance would you have of proving that?’
‘It doesn’t always have to be about what you can prove,’ Sam replied. ‘Sometimes, it can be about what’s right.’
‘Is that what you thought when you went to law school, that it wouldn’t be about proof?’ Sam didn’t reply, so Harry continued, ‘If you think that, you’re in the wrong job. It’s only ever about what you can prove.’
‘So why did you go to law school?’ Sam replied, his voice harsh. ‘For the power, because you can change a life just like that?’ He clicked his fingers.
Harry leaned forward, a sneer on his face. ‘You’re the type who never lasts long. I’ve seen it too often. Came to the law to change the world.’
Sam smiled. ‘The trouble with lawyers is that you don’t live in the real world. You have no moral compass. Deep down, it’s only ever about the money.�
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‘And now you talk about lawyers in the third person. Have you given it up already?’ When Sam didn’t reply, Harry added, ‘That money affects me and my family. It gives them a good life, a better one than I had.’
Sam laughed, the noise loud in the office. ‘Don’t give me that impoverished speech again. I’ve heard it too often. And don’t pretend that you did it all for Helena.’
Harry swallowed. ‘And I would do it again.’
‘Where did this “good father” act come from?’ asked Sam, his voice rich with sarcasm. ‘Helena talks like you were never there. Remember, she called me yesterday, when she got into trouble, not you.’