by Andy Maslen
Jamie nodded. ‘In my experience as a forensic psychiatrist—’
‘Soon to be published in a very prestigious academic journal…’
He grinned. ‘Religiously inspired killers tend to go for more, what shall we say, baroque methods of killing. Think of Robey.’
‘I’d rather not,’ Stella said, massaging a place on her left bicep where the serial killer Jamie had just mentioned had cut deep into her flesh with a machete.
‘My point is, they tend to select weapons with religious resonance. Knives, usually. Ropes, occasionally. Even home-made gadgets they’ve constructed from drawings in old books,’ he said. ‘They often see themselves as conducting some sort of sacred ritual of cleansing or consumption. Now, if your killer had eaten the tongue, or part of it, that would be different. But a pistol? No. Too modern.’
Jamie had confirmed her own initial feelings about the case. Killers who used pistols tended to score way down on the religious nutcase scale.
‘So, what else?’ Stella asked, sipping her wine.
‘Well, tell me about tongues. What do they signify?’
This was why Stella enjoyed talking shop with Jamie. He wasn’t Job, but close enough to be able to discuss any detail of a case, however gruesome, without getting a fit of the vapours. Plus he came at things from a different angle to cops. And that made it interesting. Invaluable, sometimes.
‘Tongues signify more than just speech,’ Stella said. ‘If you stick your tongue out, that’s offensive. Lick your lips and it’s erotic. Maybe Brömly had sexually abused his killer in the past.’
Jamie nodded. ‘If you want a motive beyond a jilted lover, that’s where I’d look.’
‘I’ll add that as a line of enquiry. But I still see the silencing angle as the best right now.’
‘I agree. It’s the most straightforward. And don’t be put off by thoughts of having seen it in the movies,’ he said, making air quotes. ‘Most murderers lack imagination as well as self-control.’
‘Thanks.’
Jamie smiled. ‘You’re welcome. Now, how about some food? I’m hungry.’
They stayed up late, discussing work and a holiday they’d been talking about. Jamie wanted to visit the Lake District to do some walking. Stella wanted somewhere they didn’t speak English and where she wouldn’t need to pack anything warmer than a sarong.
They tumbled into his king-sized bed at just after midnight.
Stella yawned luxuriously.
‘Sleepy?’ he asked.
‘Not yet,’ she said, reaching down for him under the sheet.
Stella woke to the buzzing of her phone. Jamie rolled over.
‘What time is it?’ he mumbled.
‘Six-thirty.’
‘What? We normally get up at seven.’
‘I know,’ she said, backing into him. ‘But today we need a little longer.’
‘Again, Ms Cole?’
She responded by pushing her bottom against his groin. She sighed with pleasure as he slid his hand between her arm and ribcage to cup her breast.
The memory of the sex took her, still smiling, into London and on to the post-mortem. Standing beside her in Examination Room 3 of the mortuary, Garry nodded to her.
‘All right, boss?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, you?’
‘Me? Fine. Yeah, tip-top.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Get some this morning, did you?’
‘What?’
He grinned. ‘You heard! You had that smile on your face when you came in.’
‘I have no idea what you mean.’
‘Yes you do. It was an “I had a pre-work shag” smile.’
Shaking her head, she pointed at the sheeted body before them. ‘Inappropriate.’
‘I’ll take that as a yes, then.’
Joining them at the dissection table, Dr Craven cleared his throat. ‘If our colleagues from SIU have finished their banter, perhaps we could make a start?’
‘Sorry, Doc,’ Stella and Garry chorused.
Beside Dr Craven stood his assistant Verity Carr, her willowy figure disguised by her baggy scrubs. She glanced at Stella and shot her a wink from behind her Perspex visor.
One of the rituals Craven performed at his post-mortems was to say a short prayer.
‘Lord, help us bring clarity where there is doubt, light where there is darkness and order where there is chaos. And, above all, let us uncover the truth behind Tomas Brömly’s death and bring the perpetrator to justice. Amen.’
‘Amen,’ Garry murmured.
Craven clapped his double-gloved hands together. ‘Right! Let’s crack on, shall we? Verity, my trusty PM40 scalpel, if you please.’
As he drew the large blade in from each shoulder to a point at the sternum, then continued down to make the classic Y-incision, Craven kept up a running commentary into a mic dangling centrally above the table on a curly wire. Stella had attended dozens of post- mortems as a detective. Although she wasn’t shocked by what she saw anymore, she still felt a thrill each time the pathologist revealed the workings of the human body.
Craven opened the chest cavity. He cut through the rib cartilage each side of the sternum with what looked like a high-tech version of garden secateurs. Each rib parted with a crack like a snapping stick.
He freed the heart from its attachments and pointed to a huge wound.
Stella looked closer. The right side of the heart had been virtually destroyed. Cause of death would have been massive internal bleeding. Craven handed the ruined pump to Verity, who weighed it and placed it in a plastic container.
The lungs came next and Craven showed them to the assembled observers. Apart from Stella and Garry, they included Lucian, a photographer, the crime scene manager and the coroner’s officer. The bullet had ripped through the left lung, turning its upper half into a mass of shredded pink, foamy tissue.
The chest cavity was full of blood. Unasked, Verity brought a suction pipe into play. With the pipe gurgling as she moved it deliberately around the chest walls, Stella peered at the internal surface of the entry wound.
It resembled a grotesque flower. Petals of burnt flesh folded back on themselves above a hole that led through the ribs and the broad triangular muscle beyond to the breach in the skin.
‘Where’s the bullet, Doc?’ Garry asked.
‘That is precisely what I am trying to ascertain,’ Craven said. ‘Verity, would you be so good as to have a poke around in the heart for me?’
Stella observed the way Verity inserted a long gloved finger into each of the remaining chambers of the heart. She looked up as she probed, relying on feel alone.
‘Not in the heart, Doctor,’ she said after a minute or so.
‘Very well. Where else might we look?’ Craven asked. ‘Anyone?’
‘The lungs?’ Garry asked.
‘The wound track suggests only a single pass through the lungs. I believe it entered through the latissimus dorsi muscle, smashed its way between the third and fourth true ribs just to the left of the T3 and T4 vertebrae,’ Craven said with all the authority of a twenty-year veteran of the autopsy room. ‘From there, it travelled upwards at a slight angle, penetrating the left lung, before entering the right ventricle where it caused the fatal injury.’
‘Chest wall?’ Stella offered.
‘That seems probable.’ Craven took a smaller scalpel and probed the great flap of flesh lying on the corpse’s left side.
‘The interior surface of the left pectoralis major bears every sign of a penetrating wound. And if we just…’ As Verity had done, he glanced upwards, using feel rather than sight. ‘Forceps, please.’
Using the narrow-nosed forceps Verity placed in his palm, Craven poked and prodded for a few more seconds. Nodding, he pulled them clear. They made a tiny sucking noise.
Gripped between their serrated tips was a deformed bullet, its splayed tip resembling a ragged-edged mushroom. Craven dropped it with a clink into the stainless-steel kidney bowl
Verity held ready.
‘Voilà!’
Verity held the bowl out so Stella could see the bullet. It looked to her like a jacketed hollow-point round from a nine-mil. She’d keep her counsel until the techs had done their stuff.
Craven pointed to the face and nodded at Verity. She hooked her right index finger into the corpse’s lower jaw, pulling down to open the mouth then taking half a step backwards to give Craven space.
Craven leaned closer and brought his face almost within kissing distance of the corpse. Stella shuddered.
‘The killer did not use a knife, scalpel or any other type of blade to remove the tongue,’ Craven said, probing the lower surface of the open mouth.
‘What can you tell us?’ Stella asked. ‘How much strength would it take to pull out a man’s tongue?’
‘Yeah, Doc. Could a woman do it, for example?’ Garry added.
‘To tear the tongue away from its four anchor-points and separate it from the soft tissue would require a great deal of force. But it would certainly be possible for a woman if she were determined enough. However, the principal obstacle to the successful evulsion of the tongue would be saliva.’
‘It’s too slippery, right, Doc?’ Garry asked.
‘Precisely. One would need gloves and pincers of some kind. In fact, let’s take a look at the abused organ and see what we can deduce about the killer’s method.’
Verity walked to a large stainless-steel fridge, one of three ranged along the back wall. She returned holding a plastic container.
Garry nudged Stella. ‘Crap! I brought my lunch in one just like that.’
Stella rolled her eyes.
Craven lifted out the tongue and placed it on a second, smaller examination table. Everyone moved over to gather round.
Craven tapped a Perspex rod against the upper surface of the tongue. Stella looked closely. Craven was indicating a sharp-edged rectangle of depressed flesh, inside which, running left to right, were a series of deep parallel cuts.
What would have created marks like those? Grips, she thought. Or pliers. She had some basic tools in the flat for the Bonnie. She thought one of them could have made similar cuts.
Stella and Garry stood aside as the photographer stepped closer and took a series of close-ups of the marks.
‘Could you email those to me as soon as you can, please?’ Stella asked the photographer, who nodded in reply.
Craven returned to his examination of the body. He pointed at a purplish-red area of bruising on the corpse’s forehead. It looked like a honeycomb: interlocking hexagons studded with irregular blotches. A shoe print of some kind. Probably a running shoe. Something athletic, anyway.
As Craven worked and kept up his commentary, Stella began to see how Brömly’s murder had unfolded.
The killer had buzzed the intercom for admittance, then knocked or rang the doorbell. Brömly had let him in, probably with a smile, as he knew him. They’d talked.
The killer had bided his time and, when Brömly’s back was turned, shot him in the back with the nine. Brömly had fallen. The killer had rolled him onto his back, put his foot on Brömly’s face, grabbed the tongue with a pair of grips and then yanked. Hard.
Craven picked up the right hand. She looked at the pale digit gripped in Craven’s gloved fingers. The nail was trimmed, the edge smooth, not ragged. Not a biter. She looked at the knuckle. On its left side, roughly where it would touch the index finger, she saw a raised bump.
‘What’s that, Doc?’ Garry asked. ‘Arthritis?’
Stella saw it. A writer’s callus. She recalled the cluttered writing desk in the study. Most people these days used keyboards or touchscreens. Brömly preferred a pen.
After establishing with Craven that the rest of the post-mortem would be largely routine, Stella excused herself and Garry.
‘You’ll have my report by day’s end,’ Craven called after them.
Which would be fantastic. But she was already working angles, formulating theories and drawing up a new list of lines of enquiry she wanted to pursue. One of them meant a return to Brömly’s flat.
She sent Garry back to Paddington Green and made her way to Upper Brook Street. Once through the cordon, Stella entered Brömly’s office and sat at the desk. She began surveying the space where Brömly had done whatever retired ambassadors did at their desks.
A large, old-fashioned blotter pad occupied most of the space in front of her. The gold tooling on the burgundy leather surround was worn on the right-hand side nearest the front edge. Brömly must have been right-handed. The pale-blue paper in the centre bore a few doodles: mainly spirals and crosses, no words.
The rest of the desk and the dinky wooden cubbyholes against the wall were cluttered with all sorts of pens, old-fashioned wooden rulers, pencil pots and bottles of ink.
She pushed the chair back and squatted in front of the desk. Reaching up, she switched on the Anglepoise desk lamp and angled its conical shade until the light spilled across the blotter at a shallow angle.
She dipped lower, grateful that her running regimen kept her quads in good shape, and looked along the surface of the blotter. There! Faint impressions denting the soft, fibrous paper. She ran her fingers over them, just brushing the surface.
5
London
Stella called the Swedish embassy and, after explaining why she was calling, was put straight through to the ambassador. Ten minutes later, she was passing through several layers of embassy security.
The junior diplomat who escorted Stella to the ambassador’s office wore a beige skirt suit and nude high heels. In her bike jacket and black jeans, Stella felt distinctly underdressed. The diplomat knocked softly on the door and waited.
The door opened inwards to reveal a man in his late forties with thick, dark hair swept back from his forehead. He smiled.
‘DCI Cole? I’m Anders Johansson, please come in. Thank you, Nilla.’
He led Stella to a pair of armchairs flanking a glass-topped table. The plate-glass window beside it gave onto Montagu Square, a neat little park with trees, flowerbeds and well-maintained benches.
On the table sat a chrome coffee pot, two white china mugs and a jug of steaming milk. Beside them, a plate of dinky chestnut-brown spiral buns.
He sat and gestured for Stella to do the same.
‘Please, help yourself to a kanelbullar. Coffee?’
‘Thank you.’
Stella took one of the little buns and bit into its warm, doughy centre. The way the cinnamon and sugar combined with the sliced roasted almonds on the top made her groan involuntarily.
‘That is delicious! Where do you get them from?’
‘Our chef makes them fresh every morning. I recruited him personally from the best bakery in Stockholm.’
‘I hope you’re paying him well.’
Johansson laughed. ‘Believe me, I will make sure he stays here as long as I do.’
Stella placed a folder on the table between them. Johansson’s gaze flicked down before returning to her.
‘The man who was murdered. His name was Tomas Brömly,’ she said.
Johansson’s eyebrows shot up. ‘My god! You mean Ambassador Brömly?’
‘I’m sorry. We need to track down his next of kin. Is that something you could help with?’
‘He was widowed. Anna died ten years ago. They never had children, but I’ll have someone look into it for you.’
‘Thank you. Did you know him well?’
Johansson wiped a hand across his mouth. His face had paled.
‘Fairly well, yes. He was my predecessor-but-one. The Swedish community in London isn’t large, and the diplomatic community is smaller still. We used to see each other socially maybe once a month.’
‘Can you think of anyone who would have had a reason to hurt Mr Brömly? To the point of killing him?’
Johansson frowned. He didn’t answer at once, instead standing and walking over to the floor-to-ceiling window and staring down at the square.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I need to compose myself. This is a great shock.’
He drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and pressed it to his eyes. He blew his nose. He turned back to Stella, though he remained standing.
‘Tomas was what you might call a diplomat in the classic mode. He was unfailingly courteous to everyone he met, from heads of state to the office cleaners. I don’t think in all the time I knew him I ever heard him raise his voice.’
‘None of that excludes the possibility of an enemy,’ Stella said as gently as she could.
‘I know. But I am struggling. After he retired, he settled in London. He told me once he had fallen in love with Britain and wanted to live out his days here. I suppose at least he got his wish.’
Johansson returned to the table and sat down again. He finished his coffee and poured some more.
‘If he did make enemies, I don’t see that he could possibly have made them in London.’
‘Did you know him socially?’ Stella asked.
‘A little. We saw each other at church and at the Swedish Social Club on Balfour Place. He was a very good bridge player.’
Stella had been making notes as he spoke. She’d underlined ‘church’ and ‘social club’.
‘His flat was in a very expensive part of London,’ she said. ‘And he had some expensive art on his walls. I didn’t know diplomacy paid so well.’
Johansson shook his head. ‘I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree. Tomas was not poorly paid as a diplomat, and the Swedish government is generous with pensions,’ he said. ‘But it was Anna who had the real money. Her family built a sizeable industrial company supplying aerospace industries around the world. He inherited her fortune when she died.’
Mentally crossing off money as a line of inquiry, Stella returned to more mundane matters.
‘Do you have his CV on file?’
‘Yes. No harm in sharing it with you, now’s he’s dead. I’ll have it emailed to you.’
Stella passed him one of her Met business cards.
‘I’d also like to speak to the minster at the church he attended. And someone at the social club,’ she said.