Let The Bones Be Charred

by Andy Maslen

  ‘I know it’s usual to say, like, Oh, wow, he clearly has some rudimentary knowledge of surgical procedures,’ Garry said.

  ‘Go on,’ Craven said with a smile.

  ‘But this looks like butchery. The edges of the wounds are ragged.’ He poked a white-gloved finger into the space where Niamh’s left breast would have rested. ‘Bits of the muscle are, sort of, lifted. Like they were chopped at and not cut cleanly.’

  ‘Very good, DS Haynes,’ Craven said. ‘If this was the work of someone with medical training, or even a tangential connection to the profession, I will eat my hat. No,’ he said, with authority, ‘we are looking at the work of a killer whose reach exceeded his grasp.’

  Stella let her eyes travel down the body, from the chest to the belly which, she noted, was marked at its lower curve with a faint pink, crescent scar.

  ‘It looks as if she had a caesarean at some point.’

  ‘It does indeed,’ Craven said, pulling the belly skin upwards a little to stretch it taut. ‘Although there are other procedures that could account for a scar like that. If she ever donated a kidney, the latest surgical techniques could very easily leave that sort of scar.’ He looked up at the three DCs. ‘A manual laparoscopic nephrectomy, for example. Keyhole surgery to remove a kidney. Her medical records will confirm it once they arrive.’

  Stella pointed to the dead woman’s pubis.

  ‘He shaved her.’

  Garry interrupted.

  ‘Really, boss? I mean, not telling tales out of school or anything, but I can definitely state that most girls do that these days. It’s something to do with porn, apparently.’

  ‘That’s just the point, though, Garry. She’s not a girl, is she? Yes, if she was in her thirties or younger, I’d say it wouldn’t tell us anything. But she’s in her early fifties. That generation tend to favour the natural look.’

  She peered a little closer. Several small nicks had crusted over with blood. Clumsy, she thought, then, why blood? She turned to Craven.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I? She didn’t do it herself, did she?’

  Craven inclined his head as though conceding a point to a bright student.

  ‘Obviously, we can’t be certain, but those cuts appear to be more than just shaving nicks. And if they’d happened during the regular course of Mrs Connolly’s personal care regime, I wouldn’t expect to see any blood at all.’

  Stella looked again. A thought crossed her mind.

  ‘Even if a woman of fifty-two did want to remove her body hair, she wouldn’t shave. I saw Niamh Connolly on the telly. She always looked immaculate.’

  She turned to Cam and Becky.

  ‘If anything, she’d get a wax, wouldn’t you say, ladies?’

  They both nodded.

  ‘So the killer did it, then,’ Garry said.

  ‘That would be my guess, yes,’ Craven said.

  ‘Before or after he killed her?’

  Craven sniffed.

  ‘There’s very little blood. I would say the depilation happened after Mrs Connolly was dead.’

  Stella looked back at the purplish-red mark around Niamh Connolly’s throat. She pointed.

  ‘Is that the cause of death, Doc?’ she asked. ‘She was strangled? Or was it the blood loss that killed her and he either subdued her by choking her or did it later?’

  Craven held up his hands, smiling.

  ‘Slow down, DCI Cole. Too many questions! First of all, as you know,’ he paused, ‘I should be drummed out of the Royal and Ancient Order of Grouchy Forensic Pathologists if I were to offer you my opinion on COD before conducting my post mortem. But…’ He held up a hand as Stella opened her mouth to protest,

  ‘– but, from the preliminary report from the onsite pathologist and the forensic report the Wandsworth crime scene manager sent over, it doesn’t appear as though blood loss was sufficient to kill her. She would have been in extreme, and I mean excruciating, pain, and probably in shock, but people have been known to survive mutilations of this,’ he sighed, ‘egregious severity.

  ‘I volunteered in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide. We were able to save people who had had hands, feet, breasts or genitals cut off by machetes. So, I don’t think that exsanguination or shock were the cause of death. I can’t go further than that.’

  ‘Thanks, Doc. I can live with that.’

  ‘Unlike Mrs Connolly,’ Garry said, to groans. ‘Sorry,’ he added. ‘Couldn’t resist.’

  Cop humour. Better than a drink sometimes.

  Stella could see Craven was itching to get his hands on the body and start the PM proper. But she had one final question.

  ‘Doc. The breasts. Are they…?’ She pointed at the table behind her.

  ‘Yes. Shall we take a look?’

  ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  19

  WEDNESDAY 15TH AUGUST 9.30 A.M.

  Without the theatrics this time, Craven lifted the green drape aside to reveal the severed breasts.

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ somebody said behind her.

  Stella bent closer to examine the flattened mounds of flesh with their dark-brown nipples and ragged red edges. No cuts on the skin, no bite marks, either, but each breast was imprinted with five small, roughly oval bruises, four above the nipple, one below.

  ‘So, he holds the breast and clamps his fingers onto it hard to pull it out so he can cut it off,’ she said. ‘Which is which?’

  ‘I’ll need to examine the musculature and match the wounds to the torso to give you a definitive answer. But from a cursory examination, we have determined,’ he glanced back at Verity, who smiled at him, before pointing, ‘that this is the left, and that the right.’

  Stella put out her left hand, laying her fingertips gently on the pattern of bruises on the right breast.

  ‘Would he be right-handed, d’you think?’

  ‘A very good question. Again, further analysis of the cut direction will give us more to go on, but it’s certainly a strong possibility, over and above the statistics.’

  ‘Thanks, Doc.’

  Craven reached for the mask below his chin.

  ‘My pleasure. Now, unless you want to stay here for the PM, rather than watch on the CCTV next door, I’ll simply say that my report will be with you by the end of today.’

  ‘Actually, there is one last thing I need, Doc,’ Stella said, producing Niamh Connolly’s iPhone still sealed in a transparent evidence bag with its yellow chain of custody tag. ‘We think she used Touch ID to lock it.’

  She handed the bag over and watched as Craven deftly slit the seal with a scalpel. He retrieved the iPhone and then picked up Niamh Connolly’s right hand.

  ‘Around nine in ten of the UK population are right-handed. So let’s try the right thumb first.’

  ‘That’s what I use,’ Garry said, watching closely as the doctor gently pressed the dead woman’s right thumb pad onto the circle of plastic.

  The phone unlocked. No drama, no trying every finger in turn.

  ‘Thank God for predictable human behaviour,’ Stella said, taking the phone from Craven.

  ‘Indeed. I am led to believe that many people still use “password” as their password.’

  Stella tapped the Settings button and disabled the phone’s touch ID and password, leaving it unlocked permanently. She resealed it in the evidence bag and, together with Garry and the others, left the room for the comfort and stink-free air of the viewing room.

  With the dissection room cleared, Dr Craven settled his mask over his mouth and beckoned to his mortuary technician to come over from her work station and help him.

  Verity had been with him for a year and a month, and he appreciated her quiet and careful way of working. At times she struck him as being too young to be spending her days unloading torsos of their contents, measuring the length and depth of incisions made in human flesh, and sieving stomach contents.

  At twenty-six, she was the same age as his daughter, Gemma, who was an
accountant. But then, as Verity had said when he’d asked her the question at interview, ‘All my friends wanted to do after school was be famous. I wanted a career where I could help make things better.’ Then she’d smiled, showing crooked teeth. ‘Plus it would make it easy to get rid of creeps in pubs when I tell them what I do for a living.’

  And now she stood beside him, watching as he selected a long-handled scalpel from the tray of instruments by his right elbow.

  He touched the tip of the blade to the raw red wound on the left side of the chest.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ he asked.

  She brought a large, plastic-handled magnifying glass from the pocket of her apron and bent over the body, adjusting distances between wound and lens, lens and eye. She took her time, another facet of her working method Craven appreciated, moving over the whole of the surface of the wound before peering even closer at the edges.

  ‘He didn’t use a knife,’ she said, finally, without turning away from her examination.

  ‘And you say this why?’ Craven asked, meaning to prompt not criticise, as he knew Verity would understand.

  ‘Well, if I was going to cut off a woman’s breast, I would use something like a carving knife. You know, one with a long flexible blade. Maybe nine inches.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And in that case, I would use a long-stroke, sawing action. That would leave a series of clean, longitudinal cuts, layered upon each other. You’d see a distinctive shallow, zig-zag pattern progressing across the remaining tissue.’

  ‘So, what are you seeing instead?’

  Verity bent over the ravaged flesh again with the magnifying glass.

  ‘I’m seeing a mixture of marks. There are shallow, triangular punctures. There are marks where the muscles appear to have been almost crimped as well as cut. And the skin around the wounds has little peaks at the end of the separate cuts. May I have some tweezers, please, Doctor Craven?’

  He handed her a pair of tweezers and watched closely as she picked at the darkening red flesh on the left-hand wound. He held out a petri dish ready as she turned and tapped the tweezers against its side. A small dark fragment of what could have been dried blood fell into the glass dish.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘but I think there’s rust in the wound.’

  ‘So what do we have here, in terms of a weapon?’ Craven asked her.

  He had already formulated an initial hypothesis, but he wanted his protégée to arrive at her own answer, albeit with a little guidance from him. Verity straightened, without the groan or grunt of the middle-aged man feeling his lower back protesting, Craven noticed somewhat enviously.

  She turned to face him. Spoke decisively.

  ‘Some sort of two-bladed implement. With a scissoring action. But the cuts weren’t clean or neat, so I’m not thinking anything even remotely designed for the job. Not kitchen scissors, for example.’

  Craven smiled. She was good, this young woman with the cast-iron stomach and curiously matter-of-fact attitude to the grislier tasks of her chosen profession.

  ‘So what, then? If you had to hazard a guess?’

  She smiled back.

  ‘If I had to hazard a guess?’ She looked up and to the right and touched her chin with a purple-gloved index finger. ‘Hmm. I would have to say, given the fragments of what I will assume, just for the moment, is rust, and the unusual wound signature, that the killer used some short of shears. Old ones at that.’

  Craven nodded. Verity was going to go a long way. He saw a future pathologist standing beside him.

  ‘We should advise the police to get a tool marks specialist to have a look, of course, but I agree with you. That’s very good work, Verity.’

  She looked down for a second, then back at him. No blush, just the steady gaze of someone totally in her element.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor Craven. And before we get to the internal examination, I just want to say I agree with DCI Cole about the pubic area. My friends and I are all bare down there,’ she pointed at the patch of stubble on the body’s pubic area. ‘But nobody goes at their lady garden with a razor blunt enough to do that. And nobody would want to, either. You do waxing, sugaring or you use a special shaver. That’s the killer’s handiwork. And look.’ She lifted the thighs apart on the table, exposing the labia and the cleft where the buttocks met. ‘Only the front’s been done. No woman would leave herself looking like that, razor or not.’

  Not for the first time Craven felt amazement at his assistant’s utterly unflappable attitude to, and openness about, intimate subjects. If I didn’t know you came from North London, I’d swear you were Swedish, he’d thought in her first week, when they’d discussed the sex toy he’d found inside a male cadaver. Now, he could only smile and agree.

  ‘My feeling, too. Now, how about the wound on the throat?’

  20

  WEDNESDAY 15TH AUGUST 9.45 A.M.

  Verity moved around the steel table and looked down at the purple circlet around the dead woman’s neck. She crouched before gently tipping the head to one side, lifting up the hair and peering at the nape of the neck.

  ‘Not manual strangulation,’ she said immediately.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We have one continuous ligature mark: even width, even colour, therefore even pressure. No separate bruises that would indicate the killer used his hands. When you open her up I doubt you’ll find that the hyoid bone is broken, as would be the case if the killer’s thumbs or fingers were clamped over her throat.’

  Craven nodded his appreciation again. Let’s test you a little further.

  ‘Any thoughts on the ligature itself?’

  She placed the magnifying glass close to the bruised neck. The mortuary was silent as she examined the marks. Silent, apart from the whirr of the air extractor and the occasional gurgle from the drain beneath the table.

  ‘There are faint diagonal marks where the bruising is less pronounced. That makes me think of something plaited or twisted, not smooth. So not a modern cable like a clothes line or electrical wire and more like a rope. Hold on, there’s something sticking to the skin. May I have the tweezers again, Doctor?’

  Moments later she was holding the clamped, needle-pointed tweezers up to the light. Craven looked closer.

  ‘Is that a thread, Verity?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. It’s golden.’

  She went to the bench and trapped the minuscule fibre in a petri dish. When she returned to the examination table, Craven was extracting a second fibre, which she captured in a new dish.

  Craven picked up the left forearm, turning it over so the paler inside was uppermost.

  ‘What do you see?’ he asked.

  ‘No defensive wounds. No cuts or bruising.’ She flexed the fingers then looked at the palm. ‘None here, either.’ She looked at the other arm and hand. ‘Or here.’

  She fetched a small, narrow-ended tool like a clockmaker’s screwdriver and deftly ran it beneath each of the ten fingernails in turn, placing the meagre scrapings in a dish.

  ‘Whatever we find, I’m not hopeful there’ll be any epithelials from the killer,’ she said, once she’d placed a lid over the dish.

  ‘And she wasn’t subdued physically, we can see that. No head wound, no ligature or handcuff marks on her wrists.’

  Verity frowned.

  ‘I know this isn’t our job, Doctor, but that suggests to me that she knew her killer.’

  ‘Possibly so, possibly so. But even if she did, he would still have had to render her immobile while he tortured her.’

  ‘He drugged her.’

  ‘Or knocked her out by briefly stopping the blood supply to the brain. I suggest we stop hypothesising here and let her body tell us its story.’

  Craven reached up to switch the mic back on.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘shall we get going? We’ll start with a rape kit, I think.’

  He watched while Verity combed through what was left of the pubic hair, took separate swabs from th
e mouth, anus and vagina, labelled each sample, and sealed them in evidence bags.

  When she’d finished, Craven took the largest of the scalpels and, starting at the point where the right collar bone met the shoulder, drew the blade towards the sternum. The wounds to Niamh Connolly’s chest meant that he had to modify the traditional Y incision, directing his blade beneath the site where her right breast had been removed to a point on her solar plexus. He repeated the process on the other side, then drew the blade smoothly through the cold, pale skin and yellow fat to the pubic bone.

  Verity helped him peel the two large sheets of skin and subcutaneous fat away from the muscles wrapped in their silvery shrouds of fascia and lay them folded to each side. The triangle of skin from throat to sternum that sat in the valley of the Y they lifted up and laid carefully over the dead woman’s face. The abdominal wall went next.

  Using the rib-cutters, Craven cut through the costal cartilage attaching the ribs to the shield-shaped breastbone and opened up the ribcage with a series of sharp cracks. And then began the business of removing, weighing and sampling the internal organs.

  Craven worked steadily, handing each glistening organ to Verity who would carry it, almost reverently, to the large stainless-steel pan of the scales, note its weight, then remove a small piece for further examination before finally depositing it in a large Tupperware container.

  ‘DCI Cole was right,’ Craven said, after examining the dead woman’s uterus. ‘Mrs Connolly had at least one child delivered by caesarean section.’

  Carefully, he handed her the soft bag of the stomach. She made a long incision on one side and ladled the contents into a cylindrical plastic container. At once, the sharp tang of stomach acid filled the space between them, overlaid with the sweet smell of partially digested alcohol.