Birdman

'Make-up, tattoos—'

'Yes, Mr Maddox. And, thinking along those lines, two had pelvic infections, one a keratinized anus, plenty of evidence of drugs use; endocarditis of the tricuspid valves. I don't want to jump to conclusions—'

'Yes, yes, yes,' Maddox muttered. 'So we're saying they're toms. I think we already guessed that. What can you tell us about the mutilations?'

'Ah! Interesting.' Krishnamurthi edged in next to a cadaver, beckoning them to follow. Caffery thought, not for the first time, how like a side of hung meat the skinned human body is. 'You can see what I've done is to bring the second TA incision in tight, missing the one our offender did and avoiding the breasts so I could biopsy the incisions and get a look inside to see what's going on in there.'

'And?'

'Some tissue has been removed.'

Maddox and Caffery exchanged glances.

'Yes. It's roughly consistent with a standard beta mark breast reduction procedure. Stitched up, too. I suppose it's significant that your offender hasn't bothered with this decoration on the smaller-breasted victims.'

'Which ones?'

'Victims two and three. And let me show you something interesting.' He beckoned them to where a mortician was stitching up the crumpled torso he'd taken the intestines from. 'The nail scrapings look dismal — and the very strange thing is I can't find any signs of a struggle. Except for on this one. On victim number three.'

They gathered round the corpse. It was small, as small as a child, and Caffery knew that for this accidental resemblance, rational or not, she would be set aside in the team's considerations.

'She weighed in at forty kilos, that's not much more than six stone.' Reading Caffery's mind Krishnamurthi said, 'But she wasn't an adolescent. Just very petite. Perhaps that's why the breasts were not mutilated.'

'The hair colour…?'

'Hair dye. Hair degrades very slowly. That aubergine colour — it won't have changed much since death. Now, look.' He pointed a wet black finger at a scattered pattern on the wrists. 'It's difficult to distinguish from the normal lesions of decomposition, but these are actually ligature marks. Ante-mortem. And a gag around here on the face. On the ankles, too, chafing, bleeding. The others died as cool as ice; they just' — he held out his hand and mimed cresting a summit — 'just tipped over the edge there. Like falling off a log. But this one — this one's different.'

'Different?' Caffery looked up. 'Why different?'

'This one struggled, gentlemen. She fought for her life.'

'The others didn't?'

'No.' He held up his hands. 'I'm coming to that. Just bear with me, OK?' He rolled aside a triple-beam balance and moved on to the congested, swollen body of the first victim discovered. 'Now.' He looked up, waiting for Maddox and Caffery to follow. 'Now then. This we'll call number five. Dreadful state, really, no doubt the head injury was post-mortem, done by heavy machinery, your guess of the bulldozer sounds about right. Gives us big problems identifying her. Our best hope's prints, although there again we encounter problems.' He lifted up a hand and gently pushed the skin back and forward. It moved, jellied and thick, like the skin on a pudding.

'See that slippage? Not a hope in hell of getting a straight dead set. What I'll have to do is flip the skin off and print.' He lowered the hand. 'She was a user, but her death was instantaneous, not an OD, none of the usual oesophageal and tracheal artefacts, no pulmonary oedema.' He rolled the body gently onto its side and pointed to a greenish collection on the buttocks. 'Most of what you're seeing is putrefaction. But under it you can see black blood pricks?'

'Yes.'

He rolled the body back. 'Scattered hypostasis. She was moved after death. There's more on her arms, even, rather unusually, in her ankles.'

'Unusually?'

'You'd see that in a hanging victim. Blood drifts downward into the feet and ankles.'

Caffery frowned. 'You said the hyoid's intact.'

'It is. And from what's left of the neck I can guarantee this was not a hanging.'

'Well?'

'She was in a standing position for some time. Postmortem.'

'Standing?' Caffery said. 'Standing?' The image made him uneasy. He turned to Maddox, expecting explanation — an easy reassurance. But it wasn't there. Instead Maddox narrowed his eyes and shook his head. I don't know, he was saying, don't look at me for every answer.

'Maybe she was propped up,' Krishnamurthi continued. 'I can't see any whitish areas to indicate how — the putrefaction is too advanced — but she might have been suspended under her arms, or wedged somewhere so she was upright. Some time soon after death, when the blood was not yet viscid.' He paused. 'Mmmm, hm. I missed that.'

'What is it?'

He bent in and gently tweezered something from the scalp. 'Good.'

'What's that?'

'A hair.'

Caffery leaned in. 'A pubic hair?'

'Maybe.' Krishnamurthi held it to the light. 'No. That's a head hair. Negroid. It won't be any use for DNA except mitochondrial, there's not enough follicle on it.' He carefully bagged the hair and handed it to the mortician for labelling. 'I've already pulled some blond hairs off three of the victims. They're on their way to Lambeth.' He moved to the next table. 'Number two. She died fourteen or fifteen weeks ago. Five eight, age maybe thirty. The fingers are desiccated, but we'll still get a good dead set; there's an excellent chelation tissue builder on the market. Gelatine. Swells the tips up. Normally for that we'd take the hands off and do it at Lambeth, but' — he leaned in to Maddox — 'since the fuss over the Marchioness I've stopped taking hands off. Do it right here in the pit, awkward or not.'

He moved on to the next table where a large white carcass lay, cracked down the centre and unfurled. A cobwebbing of silvery white fascia shimmered between the blue ribs, the bleached blond hair had been wetted and smoothed back off the clean forehead. The throat too was split wide, revealing a glimpse of a milky chord. 'Victim four, gentlemen.'

Caffery lightly touched the ankle. 'Good.' A tattoo, surprisingly clear, centimetres above the tarsal bone. Bugs Bunny. Trademark green-topped carrot.

'You say no OD artefacts?'

'That's correct. No trauma either.'

'So how did they die?'

Krishnamurthi held up a stained finger and smiled slowly. 'That's where I've got an idea. Look at this.' He gently inserted his fingers into the neck cavity, carefully opening the throat wider, inching aside the trachea and oesophagus, until the spinal column showed slippery and grey. 'This man is so clever, but not as clever as I am. If you drain off enough cerebrospinal fluid from down here' — he straightened and tapped his lower back — 'instant death, hardly a mark. Even your standard lumbar puncture has to be done very, very carefully; take too much of that stuff and whoopee, your patient hits the deck. Now these subjects've got about the right amount of CSF in the spine and no puncture wounds on the back. So I'm wondering if he cut out the middle man and went direct' — he nudged the calibrated scalpel in the opening between the vertebrae and carefully excised a small amount of the white myelin caul — 'to the brain stem itself.'

'The brain stem?'

'That's right.' Krishnamurthi made a second incision and bent in to look. 'Hmmmm.' He carefully manipulated the scalpel and muttered to himself. 'No, I'm incorrect.' He frowned and looked up. 'This wasn't done by removing CSF.'