Another door opens. Louis Preston has his hands deep inside a butterflied ribcage. Half a dozen students are gathered around him, dressed in matching surgical scrubs and cloth caps.
‘You see that?’ Preston asks, adjusting a lamp on a retractable metal arm above his head.
Nobody answers. They’re staring at the disembowelled body with a mixture of awe and disgust.
Preston points and raises his eyes to theirs. Still no response.
‘What are we looking for, sir?’ one of them asks.
‘Evidence of a heart attack or otherwise.’
He waits.
Silence.
‘I swear you’re all blind. Right there! Damaged heart tissue. You don’t always find the clot, but cardiac arrhythmia can still be the likeliest cause of death.’
‘He suffered a heart attack,’ says one of the students.
‘You think?’
Preston’s sarcasm is lost on them.
‘Sew him up,’ he says, peeling off surgical gloves. He tosses them overhead like he’s shooting a basketball. Rattles the bin. Scores.
‘You had something to show me,’ says DCI Cray.
‘Absolutely.’
The pathologist leads us to a glass-walled office with a desk and filing cabinets. Having collected a manila folder, he waves it above his head like a tour leader and we follow him down another corridor until he stops before a large steel door. Pulling down on the handle, he opens the door, breaking the airtight seal with a soft hiss. Lights are triggered automatically. I feel a breath of frigid air. Four cadavers are on trolleys beneath white sheets. Three walls of the room have metal drawers. Bodies lie within.
Preston checks a nameplate and tugs a handle. Another hiss as the seal breaks. Ray Hegarty slides into view on metal runners. His joints are stiff with rigor mortis and his skin marbled by lividity.
Preston pulls on latex gloves.
‘He was knocked unconscious by a blow to the back of the head. The bruising and depression on the skull match the heel of a hockey stick. The blow was delivered in a chopping motion.’ He puts his fists together and pretends to swing an axe.
‘Ray Hegarty fell forward. The killer stood over him, grasped his hair, raised his head and sliced left to right. The weapon was most likely a Stanley knife, extended about an inch, which was drawn across his neck, severing his carotid artery and jugular vein. He bled to death within twenty or thirty seconds.’
I gaze at the wound, a slash of crimson that begins just below his left earlobe, cutting through muscle and cartilage.
‘They were left-handed,’ I say.
‘Most likely,’ says Preston. ‘Some people are ambidextrous.’
‘Sienna Hegarty is left-handed,’ adds Cray.
‘Could a teenager have done this?’ I ask.
‘It’s not so much a matter of strength as the sharpness of the blade,’ replies the pathologist.
‘Is there anything else?’ asks the DCI.
‘Hegarty had alcohol in his system.’
‘How much?’
‘A significant amount - it would have slowed his reaction time.’
Preston opens the folder and withdraws a forensic report.
‘We pulled forty-two full or partial prints from the house. Most of them match with the family. We’re looking more closely at those that don’t match. We collected fibres from the rug and the wound, and there might be DNA from the hand-towel in the bathroom. There were old semen stains on the daughter’s bed sheets and also on her underwear. The DNA results won’t be back for another five days.’
I can hear Ronnie’s teeth grinding.
‘Check them against the victim. Then run them through the national database. Tick off the boxes.’
Preston slides Ray Hegarty’s body from view and opens a folder of crime-scene photographs. The first shows Hegarty lying face down, his right cheek resting in a pool of blood. The image is centred on a bloody heel print beside his right knee. The second image is a close-up of Hegarty’s shirt showing handprints between his shoulder blades. Another partial print was found on the right side of the doorframe.
‘The tread design on the heel matches the daughter’s jazz shoes. Size six.’
‘Sienna wasn’t wearing any shoes when I found her,’ I hear myself say.
‘We found them in the river,’ replies Cray.
Taking the first photograph from Preston, I study the position of the body in relation to the heel print. There is a second bloody mark on the opposite side of the body. Not a shoeprint. A knee. ‘Somebody knelt.’
‘To cut his throat?’ asks Cray.
‘No, afterwards.’
Ronnie Cray studies the photograph and hands it back to Preston.
‘So we’re looking for a Stanley knife.’
Preston nods.
The daughter is a cutter. She had a shoebox full of bandages but no blade, which means she hid it somewhere else or got rid of it.
She’s already convinced that Sienna was responsible.
‘I don’t think we should jump to conclusions,’ I hear myself saying. ‘Maybe it was self-defence.’
‘More like an ambush,’ says Cray. ‘She hid behind the door.’
‘Somebody hid behind the door.’
‘His blood was all over her.’
‘He was twice her size.’
‘Size had nothing to do with it.’
‘She’s fourteen.’
‘I know how old she is, Professor.’ A sharp tone. ‘I hope you’re not making excuses because she’s your daughter’s friend.’
‘And I hope you’re not predisposed against her because Ray Hegarty was your friend. He must have had enemies. You said so yourself.’
Undisguised contempt enters her gaze. I’ve gone too far. Cray doesn’t like having her judgement questioned publicly.
Through clenched teeth: ‘Do you think I want this? I can see what’s going to happen. I can hear the defence warming up. They’re going to trash Ray Hegarty’s reputation. One of the best and bravest officers I ever served with is going to be branded a nonce, a child molester. They’re going to destroy him.’
‘What if it’s true?’
‘Bullshit! There were no defence wounds. No signs of a struggle. No signs of rape.’
‘What about the semen on her sheets?’
‘She had a boyfriend.’
There’s no point in arguing because Cray hasn’t put a foot wrong procedurally. Meanwhile, I’m doing exactly what I tell my students to avoid - I’m ignoring the obvious answer. There’s only one greater sin - embracing it.
Cray hitches up her trousers and I follow her down the corridor, noticing the scribble of purplish veins on the back of her ankles, above her drooping socks.
It’s cold in the underground car park. She pulls open the car door.
‘Was anything missing from the house?’ I ask.
‘A laptop.’
‘Somebody could have taken it.’
‘Or she could have left it at school.’
We’re moving. Cray has a driver, a young policewoman, who glances nervously in the rear-view mirror.
‘Where to, boss?’
‘Trinity Road.’
10
Freud said that our memories are a repository of traumatic past events, but often these are merely fantasies rather than actualities. They haven’t taken place in the real world, only in our minds, which are vast storehouses for things that never existed and events that never happened. Sometimes I wonder whether my memories are real. If I try to concentrate on them too carefully, they catch in my throat and I struggle for breath.
The nightmares of my recent past involve a former soldier who was trained to unlock secrets by torturing people - a man who knew how to reach inside a mind and pry it apart as if opening the segments of a citrus fruit. This is the man who took my Charlie and wrapped her in a world of darkness.