‘Done.’
The Home Office pathologist stood on the other side of the table, removing gloves and mask, revealing the face underneath.
Keira O’Connell was the locum pathologist standing in for the currently absent Professor Baines, a man Henry knew well. He had been initially disappointed that Baines wasn’t available. Apparently he was away on an international conference for pathologists in the Bahamas, concentrating on forensic dentistry, which was one of Baines’s big interests. Henry had to admit, though, that the temporary replacement was much better looking, even with her blonde hair scraped severely back off her face into a tight ponytail. Her face was round and sweet, yet her eyes, which Henry had studied over her facemask, were steel-cold grey and deeply intelligent.
O’Connell leaned on the table and inspected her handiwork as her assistant busied himself doing a tidy-up. It had been a nasty and gruesome task, extremely smelly, terribly unpleasant. Henry — the ‘new man’ who even did the ironing at home — despite his recent diversity training found himself hard pressed not to comment that this wasn’t the sort of job a woman should be doing. He refrained, mainly because he suspected that she would have stabbed him with a scalpel, and also because she had done a terrific examination which Henry had watched with a mixture of distaste and awe.
On the work bench behind her was an array of test tubes, plastic bags, swabs and trays containing specimens taken from the body which would require laboratory examination down at the forensic science lab.
‘Summary,’ the pathologist said in the staccato way in which she spoke. Her words were spoken clearly both for Henry and Rik’s sake and for the audio/video recording that had been made of the post-mortem. ‘Female, aged between twenty-five and forty. Difficult to ascertain the ethnic origin at this time due to the extensive damage caused by the fire which I would grade as fifth degree. She was set on fire whilst naked as there appear to be no traces of clothing on her. However, the fire was not the cause of death. She was set alight after death as the burns on the body show no signs of vital reaction.’
O’Connell turned away from the cadaver, which lay split open from neck to lower stomach. She stepped to the steel draining board on which the organs from the corpse had been laid out and examined. The display reminded Henry of a butcher’s shop he’d once seen on holiday in Tunisia.
She picked up the lungs and inspected them like a big, floppy book. Henry was always amazed at how large lungs were.
‘The lungs were filled with water, indicating the victim had inhaled water. They are wet and heavy, very pale and distended. No sign of any lung disease.’
‘So the victim was drowned?’ Rik asked.
‘Yes.’ Next she picked up the fist-sized chunk of muscle that was the heart. ‘Good, healthy heart, too.’ Then she moved to the brain which had been sliced open like a country loaf. ‘Severe bruising of the brain, causing much internal bleeding, indicating a frenzied attack with a heavy, blunt instrument.’ Next came the liver, slimy and difficult to hold. ‘Liver healthy.’
O’Connell glanced at the two detectives. ‘All in all, this woman was very healthy before she died. I would say she looked after herself well.’
She placed her hands on her hips and blew out, then turned. ‘The trachea had been constricted, indicating an attempt at strangulation, but neither the strangulation nor the beating killed her — it was drowning.’ She regarded Henry and pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows and tilted her head. ‘All in all, this woman has been subjected to prolonged and severe torture. She has been beaten and half-strangled and her head has been held under water until she died. She was then set on fire. Brutal, nasty.’
‘You can tell all this?’ Rik said.
She blinked and frowned at his stupidity. ‘And more … I’m a pathologist, so, death, as it says in some book or other, is my beat.’
‘As it is mine,’ Henry said.
‘Touche.’ She smiled pleasantly. ‘You don’t know who she is yet?’
‘No,’ Henry admitted. ‘No leads as yet. Gonna be a toughie, I reckon, unless we get lucky in the next few hours.’
‘Lucky?’ O’Connell said cheekily. ‘Why not get professional instead?’
‘They go together hand in hand. One begets the other.’
She did not look convinced and she was acting as though she did not have much time for Henry, or perhaps she was just being professional.
‘You want an opinion?’ she asked.
‘On me, or the deceased?’ He raised a flirty eyebrow.
‘The deceased,’ she said and Henry saw her hiding a smile.
‘Always welcome.’
‘It will be difficult to establish the ethnic origin, but there is a gold filling in one of her back teeth which could be helpful if you get the gold analysed. I say that because I actually think we are dealing with a woman of Asian origin here from what I can see of what is left of the bone structure in the face. A facial reconstruction could prove worthwhile.’
‘Asian?’ Henry said, surprised.
‘And if I’m right, you could be dealing with an honour killing.’
Henry’s heart sank a few centimetres in his chest. ‘An honour killing? Bugger.’
‘Just a gut feeling … I could be wrong, though.’
‘But I’d guess that’s not usually the case?’
This time O’Connell did not hide the smile. ‘No, not usually … now, if you’ll excuse me, the job’s not over until the paperwork’s done, if you know what I mean? I think you’ve probably got enough to progress your investigation. I’ll let you have the report and a copy of the DVD of the PM by tomorrow afternoon.’
Henry took the hint and started removing his mask as he and Rik walked towards the door. ‘Thanks, Doctor O’Connell …’
‘Professor, actually,’ she corrected him.
‘Thanks, Doctor Professor,’ he said. He stopped and looked at her. She shot him a look of amused contempt before returning to the organs. He and Rik went into the office next to the mortuary to hang up their masks and gowns.
‘You shameless flirt,’ Rik chided Henry.
‘Ah, but that’s all I do now,’ Henry said, his mind pondering what the next stage of the investigation would be. He was thinking about his ‘fast-track menu’: the list of things to do that included a combination of investigative actions which, according to the Murder Investigation Manual (which Henry could almost recite), ‘are likely to establish important facts, preserve evidence or lead to the early resolution of the investigation’. He needed to sit down somewhere quietly and jot stuff down in an exercise book which would hopefully get his grey matter on the road to solving the age-old problem of any murder investigation which the manual simplistically states as ‘who killed the victim?’ and the simple problem-solving formula of ‘why + when + where + how = who?’
Dead simple, and all made a bit easier if the victim is identified, although that should not in itself stall the investigation.
Henry had decided there would be a murder squad briefing at 8 a.m. the following morning at Kirkham police station, from where he would run the investigation, that being the nearest decent-sized cop shop to the scene. After that, at 10 a.m. there would be a press briefing — and then the work would really begin. He sent Rik off to start making some phone calls to get a squad together.
The mortuary office was quiet, so he decided to use this facility for a quick brainstorm. Henry had a pen and exercise book in his jacket pocket, which he spread open on the desk, and began blatting down his battle plan.