Then he began to shake.
FOUR
The old man had been stripped and tagged. His arrival had been entered on to the database at the public mortuary and the computer-generated reference number — there was no name at present — scribbled on to the big-toe tag and in big figures on to his left shin in black felt tip.
Henry, having assisted the mortuary attendant with this procedure, was now wearing a surgical gown, latex gloves and a facemask pushed up on to the crown of his head. He walked slowly around the body, now laid out on a stainless steel mortuary slab. Henry’s hands were clasped behind his back as he inspected the body, as though he was walking the beat at regulation pace.
The old man was in a terrible mess, something even more apparent now that he lay there naked and pitiful. The car had done a great deal of damage, crushing his chest, stomach, hips and upper legs; breaking numerous bones as though it had driven over a sack of twigs. The bullets had torn his head open.
Henry didn’t flinch. He had seen much violent death over the years, lost count of the number of times he’d inspected a cadaver in a morgue. It was an obvious part of being a detective specializing in murder investigation. He wasn’t immune to death, but neither was he upset by it — unless it touched him personally. The luxury of emotion had long since passed, probably since the first post-mortem he had ever attended as a nineteen-year-old rookie dealing with his first straightforward sudden death. He’d passed that test with flying colours — one of the top five dreaded incidents for all new cops — despite the evil machinations of his sergeant who had closed all the mortuary doors, turned up the heating to a swelter, and prayed that the sight and smell of a bloated, three-week-old corpse would cause him to hurl. It didn’t. The spectacle had never affected him in that way. He couldn’t pretend to be unmoved by the deaths of young people, but his professional detachment had given him inner strategies to deal with such rare occurrences.
The smell always bothered him, though. Never enough to make him physically sick, but enough to know he hated its musty clingy-ness, the way it stuck to clothes and on to nasal hairs for days on end.
But this dead man, mown down and shot, made his arse twitch with excitement. He knew this was no run of the mill Blackpool killing and the prospect of investigating it sent a thrill through him.
‘OK, guys, what’ve we got?’
Henry’s observations were curtailed by the arrival of the appropriately suited and booted Home Office pathologist, entering the mortuary blowing into a latex glove until it expanded like a cow’s udder, before fitting it.
Keira O’Connell was the locum pathologist standing in for the usual incumbent, Professor Baines, a man Henry knew well. His temporary replacement was far better looking, even though she looked exhausted and her hair was scraped severely back off her face and bunched into an untidy bun at the back of her head. And she was wearing a green surgical gown that did absolutely nothing for her figure.
Her steel-grey eyes regarded Henry as she fitted the second glove and then her facemask. He did not answer her question, which he guessed was rhetorical. O’Connell, like all good pathologists had already been out to the scene of the murder and knew as much as Henry.
She looked at the old man — not Henry — then glanced at the creepy-eyed mortuary assistant, who was precisely laying out the tools of the mortician’s trade in a perfect line on a contraption resembling a breakfast-in-bed tray that fitted on runners over the mortuary slab and could slide up and down as the pathologist worked.
‘Are we recording?’ she asked him.
‘Yes, boss… sound and vision on.’
‘OK,’ O’Connell said. Then, for the benefit of the recording equipment, spoke the time, day, date and location, and introduced herself and that she was about to perform a post-mortem on the body of an as yet unidentified male found earlier that evening on a street in Blackpool.
Henry glanced up at the video camera on the wall, and the one attached to the ceiling, both focused on the body.
O’Connell did a recap of what she already knew and gave some general observations such as, ‘Male, aged somewhere between sixty-five and seventy-five, five-eight tall — yet to be accurately measured — and perhaps eleven stones, again, yet to be accurately weighed. Slim build, well-nourished, white-skinned but possibly from a Mediterranean background…’ When she had finished her introduction, she walked slowly around the body, pointing out the various injuries. They were, she said, consistent with having been struck and then run over by a vehicle, possibly a heavy saloon car, and the head injury — massive trauma — consistent with having been shot twice. The obvious always had to be stated.
Henry watched and listened. He admired her professionalism and knowledge, and whilst his professional side nodded sagely at her findings, his less professional man-side cursed the fact he’d once screwed up his chance of ending up in the sack with her. A couple of years earlier, after a post-mortem, they had gone out for a drink. He’d been going through a rocky patch at work and instead of allowing her to talk, he made the fatal error of rambling self-pityingly about his own misfortunes and bored her half to death. When her eyes glazed over she made her excuses and left, leaving Henry mentally kicking the living crap out of himself. She probably didn’t even remember it — he hoped.
He glanced at the wall clock: 2.07 a.m. Then his eyes flicked back to the body.
‘… looks like an old bullet wound,’ O’Connell was saying, words that made Henry jerk upright. She was standing alongside the old man, lifting the body slightly and inspecting an area just below the rib cage on the right-hand side.
‘What?’ Henry blurted.
O’Connell raised her eyes over her mask, tilted her head. ‘It looks as though he’s been shot before.’
Henry scurried around the slab to inspect the discovery. Just below the rib cage there was an entry wound and an exit wound corresponding to it at the back. It looked as though a bullet had winged the old man through the soft tissue around that part of the body, near to the liver. ‘In here,’ she said, putting her forefinger on the entry, ‘out here,’ and she put her thumb on the exit, taking a lump of flesh between her fingers. ‘Obviously didn’t do too much damage, not much more than a flesh wound, though the exit is more of a mess than the entry, as they often are.’
‘I hadn’t noticed it,’ Henry admitted.
‘That’s why we have pathologists,’ she responded. Henry saw her ears rise as she smiled teasingly behind the mask.
‘How old?’
She shrugged. ‘Difficult to say exactly… it’s well-healed and it looks as though it was treated medically and well… maybe five years,’ she estimated.
Henry blinked, did the maths. ‘So if this guy is at the lower age you estimated, he got shot when he was sixty?’ His voice rose incredulously on the last few syllables. O’Connell nodded. ‘Not likely to be a war wound, then?’
‘Not unless he was in Dad’s Army.’
Henry stood upright. ‘Can we get that photographed?’
‘All part of the service.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And so we begin.’
Henry retreated a couple of steps, his forehead creased in thought by the wound in the man’s side as he considered the possibilities. ‘I’ll go bag and tag his clothing,’ he announced.
When the body had been stripped, the clothing had all been dropped into a plastic basket that was now in one corner of the room. He went across and picked it up, then carried it through to the mortuary office where he dumped it on a desktop. He nipped out to his car parked in the tiny car park at the back of the mortuary and brought back several paper bags, sacks, polythene bags, tags, and a notebook he always had with him — just in case. Most detectives are similarly equipped. You could never tell when some bloodstained clothing or other evidence might have to be seized. He left his portable fingerprinting kit in the boot. That job was going to go to a CSI.