Alex put her hands over her ears. “Don’t. Please, don’t.”
“Be realistic, Alex.”
“I can’t tell you any more. I don’t know any more. I would if I could.”
“That’s OK. I believe you. It’s late now, but what I want to do first thing in the morning is get this man’s card checked for fingerprints. If he’s a habitual criminal, there’s every chance we have his prints on file. I’ll also need you to come in and give us your own prints for elimination purposes. Then we’ll see about the sketch artist. I’ll come over early and drive you to the station after we’ve taken Ian to school. And we’ll fix it with your boss. Will you do that? Maybe you can help us with Morgan Spencer, too? We don’t have any photos or good descriptions of him.”
“OK.”
“In the meantime, I’ll see if I can get a family liaison officer to come over right now—”
“No. I don’t want a stranger in my house. Why can’t you stay? It’s a let-down sofa. You’ll be comfortable. Or you can take the bed, if you want. I’ve even got a spare toothbrush. Never been used.”
“I can’t do that, Alex.”
“Why not?”
“I . . . just . . .” Annie could think of no real reason, except that she wanted to go home and be alone. She realized how selfish that was. Here was a young woman in need, and all that Annie had to do was agree to stop the night and settle down on the couch. Besides, she knew she had drunk a bit too much wine to be driving safely. She could always get a taxi home, but that would be expensive.
Alex refilled their glasses. “Seriously,” she said. “I’m really scared. It’ll make me feel a lot better if you’ll stop. I don’t want to be a victim anymore, but I need help right now.”
Then the hall door opened, and a little boy stood there in his striped pajamas rubbing the sleep from his eyes, his hair tousled. “I can’t sleep,” he said in a pathetic little-boy-lost voice. “I had a bad dream. Can I sit up with you and watch TV?”
8
IT WAS FAR TOO EARLY IN THE MORNING FOR A POSTmortem, Banks thought as he walked down the high green-tiled basement corridor of Eastvale General Infirmary.
It would always be too early in the morning for a postmortem like this one, he thought, when he entered Dr. Glendenning’s recently modernized domain and saw the pieces arranged on the stainless steel autopsy table: two sides of a human being, like two halves of a pig in a butcher’s cold room, roughly aligned. The arms had been placed where they should have been joined to the body, and the head, which had been found after dark under a split bin bag containing a stillborn lamb, sat on top. Between the eyes was a ragged hole.
“Ah, Banks,” said Dr. Glendenning. “Glad you could come. Decided to have a lie-in, did you? You almost missed the show.”
“Pity,” said Banks. For a moment, he longed for the old days, when Dr. Glendenning bent over the body, a cigarette dangling from his lips, spilling ash in open incisions. The days when he could enjoy a cigarette himself, anything to mask the smell of decayed flesh and take his mind off violent death.
No chance these days. Both he and Glendenning had stopped smoking years ago, and a lit cigarette would probably set off every alarm in the building. It was almost unthinkable today how much they used to be able to get away with. Dr. Glendenning didn’t believe in a dab of Vick’s under the nose, either. He thought anyone who did was a sissy, and you didn’t want to be thought a sissy by Dr. Glendenning. Still, this time there wasn’t much of a smell at all. At the crime scene, most of the stink had come from the dead animals, not from Morgan Spencer’s butchered corpse.
“You look a bit pink around the gills,” Dr. Glendenning went on as they approached the body. “Been sitting around brooding and boozing again?”
“Not sleeping very well,” said Banks. “Or not enough.”
“It’s the demon drink. I thought so. Plays havoc with your sleep patterns. Now, what do we have here?”
“A jigsaw puzzle?” Banks suggested.
“I’m not normally a fan of TV crime dramas, but did you ever see that Swedish program—or was it Danish—the one about the body on the bridge? That was in two halves, but in that case, it was top and bottom. This is much more unusual. And see how clean the cuts are. Look at those arms, taken off right at the shoulder joints, just like chicken wings. What does that suggest to you?”
“A chef?”
“Be serious, man.”
“A professional?” Banks ventured.
“But what kind? What kind?”
“Doctor, perhaps? A surgeon?”
“Hah. Apart from the personal insult implied, you couldn’t be more wrong. The body’s been jointed and split, Banks. Now, why on earth would a surgeon do that?”
“I don’t know. A butcher, then?”
“Possibly.” Glendenning scratched his bristly mustache. “Closer, at any rate.” He bent over the remains and poked and prodded for a while, at one point lifting up the right arm and examining it from various angles. He then put it down and picked up the other arm. “No sign of defensive wounds, but there’s some light bruising on the arms,” he said. “Premortem.”
“Somebody held him by his arms?”
“Well, laddie, he might not want to just stand still and get shot. Some people would take objection to that, you know.”
Banks noticed as he looked at the naked body that there were no genitals. “Was he castrated?” he asked.
“The genitalia were certainly removed,” said Glendenning. “As were all the internal organs and viscera. He was also exsanguinated. But all that was carried out postmortem. There are no incisions on what’s left. Each part is intact in itself, except the head.”
“Be thankful for small mercies,” Banks muttered.
“Aye.” Dr. Glendenning pointed to the head. The eyes were closed. “That’s what killed him, I’m almost certain. That bloody great hole in his head, to be technical about it. And you can see if you look carefully that the throat was cut before the head was severed. There are signs of two different incisions.” He selected a scalpel from the tray of instruments on the side table. “Now, let’s see what else we’ve got here. There’s no sign of lividity, no blood settled in the muscles or tissue.” He put down the scalpel and conferred with his assistant quietly for a few moments, then he turned back to Banks.
“The victim was shot in the forehead. And I’m glad you haven’t asked about time of death, because I’m afraid it would be very hard to tell.”
“We think it probably happened on Sunday morning.”
“Now look at this.” Dr. Glendenning pointed toward the ankles, where Banks could see the deeply cut groove of some sort of binding.
“Rope?” he asked. “Leather? Metal?”
“We’ll settle that later when we check the wound for fibers. For the moment, though, I can tell you that the throat was cut and the body was drained of blood, most likely while hanging upside down. The arms were expertly removed at the shoulder joints—no cutting of bone involved—and finally, the body was sliced in half by a very sharp blade and eviscerated. Scraped out. Look at the cleanness of those cut lines. There’s little tearing, no raggedness.”
“What was used? A chain saw or something?”
“Certainly something.” Glendenning nodded toward his assistant. “But probably not a chain saw. At least not an ordinary one. There would be much more tearing. Karen over there has a theory. Tell DCI Banks your theory, my dear.”
Karen gave Dr. Glendenning a daggers-drawn look at the sexist endearment. Not that it would do any good, Banks thought. Glendenning loved to tease and play the politically incorrect male chauvinist pig, and he was too old to change now. “Taking everything together,” Karen said, “it very much looks to me as if this body was dressed in a working abattoir.”