Pringle nodded, then picked up the last biscuit from the plate on Skinner’s coffee table. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said, just before he crunched it.
‘That’s about it then,’ said the DCC, ‘now that they’re finished.’ He pushed himself up from the low leather couch.
A small wave of relief swept through the head of CID; his suspicions must have been wrong after all. Someone else must be for the high jump.
He was almost at the door when a big hand squeezed his shoulder. ‘By the way,’ Skinner drawled casually, ‘Sarah was telling me last night that she’s got one of ours on the slab this morning: a guy found topped in the Meadows yesterday morning. Imagine my surprise and delight, Dan, when the wife tells me across the fucking supper table that we’ve got a potential homicide investigation on our hands, and I haven’t heard about it from anyone else.’
An ice-ball dropped in Pringle’s stomach. ‘Ah, well,’ he began slowly, ‘the division felt that it would be a bit premature to go calling it a murder inquiry before the SOCOs and the autopsy confirmed it. There were some anomalies at the scene that made suicide look unlikely, but I heard from Maggie Rose last night that they’ve all been sorted out and that suicide’s now seen as a possibility.’
‘I see.’ The big man scratched his chin. ‘It’ll be an unusual one if it is, him stringing himself up from a tree in the middle of the city. Usually they go into the garage, lock the door and turn on the car, or they swallow a bottle of single malt and a bottle of Valium, or they get out the twelve bore and blow their fucking heads off.’
Pringle sighed. ‘Sorry, boss, I should have got word to you. But I didn’t hear about it myself until Maggie called me at half four, once the ID was complete.’
He looked up at Skinner and saw that he was smiling. ‘It’s all right, Dan. If I hadn’t heard about it from Sarah, there was always this morning’s Scotsman. No harm done, and anyway, I had other things on my mind yesterday.’
He reached out and opened the door for his colleague. ‘I made some resolutions on the way in in the car this morning. One of them is to stop giving the people around me such a hard time. If I made you run and tell me right away about every serious incident that goes down on our patch, then neither of us would be doing his job properly. But in this case, I gather that the victim’s a corporate banker. Just to be on the safe side, I want you to keep a close eye on the investigation, and keep me in the loop as well.’
The chief superintendent nodded. ‘I’ll do that, don’t worry. I won’t lean too hard on Maggie Rose, though. Stevie Steele gets upset when I try it, and there’s worse than that. She doesn’t like it herself, and sometimes her eyebrows can be as bloody heavy as yours!’
‘Mmm,’ said Skinner. ‘Mags can be frosty from time to time, I’ll grant you, but you won’t have to handle her for much longer. Put your kid gloves on for now, but keep me in touch.’ He patted Pringle on the shoulder. ‘I’ll talk to you later. As you leave, ask young Jack to come and see me. There’s some air I have to clear with him too.’
19
‘Is this new place an improvement, or what?’ asked Stevie Steele, his blue tunic rustling as he looked around. ‘There was something about the old Royal Infirmary that always gave me the creeps. Every time I went to an autopsy there I found myself thinking about Dr Knox, and Burke and Hare.’
‘The resurrectionists, you mean? The body-snatchers?’
‘They’re the boys. Every time I saw one in the old Royal I imagined the ghost of Knox the anatomist standing there instead of you or Prof Hutchinson.’
Sarah Grace Skinner, who was dressed identically, smiled at him. ‘You’re a romantic at heart, Stevie, aren’t you? It would have had to be Knox’s ghost. I doubt that he ever set foot in any part of the old Royal. He pre-dated that; his school was somewhere up near Surgeons’ Hall, I believe. Mind you, Burke’s still around.’
‘Uh?’
‘Well, his skeleton is, at least. After they’d hanged him, his body was given to the medical school for dissection; I guess it seemed appropriate at the time. His bones are still there. Plus there’s a pocket book made from his skin on show at the police museum.’
Steele shuddered. ‘We’re a ghoulish lot, us Scots, aren’t we?’
‘Not just you. I believe that Ned Kelly’s skull became a desk ornament in an Australian jail.’
The inspector looked round the autopsy room once more. ‘This is a different era, though. This place is purpose-built, everything’s stainless, there’s proper drainage, a high-pressure water supply and most of all,’ he pointed at the big fans set in the ceiling, ‘there’s a proper air-extraction system.’
Sarah gave a grim laugh. ‘They’re still looking for the ultimate air-freshening system,’ she said, ‘as you will discover when I open up the late Mr Whetstone.’ Steele winced, and moved a few feet away from the table.
She switched on the microphone above the examination table. ‘Let’s get started. The subject is a white male, mid-fifties, found hanging by the neck from a tree.’ She lifted the body’s right arm. ‘Rigor mortis appears to have worn off, this is consistent with the initial medical examiner’s estimate of time of death as approximately. .’ she checked her watch ‘. . thirty-six hours ago.’
She turned the head to one side. ‘The imprint of the belt is clearly visible.’ She felt the neck carefully, for over a minute. ‘However,’ she continued, ‘there is no apparent dislocation of the cervical vertebrae. Subject to more detailed examination, this would indicate that death was due to strangulation.’ She took a pace back, and looked at the corpse carefully, from head to toe then back again, walking around the table as she did so. ‘There are no visible marks on the torso or limbs,’ she paused, ‘except. .’
She moved forward again, close to the body, and took the right shoulder in both of her white-gloved hands, probing with her fingers, manoeuvring it slightly. ‘Inspector,’ she said, ‘can you confirm for the record that when the body was taken down rigor mortis was complete?’
‘Yes, I can,’ Steele replied, speaking loudly to make certain that the microphone picked him up. ‘Mr Whetstone was absolutely stiff when my officers took him down.’
‘And they handled him carefully?’
‘Certainly.’
‘In that case, this shoulder dislocation could only have happened pre mortem. It would have been very painful, and the shoulder would have been immobilised. Therefore it would have been very difficult for the victim to have made all the necessary preparations before hanging himself. That suggests he may have had help, or may have been attacked. Either way, since there’s no such thing as assisted suicide in Scots criminal law, it looks to me as if you could possibly have a murder investigation on your hands after all.’
‘Can I make a call to let Maggie know?’ Steele asked.
‘I’d rather you waited till I’m finished; unless you’d like to go outside to make it, then change into fresh blues.’
‘No, I’ll wait.’
‘In that case. .’ she said, picking up a scalpel.
The inspector watched in a kind of haze, doing his best to keep his heaving stomach under control. The only policeman he knew who did not mind witnessing a post mortem was George Regan, but his grandfather had been a village joiner, one of the last to combine funeral undertaking with the carpentry business. George liked to regale young coppers with a story from his childhood, which he swore was true, of watching Grandpa Regan lay out a late customer. In life the man had worn a wig, without mishap. In death as he lay in his coffin, it kept slipping sideways. After several attempts to fix it in place, the old tradesman had turned to his grandson. ‘Lad, wid ye pass me ma claw hammer, and a big nail.’