When the first phase was complete, she turned to the student. ‘Mike, I want you to do a couple of strong compressions on the chest wall. Not too strong, though; mustn’t break any ribs.’ As the young man did as she had asked, she turned to her witness husband. ‘Do you know what this is for?’
‘No.’›
‘It’s. . Wait a minute. Yes. Come here.’ Reluctantly, he followed her beckoning finger. ‘Do you see that foam, around the nostrils and mouth?’ He leaned over and saw as she had described, a light froth, white, with a very faint pink tinge. ‘That’s a vital sign,’ she told him. ‘It’s a mix of water, air, mucus and a little blood, whisked up by respiratory efforts. Basically it tells us before we do anything else that he was alive when he went into the water.’
‘We never doubted that,’ said Skinner.
‘Well, you know for sure now. Okay, I’m ready to begin the internal examination. In the circumstances,’ she said to her assistant, ‘I’m going straight for the lungs.’ Skinner backed off, quickly; when she picked up her scalpel, he cheated, as he always had done at that moment in every autopsy he had witnessed, by staring into the lights, blinding himself to what was going on before him. He could not shut out the sounds, though, as she opened the abdominal cavity then spread the ribs.
As she worked, her assistant came to join her on the opposite side of the table, mercifully blocking Skinner’s view. He knew what they were doing, and he tried not to imagine it, but as always he failed. She removed the lungs, and placed them in a wide dry basin, which the assistant hooked on to a scale. ‘Seventeen hundred and ninety grams,’ he announced.
‘That indicates that they’re still full of water,’ said Sarah, as the student laid the organs on a steel bench. Leaving the opened corpse, she walked round the dissection table and began to examine them. ‘They’re voluminous and ballooned,’ she called out, speaking up for the microphone. ‘The pleural surface appears marbled; they feel doughy and are pitting on pressure. I’m going to start to section now.’ The assistant came over to her with several dishes ready to receive tissue samples. ‘But first, I’m going to be a little unconventional and aspirate some of the water content.’ She reached out and selected a syringe with a long needle, inserted it carefully into the lower lobe of the right lung and began to draw off liquid.
‘Bob,’ she called out, when she was finished, ‘I think you should see this.’
Her husband tore his eyes away from the bright, near-blinding light. ‘Must I?’ he replied.
‘Oh yes, you must.’
He blinked hard as he walked round to her, trying to restore some focus to his vision. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to make you look at any squidgy bits, but tell me,’ she held up the syringe, ‘what you make of that.’
He peered at the fluid in the chamber. ‘It’s slightly pink,’ he murmured.
‘Blood traces; to be expected. Anything else?’
‘Nothing I can see.’
‘Exactly. And that’s what’s giving me a problem.’
She laid down the syringe, and turned to him. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘get your large ass out of here.’
‘Eh?’
‘You heard. I don’t need you here any longer; Mike’s a witness, the photographer’s a witness. This autopsy has just become anything but routine. I am going to have to work super-carefully from here on. I’m going to have to take several sections of the lungs from different lobe locations, central and peripheral. I’m going to have to take samples of the stomach contents, and do a lot of other testing. I do not need the distraction of having you in the room and wondering all the time when you’re going to puke.’
She patted his chest. ‘Thanks, you’ve got me this far, after I was reluctant to do this; now the best way you can support me is by digging out a technician, regardless of the time of day it is, to take water samples from the part of the dock where the body was found. We’ll need to analyse them. After that, you can go home. . but don’t wait up for me: I could be some time.’
58
The top hinge of the front door squeaked. It had done for the last year, and every two months Bob had promised that he would buy a new tin of Three-in-One and fix it. On the odd occasion, though, it served him well.
He checked his watch: the time was ten past one. Killing the insomniac’s movie on BBC2 with his remote, he walked into the hall with a glass in each hand. One contained red wine; the other, which he handed to Sarah, was a brandy goblet. ‘That’s been getting warm for the last hour and a half,’ he told her.
Dropping her briefcase where she stood, she accepted it, gratefully, and took a sip. ‘I told you not to wait up,’ she said, ‘but I’m glad you did.’
He led her through into the darkened garden room, and dropped into a couch, looking out of the window at the lights of the Fife towns, across the river. ‘Sleep wasn’t an option, not knowing what you’ve been doing.’
‘Did you do your part?’ she asked, as she joined him.
‘Not personally, but it’s taken care of.’ He glanced at her as she sat beside him. ‘So what’s your story?’
‘You’re not going to like it. It’s all subject to confirmation by test, but I don’t believe that Inspector Mawhinney drowned in the Albert Dock. When I checked the stomach, there was dirty, oily water present, and other detritus that almost certainly did come from there, but that need not have been swallowed. It was also present in the large airways, but it need not have been inhaled. It wasn’t in large quantities in the stomach, and it wasn’t present in the further reaches of the bronchus. You saw the water I aspirated with that syringe; it was clear, and it was abundant in the lower areas of the lungs. It may also have diluted the dock water in the stomach. Bob, I think that he was drowned in fresh water and was put in the dock afterwards, weighted down with that chain to make him sink.’
He leaned back and let out a huge sigh. ‘You’re right about one thing, without any lab confirmation. You haven’t exactly made my night. Was there anything else?’
‘Yes. There were signs of bruising to the shoulder girdle and the neck. That can happen occasionally in drowning fatalities, but usually it’s caused by the victim struggling in the water prior to death. Muscles can even rupture in those circumstances and you can find haemorrhaging, but not in this case. Here, the bruising could have been caused by his being restrained and held under water.’
‘Christ on a bike,’ Skinner muttered. ‘You’re saying that someone snatched the guy off the street and drowned him in a bath or something similar.’
‘That is my hypothesis.’
‘Not your everyday mugging, is it?’
‘Not even close.’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘Mafia?’ she murmured. ‘Has he upset someone in New York?’
‘And been taken care of over here, you mean, in the hope that it would raise less heat?’
‘The trip was publicised.’
‘The Mafia don’t rely on the papers,’ he told her, ‘they bribe informants; but essentially you’re right. I tell you, love, the sooner the Pope gets here the better. I’m going to need divine assistance to sort out all the mess that’s landed in my lap in the last twenty-four hours.’
59
‘Neither Aurelia Middlemass nor Señor Alsina showed up for work this morning,’ said Stevie Steele. ‘I’ve just confirmed that with the bank and with the professor of chemistry at Heriot-Watt. ’