A June of Ordinary Murders (11 page)

‘So we don't know what gender the victim might have seemed to be at any given time,' Mossop ventured. ‘I suppose she must have left her own clothing and maybe other effects somewhere. If we could find that we'd have a start, wouldn't we?' His voice trailed off as he realised that he was building on thin air.

Lafeyre beckoned to the detectives from the door of the examination room. He led the way to where the two bodies lay on steel tables, draped in white sheets.

Four steel examination tables stood against the wall under a battery of electrically powered lights.

The medical examiner had wrung the cost out of the Under-Secretary's office in Dublin Castle. ‘What one smells may be as important as what one sees in a post mortem,' he had argued with the senior accounting clerk who had challenged the cost. ‘The fumes from the old gas-burning lights negate the olfactory senses – you can smell nothing.'

The clerk, who saw himself as a moderniser, accepted the argument and approved the outlay.

Two bundles of clothing sat on a side table. Swallow recognised the man's jacket and trousers from the park. All the items had been labelled and tagged by Lafeyre's assistant. The child's trousers and jacket and the light shoes he had been wearing made up the smaller bundle.

Lafeyre tied a rubber apron at the neck and waist and began the examination of the woman's body. Under the strong electric light Swallow saw that she had been well nourished and healthily formed. The pallor of death seemed to add years to the face, but the smooth limbs and torso were those of a young woman in her physical prime.

Lafeyre or Scollan had cleaned the bloodied face so that in spite of the knife wounds Swallow could begin to imagine her as she might have been in life. The features would have been handsome and regular, the skin smooth. The lips were firm and well-formed. Swallow could imagine a lively young woman smiling or laughing with her son. He felt his anger stir at the destruction, the waste of beautiful life.

Pat Mossop opened the murder book and started to write as Lafeyre began his commentary.

‘The time of death, judging by the degree of rigor mortis when I examined the body, I'd say was around 10 to 12 hours previously. That's roughly between, say, 10 p.m. on Thursday night and early on Friday morning. But I can't be any more certain. The warm night could perhaps slow the process.

‘Cause of death was the wound to the temple. This one … it certainly looks like a bullet entry, but it's an unusual bullet…'

‘What's that supposed to mean?' Swallow asked.

‘I'll try to tell you in a moment. First, let's see the damage.'

He indicated to his assistant who stepped forward with a heavy steel saw to section the skull. After a few minutes of noisy work he put away the implement and removed the forward section. Almost like quartering an apple, Swallow thought.

Lafeyre took his magnifying glass and a steel spatula with which he probed the now-open skull.

After a moment he put down the probe and took up long, surgical tweezers which he inserted into the open cavity. A few seconds later he withdrew the instrument and deposited a flat-headed lead slug into a small, steel kidney dish.

He resumed his narrative for Mossop.

‘The diameter of the wound on the right frontal lobe is six tenths of an inch. The wound penetrated three and a half inches into the brain so death would have been instantaneous.

‘At the extreme site of the wound I have located and withdrawn a bullet. It is a little distorted but not flattened. It appears to be of a medium calibre with a flat point. I would estimate it to be a .38 or .32 calibre.'

He reached for a small glass bottle on a shelf behind him and held it by thumb and index finger in front of Swallow and Mossop. It was filled with a clear, pinkish liquid. Then he swabbed the wound and the eye sockets with small pieces of linen and placed them on a series of glass slides on the table. He watched and waited for perhaps a minute. He turned to Mossop as if to ensure the book man was getting all the details he needed.

‘I've swabbed the wound and I've tested the swab for the main kinds of gunpowder or ballistic propellant. It's a simple alkali test. After three tests without a reaction, I got this. The colour confirms the presence of nitro-cordite.'

‘Nitro-cordite?' Mossop repeated. ‘Didn't they use it for muskets?'

‘Yes. And it's still used today, but only in low-charge ammunition where the bullet isn't intended to travel very far. Nitro-cellulose is used nowadays for longer range and greater force.'

‘I don't understand,' Swallow interjected. ‘Who would use that sort of ammunition and why?'

‘I think I know of some uses for it,' Pat Mossop said. ‘It's sometimes used in shooting ranges for target practice, for example. There'd be a danger if the bullets carried too far so the manufacturers reduce the amount of propellant.'

‘That would tally with the use of flat-pointed slugs,' Lafeyre agreed. ‘They make for a neatly punched hole in the target, plainly visible.'

Lafeyre replaced the bottle on the shelf. ‘It makes sense of what we're looking at here. There's no exit wound on either victim, yet the presence of nitro-cordite on the skin tells us the shots were fired at very close range, maybe even with the weapon pressed up against the victim's temple. The nitro-cordite powder is actually burned into the skin. A standard .32 or .38 bullet fired into human tissue, even bone, would usually go straight through and out the other side. That hasn't happened here.'

Swallow absorbed the information, framing immediate questions in his own mind. ‘What about the other wounds? What do we know about the injuries to the face apart from the bullet wound?'

Lafeyre turned back to the woman's corpse and worked with his magnifying glass, peering at the wounds from different angles.

‘I looked at these earlier with the microscope. It was done with a middle-sized knife, maybe 5 or 6 inches long, smooth-edged rather than serrated. Not too sharp, either. The cutting pattern was rough, almost random.'

Swallow was silent for a moment, staring at the blue sky through the morgue's paned windows. ‘Brutal,' he said quietly.

‘That's a fair enough description. But if you're looking for any mercy here it's the fact that they were killed before they were mutilated. There was very little post-mortem bleeding in spite of the repeated stabbing or slashing with the knife. And there are no defensive wounds on the hands that you'll generally get if someone is attacked with a knife.'

Lafeyre signalled to Scollan, who took a heavy brace from the shelf. Lafeyre expertly slipped the knife under the breast bone, then the assistant inserted the brace. The ribcage came apart with a harsh snapping sound to reveal dark lungs and a red-yellow cardiac sac.

Lafeyre probed the lungs and the area around the heart for a few minutes. He took a scalpel and, in one swift, slicing movement, opened the woman's stomach. A hiss of foul gases floated across the room, making Swallow and Mossop blanch.

Lafeyre plunged his spatula into the stomach and started probing and testing. He took small samples and placed them in various glass tubes, adding chemicals and noting reactions. Then he laid down his implements.

‘The heart and lungs look healthy. There's nothing out of the ordinary in the stomach or other visible organs. If there was anything like a poison ingested it would show up. I think I can say with certainty that she died of the gunshot and that alone.'

‘Anything else that might be helpful?' Swallow asked.

‘Well, there's one possibility that might help in identification,' Lafeyre said.

‘There's a tumour or cyst under the skin behind the right eye and a smaller one near the left eye. At a guess I'd say it's some sort of inherited condition. The one behind the right eye was partially exposed in the mutilation of the face. It would probably have caused a protrusion or swelling of the eye itself. It might have been quite noticeable. Do you remember anything from your medical classes about a condition known as Grave's Disease?'

‘A bit,' Swallow said. ‘Graves was a Dublin doctor, I know, quite celebrated in his time. The condition causes the eyes to swell.'

‘Not bad,' Lafeyre smiled. ‘You must have been at least half sober in one or two of your medical lectures. These cysts might mimic the symptoms.'

He gestured to the woman's body.

‘I think she could have had somewhat prominent eyes, bulging if you like. It might have been noticeable.'

Swallow nodded. ‘A distinctive thing like that might help us to identify them, or at least trace their movements. What about the child?'

They moved to the adjoining table. The child's face too had been cleaned of blood and dirt, but the hair was matted above the dark spaces where the eyes had been. Swallow saw a terrible sadness in his expression. His instinct told him now that the woman was first to be killed. The boy had seen his mother shot.

On a signal from Lafeyre, Scollan sectioned the child's skull as he had done with the woman, then the medical examiner probed the wound with the surgical tweezers. Within a minute or two the probe located the bullet that had killed the boy. Lafeyre dropped the small, distorted slug into another kidney dish.

‘It looks to me to be the same calibre as for the woman. It's probably .38.

‘The knife wounds also follow the same pattern,' he said after a few minutes of further probing. ‘I'll test again later for gunpowder, but I imagine it's the same nitro-cordite. You can see the burning on the skin where the weapon was fired at point-blank range.'

He spent another ten minutes examining the boy's body with his magnifying glass before signalling to Scollan to replace the sheets over the two corpses.

‘There's nothing of significance apart from what I've recorded. He was a healthy young boy, quite well-nourished. I'd say 8 or 9 years old. No signs of illness. No scars.'

Lafeyre, Swallow and Mossop withdrew to the office. Lafeyre removed his rubber apron and indicated to the detectives to take seats at the work desk.

‘Let's go through things one at a time,' Swallow suggested, ‘as though we're starting from nothing.'

They had done this many times, on many cases, detective and doctor. They went back to basics, sieving the questions, examining and re-examining what might appear to be obvious, testing theories and possibilities against each other's judgment and knowledge.

Lafeyre steepled his fingers and indicated to Mossop, who began to scribble quickly.

‘All right, first we'll describe the woman. She was a healthy female, apart from the two small cysts that I've mentioned. She was aged about 25 to 30 years, I'd guess. She was 5 feet 6 inches tall. The corpse weighs 7 stone and 12 pounds. No signs of illness or surgical scars. There was some decay on the teeth. She had a good head of hair, dark, healthy but cut short. No colourant or dye used.'

‘There's nothing of significance in the contents of the stomach. She'd eaten maybe three or four hours before she died. Some sort of vegetables, certainly potatoes. I'd think some oatmeal bread too. I've tested for alcohol and found none.'

He paused. ‘I can tell you also that the woman experienced at least one delivery, maybe more. But that wasn't very recently. It was a number of years ago. At a guess, she could have been the boy's mother.'

Swallow made a sour face. ‘What did you think about her? Tell me her life story.'

Lafeyre shrugged.

‘My acquaintance with her has been too brief for that, but I'll take a bit of a leap in the dark. From the state of her hands, I'd say she was a servant, or perhaps a shop assistant or maybe she did light work in a mill. Her hands weren't used for labouring or farming. She was a city woman rather than, say, a farmer. She wasn't very muscular so I don't think she would have been fit for that sort of life anyway.'

‘Was she Irish?' Swallow asked.

‘Maybe, there's nothing to indicate one way or another.'

Mossop continued to write as Swallow summarised.

‘So, we know we have one female victim of about 25 to 30 years of age, maybe a servant or a shop assistant or a mill worker. Shot to death with a low-charge, medium-calibre slug. We have the second victim, a male child, killed in the same way. We have the faces of both victims extensively mutilated, probably with a knife. And we have the bizarre dimension that the woman was masquerading as a man.'

Lafeyre nodded. ‘That's a fair summary. Can the clothing or footwear tell you anything about their identities?'

‘Not a lot. The man's clothing worn by the woman could be bought in any city or town here or in England, I'd say. There aren't any tailor's or manufacturer's labels. The boy's clothing is much the same. The shirts could have come from any cotton factory. The boots show some repair work. There's nothing of much help there. So what do we know – or what can we speculate – about the killer, or killers?'

Lafeyre shrugged again.

‘Whoever did the killing might have been somewhat bloodstained. The shots were fired at very close range so spattering could be expected. The knife wounds were inflicted post mortem so there wouldn't have been any great gushing or effusion of blood even from the deep wounds. The killer or killers would probably have picked up some stains, but they wouldn't necessarily have stood out with blood all over their clothing.'

‘You've placed the death some time late on Thursday night or early on the Friday morning,' Swallow said. ‘There'd still be people on the streets in the village or on the roads up to midnight. A bloodstained man would probably be noticed … unless he was in a carriage. So give me a medical opinion. What sort of sick person would do those things to a woman and child?'

Lafeyre shook his head.

‘You know there doesn't have to be any sickness involved. When the motivation is strong enough, certain men – or women – won't be held back by any barriers or restraints. So let me turn the question back on you. You tell me, have you any idea as to what sort of motive we might be dealing with here?'