A Long Time Dead (The Dead Trilogy) (17 page)

Drizzle, thrashing windscreen wipers and a haunting blaze of red taillights in the darkness. Tyres on wet tarmac and loud traffic noise roared into the van as Chris lowered the window and dumped a handful of empty chocolate wrappers out. “You should carry your own emergency supply of these. You never know when you’re gonna need ‘em.” He offered Paul a chocolate bar. “You sure you don’t want one? Could be a while before your next meal.”

“No. Ta.”

“Could be a while before your next breath of fresh air, come to think of it.”

Within minutes they were bouncing up the rutted mud track leading to the mortuary building. He parked the van, switched off the engine and watched rainwater running down the broken drainpipes.

“Shouldn’t someone else be doing the PM?” Paul asked.

“Why?” Chris got out of the van in a hurry, still shaking his head, only now it was because the kid was starting to annoy him.

Paul stuttered, looking for a good reason not to be here. “Contamination?”

Chris closed the van door, “Bring the camera gear and hurry up about it.”

Chris held open the exterior door for Paul who slovenly ambled in, head down, huffing. He walked past the wall of twelve refrigerators and three freezers.

The door swung shut and quietened the hum of the refrigerant machines outside.

It was nearly 8.30; Bellington Wainwright’s timing for the PM was hopelessly optimistic. When the entourage arrived at Pinderfields mortuary, Ann Halfpenny was still tying off the beautifully neat stitching on the chest of a heroin victim. She didn’t look up and she didn’t stop her happy humming.

The large, well-lit room was clean, smelled of pine disinfectant, and was cool and echoey. A ceiling-mounted fan blew a breeze in Chris’s face and if he closed his eyes, he thought, he could be in a Norwegian forest… “I wish,” he whispered.

A stainless steel workbench complete with sinks and sluices filled one wall. Fluorescent lights peered into the deep scratches of polythylene chopping boards set beside digital scales. These scales were used for weighing the organs as they emerged from each cadaver. Over the chopping boards were clear Perspex sheets designed to prevent blood from spraying into the pathologist’s face as he cut the organs to inspect their interior surfaces.

At the other side of the room, a similar workbench was partly hidden by a congregation of police officers, all suited up in green disposable aprons and white rubber gloves. As with Sally’s PM, some were there in an observational capacity, gathering information about the girl firsthand to pass onto the briefing and the SIO the next day. Others were there performing the role of Exhibits Officer, collecting items from the pathologist, samples of all body hair, nail scrapings, blood samples for toxicology and DNA use, urine samples and anything else that may lead the investigation in an appropriate direction.

Chris watched the Coroner’s Officer, Jacob Cooper, standing silently, seemingly unable to penetrate the cliquey circle of detectives.

At 8.50, Ann laid Nicky’s body on one of the three stainless steel tables. At one end a drain hole, similar to that found in a bathtub, caught her slim trickle of redness, and over it was a dripping showerhead.

Paul rigged up the tripod, affixed the Mamiya medium format camera to its head, while Chris busied himself loading film into the spare camera backs in readiness for a quick changeover. Some PMs were performed at a startling rate, and some pathologists became irate if their proceedings were affected by ill-prepared SOCOs having to wind-off and reload film. Then Chris flicked both Metz flashguns into life, listened to their high-pitched whine and watched their LEDs flash.

Between them, they photographed the body from both sides; general shots, not concentrating at this stage on any detail, before having Ann turn Nicky’s body onto its side so they could photograph her front and back.

All the while, the detectives spoke quietly amongst themselves and did so in a suppressed and respectful way as they would, for example, in a library. Their banter was hushed not out of respect for the dead, but because while they stood temporarily idle, others were performing their own work and it would be impolite to disturb them.

What a change from Delaney’s PM, Chris thought. Haynes seemed subdued.

Bellington Wainwright entered the room dressed in a green cotton smock, heavy-duty rubber gloves, and white Wellington boots that squeaked on the tiled floor. In one hand, he carried a facemask with a clear visor – rather like a welders mask – and in the other, a clipboard. “Right…” he said.

The echoes in the room hushed further.

Chris had worked with Wainwright only once before, and wasn’t too impressed by the thoroughness or the methodology he employed. He was on the Home Office books though, and so should be up to the standard, but Chris thought he could certainly tighten up his routine, and not miss so much bloody evidence!

He was a quiet worker who would timidly ask for a photograph here or a swab there, rather than yelling orders like a Sergeant Major, as would some pathologists.

Wainwright began his autopsy by carefully removing the plastic bags covering the hands, feet and head. These he handed to one of the Exhibits Officers, who began her routine of packaging and labelling. He then made more notes of the deceased to supplement those he made at the scene, and sketched any unusual markings to the skin, scratches or abrasions on the wrists or hands that may have indicated signs of a struggle. Defence wounds, they were called.

He checked her eyes for obvious signs of drug abuse, illness or the like, and her arms and legs for tracks. There were none. She did indeed appear to be a clean young lady.

By the end of this preliminary stage, half an hour had passed and people began chattering again. Chris was not optimistic of an early finish. The Exhibits Officer, DC Clements, flicked a pen against her bottom lip, her top lip shining with Vicks; Haynes rapped his fingers on the bench, and Paul, Chris noted, looked away from the body; not just slightly away, coyly like he was pretending to be busy, but 180 degrees away, arms folded, stomach rumbling.

Before Wainwright put his clipboard down, he again picked up the girl’s left hand and studied the back of it quite closely. When, after a moment, he failed to put the hand down, the chatter gradually ceased. Pens, fingers and feet stopped moving and attention grew. Wainwright looked up. Shelby glided to where the pathologist stood and looked at her hand. “Chris,” he said, “can we have a picture of this, please?”

“Sure,” Chris snapped a shot of the blue-ish smudge on the white skin. “Looks like it says something to me,” he said, more to Shelby than anyone else. There were two faint lines of blue smudge running roughly from her wrist to her knuckles.

Ann rigged up an illuminated magnifying glass over the dead girl, and Wainwright peered through it at her hand. Distinct letters and shapes appeared. “Strange,” he said.

“What, what?” Shelby said, hoping for a lead.

“Well, the writing, if we at this stage may call it writing, is angled peculiarly.”

“How do you mean?” Shelby asked.

“If for example, you were to write upon your own hand, chances are it would go in a straight line roughly from the inboard part of your wrist towards the top knuckle of your index finger, following the line of  the tendon. But as you can see, this goes in a straight line from the base of her thumb toward the knuckle of her middle finger, possibly indicating that someone else wrote whatever it is, and not the girl.”

Shelby nodded, and DS Lenny Firth made notes in a green-backed pad. “S’cuse me, boss?” Firth chipped in. “I don’t think she wrote on her hand. She’s left handed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, yeah. I took her watch from her right wrist; and back at the house there were left-handed scissors and stuff in the bathroom.”

“Okay, then. So, we have some illegible writing on her left hand probably written by someone else. Photo, Chris, if you please.”

Chris photographed her hand with and without grey measuring scales, and then re-photographed it using a slow speed black and white film, hoping to provide better contrast.

“What can we do with that, Chris, to bring it out more?” Shelby asked.

Just as he was pulling the camera out of the way, tripod legs hopping across the tiles, Chris paused. “We could try Quasar,” he said. “It’s a high intensity light which, if the right wavelength is selected, should get the ink in her skin to fluoresce, but I don’t think that will be available until tomorrow; it needs specially trained staff from the Fingerprint Development Lab.”

“Okay, good.”

“Oh, we could also use a plain old-fashioned UV lamp and photo the results.”

“Good, good, any ideas, Chris, keep ‘em coming.” He finally smiled and the crow’s feet surfaced. “Well,” Shelby said, “let’s bag her hand up again so the writing doesn’t get washed off or rubbed out altogether, and we’ll get FDL here tomorrow.” He was about to ask a question of Firth and then said, “Never mind, I’ll arrange it.”

“Well, let’s see if we can’t get some under-nail crud; paring stick please and a Beechams,” Wainwright said.

“A what?” asked DC Clements.

“A folded piece of paper,” Chris whispered, “to catch the nail scrapings in.”

“Right.” And then quietly, “Why didn’t he say than in the first place?”

“It isn’t going to be easy,” Wainwright examined her fingers, “she was a nervous little thing; bitten most of her nails away.”

Shelby moved closer, peered at her ragged nails. Some were so well chewed that they had dark deposits – dried blood – up by the quick.

“But we’ll try.” He did, but unsuccessfully.

The hand re-bagged, Wainwright moved on to take other body hair samples. These were primarily in order to link her with another scene, to place her in a car or perhaps another address, if the full story of her last night alive ever became known.

He plucked and cut head hair, and placed it into a plastic universal container held in the Exhibits Officer’s shaky grasp. Then he passed her some eyebrow hair, then eyelash hair, and then nasal hair. When he moved down to the pubic region, Wainwright stopped in his tracks, tweezers poised. “Inspector Shelby.”

Shelby moved over, accompanied by Firth, and saw that her pubic mound was sheathed in fine light ginger, almost straight, pubic hair; downy to the touch.

“What am I looking at, Bellington?”

“Can’t you see it?”

Shelby looked harder, moved even closer. “I haven’t a clue what you want me to look at.”

“There,” Wainwright pointed with a gloved hand. “The black hair amongst her own?”

“Photograph, please, Chris.”

Chris photographed the hair, and then again with an adhesive arrow pointing it out in case the jury couldn’t make it out either.

Wainwright’s tweezers shook as he handed the hair to the Exhibits Officer.

“I want that treated as a priority,” Shelby said sternly to her. “We should be able to get DNA from that, right?”

“Hopefully,” said Wainwright. “If the root is still in good condition, yes. If not, then we should be able to extract mitochondrial DNA from the hair shaft which will enable a maternal strain to be identified.”

“A what?”

In his wonderfully rich, public school voice, both aspects of which annoyed Chris, Wainwright explained that, “Mitochondrial DNA is unlike the nuclear DNA fingerprinting one hears of on the news occasionally. It has less of a distinguishing property in that all the mitochondrial DNA from siblings is identical, and furthermore is only carried down from the mother – hence, maternally-passed down.”

“Thank you,” was all Shelby said.

“Problem being though,” Wainwright continued, “is that mitochondrial DNA is not compatible with the National DNA Database. That means, I’m afraid, you will need a suspect to match it against. Or access to his mother.”

“Fucking marvellous,” Shelby said.

Wainwright took a sample of her own pubic hair as a control. Next, two sets of oral swabs: one from around the inner region of the lips, and the other from around the tongue; and then he performed upper and lower vaginal and anal swabs before concluding, “I would say that no sexual penetration has occurred recently before death.”

“But plenty afterwards,” whispered Haynes, who thought Shelby couldn’t hear him. He was wrong, and reddened when Shelby strongly intimated demotion.

“What?” asked Shelby, returning his attention to the pathologist, more confused than ever. “You mean to tell me that a pretty girl was found dead in the bedroom of an otherwise unoccupied house,” he pointed, “
and
she was naked, let me add, and you say she hadn’t been…she hadn’t had sex?”

“That’s right, Inspector.”

Shelby muttered, “What
is
the world coming to.”

“Possibly the offender, er…” clearly embarrassed, Wainwright looked at DC Clements, “I mean, perhaps he was unable to er, to fully er—”

“He couldn’t get it up?” Clements suggested.

“Well, I just think it’s something you ought to bear in mind, Inspector.”

Next, Chris took more photographs of the neck wound before and after cleaning. They discovered that a single-edged blade had penetrated her neck by nearly two inches, severing the carotid artery and nicking the jugular vein. It was the sort of blade found on a million penknives, and that similarity with Delaney’s death wasn’t lost on anyone.

After Wainwright weighed and dissected each organ, everyone stood back and watched Ann place them in a black plastic bag and shuffle them into Nicky’s gaping abdominal cavity, humming
Bring Me Sunshine
. She didn’t sew Nicky up at this stage, as there was a chance of a further PM carried out by another pathologist under the instructions of the Defence counsel – if one were ever needed.

“Briefing at oh-eight-hundred sharp, Chris.”

A light snow began to fall.