Winding Up the Serpent (7 page)

It was Joanna who moved first. With a quick movement she turned, bent down and locked her car. Then together they walked through the swinging doors into the hospital and turned down the long corridor towards the Pathology Department.

‘Inspector Piercy,' he mused. ‘So you got your promotion – at last. I read it in the paper,' he added. ‘I'm proud of you, Jo.'

‘Thanks,' she said. ‘Yes, I got the promotion.' She couldn't resist adding, ‘Life has to hold some compensations.'

He ignored the dig and disappeared into a cubicle to change. ‘You deserved it after nobbling the Whalleys. Blood and thunder,' he said from behind the curtain. ‘Leek's getting positively law-abiding.'

‘Not too much,' she said, smiling. ‘I don't want to be seconded to Manchester because there isn't enough work. I like it here. I've grown used to it.'

‘Me too,' he agreed, emerging in theatre greens and white wellies. ‘But perhaps we'd better reserve judgement on the quality of local law and order until after we've tackled this little problem.'

‘This little problem' was wheeled in on a refrigerated trolley, smothered in a white sheet. Matthew lifted it. He stared at the black lace underwear, whaleboned figure, suspenders and the long stockings ending in cover girl high-heeled shoes. His eyes moved the whole length of the ladder. ‘God,' he said, then glanced at Joanna. ‘What a get-up.'

His eyes met hers and she couldn't resist a comment. ‘Like a bloody fancy dress, isn't it?'

Matthew gave her a questioning look.

‘Just right for a mistress,' she said sourly.

‘Joanna ...' he pleaded but she met his gaze unflinchingly.

‘I've got the plastic bags,' she said. ‘I think you'll have to cut the clothing off. We'll want it for forensics.'

Without another word he inspected the clothes, meticulously noting stains and tearing, and carefully cut them off and dropped them into the bags. Helped by the mortuary assistant he then measured the body, nape to feet, head circumference, dictating all the details into the small, pocket dictaphone.

Next he made a close inspection of the skin for contusions, tearings, took swabs of orifices, and inspected under fingernails for bloody pieces of tissue, or clothing from an attacker.

He turned the body over and spoke into his recording machine: ‘Body unmarked – no sign of attack.' He glanced at her. ‘Doesn't look like an assault,' he said. ‘What were your thoughts, Jo?'

‘I'm puzzled,' she said frankly. ‘But I did wonder ... drugs, poison? Perhaps ... suicide? There were no signs of a break-in and the dog inside the house would have killed anyone who tried to get to her.'

She looked back at Matthew. ‘She must have died of something, Mat.'

He grinned at her. ‘Quite right,' he said. ‘Let's see what pathology we can unearth.'

Now it was time for methodical work, deft hands sawing through the skull, search the brain – cross-sections in flesh and blood. Sternal split, the ribs pulled back to reveal heart, lungs ... weighing each organ.

It was more than an hour later that he stood up.

‘There's nothing here,' he said incredulously. ‘I can't find a cause of death.' His face was troubled and set, and he stared abstractedly past her as though battling with a mental puzzle.

‘Matthew,' she said gently, ‘you're not making any sense. She must have died of something.'

‘Viscera to Birmingham,' he said. ‘They'll have to be analysed. It might be poison.' He looked dubiously at her. ‘It could be – it's just that I don't think so. There's nearly always some sign – scent or discoloration, foam around the mouth, sometimes blisters if a corrosive substance was ingested. There's nothing. Not a clue.'

‘But surely you would have picked up poison in the stomach?'

He shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. Personally, I'd have plumped for natural causes. Ten pounds I'd have bet on a subarachnoid haemorrhage, some congenital weakness in the circle of Willis. But it wasn't there.'

She looked hard at him, chewed on her lip. ‘I might have gone along with natural causes,' she said, ‘if it hadn't been for the clothes ... You saw them. She was togged up like a tart. It was all brand new. We found the price labels in the wastepaper basket. And then there was the room.' She frowned. ‘Matthew – you didn't see it. Champagne, silk roses, pink lampshades. It was cheap, contrived – seductive – like a brothel.'

She found the words difficult to say to him of all people, recalling scenes she had set, rooms tidied, props placed for lovemaking – bottles of champagne in coolers, flowers, scented sheets.

Matthew met her eyes and she knew he was thinking identical thoughts. Mercifully he said nothing.

‘Come on, Matthew,' she said softly. ‘Women don't spend more than a hundred pounds on boned basques and négligés for nothing.'

He scratched his head in a confused gesture. ‘Well, I don't think I've missed anything.'

‘Intercourse?' she asked firmly.

‘Again – I don't think so.' He paused. ‘I can't see any semen or tearing and oedema – bruising. Of course I can't be one hundred per cent positive until the swabs come back.' He crossed the room, dictating into his tape recorder as he walked.

The police photographs were pinned up on an X-ray light and they looked at them ... Marilyn, legs splayed, crude black underwear, make-up grotesque and bright ...

‘It isn't fitting together,' he said. ‘It's like muddled pieces of two separate jigsaw puzzles ... different shapes ... different pictures. No sense,' he said flatly. ‘No sense at all.

‘And there's something else I want to show you,' he said, returning to the post-mortem table. ‘She was a very expensive corpse.'

Joanna almost giggled. ‘That has to be the first time I've ever heard a corpse described as expensive.' She bit her lip. ‘Unless you count the cost of funerals. How can a corpse be expensive, Matthew?' she said. ‘What do you mean?'

‘This,' he said. ‘Look.' He held back the ears, lifted the breasts, the chin, pointed out marks on the thighs – thin lines, paler than the surrounding skin, an asymmetrical lumpiness on the legs.

Joanna looked at him, puzzled. ‘What are they?'

‘This woman,' he said, ‘spent a bloody fortune trying to look beautiful.'

‘What?' She still didn't understand.

‘Scars, Jo. They're Harley Street scars.' His enthusiasm for the job spilt into his voice. He loved finding clues. He was an expert in his field, a lover of puzzles.

And as she looked at his face, so absorbed and alight with enthusiasm, Joanna remembered a conversation they had once had long ago.

He had told her that he could usually tell the cause of death without making a single incision, simply by looking at the hands of a dead person: fingers clubbed with heart disease, distorted with arthritis, clutching in agony, mottled blue from poisons, nicotine-stained, cut or weathered, grazed in a fall, clutching a dozen clues beneath the fingernails. The list had been long and she had listened, half amused, until she had drawn a baptismal cross in wine on his forehead.

‘OK, clever clogs,' she had giggled, and rolled to face him in the wide bed of a strange hotel. ‘So why mutilate the corpse at all by doing a post-mortem?'

It had been one of their many warm, intimate, frank postcoital chats.

‘Literal policewoman,' he had teased, wiping her hair away from her face. ‘For the girls and the boys in blue I must always prove it.' He had kissed her and when his mouth was free had added, ‘Beyond reasonable doubt.'

But she had known even then that it was the truth. Almost always he did know the cause of death by looking at his corpse's hands. And she had lain her head on the springy hair that forested his chest and listened to his heart's regular beating with fierce jealousy ...

‘So what about her hands?' she asked, coming back to the present and picking up a pudgy hand with short fingers, nibbled nails spotted with nail varnish.

He looked. ‘The sign of a slut,' he said. ‘She spent a bloody fortune on desirable underwear and plastic surgery and didn't even bother to put on new nail varnish.'

He smiled and his green eyes met hers, so she knew he recalled that conversation.

He took the hand. ‘Work roughened,' he said, ‘but she liked to think herself a lady. She took a lot of trouble that night, apart from the nails.'

‘Just to die, Matthew?'

He turned and looked at her. ‘You think suicide, Joanna?'

‘What else?'

He left the table and washed his hands at a sink in the corner of the room, knocking the taps on with his elbows, peeling the surgeon's gloves from his hands.

‘The scars were well hidden in hair lines ...' He mused, rinsing his hands underneath the gush of water as he spoke. ‘... Natural creases, tucked away in folds of skin, but once I'd found the first one I had a good hunt. She'd had the lot: some face reconstruction, nose job, breast augmentation—' He broke off for a moment and looked at her. ‘You must have noticed the hard, pointed breasts. Typical fibrosis following silicone implants. All her teeth were crowned,' he continued, ‘with pearly-white porcelain. And the lumpy look to the thighs – they almost always get that following liposuction. Yes,' he said again, ‘that was a very expensive corpse, Joanna ...' He looked at her. ‘You realize we're talking about somewhere in the region of...' he stopped for a moment, mentally calculating, ‘eighteen thousand or so. Harley Street plastic surgeon. Some top-quality work there. She was well off for a nurse.' He watched her carefully as he dried his hands on paper towels. She felt he was trying to tell her something.

‘She would appear to be comfortably off,' she agreed cautiously, ‘for a nurse.'

Matthew merely nodded. She looked carefully at his face. It still held that guarded, watchful look.

‘So now where?' she asked.

Matthew cleared his throat. It was a habit he had when he didn't know what to say. ‘I can't be sure,' he said and she wondered why he sounded so uneasy. Was it purely professional embarrassment at being defeated by a corpse? True, she had never known him stuck before; but was it so very important? Something was bound to turn up through the laboratory tests.

‘There's only one – unusual – finding. She'd sweated a lot.' He looked at her. ‘Was the room very hot – overheated?'

‘No.' She paused. ‘The windows were open. If anything, it was quite cool. And it certainly would have been last  night.'

‘Well, the clothes were still damp.'

‘Did she have an infection?'

He shook his head. ‘Nothing to support that at all.' He grinned at her. ‘Coffee?'

Joanna walked along the corridor with him to his office and sat, perched on the edge of his desk, while he filled in the post-mortem forms.

‘Mat,' she began, ‘you realize this puts me in a tricky position. It means I have to put a full-blown murder investigation on hold. Discreet enquiries is about all I can get on with until you can find a cause of death.'

He cleared his throat again. ‘Jo,' he said, ‘if it's any help to you I very much doubt it's murder.' He paused. ‘There is absolutely nothing to suggest it. I'd lay a bet on it that it was natural causes. Maybe she committed suicide. After all – she was a nurse. She would have had access to poisons.'

‘And would you lay that same bet in front of the coroner?' she demanded.

He was silent, his eyes evasive, and she knew the answer. He would preserve his reputation in tissue paper, hedge his bets and reserve judgement. So why was he trying so hard to convince her?

‘Well, to return to the facts,' he said after a minute. ‘I'll know more this afternoon when I get some results back from the path lab, and even more by the end of the week when the results run on the viscera come back from the forensic lab in Birmingham.'

‘Barbiturates,' she said suddenly. ‘Sleeping tablets – the bottle I found on the bedside table.'

‘I've bagged up all the stomach contents,' he said. ‘We'll have a look what's in there. I'll know quite a bit later on today.' He hesitated for a while, frowning, and she chipped in sceptically.

‘And the clothes, Matthew?'

‘I'm inclined to think she died naturally while inhabiting some personal make-believe land, some fantasy land of her own. Hence the underwear, the champagne, the perfume, and so on.'

‘So you noticed the perfume,' she said quietly. ‘I might have known. But Matthew, if she died of natural causes why can't you find them?'

He had lovely eyes – green and very clear, fringed with thick dark eyelashes in spite of his blonde hair. Normally they held an honest, frank expression. Today they refused to focus on her. Instead there was a long, pregnant silence.

‘What about lunch?' he said at last.

No, Joanna prayed silently to an unseen god, digging her nails into the palms of her hands: help me say no.

‘We can visit the path lab after lunch, Joanna. If you were with me ... we could call in together.'

‘No, Matthew,' she said gently, her prayer answered. ‘No. I have to report back to the station.'

She heard the hurt in his voice and saw it in his eyes but she was glad.

‘All right,' he said quietly, ‘if that's the way you want it.'

She picked up her handbag from the table. ‘Matthew.' Her voice was soft, pleading. ‘It isn't the way I want it, but it is the way it is.'

‘Yes,' he said, suddenly irritable. ‘I understand. But what have you found to replace what we had? Promotion?' He was following her to the door. ‘Being an inspector – has that made up for it?'

‘Of course not,' she said. ‘Of course not, but at least I know where I am. At least what I have alone is honest. With you it was not.' She bit her lip. ‘Jane haunted me,' she said finally. ‘I hated her. It was all so deceitful. It took away my integrity. I began to despise myself.' She paused, remembering.