After her mini freak-out Cassie had passed a restless night, trying and failing to identify whether the faintly citrusy fragrance in the air was aftershave, a female perfume – or something else. Within a couple of minutes, she’d no longer been able to detect it. Had it just been her imagination? Or had some smell from the canal seeped in through the bilges – as sometimes happened? Either way, she ought to get a second lock put on the boat door to back up the old and easily slippable Yale. She even thought of calling Flyte before thinking better of it: her tone had still been frosty the last time they spoke and she could just hear the sarcastic response to her reporting a ‘random lemon smell’.
Macavity turned up for breakfast at the crack of dawn as if nothing had happened. ‘So was I just being paranoid?’ she asked him, yawning – but if he had any intel he wasn’t sharing.
*
In the forensic autopsy suite where Sean Kavanagh’s PM was taking place, Cassie laid out the instruments and prepared herself for long periods of boredom, simply because her role was so limited. In a forensic PM the body had to be treated as an exhibit, a piece of evidence, and to preserve its integrity the pathologist would perform the entire evisceration, with the technician’s job reduced to handing them the right scalpel and bone saw.
The suite was soon full of people. There was Andy the Crime Scene Manager – a civilian officer with forensics training – an exhibits officer, and a police photographer who would capture images of Sean’s body at every stage of its deconstruction.
Still, it was great to be working with Prof Arculus again. He was one of around thirty-five pathologists approved by the Home Office to conduct forensic post-mortems and had only just got back from a sabbatical, researching a book on the Battle of the Somme.
‘Your keenest-bladed PM40, please, Cassandra.’ The prof twinkled at her over his glasses. Her grandmother aside, he was the only one who ever used her full name. He was wearing new snazzy varifocals in place of his old specs – which had been held together with tape for as long as she could remember – and which he’d occasionally had to retrieve from body cavities. But she noticed that when he wanted to examine something more closely he simply pushed the new glasses up on his head.
‘Isn’t the investigating officer coming? DS Flyte?’ Cassie asked Andy.
Andy told her that the IO was a DS Willets, who had sent a message saying that he was ‘unforeseeably detained’ at the nick. Cassie raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t the first time a lazy detective had left it to the CSM to attend a forensic.
Prof Arculus unzipped the line of stitching that had closed the midline incision on Sean’s body and reached inside for the bag containing the organs.
‘Cassandra, would you kindly activate my recording apparatus?’ He waved a gloved hand at the chunky old-school voice recorder on the bench beside him. The prof had no truck with smartphones, insisting that his circa-2005 Nokia flip-phone fulfilled all his needs. After recording Sean’s name and d.o.b., he used the scalpel to peel a flap of skin the colour of a late-stage bruise – motley shades of purple, green and yellow – off his torso before intoning in the direction of the recorder. ‘Advanced putrefaction has caused skin slippage and discolouration that impedes accurate identification of any contusions or injuries. Histology should assist us in establishing a time of death.’
Good luck with that, thought Cassie. She couldn’t tell the prof that Sean’s body had been frozen without dropping Archie in it: that would have to wait until he saw the tissue under a microscope for himself.
After opening the bag of organs onto the dissecting bench, he separated them out. ‘The organs show similarly advanced autolysis . . .’ He paused, turning an enquiring gaze on Cassie. ‘Which means?’
‘Auto- from the Greek for self; -lysis meaning breakdown, disintegration. The self-destruction of cells by the natural action of enzymes.’
‘Very good.’
After discovering early on in her job that the roots of all medical and anatomical terms lay in Latin and Greek, Cassie had signed up for her fourth and final evening class, in Classics. It still gave her a buzz discovering how languages last routinely spoken more than a thousand years ago held the keys to human anatomy.
The prof put samples from the organs and tissues into pots and passed them to Andy to label up before they went to the exhibits officer for sealing in bags preprinted with the case reference number.
‘And what must we concentrate on in such an advanced state of decomposition, Cassandra?’
The prof had always encouraged her hunger for learning and, unlike Curzon, was respectful of the insights she could bring from the time she spent with the bodies and her contact with relatives.
Cassie frowned. ‘The bony structures?’
‘The bony and cartilaginous structures.’
He pulled the sternum towards him – a truncheon of bone about a foot long – and bent so close towards its base that Cassie feared his nose might make contact.
‘Hmmm.’ Narrowing his eyes, the prof carefully filleted the tissue off the bottom end of the sternum, where it protruded beyond the ribs. He beckoned Cassie over and pointed with his scalpel. ‘Do you see? A small but distinct fracture of the xiphoid process.’
‘No . . . ? Oh there!’ Making out a crack no thicker than a hair Cassie felt a ripple of excitement.
‘So, what does it mean?’ Andy the CSM asked.
‘As I am sure you know,’ said the prof politely, ‘the xiphoid process is a small protuberance formed of cartilage that ossifies as we age. It acts as an anchor to the abdominal organs and muscles but it can be vulnerable to fracture.’ He turned to the photographer. ‘You’ll be needing your macro lens.’
‘How might it have got broken?’ asked Andy.
‘Cassandra?’ said the prof with a courteous gesture of invitation.
‘A xiphoid fracture is usually the result of blunt force trauma,’ she explained. ‘The most common cause is a sporting injury. Like getting hit in the chest by a rugby ball with great force. Or a violent impact with the steering wheel in a car crash.’
‘What about an assault?’ asked Andy.
The prof sent him a look of kindly reproach over the top of his glasses. ‘That, I’m afraid, is a matter for the police to establish. The body might have been struck by a boat, for instance, while floating in the water. When I put it under the microscope I should at least be able to say whether the injury occurred post- or ante-mortem.’
Andy frowned. ‘And a little crack like that could be enough to kill someone?’
‘An impact violent enough to break the xiphoid can cause cardiac arrest. A blow of sufficient strength’ – he struck his fist against his own sternum with some force – ‘if it comes at the wrong moment in the heart’s electrical rhythm, can stop it instantly.’
It was called commotio cordis – agitation of the heart.
Again, Cassie berated herself for letting Jason eviscerate Sean’s body. Mr Cut and Shut wasn’t likely to have noticed any tiny bruise over his sternum. Had she spotted one Curzon would have had to call for a forensic PM – when the body had been in a far better condition.
Sean Kavanagh had come knocking on her boat hull. But she’d been too consumed by her own concerns to answer his appeal.
Now she made him a silent promise. I’ll make it up to you.
After the PM was over and while the samples were being packed away to go to the lab, she discreetly caught the prof’s attention. He came over to her workstation and she said quietly, ‘Prof, is there any chance you could prioritise the histo on the tissue samples?’
His eyes sparkled with intrigue. ‘Has our Cassandra had one of her premonitions?’
‘Just a feeling, Prof, about how long he’d been dead when I found him.’
He nodded. Then studying her expression, ‘You know, your mythical namesake could see the future but was cursed never to be believed by the powerful.’