45

The pathologist, Jonah, looked up as Geraldine entered the room.

‘Well, hello again, Geraldine. How are you? No Ian this time, I see?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me today.’

‘That’s probably just as well. I have to say I don’t blame him for not wanting to look at this. She’s a mess.’

Geraldine didn’t answer.

‘I get the impression your inspector’s not keen on looking at dead bodies,’ Jonah went on, staring curiously at Geraldine. ‘Am I right?’

Uncertain how to answer, she didn’t say anything.

‘Either that, or he doesn’t want to see me,’ he added with a grin.

Geraldine returned his smile. ‘That must be it,’ she replied.

‘Aha,’ he cried out. ‘The ice queen melts. So, I suppose you want to know what happened to this poor woman?’ He let out an exaggerated sigh. ‘And I thought you’d come here just to see me.’

‘I wish that was the only reason.’

With a rueful smile, Geraldine turned to look at the body. It was usually disturbing viewing the corpse of someone she had met while they were still alive, but in this instance it was somehow less disconcerting because Charlotte wasn’t easy to recognise. Not merely anonymous, she barely looked human.

‘It’s self-explanatory,’ Jonah began, suddenly brisk. ‘She was killed by physical trauma, shock, blood loss. Her carotid artery was ripped out.’ He pointed at the dead woman’s ravaged throat. ‘She would have bled to death within minutes if she hadn’t already passed out from physical shock.’ The woman’s bloody injuries had been cleaned up and he pointed to bruising on her knees. ‘It looks as though she fell to her knees while she was still breathing, if not actually conscious. The first injury appears to have been inflicted here.’ He pointed again to the woman’s injured throat. ‘All this,’ he waved his hand at her head and chest, ‘all of it was mutilated post mortem.’

‘So the attack continued after she was dead?’

Jonah nodded. ‘I’d say it went on for a while. Either she was on her own with the animal, or someone else there wasn’t able to pull the animal off in time to save her.’

‘Or they were watching,’ Geraldine added quietly.

Jonah glanced at her and frowned. ‘Well, yes, there is that possibility. At any rate, like I said, it appears no attempt was made to stop the attack for a while. Maybe no one else was present. It looks as though the creature was savage, wild even.’ He frowned and glanced at Geraldine again, as though weighing up how much to tell her.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You were saying –?’

‘If that dog is still roaming around out there –’ he broke off with a grimace.

‘There’s no way to hide behind euphemisms when you’re talking about something as savage as this,’ Geraldine replied. She thought Jonah looked relieved. ‘I’m not easily thrown by dead bodies,’ she added. ‘I’ve seen a lot of them in my time. I guess there’s something about people like us that sets us apart?’

‘People like us?’

‘I mean, don’t you ever wonder how it is we can see things like – well, like this – without having nightmares?’

Jonah looked solemn. ‘What makes you think I don’t have nightmares? I can assure you I do – and they’re always about my wife’s credit card bills.’ He laughed.

‘I’m being serious. Most people wouldn’t be able to stomach seeing this kind of thing.’

‘It’s all part of the job,’ he replied casually. ‘There are plenty of other jobs I’d have more of a problem with.’

‘Such as?’

‘I wouldn’t want to stick my hand up a cow’s backside, and I couldn’t operate on a living person. How do surgeons do it? What if they make a mistake? At least with these guys,’ he patted Charlotte’s bruised knee, ‘well, the suffering’s over for them, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s what I think,’ Geraldine replied.

Relieved that he understood her, she was about to explain that the worst part of her job was dealing with the bereaved families of the victims, but before she could say any more, Jonah continued.

‘It was only through her dental records that we were able to identify her. We’ll have to try and reconstruct her face but it’s not going to be easy for anyone to formally identify her from her appearance. Fortunately, she had a fair bit of work done on her teeth so we’ve got a definite identification, probably more reliable than visual recognition.’

An hour later Geraldine was back at the police station reporting to Ian about what Jonah had told her. There wasn’t really much to add to what they both already knew, as the nature and extent of the victim’s injuries had been apparent from their first glance at the body. It didn’t take a pathologist to establish the cause of this death. But the reason behind it was far from clear. They could be certain only that shortly after Mark died, his sister had been strangled and his wife had been killed by a vicious dog.

‘So who stands to benefit from all these deaths?’ Eileen asked, once the team had read the report on Charlotte’s death.

No one even questioned whether this was another murder.

‘Oh my God,’ Ariadne blurted out on seeing an image of the dead woman. ‘Her face is…’

A few officers groaned and muttered that it was ‘gross’ and ‘disgusting’.

‘So,’ Eileen’s voice cut across the murmuring. ‘Who stands to gain from all this?’

Once more, the question was rhetorical. Charlotte had inherited Mark’s entire estate which now passed to their only son. It was time to question Eddy again, and Ian was tasked with conducting the interview. Gratified when Ian chose her to accompany him, Geraldine followed his familiar figure along the corridor and out to the car park. It was a bright cold day and they walked quickly.

‘You drive,’ he said as they reached the car, and she nodded.

Neither of them spoke again, but Geraldine was aware they might be heading towards a defining moment in the investigation.