Helen stood alone, looking at the corpse in front of her. The modesty sheet lay discarded on the floor now, revealing Lucy in all her glory. She was a curious specimen, born with a slender waist and generous curves but these aspects of her femininity were increasingly under attack. Firstly, from the large amounts of male hormones she was taking, adding muscle bulk and hair, and secondly from the damage visited on her by her own hand. The long, thin cuts on her thighs, arms and breasts were a depressing testament to the latter.
But the damage wreaked by Lucy was nothing compared to the injuries she’d sustained at the hands of her killer. As with Leah and Jordi, Lucy’s mouth, eyes and vagina had been sewn up, her nose, ears and anus filled in. Helen tentatively touched the opaque, gelatinous substance that hung from Lucy’s left ear and held it up to examine it closer. As expected, it was Vaseline. This could have been found anywhere – you could even buy it from the prison shop – so unless the killer had been careless enough to deposit their DNA on it, it would be useless to investigators.
Helen was about to resume her examination of the body, when she sensed movement out of the corner of her eye. Instinctively she snatched up the scalpel from the tray and spun to defend herself. But no sooner had she done so than her ‘assailant’ disappeared, vanishing into the brickwork with lightning speed. Helen shook her head at her stupidity – it was just a mouse. Nowhere in this place was sacred.
Returning to the body, Helen took in the stitching. It was efficiently done, so whoever did this was a practised hand. This time the killer had chosen a nice violet thread. Was the different colouring significant or just done to taunt the hapless investigators? Swallowing her revulsion, she moved up close to the wounds, looking particularly keenly at Lucy’s sewn-up vagina. She was looking for signs of excessive mutilation – for signs of hate – but the sewing had been carefully executed. There were no bruising, no signs of violence and no traces of blood. In fact, not a single drop of blood had been spilt at any point.
Helen knew she should leave. No doubt Khan would report her intrusion and armed officers would arrive to detain her. But a thought was forming in her mind and she knew she had to stay. She had come across very few bloodless murders in her time, very few acts of brutality in which the bodies exhibited such a complete absence of defensive wounds. She was sure this was significant, so returned to the body.
Taking up Lucy’s hands, Helen examined her long fingers for signs of a struggle, of a woman fighting for her life. But there were none. And now, staring down at the lily-white hands, it struck her. Lucy was a woman who hated herself, who hated life and more than anything hated being in Holloway. She had mounted numerous dirty protests, smearing excrement over herself and the walls as each attempt to get herself transferred came to naught. She had attempted suicide twice, gone on hunger strikes and had categorically refused to groom herself. She had insisted that this was because she didn’t want to appear ‘girly’ but everyone knew it was because she had given up. Her hair was lank and greasy, her armpits were stale and her short fingernails always had a thick line of black dirt beneath them.
But not now. The Lucy that lay on the slab in front of Helen was Lucy as she perhaps was supposed to be. Her hair was still greasy, but it was parted and combed. Her normally chapped lips seemed plump and every one of her fingernails was spotlessly clean. Khan might have taken samples from one or two of them, but he would never have cleaned them so thoroughly. Khan wouldn’t have noticed these changes, not being a resident and knowing little of Lucy’s life, but to Helen these changes were obvious and striking.
And now a handful of images flashed through Helen’s reeling mind. The mouse that had just darted across the mortuary. The cockroaches rutting in the Segregation unit. The bluebottles circling the cells, looking for somewhere moist to lay their eggs. And the thought that had been nagging away at her took hold. The killer was trying to protect his victims from these intruders, sealing every orifice so their neatly presented bodies couldn’t be defiled by the prison’s legion of unregistered inhabitants. It should have been obvious to Helen from the start. That rat that had run across her on her very first night here had given her the biggest clue of all.
For a long time she had laboured under the misapprehension that these murders were acts of hate, but they were nothing of the kind. This calculating killer had no desire to abuse the victims – quite the opposite, in fact. He wanted to cleanse them.