‘She’s long gone.’
Khan looked up as Benjamin Proud emerged from the robing room at the rear of the mortuary. He had had no luck finding a prison officer who was interested in Grace’s intrusion, but had eventually located Proud, hard at work in Bassett’s office. The pair of them had hurried back to the mortuary and Proud had conducted a thorough search. But there was no sign of the former police officer.
‘Has she taken anything?’
Khan looked over the body, the tray, the nearby desk.
‘Not that I can see.’
‘Has the body been tampered with in any way?’
Khan snapped on his sterile gloves and ran his eyes over Lucy’s naked body.
‘Don’t think so. The stitching is as it was, likewise the petroleum jelly. The body hasn’t been moved …’
He lifted one arm up to check the underside, then laid it down to check the other.
‘… or marked in any way.’
‘And she didn’t harm you?’
‘No, she just wanted to talk. Somehow she’d managed to get hold of the pathology reports on Smith and Baines and wanted to compare them with Lucy Kirk’s death. I couldn’t tell her much. I was halfway through the PM …’
‘But she was interested in the adrenaline, right?’ Proud pressed. ‘Does her theory stack up?’
Khan hesitated before replying:
‘Yes. I think it does. If you inject enough of it, it causes a surge of activity that basically short-circuits the heart. Fast-acting and very effective.’
Proud nodded – finally this difficult case was beginning to make sense.
‘But you’d have to be able to source pure adrenaline in order to do it,’ Khan continued.
‘The infirmary?’
‘That would be my guess.’
Proud was already on his way. This new lead didn’t narrow down the potential suspects, but it might provide an important piece of the jigsaw.
‘Hold on a second.’
Proud had reached the exit but now turned to face the pathologist once more.
‘Before you go, you might want to see this.’
Something in Khan’s tone intrigued Proud, so he walked quickly back to the slab. As he did so, Khan extracted something from the body.
‘This was caught in her watchstrap. Might be a trace of your killer. If there was a struggle perhaps …’
Khan held his prize up to the light, examining it intently. Proud moved in closer and was stunned by what he now saw.
Clamped in the teeth of the tweezers was a single white hair.