The senior pathologist doused her face in cold water. The heat outside was crazy, but she wasn’t complaining. She had the afternoon off and intended to spend it sunbathing in her garden, and perhaps meeting a friend for a frappuccino by the river Cam.
Her assistants had done the prelim on the victim and she had all morning to perform the post-mortem operation. She’d read through their initial findings, and learned that the death had been a violent one. Murders in Cambridge were rare and so she planned to take her time on this; she didn’t mind getting up early on a Saturday for such a case, as long as her afternoon wasn’t interrupted.
The victim was young, healthy and in her prime. Keeping the body at an ambient two to four degrees in the mortuary preserved many things, including trauma, and this woman had gone through a brutal few minutes prior to death. People thought that death was quick, like in the movies, when a few gunshots or knife wounds resulted in the victim falling over, looking into the camera expectantly, and dying almost instantly. It wasn’t like that at all. The human biome was incredibly resilient, and difficult to halt.
It took time.
The body bag had already been transferred from the chill room to the steel gurney by her assistants, and it lay like a lumpy rolled-up tent waiting for her attention. She’d scrubbed up and made sure she was sterile, not to protect the corpse, of course, but to safeguard herself against some of the more unsavoury bacteria found on rotting bodies. She’d been told that the woman wasn’t yet in full bloat, and a forensic etymologist called to the crime scene had already estimated the time of death. It was her job to confirm it. The heatwave hadn’t helped preserve the body and had contributed to virulent insect activity, but given all those factors, they were happy with their theory, working on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning for her time of death. The timeline explained the stages of decomposition nicely, which fitted in with a three- to four-day exposure to the elements. If there’s one thing that is a primary driver for decay, it’s heat, and the thirty-degree ambient daytime temperature in the county of Cambridgeshire had cooked the woman’s insides like a furnace. There wouldn’t be much left of her internal organs to examine, and so she hoped she’d have some luck with the external and visible signs on the body.
She unzipped the bag, expecting the routine stench to fill the room. It didn’t take long, but the mortuary workers were used to it and smeared perfume or Vicks under their noses. They also smelled the familiar whiff of bleach. Somebody had tried to clean up, and it was her job to assess how well they’d done. It was clear from her first cursory walk around the body that the woman had suffered terribly.
She took her time to walk around the body, placing goggles on her head to intensify the magnification levels. Before going inside the cadaver, which she expected would be pretty mushy by now, her assessment of the external form might prove critical in this case. She was well aware that, when this went to court, her notes might be pivotal in securing a conviction or not. But by the look of the woman’s skin, she doubted she’d be able to find much forensic evidence now, especially with the presence of a common cleaning agent.
A female murder victim with this amount of trauma was always checked for sexual assault, but disappointingly, there wasn’t much tissue left around the woman’s genitals to say conclusively. The offspring of blowfly work quickly in this heat. She swabbed anyway and crossed her fingers. She liked to work in circles around the victim, moving closer on each circuit, making notes and speaking into her mic softly as she noted new details. She was trying to piece together a picture of this horrendously violent event by examining the bruising pattern and the photographs from the dump site. Absence of blood and matter around the body confirmed that the bank of the river Cam wasn’t the location of her murder. Crime scene investigators had established that this woman had been killed before being dumped by the river. These cases were the most difficult to crack. Cleaning meant that vital evidence was lost and she’d already confirmed this without even touching the victim.
Her assistants worked silently around her. Music played gently in the background: after all, they needed some cheer in the place. It wasn’t all doom and gloom. People died, bodies expired, and it was their job to pass on the final message to those who once loved them. In this case, those very people might in fact turn out to be the ones who’d killed her, but that was for the police and barristers to argue over. She, and anyone in this line of work, was well aware from talking to the many detectives she associated with that women who died in this way often did so at the hands of their most intimate partner: husband, lover, or ex.
The pathologist’s post-mortem operations weren’t usually drawn-out affairs, because her customers were typically atherosclerosis or stroke victims in their eighties, but today was different. The body would have to be meticulously scraped and taped for residue fragments and organic matter, like DNA, as well as taking samples from fingernails, toenails, teeth, eyes, hair and vagina, or what was left of it. Specimens would then be sent to the histology and toxicology departments.
The woman had once had beautiful black curly tresses and it seemed just as vital as it would have been the last time she’d laughed out loud and threw the mane back. She dug around in it, to see if she could find anything interesting tangled in it, like a foreign follicle or a manmade fibre. The skin, where it wasn’t discoloured or bruised, was pale and perfect. She’d taken care of herself. Her fingernails were manicured and she still wore three pairs of gold hoops in each ear. One might expect them to have been ripped out during an aggressive attack, so it could be assumed that she was either overcome very quickly without struggle, or she was too terrified to fight back, like the impala’s collapse before the final death bite of the cheetah.
The body had been stripped and so there were no clothes to examine, and there was little chance of getting prints off anything much. Swabs might prove inconclusive due to the state of the body, and she concentrated her attention on the huge head wound. She’d done experiments on pigs’ heads, and hit them herself, several times, to ascertain how much force and how many sustained blows it took to collapse a skull.
It took a lot.
This was a rage-related death.
She intensified the magnification on her goggles and peered at the head area. The way the skin had broken, and the shape of the indentations, told her that either the instrument had been blunt, or that something had been placed between skin and weapon, perhaps so the killer didn’t have to look at her. This was no rash decision. The bruises had begun to develop nicely, and this would aid in the dating of the blows. Tuesday night through to Wednesday morning matched her assessment.
‘The crime scene must be covered in matter,’ she said. ‘But of course we’ll probably never see it. Turn her over.’
The anterior of a corpse was less offensive than looking into the eyes of the deceased, and this woman’s back was no different. In life, it must have been rather attractive. It was tanned and structured.
‘Ah, this is interesting.’
The pathologist wasn’t referring to the ugly tattoo that crawled up the cadaver’s back. It was the back itself. To the right of her thoracic vertebrae, around numbers seven to nine, there was a large puncture wound.
‘That will have ruptured her lung, and it looks to me to be where the most blood loss occurred.’
An examination of the ribs confirmed to her that the victim had either been attacked, or had fallen backwards during the assault, resulting in sharp-force trauma.
‘This could have been the initial strike, with the head wound finishing her off. We’ll see when we open her up.’
She went closer and requested her tweezers. She dug around inside the wound and finally pulled out a large splinter of wood. It was painted eggshell blue, and there were more.