19
I gave up flying after five hours of lessons. The fire in our house created such an array of complications and pressures that wild surges of unbounded joy were driven right off the agenda. Spending my very limited spare time alone with an instructor in the air when I should have been spending it with my family began to look downright selfish. So, it was back to PM40s by day and chores by night: cooking, writing up post-mortem reports, phoning builders. Back down to earth.
Not that life was boring. I loved the variety of my work – in one week I might have a suicide by shotgun, a carbon-monoxide poisoning, a drowning, a knife murder, a drug overdose, a variety of sudden natural causes. Each had its own fascination, as long as one detached oneself from the emotional payload death carried for the living who surrounded it. Drug overdoses were still rare, particularly if the user had died with a needle in the arm: that was certainly something to show interested colleagues (today, of course, these cases are simply routine). There was a strong possibility that the deceased, if an intravenous drug user, was HIV positive and so drugs deaths triggered elaborate safety precautions. AIDS was still sufficiently new and unexplained to be terrifying and, in those days of ignorance about its transmission, fear stalked hospital corridors.
Iain West had become the UK’s, and perhaps the world’s, foremost expert in death by bullet or bomb: his career had peaked alongside IRA activity and his work regularly made headlines. I did appreciate the breadth of the cases I dealt with but colleagues hinted that I, too, should find an area in which to develop special expertise. What, though?
Drugs deaths were a growing trend, so was death by glue-sniffing, but these generally demanded more of toxicologists than forensic pathologists.
Babies? No, thanks. I felt that few pathologists could enjoy working on such morally complex and emotionally draining cases, although in fact this specialization was to explode, in significance and complexity, over the coming years.
My intellectual curiosity drew me towards knives, a method of homicide as old as mankind and one I predicted would last on this planet as long as man does. Or woman. One of the interesting aspects of homicide by knife is that it is very often a woman’s weapon of choice. The knife in every kitchen drawer in the land is a murder waiting to happen. And it is easy to use. No training or specialist knowledge is required. Not even much force, really. All that is needed is the ability to get close to the victim. But it was not the domestic or street nature of knife murders that interested me so much as the fact that, increasingly, from the incisions themselves, I often felt I could attempt to reconstruct the events surrounding the homicide. And, although I was coming to terms with the fact that, post-Simpson, the police didn’t seem to regard reconstructions as proper evidence and lawyers less and less often had the time or inclination to hear them, I could not entirely abandon the reason I had become a forensic pathologist: to help solve death’s puzzle.
I don’t think I actively made a decision to be a knife specialist. It just seemed to find me. And my interest was sealed after a call-out on a sunny Sunday autumn morning when I had woken early to see the clear sky and wish, sadly, I could fly a little aeroplane through it. Our burned house was healed and sold, we had passed through the chaos of moving, the new house was in something like order … but I knew that taking time out from work and family to continue my flying lessons was still simply out of the question.
The leaves were turning colour as I headed off through the crisp, cold morning towards a village where an elderly man had been found in his kitchen with his throat slashed. As I neared the address I met a line of police cars parked at the roadside. A harassed young constable was trying to persuade a knot of gossiping neighbours to move back.
The old man had lived in one of those big early council houses, detached and built to last from solid black and red brick. The neighbours fell silent as I approached. They listened as I identified myself to the constable, then as he lifted the crime-scene tape and I walked through, they all started to talk at once. In the corner of my eye, I glimpsed someone in a police car. A woman, head in hands.
‘I’m the coroner’s officer; thanks for coming so quickly,’ said a big, red-faced man at the door who I guessed at once was, like many coroner’s officers at that time, a former policeman. SOCOs were busy with their evidence bags, and there were a couple of senior detectives. A police photographer arrived.
‘That’s the daughter,’ muttered the coroner’s officer, gesturing to the police car in which the woman sat. ‘Phoned and couldn’t get a reply, rushed straight over …’
In the kitchen near the back door, feet stretching to the entrance of the living room, lay the body of an elderly man.
‘Mr Joseph Garland. Eighty-two years old,’ the coroner’s officer murmured in my ear.
Mr Garland lay on his right side. His clothes were bloodstained. Beneath him the kitchen floor was bloodstained. The mat was bloodstained. The cupboards and walls were bloodstained.
He wore pyjamas with a tweed jacket thrown over the top. His hands were bloody. His feet were bare. By the open back door stood a pair of bloody wellington boots.
I could hear the two detectives talking behind me.
‘So, they bang on the door or maybe he just sees them outside in his garden. He throws on the jacket, gets into his boots, goes out there and … they knife him but he manages to get back into the house, probably reaching for the phone …’
I looked back at Mr Garland. The bloodstaining was unusually distributed. His jacket and pyjamas were heavily stained on the front. Confusingly, the blood extended down to the upper calf. There was no blood below this except on the soles of his feet. The wellington boots, however, were bloodstained on the outside and in a narrow rim on the inside at the top.
It was obvious that he had been wearing the wellies at or after the time he received the injuries. Then he had taken them off when he came into the house. They stood neatly in what was almost certainly their accustomed place by the door. Their owner probably had a long-practised, ingrained habit of stepping out of them as he entered.
‘I bet he once had a wife who nagged him about bringing mud onto the kitchen floor,’ I said to no one in particular.
I stared out into the back garden, which was being combed now by a number of police officers. I saw a trail of blood leading to the greenhouse. Outside it, Mr Garland’s pots were stacked. Inside, through dirty windows, the summer’s tomato plants were visible. They were brown, dying off as autumn closed in.
Beyond the greenhouse was a garage and parking area. A deep pool of blood was visible in the parking area: clearly the wound had been inflicted here. A red car stood nearby at an odd angle, the driver’s door not properly shut, as if someone had leapt out in a hurry.
‘It’s the daughter’s,’ explained the coroner’s officer.
The photographer had finished his initial work now and I went back to the body. I rolled Mr Garland over and a huge incised wound on the side of his neck, just above the jacket, gaped at me. A knife had cut through the muscles and the right jugular vein and partially severed the carotid artery. There were a number of other horizontal wounds across the throat, but none so deep as the wound that had most certainly killed him.
I felt his arms and legs. Rigor mortis had set in but was not fully established in the legs. I took his temperature.
Another policeman was listening intently to his radio.
‘Suspicious van … two men, early twenties, approached a pensioner this morning. Asked if he had any gardening work. The van was a white Ford, registration probably included letters T and K …’
‘Get someone out there looking for it,’ said a senior voice, who then introduced himself to me as a detective superintendent.
I had been crouching by the body and stood up now.
‘Could you ask his daughter if he was left-handed?’
The super looked at me for a moment and then disappeared to the police car. Through the open door I heard Mr Garland’s tearful daughter confirm that he was indeed left-handed. She knew what this question meant, even perhaps before the detective, because she began to wail.
‘I don’t think this is a murder investigation,’ I said when the detective came back.
The officers, busy around the scene, inside and out, all seemed to freeze.
‘This wound is self-inflicted. I’m afraid Mr Garland killed himself.’
‘That was our first thought. But we’ve searched high and low for a knife and there just isn’t one.’
‘There must be.’
The detective began to look annoyed: ‘You can’t kill yourself and then dispose of the weapon. There’s no weapon here. This is a homicide.’
‘Maybe he dropped the knife into the bushes.’
The super gestured to his team of officers, even now busy in the flower beds.
‘This is their second sweep of the garden. It’s not that big and there’s no knife.’
I was sure the knife was there. I was sure the old man had killed himself. I paused and considered. How sure was I?
The detective was glaring at me. ‘You don’t know anything until you do the post-mortem, Doc.’
People always think that by opening the bodies of the dead I will find their secrets locked inside, like someone who cracks safes. But in this case, I already knew a great deal from careful study of the body’s external appearance.
There was no point in arguing, as I would have to do a post-mortem anyway. I turned back to the coroner’s officer. ‘Can you arrange to take him to a mortuary now?’
He nodded and called over two uniformed police officers.
‘Right, let’s get him bagged up and over to the Royal Surrey.’
I turned back to the super. I was confident.
‘Of course, I’ll do the post-mortem, but I’m sure this is a suicide.’
‘What makes you so sure?’ he asked me, and not pleasantly. It was a tone I knew already but I’d rarely encountered it at the scene of a crime, where there is generally quiet, good-natured teamwork. No, that sneer belonged in court, employed by a senior defence barrister setting out to humiliate a pathologist whose evidence inconveniences his client.
I responded in my most clinical voice.
‘First, the site of the injury. Mr Garland has cut himself several times, and the site he’s chosen is absolutely typical of self-inflicted incisions. They’re nearly always on the neck or the wrists. He cut the right side of the neck, which would be most unlikely if he was right-handed. But you’ve just confirmed that he was left-handed. And look at all those smaller injuries. They’re parallel.’
The detective glanced, reluctantly, at the old man’s neck. I pointed to the thin, superficial lines of blood on either side of the large slash wound and explained hesitation injuries to him. ‘We don’t know exactly why people do this: perhaps they’re just building up their courage. Preparing for the pain. Or trying to find the right place. But hesitation injuries are strong indicators of suicide.’
The detective still looked sceptical.
‘Those lines always mean it’s suicide?’
‘In my experience that is usually the case.’ My experience at the time was not so very extensive, but I didn’t plan to tell the officer that.
‘If he cut himself out there …’ The detective indicated the pool of thick blood in the parking area. ‘… and died just here, how much time would he have had to dispose of the knife?’
I thought.
‘Up to a minute.’
Not that he would have been able to hide the knife after losing all that blood. He might have been able to throw it but he had almost certainly just dropped it.
The detective, who really seemed to want a homicide to brighten up his Sunday, said, ‘Someone could have knifed him and run off with the weapon.’
‘Well …’
‘It’s possible, you admit the possibility, that his wound was inflicted by someone else?’
I hesitated. Of course it was possible, anything was possible. But it was my job to collect and present evidence, not to speculate on every wild theory.
I said, ‘It’s unlikely. But it’s possible.’
The detective looked triumphant.
‘However, I believe that the knife must be here,’ I said. ‘And in a fairly obvious place.’
The team looking for the knife heard this. They paused. Some put their hands on their hips, others stood straight, staring at me. They had been searching for a while now and didn’t want to hear they had missed something obvious.
I went out through the little back door, past the bloody wellington boots, past the greenhouse and the old clay flowerpots, past an ancient tin bath that lay on its side, following the blood trail to its source.
‘He lost a lot of blood and he was losing more fast as he moved back towards the house, I really think he would have just dropped the knife somewhere near this spot rather than throwing it,’ I said. ‘Perhaps the daughter …?’
‘Says she hasn’t touched a thing.’
When there is a suicide, often a relative or friend suspects it has taken place. Perhaps Mr Garland had threatened suicide or maybe he had just seemed very depressed. I tried to imagine the middle-aged daughter arriving at speed in her red car, heart beating, scared of what she might find. The first thing she would have seen was the pool of blood. Her car had screeched to a halt just short of it, and, leaving the vehicle askew across the parking area, barely even shutting the door, she would have jumped out and run into the house to find her father.
‘No knife, no suicide,’ stated the detective firmly.
‘Could you reverse her car, please?’
Everyone looked at everyone else and the detective went to ask the daughter for the keys, then came out and slowly backed the car away from the parking area.
Beneath the wheel’s original position lay a bloody, bone-handled bread knife.
The detective can have had no idea of the relief I felt at having my theory confirmed. I had probably sounded very sure of myself. And I was very sure. But deep down I have, since childhood, recognized that life is a series of unexpected twists and turns. This knowledge enslaves me. Although it is my job to be certain, I was unable that day, and am still unable, to escape a greater certainty: that there are always other possibilities.