21

I could not ignore the problem of death caused by restraint but, intellectually and analytically, I remained committed to studying knife murders. As a bullets-and-bombs man, Iain West had specialized in a comparatively straightforward area. The perpetrators want someone dead and they shoot them, end of story. Stab wounds require perpetrator and victim to be up close and personal. Stab wounds often involve mixed motives. Stab wounds may have more to do with a sense of theatre than a definite wish to kill – particularly if the injuries are self-inflicted. But what really interested me was my theory that every wound track tells a story. I was still sure that the exact track a knife made into the body – and often victims are stabbed many times – could provide a sort of photograph of the homicide itself if one knew enough about wounding.

At each knife murder I was anxious to learn anything I could from the wounds. Very soon after the suicide of the old man with the bread knife came another death by knife. It was an entirely routine homicide but it did show me that all those experiments with the Sunday roast were getting me somewhere.

Winter followed quickly behind that sunny autumn day, and soon the first frost came. One morning, I was called to a body found by a canal in north London. I arrived at noon to find a young man in jeans and jacket lying face down in a grassy waste area, his arms beneath him. The temperature was still only 2°C and this did not help the usual problems determining the time of death. Body temperature was down to 20°C and the police photographs showed that there was frost still on the body when found. Rigor mortis was established but not fully fixed.

All I could tell the police from this was that death had occurred at some time between midnight and 6 a.m. – eliciting the usual response of veiled frustration.

The grass adjacent to the deceased’s feet was bloodstained and next to the body was a bloodstained kitchen knife. I turned him over and saw that the mouth, nose, hand and front of the chest were covered in blood.

We moved him to the mortuary for a full post-mortem, where I confirmed that a single stab wound had penetrated first his clothes, then the cartilage of three adjacent ribs. The cartilage had deflected the blade. Just a little, but that small deflection meant sadly that the knife went straight into the aorta. It had cut through the aorta to the trachea behind it. The track ended in the oesophagus. The total track length from the skin surface was 12cm. The incision went horizontally from front to back and slightly from right to left.

The black-handled kitchen knife found nearby would certainly have been the right size and shape to cause this wound. The force used must have been more than moderate as it had cut through both clothing and the three ribs. There were also minor abrasions on the deceased’s face and various abrasions on the left arm.

It looked like a straightforward stabbing. The police were trying to match it to the defendant’s story. The defendant and victim, both aged about twenty, had been drinking together and then went out for a walk. They were good friends but, as revealed during his police interview, the accused was secretly angry with his mate:

Q: What did you talk about?

A: Nothing really.

Q: Were you armed?

A: No.

Q: Was he?

A: Yeah, he always carries a knife.

Q: On previous occasions have you both carried knives?

A: Yeah, but mine was at home then.

Q: I must tell you that you are still under caution. Do you know how he died?

A: I think I do.

Q: Please tell us.

A: We reached the canal and he said he felt sick. So I stood there and waited for him and I looked down and saw my trainer was undone so I bent down to retie my lace and he said, what do you think of me going out with your sister?

Q: Mary?

A: Yes.

Q: How old is Mary?

A: Thirteen.

Q: What did you say?

A: I said I didn’t like it very much because she’s only thirteen. I looked up to face him and ask him why he was asking but I didn’t have time, he was drawing something from his clothing. I thought he was going to hit me. So I panic and I push him then I turn and run. I turned round once and saw him stumbling backwards. I carried on running. I didn’t know he was hurt or I would have gone back and helped him.

Further questioning revealed how upset the young man was at the possibility that his friend was having sex with the thirteen-year-old Mary. After one of many breaks, during which he conferred with his solicitor, the accused said, ‘If it’s the knife I think it is then I saw that in his flat. It had fallen out of the plate rack with a load of others and I picked it up and put it on the worktop.’

The solicitor later asked once again for a few words alone with his client who, on re-emerging, admitted to causing the death – but insisted it had been an accident: ‘He was my best friend and no way did I mean to hurt him, that’s it.’

I was sure that the defendant’s version of events was false. My own instinct told me that it would not be possible to turn around a knife held by someone else and penetrate the chest with it in this way – the wound was straight and horizontal. And certainly not to penetrate so high into the chest from a low, crouching position.

However, on the basis that the defendant was innocent until proven guilty, I tried re-enacting the scene at home. I crouched on the floor pretending to tie my shoelace (with my right hand), look up, and deflect an assailant’s approaching ruler (standing in for the knife – which I held in my left hand) into the assailant (a pillow on a chair) and cause a horizontal, straight wound. I had just got the ruler into the pillow when I realized that someone else was in the room.

I turned around. Chris had come into the study. Both children had been taught to knock so that they wouldn’t stumble upon any upsetting material. I must have been so engrossed that I didn’t hear him. Now he was staring at me rather awkwardly.

‘Yes?’ I said, trying to look as if this was all perfectly normal.

He was clutching a schoolbook.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked in a voice which required some explanation. He was nine now and a relaxed, even-tempered child who seemed in no way related to the screaming baby emperor who had tortured us for nights on end.

I stood up. Honesty was probably the best policy.

‘Well, I’m trying to see if a man tying his shoelace … that’s me, here, with my right hand … if another man came at him with a knife … that’s me, too, the other man is my left hand and the ruler is the knife … if the first man could somehow turn the knife around and stick it into the second man, all while he’s crouching down.’

Chris considered this wisely.

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I think he could.’

‘Thinking isn’t good enough. The first man could be sent to prison for a long time – so I have to be sure.’

‘Did the first man kill the second man?’

‘Well … yes.’

‘Have you seen him?’

‘The first man? No.’

‘The second man.’

‘Yes, Chris, I’ve seen him in the mortuary. I’ve examined his wounds and I know that the knife went into him at a certain angle, in a certain way. I’m trying to see if the first man could have done that when he was attacked while he was tying his shoelace.’

Chris nodded. I was not sure he really comprehended what I was saying. He just accepted that his father did some strange things.

‘I came to show you my biology book. I got the highest mark of anyone.’

Of course! My son was here for a reason. And I had been so engrossed I had told him about my work without even asking what that reason was. We looked at the biology book together and I exclaimed with great parental pride over his run of As and eventually Chris left looking cheerful and I continued my experiment. Despite trying very hard, I simply could not contrive a way for a crouching individual to deflect or push a knife held by an assailant into the assailant’s chest – not if the result was to be such a high, horizontal track into the pillow. I mean, body. As I had strongly suspected, this case was a straightforward (in both senses), standing stabbing injury.

There was a small knock at the study door.

‘Daddy, we both think he did it,’ said Anna, bursting in.

‘Who did what?’

‘Well, Chris was the first man, tying his shoelace and I was the second man, coming at him with a knife and –’

‘You didn’t use a real knife, did you?’

‘No, I used my pen. Anyway, Chris easily turned it round and stabbed me, so we think the first man is a murderer.’

‘Right. Well. Thanks.’

‘Shall we show you? Or if you like, you could be the first man and I’ll be the second man, I’m better at this than Chris.’

I felt that Anna, who must only have been seven years old, should not really be helping me reconstruct a homicide. If she ever caught me with a knife she tended to regard it as a bit of a joke. She responded to the idea of dead bodies as something unsavoury but the full meaning of death was still lost on her and she had certainly not seen a body, not even a photograph. Not only were the children taught to knock on the study door, I always carefully hid any police pictures on a high shelf.

‘Just what game are you playing with the children!’ demanded Jen, appearing from the living room, her face thunderous.

‘No games, Chris came in, so I told him what I was doing.’

Jen rolled her eyes.

‘I leave my work at the hospital,’ she said pointedly.

Chris and Anna eventually would understand fully what my job entailed but, for now anyway, they were told simply to inform anyone who asked that I was a doctor. They had picked up the fact that I was a specific sort of doctor, that I helped the police and that my name appeared in the newspapers, but they had no real idea what a forensic pathologist was. Although around about this time they began to realize that my speciality did not make people ‘better’. In our household it was fairly normal for Dad to stick rulers and knives into pillows and pieces of meat and, so far, Chris and Anna seemed not to have realized that other people’s fathers didn’t do that.

Today, the defence team in that stabbing case by the canal might successfully offer a manslaughter plea of loss of self-control. A post-Savile jury might decide that seeing ‘a red mist’ because your friend was sexually imperilling your thirteen-year-old sister is enough of a trigger. There were plenty of statements from family members that confirmed how upset and furious the brother had been at her possible abuse by his friend.

For the modern defence of loss of self-control, it must be proved that a person of the defendant’s age and sex with a reasonable degree of tolerance and self-restraint, would lose control in a similar way. I think the young man would have had a good chance of showing that. But for loss of control the defence must also prove that there was no premeditation. The pitfall for this defendant would be that the murder might have appeared premeditated if he had actually carried the knife to the canal that night. He had explained why his fingerprints were on the handle but he would have had to persuade the jury that the victim had been the one to take the knife from the kitchen before they went out for their walk.

This homicide happened long before the reforms of 2010, in less enlightened times. Loss of control was not a defence. There was then no hope for the young man who was so anxious to protect his sister. The charge was murder and he was found guilty: an open-and-shut case in the 1980s.

A routine murder, but one in which the precise angle and track of the stab wound provided important evidence. And it very often does. Not just the track, but, once the knife is in the body, its subsequent movement inside an organ can sometimes chart the respective movements of victim and perpetrator. As my casebook thickened, I became increasingly convinced that knife wounds could tell all, if only we could hear what they were saying. I wanted to compile a really comprehensive analysis of tracks, angles, hilt bruises … I was always rooting around in the kitchen at home for another knife to stick into another piece of meat. In fact, I bought so many knives of different shapes and hilts that, going home at night, had the police been in the habit of stopping and searching middle-class, white men, I could frequently have been arrested for carrying offensive weapons.

To the continued disgust of my family, I now used pork bellies or cow kidneys for my stabbing exercises. It was extremely hard to reproduce quite the feel of pushing through human skin, muscle and then an internal organ – perhaps because supermarket meat is seldom fresh. In reality, people who have killed with a knife are usually astonished by how easy it is. Once the blade has cut through the clothing and the skin, the inner body tissues put up little resistance. Only moderate force is required to penetrate major organs like the heart or the liver, and so even perpetrators with little strength can kill by stabbing. A lot of murderers say, ‘I didn’t mean to kill him!’ What they are actually saying is, ‘I didn’t think that what I was doing would kill him.’ And this is more likely to be true when knife murderers say it than others. Knives give the murderer an immense advantage over their victim even if the victim is much stronger. No wonder women so often turn to them.

And did I prove, after all these experiments, that it is possible to read the history of a murder by reading the stab wounds like a book as I had hoped? Well, no. But I did find knives could tell a lot about a homicide. I developed the ability to sketch a murder weapon with some accuracy, based on the track it had left in the body. And when the police offer me a series of possible murder weapons, I can exclude most and, if the right one is presented to me, generally pick it out.