Deborah Crombie - Mourn Not Your Dead

Suddenly aware that Kincaid had been standing quietly against the car, listening to their conversation, Gemma flushed with embarrassment and turned away.

The few hours sleep seemed to have rejuvenated Nick Deveney. He hopped out of the battered Vauxhall and came over to them with a quick apology. “Sorry about that. I live south of here, in Godalming, and there was a bit of a holdup on the Guildford road.” His breath formed a cloud of condensation as he rubbed his hands together and blew on them. “Heater’s out in the bloody car.” He gestured towards the doors. “Shall we see what Dr. Ling has in store for us this morning?” Smiling at Gemma, he added, “Not to mention getting warm.”

They trailed Deveney through the maze of identical white-tiled corridors, passing no one, until they reached another set of double doors. A very official-looking sign above them read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY-RING BELL FOR ADMITTANCE, but the doors stood slightly ajar and Deveney pushed on through them. A faint smell of formalin tickled Gemma’s nose, and then she heard the murmur of a voice. Following the sound to the autopsy room, they found Kate Ling sitting on a stool with a clipboard on her lap, drinking coffee from a large thermal mug. “Sorry, my assistant’s out with flu, and I couldn’t be bothered manning the portals. And it’s not as if anyone’s dying to get in here,” she added, looking at Deveney as if waiting for his groan.

Deveney shook his head in mock amazement, then turned to the others, who had squeezed into the small room behind him, none of them venturing too close to the white-sheeted form on the table. “Did you know that all pathologists have to undergo a special initiation into the Order of Bad Puns? Won’t let ’em practice without it. The doc here is a Grand Master and loves to show off.” He and Kate Ling grinned at each other, completing what was obviously a practiced and much-enjoyed routine.

“Just finishing up my notes on the external,” Ling said, scribbling a few more words, then setting her pad aside.

“Anything interesting?” Deveney asked. He studied the pad as if he might decipher it upside down, although Gemma thought it unlikely that the doctor’s scrawl was legible even right-side-up.

“Lividity corresponds perfectly with the position of the body, so I’d say he wasn’t moved. Of course, we expected that from the blood spatter, but they pay me to be thorough.” She gave them a wry smile over the rim of her mug as she drank, then continued, “So if we calculate the drop in body temperature using the temperature of the Gilberts’ kitchen, I’d say he was killed between six and seven o’clock.” Swiveling around towards the countertop behind her, Ling exchanged her coffee for a new pair of latex gloves. As she pulled them on, she added thoughtfully, “One odd thing, though. There were some tiny rips in the shoulders of his shirt. Not large enough that I could hazard a guess as to what made them or why.” Sliding from the stool, she checked the voice-activated mike hanging over the autopsy table, then lifted the lid from the stainless-steel instrument box on a nearby rolling trolley. “All set, then? You’ll need to gown and glove.” She regarded them quizzically. “You lot are jammed in here like sardines in a can. I’ll need some elbow room.”

Will Darling touched Gemma on the shoulder. “I can take a hint when I hear it. Come on, Gemma, we’ll wait in the corridor. Let them have all the fun.”

Having appropriated two folding chairs from a nearby room, Will set them up just outside the postmortem room door and left Gemma for a moment. “I’ll find us a cuppa,” he said over his shoulder as he disappeared down the corridor.

Gemma sat, closing her eyes and leaning her head against the wall. She felt a little resentful of having been so easily excluded, yet she was glad not to have to summon the resources watching an autopsy always required. With half her mind she listened to the murmured voices and the clink of instruments, imagining the methodical exploration of Alastair Gilbert’s body, while with the other half she thought about Will Darling.

He had an easy assurance not consistent with his rank, yet there was no aggressiveness to it, and no sense of the desire to impress one’s superiors that she so often saw and knew she’d been guilty of herself. And there was something comfortable about him, maybe even comforting-something more than the ease provided by his friendly, slightly snub-nosed face, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

She opened her eyes as he reappeared beside her, holding two steaming polystyrene cups. Expecting institutional sludge, she tasted the tea, then looked at him in surprise. “Where’d you get this? It’s actually decent.”

“My secret,” Will answered as he settled himself beside her.

Kate Ling’s voice came clearly through the open door. “Of course, we were fairly certain from the blood velocity and external examination of the head wounds that we were looking at blunt force trauma, but let’s see what things look like when we get under the scalp.”

In the silence that followed, Gemma cradled the warm cup in her hands, taking an occasional sip of tea. She knew that Dr. Ling would be peeling Gilbert’s scalp from his skull, folding it forwards over his face like a grotesque mask in reverse, but it seemed distant, not logically connected to the feel of the chair’s cold metal against her back and thighs or the faint shapes she fancied she saw in the distempered wall opposite.

Her eyelids drooped and she blinked, fighting the fuzzy blanket stealing over her. But her lethargy had the overwhelming quality born of exhaustion and emotional stress, and Dr. Ling’s words floated disjointedly in and out of a haze.

“… blow just behind the right ear… several overlapping blows nearer the crown… all slightly to the right… never be sure-some lefties perform gross motor skills with their right hand.”

Gemma’s eyes flew open as she felt Will’s fingers against her hand. “Sorry,” he said softly. “You were about to tip your cup.”

“Oh. Thank you.” She grasped it more firmly in both hands, making a huge effort to stay alert and concentrate, but the voice began again, its precise intonation as soporific as a warm bath. When Will took the cup from her slack hands a few minutes later, she couldn’t manage a protest. The words came to her now with a clarity and an almost physical presence, as if their existence outweighed all surrounding stimuli.

“… most likely conclusion is that the blow behind the ear was the first, struck from behind, and the others followed as he fell. Ah, now take a look at this… see the half-moon shape of the indentation in the bone? Just here? And here? Let’s take a measurement just to be sure, but I’d be willing to bet that’s the imprint of a common or garden-variety hammer… quite characteristic. Nasty things, hammers, though you wouldn’t think it. Never forget a case I had in London-a little old lady living alone, never done anyone a moment’s harm in her life, opens her door one day and some bloke bashes her in the side of the head so hard with a hammer it lifts her right out of her slippers.”

“Did they catch him?” Some part of Gemma’s mind recognized the voice as Deveney’s.

“Within a week. Silly bugger wasn’t too bright, talked about it all round the pubs. Hang on a bit while I take some tissue samples.”

Gemma heard a saw, and a moment later smelled the sickening odor of burning bone, but still she couldn’t reach the surface of consciousness.

“…commander’s medical records, by the way, he was taking an anticoagulant. Had heart surgery two years ago. Let’s see how well things had held up.”

In the silence that followed Gemma drifted deeper still. Muttered phrases such as “constricted arteries” and “type A personality” no longer had any meaning, then awareness of the postmortem faded away all together.