Peter Robinson - Piece Of My Heart

“I can’t speculate on that. You can see as well as I can, though, that there appear to be no other injuries to the surface of the body apart from that light bruising on the neck, which tells me someone held her in a stranglehold with his right arm while he stabbed her with his left. We’ll be testing for drugs, too, of course – it’s possible she was slipped something that immobilized her: Nembutal, Tuinal, something like that. But she was standing when she was stabbed – the angles tell us that much – so she must have been conscious.”

Chadwick looked down at the body. Dr. O’Neill was right. Apart from the faint discoloration on her neck and the mess around her left breast, she was in almost pristine condition: no cuts, no rope burns, nothing.

“Was he taller than her?” Chadwick asked.

“Yes, judging by the shape and position of the bruises and the angle of the cuts, I’d estimate by a good six inches. She was five foot four, which makes him at least five foot ten.”

“Would you say the bruising indicates a struggle?”

“Not necessarily. As you can see, it’s fairly mild. He could simply have had his arm loosely around her neck, then tightened it when he stabbed her. It probably all happened so quickly he didn’t need to restrain her. We already know there are no defensive wounds to the hands, which indicates she was taken by surprise. If that’s the case, she would have slumped as she died, and his arm could have caused the bruising then.”

“I thought bodies didn’t bruise after death.”

“This would have been the moment before death, or at the moment of death.” Dr. O’Neill turned his attention to the golden hair between the girl’s legs and Chadwick felt himself tense. So like Yvonne’s when he had seen her naked that time by accident at the caravan. How embarrassed they had both felt.

“Again,” said Dr. O’Neill, “we’ll have to do swabs and further tests, but there doesn’t appear to be any sign of sexual activity. There’s no bruising around the vaginal areas or the anus.”

“So you’re saying she wasn’t raped, she didn’t have sex?”

“I’m not committing myself to anything yet,” said Dr. O’Neill sharply. “Not until I’ve done an internal examination and the samples have been analyzed. All I’m saying is there are no obvious superficial signs of forced or rough sexual activity. One thing we did find was a tampon. It looks as if our victim was menstruating at the time of the murder.”

“Which still doesn’t rule out sexual activity altogether?”

“Not at all. But if she did have sex, she had time to put another tampon in before she was killed.”

Chadwick thought for a moment. If sex had been the reason for her death, then surely there would have been more signs of violence, unless they had been lovers to begin with. Had they made love first, then dressed, and while she was leaning back on him in the afterglow, he killed her? But why, if sex had been consensual? Had she, perhaps, refused, said she was having her period, and had that somehow angered her attacker? Were they really dealing with a nutcase?

As often as not, Chadwick knew, investigations, including the medical kind, threw up more questions than answers, and it was only through answering them that you made progress.

Chadwick watched as O’Neill and his assistant made the Y incision and peeled back the skin, muscle and soft tissues from the chest wall before pulling the chest flap up over her face and cutting through the rib cage with an electric saw. The smell was overwhelming. Raw meat. Lamb, mostly, Chadwick thought.

“Hmm, it’s as I suspected,” said Dr. O’Neill. “The chest cavity is filled with blood, as are all the other cavities. Massive internal bleeding.”

“Would she have died quickly?”

Dr. O’Neill probed around and remained silent a few minutes, then he said, “From the state of her, seconds at most. Look here. He twisted the knife so sharply he actually cut off a piece of her heart.”

Chadwick looked. As usual, he wished he could see what Dr. O’Neill did, but all he saw was a mass of glistening, bloody organ tissue. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

Dr. O’Neill’s assistant carefully started removing the inner organs for sectioning, further testing and examination. Barring any glaring anomalies, Chadwick knew it would be a few days before he received the results of all this. There was no real reason to stick around, and he had more than enough things to do. He left just as Dr. O’Neill started up the saw to cut through the victim’s skull and remove her brain.

Saturday morning dawned fresh and clear, and Helmthorpe had that rinsed and scoured look; the streets, limestone buildings and flagstone roofs still dark with rain, but the sun out, the sky blue and a cool wind to rattle the bare branches.

Banks fiddled with the attachment that let him play the iPod through the car stereo and was rewarded by Judy Collins singing “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” in a voice of such aching beauty and clarity that it made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. Sandy Denny’s lyrics had never seemed so doom-laden; they made him think about his brother Roy. Almost as a rebuke, it seemed, the Porsche coursed smoothly and powerfully through the late-autumn landscape.

After she had eaten the lasagna and drunk one small glass of wine, Annie had driven off to Harkside and left Banks to his own devices. It was after two in the morning, but he had poured himself a glass of Amarone and listened to Fischer-Dieskau’s 1962 Winterreise in the dark before heading for bed with a head full of gloomy thoughts. Even then he hadn’t been able to sleep. It was partly heartburn from eating so late – he wished he had taken one of Nick’s antacids, as he had none in the house – and partly disturbing dreams during those brief moments when he did nod off. Several times he awoke abruptly with his heart pounding and a vague, terrifying image skittering away down the slippery slopes of his subconscious. He had lain there taking slow, deep breaths until he had fallen asleep about an hour before the alarm went off.

The team gathered in the boardroom, crime scene photos pinned to the corkboard, but the whiteboard was conspicuously empty apart from the name, “Nick.” An incident van had been dispatched to Fordham earlier in the morning, fitted out with phones and computers. Information collected there would be collated and passed on to headquarters. Banks was officially the Senior Investigating Officer, appointed by Assistant Chief Constable Ron McLaughlin, and Annie was his deputy. Other tasks would be assigned to various officers according to their skills.

Since Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe had retired two months ago, they had been given a temporary replacement in Catherine Gervaise. There were those who muttered that Banks should have got the job, but he knew it had never been on the cards. He had got on well enough with ACC McLaughlin, “Red Ron,” and with the chief constable himself, on those rare occasions when they met, but he was too much of a loose cannon. If nothing else, running off to London to look for his brother, and getting involved in all that followed from that, had put several nails in the coffin of his career. Besides, he didn’t want the responsibility, or the paperwork. Gristhorpe had always left him alone to work cases the way he wanted, which meant he ended up doing a lot of the legwork and streetwork himself, because that was the way he liked it.

Catherine Gervaise was cool and distant, not a mentor and friend the way Gristhorpe had been, and under her rule he found that he had to fight harder for his privileges. She was an administrator through and through, an ambitious woman who had risen quickly through the ranks via accelerated-promotion schemes, management and computer courses and, some said, by affirmative action. This would be her first major investigation at Western Area Headquarters, so it would be interesting to see how she handled it. At least she wasn’t stupid, Banks thought, and she should know how best to use her resources.