Simon Beckett - The Scent of Death

I heard a muttered ‘Shit’ under his breath as he followed the pathologist through the hole. Turning on my own torch, I went after them.

My breathing sounded too loud in my mask as I stepped through the opening. The smell of decomposition was still noticeable, but fainter than before. This was the odour of old death, not recent. I’d only had a glimpse of the chamber before, too busy with Conrad to study it closely, even if there had been enough light. The torch beams showed a chamber perhaps thirty feet long by twenty wide. The walls were bare and peeling, the ceiling high for a room that size. At one side was a mound of rubble, broken timber and torn insulation from where the ceiling had fallen in.

Then Parekh’s torch picked out the beds. The three of them were lined up in a row, their tubular metal frames the heavy and institutional design of outdated NHS stock.

Two of them were occupied.

Our torch beams converged on the nearest. Clothed in a stained sweatshirt and jeans, the motionless figure lay face up on a bare, fouled mattress. Its large stature suggested the body was male, although I knew that didn’t necessarily follow. It was secured to the bed by two broad rubber straps, of a type used to restrain unconscious patients during surgery. One was fastened across the torso and forearms, the other below the knees. The hair had mostly slipped off the skull and so had the skin, which had the colour and texture of waxed leather. The head was tilted back, teeth bared as if in a cry or snarl.

A wadded-up cloth had been crammed in the mouth. It had come loose as the lips and cheeks had shrunk and now lay between the teeth like a dirty bridle.

The second body was considerably smaller but also strapped down and gagged. Like the first, its skin had sloughed off the bones like too-big clothes. But this individual had a lot more hair. Coarse and dark, it lay pooled on the mattress around the skull.

Parekh started forward, but Whelan deferentially held out an arm to stop her. ‘Sorry, ma’am, we need to get the ceiling shored up before we do anything else.’

‘I’m not proposing to swing from it, I just want to take a closer look,’ the pathologist retorted.

‘And you’ll be able to. Just as soon as we’ve got things set up.’

Parekh clicked her tongue in annoyance but this time didn’t argue. She’d put on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and the torchlight glinted off them as we played the beams over the bodies.

Unlike the pregnant woman’s remains, these hadn’t mummified. The concealed chamber was much colder than the loft, lacking both the baking heat and airflow of the roof above. Although the sloughed skin had begun to dry out, the decomposition of these two bodies had been able to continue uninterrupted, progressing through bloat and putrefaction to their current state. The only similarity with the woman’s body from the loft was that, like the mummification those remains had undergone, this process had also ended some time ago.

There was also another, major difference. I’d been shining my torch over the bodies and the floor below their beds, checking for empty pupae casings. There weren’t any. Nor did the bodies show any ravages of blowfly infestation. A single fly in here would have been enough: its eggs would have hatched into larvae, fed and pupated, then repeated the cycle again and again, until all the available soft tissue had been consumed.

If that hadn’t happened, it meant the room had been well sealed.

I turned my torch back on to the nearest body. Both hands had contracted into semi-claws, the yellowed fingernails calloused like talons. The sweatshirt cuffs had ridden up, exposing forearms reduced to bone and tendon beneath the baggy skin. The skin itself had darkened to a rich caramel colour, although that was a normal feature of decomposition and had no bearing on its original pigmentation.

‘Don’t think we’re going to have much luck getting an ID from fingerprints,’ Whelan said, shining his own torch over the hands of both victims. The sloughed skin was draped from them like badly fitting gloves, stiffened from where it had dried in the air.

He was wrong, but there’d be time for that later. I was more interested in how the rubber straps had cut into the victims’ arms. The skin had contracted away from the wound like a pushed-back sleeve. Both victims were wearing jeans, and where the straps passed over the legs the denim was frayed and stained with dried blood.

‘So what are we looking at here?’ Whelan asked, his voice hushed. It was a natural reaction in that place. ‘Some sort of torture scenario?’

Parekh made a hmming noise in her throat as she shone her torch beam on to the restrained arms of first one body, then the other. ‘Possibly. But I can’t see any trauma except for the lesions from the straps.’

‘Poor sods must have done it trying to get free,’ Whelan said.

‘They might have, but these aren’t just surface abrasions,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s hard to tell with the skin slippage, but it looks like the edges of the straps have cut into the underlying muscle. That would have been excruciating. To inflict that sort of damage on themselves they’d have to have been frenzied. It’s like a snared animal trying to gnaw off its own leg.’

He shook his head. ‘Can you blame them?’

‘Perhaps not, but there’s no sign of torture. Not physical, anyway,’ Parekh said, peering at the nearest victim’s body. ‘No pulled teeth or fingernails, and no obvious cause of death. I can’t rule out something like strangulation at this stage. But the fact the only visible trauma looks to have been self-inflicted makes me suspect they might have been alive and conscious when they were walled in.’

‘Christ.’ Whelan sounded shaken. ‘How long for?’

Parekh gave an elaborate shrug. ‘That depends. If they died of thirst or starvation it could have been several days or longer. Impossible to say right now, but it wouldn’t have been quick.’

‘Could they have suffocated?’

‘If the room was airtight, then yes, I suppose so.’

‘I don’t think it was,’ I said. I’d wondered the same thing, because there weren’t any flies in here. And flies would have found their way in through the smallest crack. But if the chamber had been airtight the atmosphere in it would have been much fouler than it was, since the gases produced during decomposition would have been trapped in there as well.

I ran my torch beam over the walls and ceiling. ‘Over here.’

Set low in one corner was the grille of what looked like an air or heating vent. Going over, I angled the torch into it. A fine mesh screen was fixed to the inside, and I could see a dark mass banked up in the duct behind it. In the torch beam it glinted with pinpoints of iridescence.

‘It’s full of dead flies,’ I said, climbing to my feet. ‘It kept them out but there’d have been enough air getting in here for two people to breathe.’

‘So they didn’t suffocate,’ Whelan said. ‘I’m not sure if that’s good or not.’

Neither was I. Suffocation would have been relatively quick, causing gradual hypoxia as the oxygen in the chamber was replaced by carbon dioxide. Starvation and thirst would have taken longer. Strapped down and helpless, when the last breezeblock had been eased into place the two victims would have been left in utter darkness, without hope of rescue or escape.

No wonder they’d torn their own skin trying to break free.

Parekh and I left the chamber to the SOCOs and technicians while floodlights and ceiling props were set up. She stood in the ward’s doorway, frowning as she stared back inside.

‘Seems an awful lot of trouble to hide two bodies. Especially when the building was going to be pulled down anyway.’