Nick Oldham - Critical Threat

‘Is he a suspect?’

Rik shook his head. ‘Nah … but he’s going to be interviewed properly shortly.’

‘Good — and the fox?’

‘Not yet managed to trace it,’ Rik said with a straight face, ‘but I’ve already got a team on it.’

Henry put his hands on his hips and surveyed the scene, turning away from the woodland and looking back towards the road, which was the main ‘A’ road connecting Blackpool to Preston.

‘Not a lot of cover,’ he mused. ‘Lots of passing traffic. But not many houses, either. You’d think a body on fire, anything on fire, would be noticed.’

‘Ahh — one thing I forgot to mention,’ Rik said sheepishly. ‘I was going to get round to it.’

Henry turned on him. ‘Go on.’

‘From the initial CSI inspection, it looks as though the body wasn’t actually set on fire here. There’s no evidence of burned ground. Looks like the murder took place elsewhere and the body was dumped here after.’

‘OK …’ He raised his face to the sky. Clouds scudded in from the east. The wind had an Irish Sea chill to it. ‘We need to get as much as possible from the scene, so let’s convene a scene conference now, then get the show on the road.’

Henry yawned and tapped his earpiece. Very little had been transmitted on it for the last few minutes and he wondered if something had gone wrong somewhere with the operation. Not that it was his problem. If it had to be chopped, as sometimes happened, he would just shrug and make his way home, slide in next to Kate and get up when he felt the urge, maybe not even bother turning in for work, have a day off, doss. It was something you could afford to do if you were supernumerary and nothing would fall apart even if you never even bothered showing up.

He checked his watch. The time had rolled on to 4.11 a.m. Already eleven minutes behind schedule. Well, there was a surprise. He rested his skull on the headrest, wafted away a particularly vicious fart, and allowed his mind to drift again …

The public mortuary at Blackpool Victoria Hospital reeked of smoke and burned flesh. Henry stood by a stainless steel dissecting slab, a surgical mask wrapped around his face, and looked down at the charred … thing … on the table that had once been, as he now knew, an adult female. He was wearing a surgical gown, too, hoping it would keep the tang of death off his clothes, though he knew it wouldn’t be a hundred per cent successful. He would need a shower and his suit would probably need dry-cleaning before it could be worn again. And the aroma would linger in his nasal passages. Next to him stood Rik Dean.

‘Done.’

The Home Office pathologist stood on the other side of the table, removing gloves and mask, revealing the face underneath.

Keira O’Connell was the locum pathologist standing in for the currently absent Professor Baines, a man Henry knew well. He had been initially disappointed that Baines wasn’t available. Apparently he was away on an international conference for pathologists in the Bahamas, concentrating on forensic dentistry, which was one of Baines’s big interests. Henry had to admit, though, that the temporary replacement was much better looking, even with her blonde hair scraped severely back off her face into a tight ponytail. Her face was round and sweet, yet her eyes, which Henry had studied over her facemask, were steel-cold grey and deeply intelligent.

O’Connell leaned on the table and inspected her handiwork as her assistant busied himself doing a tidy-up. It had been a nasty and gruesome task, extremely smelly, terribly unpleasant. Henry — the ‘new man’ who even did the ironing at home — despite his recent diversity training found himself hard pressed not to comment that this wasn’t the sort of job a woman should be doing. He refrained, mainly because he suspected that she would have stabbed him with a scalpel, and also because she had done a terrific examination which Henry had watched with a mixture of distaste and awe.

On the work bench behind her was an array of test tubes, plastic bags, swabs and trays containing specimens taken from the body which would require laboratory examination down at the forensic science lab.

‘Summary,’ the pathologist said in the staccato way in which she spoke. Her words were spoken clearly both for Henry and Rik’s sake and for the audio/video recording that had been made of the post-mortem. ‘Female, aged between twenty-five and forty. Difficult to ascertain the ethnic origin at this time due to the extensive damage caused by the fire which I would grade as fifth degree. She was set on fire whilst naked as there appear to be no traces of clothing on her. However, the fire was not the cause of death. She was set alight after death as the burns on the body show no signs of vital reaction.’

O’Connell turned away from the cadaver, which lay split open from neck to lower stomach. She stepped to the steel draining board on which the organs from the corpse had been laid out and examined. The display reminded Henry of a butcher’s shop he’d once seen on holiday in Tunisia.

She picked up the lungs and inspected them like a big, floppy book. Henry was always amazed at how large lungs were.

‘The lungs were filled with water, indicating the victim had inhaled water. They are wet and heavy, very pale and distended. No sign of any lung disease.’

‘So the victim was drowned?’ Rik asked.

‘Yes.’ Next she picked up the fist-sized chunk of muscle that was the heart. ‘Good, healthy heart, too.’ Then she moved to the brain which had been sliced open like a country loaf. ‘Severe bruising of the brain, causing much internal bleeding, indicating a frenzied attack with a heavy, blunt instrument.’ Next came the liver, slimy and difficult to hold. ‘Liver healthy.’

O’Connell glanced at the two detectives. ‘All in all, this woman was very healthy before she died. I would say she looked after herself well.’

She placed her hands on her hips and blew out, then turned. ‘The trachea had been constricted, indicating an attempt at strangulation, but neither the strangulation nor the beating killed her — it was drowning.’ She regarded Henry and pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows and tilted her head. ‘All in all, this woman has been subjected to prolonged and severe torture. She has been beaten and half-strangled and her head has been held under water until she died. She was then set on fire. Brutal, nasty.’

‘You can tell all this?’ Rik said.

She blinked and frowned at his stupidity. ‘And more … I’m a pathologist, so, death, as it says in some book or other, is my beat.’

‘As it is mine,’ Henry said.

‘Touche.’ She smiled pleasantly. ‘You don’t know who she is yet?’

‘No,’ Henry admitted. ‘No leads as yet. Gonna be a toughie, I reckon, unless we get lucky in the next few hours.’

‘Lucky?’ O’Connell said cheekily. ‘Why not get professional instead?’

‘They go together hand in hand. One begets the other.’

She did not look convinced and she was acting as though she did not have much time for Henry, or perhaps she was just being professional.

‘You want an opinion?’ she asked.

‘On me, or the deceased?’ He raised a flirty eyebrow.

‘The deceased,’ she said and Henry saw her hiding a smile.

‘Always welcome.’

‘It will be difficult to establish the ethnic origin, but there is a gold filling in one of her back teeth which could be helpful if you get the gold analysed. I say that because I actually think we are dealing with a woman of Asian origin here from what I can see of what is left of the bone structure in the face. A facial reconstruction could prove worthwhile.’

‘Asian?’ Henry said, surprised.