Stuart MacBride - Dying Light

With an exasperated sigh Isobel started in on the preliminary examination. She narrated her way around the corpse, finding evidence of at least a dozen separate violent incidents. The most recent set of contusions weren’t even old enough to bruise properly. It looked as if someone had held Jamie down so someone else could punch him repeatedly in the stomach. There were even little marks around his mouth, probably caused by a hand being clamped over it to stop him from screaming. No wonder the poor sod had killed himself.

And then it was time to open him up, but for once Logan got the feeling Isobel was just going through the motions. She sliced through flesh and tissue in a half-hearted, distracted way, as if there was something else on her mind. Probably what she was going to do to Colin Miller when she got her hands on him. The morgue phone rang while Isobel was lifting out the contents of Jamie’s lower abdomen. Brian scampered off and answered it, speaking in hushed tones, telling whoever it was on the other end that the pathologist was in the middle of someone right now, but if they wanted to call back, she’d be done in about an hour. Pause. Then a hand over the mouthpiece as he simpered at Isobel, ‘I’m sorry, Dr MacAlister, but there’s a phone call for you.’

She stopped, Jamie’s liver in her hands, speaking slowly and carefully through gritted teeth. ‘I’m busy: take a message! ’

Brian’s face contorted itself into an ingratiating smile. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, but they say it’s urgent.’

Isobel swore under her breath. ‘What is it?’ Brian hurried over to the cutting table, taking the phone with him, holding it to her ear as she severed the last strip of connective tissue and lifted the liver free. ‘Yes, this is Dr MacAlister... What?... No, you’ll have to speak up.’ Jamie’s liver was dark, dark purple, hanging like a vast slug between her gloved fingers. ‘He’s what?’ Her eyes went wide above her mask. ‘Oh my God!’ The liver slapped against the tabletop then slithered to the tiled floor at her feet.

Isobel turned and ran out of the sterile area, past the fridges, discarding blood-soiled latex gloves, mask and apron on the way. Logan ran after her, catching up as she charged up the stairs to the rear podium. ‘Isobel? Isobel!’ She pointed a key fob at her large Mercedes and jumped in behind the wheel, still wearing her blood-smeared green scrubs. Logan grabbed the door handle before she could slam it shut. ‘Isobel, wait! What is it?’

‘I HAVE TO GO!’ She grabbed the door and slammed it shut, flooring the accelerator, leaving twin trails of black rubber on the tarmac.

‘Fine,’ he muttered to himself as her car raced down the ramp, round the corner and out of sight. ‘Be like that then.’

Back in the morgue, Doc Fraser was slowly lumbering his way into a set of surgical greens while Brian washed the little bits of grit and fluff off Jamie McKinnon’s liver. ‘Any idea what that was about?’ asked Logan as Brian patted the slab of purple offal dry with green paper towels.

‘No idea,’ he said, laying the thing in a kidney dish. ‘It was the hospital and they said it was urgent, but other than that, nothing.’

‘OK, ladies,’ said Doc Fraser, snapping on his latex gloves. ‘If you don’t mind we’ll get through this one sharpish. I’ve still got all those bloody expense forms to fill in.’

The rest of the post mortem went by in a haze, Doc Fraser cutting, hefting, weighing and examining Jamie’s innards, taking tissue samples for Brian to preserve in tiny plastic tubes full of formalin. It wasn’t long before Brian was stuffing Jamie’s organs back where they’d come from, using a well-practised blanket stitch to sew the body back up again.

‘Well,’ said Doc Fraser, pinging his gloves into a pedal bin like elastic bands. ‘I’ll have to go through the Ice Maiden’s tape before I can give you the full monty, but it looks like your boy here didn’t actually die of an overdose. OK, the silly wee bastard shot himself so full of shite there was no way he was going to survive, but it was the diced carrots that killed him.’ Logan looked puzzled. ‘I’d guess,’ said Fraser as Jamie was wheeled past on a gurney, heading for cold storage, ‘that he’d been on the wagon for a bit, so the effects of the dose were magnified. Heroin, and lots of it. There’s a whole heap of diamorphine still in his bloodstream; your lad snuffed it before his system could absorb it all. Fell unconscious and choked on his own vomit. Classic rock star death.’

Logan nodded sadly. That explained why they’d found the body with the syringe still sticking out of it. Normally a heroin overdose would only kick in a couple of hours after the injection. Then Logan remembered the fresh bruises: the hand clamped over Jamie’s mouth, the marks around the wrists where he’d been held down and punched... Or maybe just held down, the hand preventing him from screaming for help while someone forced a syringe into his arm, saying, ‘ No one rats on Malk the Knife! ’ He shuddered. That kind of thing would be right up Chib Sutherland’s alley. ‘Any chance he didn’t do it to himself?’

The pathologist paused, halfway out of his scrubs. ‘Don’t remember Isobel saying anything about it...’ He looked thoughtful for a moment before telling Brian to get Jamie back out of the fridges: they had some more slicing and dicing to do.

It took Doc Fraser twelve and a half minutes to determine whether or not the overdose was self-inflicted. There was a cluster of old injection points in the crook of Jamie’s arm, the skin rough and pockmarked, and in the middle of them a little black dot ringed with a faint purple halo. Jamie had only been an occasional user, but he would have known better than to ram the needle right through the vein and muscle and into the bone. Doc Fraser dug around with a pair of tweezers, coming out with a sliver of metal that matched the tip of the syringe found with the body. There was only one needle mark, he explained, because the broken needle was only partially withdrawn from the hole, before being pushed into the vein properly. Doc Fraser was embarrassed at having missed it the first time round; he’d thought Isobel had already looked at the injection site, when she’d obviously been saving it for last.

Logan told him not to worry about it and spent the next hour and a half filling in the usual pile of paperwork and online forms that followed a suspicious death, before printing the whole lot out. He was going to sneak up to DI Steel’s office and dump it in her in-tray while no one was about. Avoid the inevitable confrontation. His conscience got the better of him by the time he’d climbed the stairs: Jamie McKinnon had been murdered and, like it or not, Logan owed it to him to set the wheels in motion properly. With a sigh, he stomped his way up to the inspector’s incident room. It was bedlam: piles of reports; a queue of uniformed officers waiting to present them; mobile whiteboards with maps of various forests stuck to them, clarted in red and blue pen; phones going; people all talking at once. And sitting at the centre of the tornado was DI Steel. Logan took a deep breath and marched up to the front of the queue, sticking his paperwork under the inspector’s nose. She snatched it and skimmed through the first couple of pages, swearing as she read. ‘What the hell do you mean suspected murder ? I thought the wee shite was supposed to have killed himself.’

‘Looks like he might have had a little help.’

‘Fuck, that’s all I bloody need, another sodding murder enquiry.’ She screwed up her face, the wrinkles all aligning into a starburst centred on her nose. ‘And it’s Craiginches! Who the hell’s going to talk to us? Might as well interview the bloody pavement! Waste of bloody time...’ Steel chewed thoughtfully on the inside of her cheek for a bit, then shouted across the room. ‘Rennie! Get your arse over here.’