Michael Fowler: Secret of the Dead

The tray made a metallic clang as it hit the back of the freezer. As Hunter pressed through a second set of doors leading into the main cutting room, he just caught the sucking sound the solid steel fridge door made as it fastened onto rubber seals, ensuring the body remained airtight until the undertakers arrived to take it away.

The double-doors swung shut behind him. The smell was even stronger in here. He knew that the metallic cloying stench was coming from the stale blood of that last post-mortem, which hadn’t yet completely drained away from the hosing down of the static gurney.

The Senior Investigating Officer appointed to the case, Detective Superintendent Michael Robshaw, was already there, with Scenes of Crime Supervisor Duncan Wroe. Before leaving 12 Woodlands View Hunter had contacted the Police Communications room asking for the pair to be updated and requesting that they meet him at the Medico Legal Centre. He had left Grace in charge of the scene, to liaise with forensics, gather the exhibits and pull together evidence, especially to determine if there were any witnesses.

Pathologist Professor Lizzie McCormack was also present. In her green scrubs, she was just snapping on latex gloves in preparation for her examination. Jeffery Howson had already been stripped and now lay on a metal cutting table.

She acknowledged Hunter’s arrival with a nod and then in her soft Scottish brogue, began her preamble as she bent over the table scrutinising the corpse. Name, age, height and weight were dictated in clear voice picked up by the in-built recording system.

Hunter was not surprised when the pathologist announced that the body of the retired detective weighed just 7st 8lbs. He could see almost every bone protruding through the yellow waxen flesh; the cancer had eaten away at him.

The pathologist began her examination at the head, hooking an arm beneath the neck and raising it from its table prop.

With her free hand she pinched back the nose, pulled at the lips and ran a finger around inside the mouth. She swabbed inside the nostrils and the mouth and dropped the swabs into clear plastic exhibit phials.

“It’s just as I surmised from my initial examination of this body at the house. Clear signs of trauma around the mouth and nose and I’ve swabbed some trace evidence of fibres from those areas. He’s bitten down on his tongue as well, most probably as he’s struggled.”

She moved onto the arms, down to the hands, removing the plastic forensic bags which had encased them, and individually checked each finger, taking several swabs beneath the nails.

“Can you photograph these please?” she said as she raised the corpse’s stick-thin wrist.

Duncan Wroe had been hovering behind Lizzie McCormack, taking the swabs from her, scribbling on the labels of each of the samples she had handed to him and then stacking them on a trolley beside him. He reached down to a lower shelf, snatched up his Nikon digital camera with its macro lens and began shooting off a series of frames as the professor rotated the left forearm.

She followed by picking up the right arm and repeating the process.

“There are clear signs of haemorrhaging into the soft tissue of both right and left lower forearms, especially around the wrist.” She pointed out a series of deep purple patterns, which stood out because of the paleness of the flesh around the left wrist.

“Looks as though he put up a hell of a struggle?” Hunter said.

“I thought that myself at first, but these contusions are ever more evident because this man was taking Warfarin. I saw in his notes that he had a heart condition, which was controlled by the drug. The least little knock can look as though he’s been in a bar-room brawl. These marks, exaggerated though they may be, look like finger grip marks. He has definitely had his wrists pressed down hard probably against the arms of the chair he was sitting in.”

She picked up another two swabs and washed them over the bruised areas.

“There might be trace evidence of DNA if the offender wasn’t wearing gloves,” she announced, sealing the swabs and handing them over to Duncan Wroe.

For the next hour and forty minutes Hunter watched Lizzie methodically going about her job. Firstly, with a precision steel scalpel, making the standard Y shaped incision into the cadaver’s chest, down through the stomach and finishing in the pubic bone region, this enabled her to crack apart the rib cage, providing access to the internal organs. She removed and inspected the heart and lungs carefully, weighed them, sliced into them and examined them again before dropping them into a bucket for a final analysis later. Throughout this, in her soft Scottish voice, she continued with her autopsy dictation.

Part-way into the dissection the removal and the cutting opening of the stomach provided a surprise and significant revelation.

Initially the vile stench caught them unawares and caused each of them to take a hurried step back.

It was some moments before Professor McCormack looked into the contents, but then she cried out, “My my, what have we got here?” Between thumb and forefinger she brought out an inch-long object. It looked to be metal, but was covered in sticky yellow globules of slime. She wiped it into the palm of her gloved hand and then held the object up to the light.

It was a small brass key.

“This was something he didn’t want anyone to find.”

She passed it to Duncan.

Her blue-grey eyes shifted between Hunter and the Detective Superintendent. “Now if I was a detective, I would be thinking that key had something significant to do with his death,” she added, flashing them a smile.

She completed the autopsy at the head, slicing into the lower part of the neck and removing the trachea, before finally removing and examining the brain.

Hunter had watched this so many times over the years and yet he still got a sense of morbid fascination.

Two and a quarter hours had passed before the pathologist set the scalpel back down onto her tool trolley and snapped off one of her surgical gloves.

“To sum up gentlemen, the post-mortem has uncovered petechial haemorrhaging to the eyes and there is determined damage to the external airways around the mouth and nose. Fibres removed from the nasal passages and from the victim’s mouth leave me to conclude that asphyxiation is the cause of death, as a result of him being smothered with a cloth covered article. And the injuries to the wrists lead me into believing that you are looking for at least two killers. He was definitely held down while being smothered.”

Lizzie McCormack turned, peeled off her other latex glove and dropped the pair into a yellow biohazard bin as she retreated to her office.

Hunter looked at Detective Superintendent Michael Robshaw.

He guessed that right now their thoughts were similar. Some cruel bastard had pressed a cushion over Jeffery Howson’s face until he’d stopped breathing.

Why was the retired detective killed? What is the significance of the key found in his stomach, why would he swallow it? Hunter guessed there was an inextricable link between these three questions.

Looking at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, Hunter smoothed a hand over his freshly shaved jaw-line, slowly rotating his head side to side, back and forth. Happy with the result, he rinsed his razor in the hand basin and then raked a comb of fingers through his receding mane.

Ten minutes previously he had been lingering in the shower longer than he normally did and with the water temperature as high as he could stand. It was always like this after post-mortems; a long hot shower was the only way he could rid himself of the smell of death.

He had confined most of his clothing to the washing machine, though his suit jacket hung outside on the clothes line, swinging in the cold late autumn breeze.