Peter May - Chinese Whispers

The pathologists turned, and Margaret smiled beatifically at Li. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t. Although after all this time, I should really, shouldn’t I?’ She took pleasure in Li’s shock at seeing her there, and even more from his immediate attempt to mask it. ‘I heard you weren’t too happy that some “goddamned American” was going to screw up your case.’

‘Where’s Li Jon?’ he asked.

Which immediately set her on edge. The little wife and mother wasn’t to be trusted with the proper care of their child. ‘I parked him under the autopsy table,’ she said. ‘Next to the drainage bucket.’ Li’s eyes very nearly flickered towards the table, but he stopped them in time. And Margaret added, with more than a tone, ‘Mei Yuan has him. Until this afternoon, that is — when your father’s coming to see him.’ A pause. ‘Is there any chance you’ll be there?’

‘I doubt it,’ Li said, his voice stiff with tension.

‘I’ll tell him you were asking for him, then, shall I?’ And she turned back to the photographs. ‘So … now that we have the domestic arrangements out of the way, I suppose we should really get on with the job in hand.’

The photographs were laid out on a side table, a graphic, vividly coloured record of a woman’s murder. On another table her bloodstained clothes had been spread out for examination, carefully cut from the body to avoid damaging it during their removal. The spotlessly clean stainless steel autopsy table lay empty in the middle of the floor beneath lights that would focus on the corpse, and a microphone dangled from an outlet in the ceiling to record the pathologists’ every observation.

Through windows in the swing doors at the far end of the room, Li could see the assistants retrieving the body from a two-tier storage facility beyond that could handle up to eighty bodies at any one time. He heard the sound of the drawer sliding open, and the rattle of the gurney as they transferred Lynn Pan’s dead weight on to it.

Margaret said, ‘I’ve spent the last hour going through Doctor Wang’s autopsy reports with him, so I think I’m pretty much up to speed.’

The double doors banged open and the assistants wheeled in the corpse in its white body bag. They manoeuvred the gurney alongside the autopsy table and carefully unzipped the bag, before transferring the oddly pale body on to the stainless steel. A wooden block with a curved indent was placed below the neck to support the head.

Li was almost afraid to look at the body. He knew it was no longer the Lynn Pan he had met yesterday, but it was hard to separate it from the force of her personality. He made himself turn his head. Naked, she looked tiny, like a little girl, small breasts flattened out against her ribs, her legs slightly apart, feet splayed like a ballet dancer’s. In life he’d had the impression of someone much bigger, much stronger. She would have been no match for her killer. Fingers like rods of iron clamped around her delicate neck, choking the breath and the life from her.

Margaret turned from the table. ‘My God, she’s like a child,’ she said. She had not known what to expect, and was taken by surprise. ‘What age was she?’

Wang consulted his notes. ‘Thirty-three, Doctah.’

Margaret crossed to the table and gazed down upon her flawless face, and saw that she had been very beautiful. ‘What a waste.’ She glanced up and found Li watching her.

He saw the shock and the empathy in her eyes. Shock because it was difficult not to feel a sense of loss when something so beautiful is destroyed. Empathy because she was almost the same age as Margaret, and it is hard in that circumstance not to feel vulnerable yourself. I never knew anyone who wasn’t madly in love with her after five minutes . Perhaps even in death Lynn Pan had that effect on people.

Margaret took a deep breath. It was her first autopsy for some considerable time. She had long ago stopped seeing the victims who had passed across her table as anything more than evidence to be examined in the minutest detail, a receptacle for vital clues that might lead to the capture of their killer. It was harder coming back to it than she had imagined. Defences were down. She had been softened by motherhood and domesticity, she had allowed herself to become human again, in a way that you cannot afford when your job is cutting open other human beings.

Li knew it would be hard for her. He watched as she summoned all her professionalism and began her external examination. There was not much of her to be seen under the shower cap and goggles and mask. Her smock and plastic arm cuffs covered every inch of her white skin, latex gloves and the mesh gauntlet on her non-cutting hand hid the beauty of her long, delicate fingers. It was something in the way she held herself that betrayed her tension. If only to Li.

There were several red-purple bruises on Lynn Pan’s arms and legs, where perhaps she had fought briefly against her killer. ‘No defence wounds on the hands or forearms,’ Margaret said. ‘No cuts or slashes, which would suggest she was at least unconscious before he cut her throat.’

Around her neck and jawbone there was similar coloured bruising consistent with having been caused by thumb and fingertips where she had been pinned against the base of the sundial arm and choked. A cluster of three round bruises about one and a half centimetres in diameter on the left side, a larger bruise on the right, probably made by the thumb — suggesting that the murderer might have been right-handed. Margaret was confident that where the head had been banged up against the foot of the monument, she would find an area of subgaleal haemorrhage when she examined the scalp.

‘This guy needs to cut his fingernails,’ Margaret said. There were marks on Pan’s throat, consistent in relation to the bruising with having been left by the killer’s fingernails. Tiny crescent-shaped abrasions between half and one centimetre long, flakes of skin heaped up at their concave side. Margaret cocked her head, frowning slightly. ‘Usually someone defending themselves against strangulation would leave vertically orientated scratches near the top of their own neck, at the base or sides of the mandible, as they tried to pry themselves free.’

‘She was wearing gloves, Doctah,’ Wang said.

‘Ahh.’ Margaret had missed that in the photographs. She was rusty.

The slashing of the throat was ugly and vicious. It began five centimetres below the point where the left earlobe had been severed. It made a jagged crescent around the throat, following the line of the jaw, severing the windpipe, both carotid arteries and the internal jugular, and cutting through all the muscle and soft tissue right down to the vertebrae, marking the intervertebral cartilages. The blood vessels contained clot. Margaret thought that the wound had probably been inflicted by a sharp, pointed, long-bladed knife, about six to seven inches long. And it was her view that from the angle of the cut and the tearing of the skin, the knife had been drawn across the throat from left to right.

She examined the face next, pulling back the eyelids and peering at the eyes. ‘There is florid petechial haemorrhaging of the conjunctiva and the face,’ she said. ‘Tiny burst blood vessels,’ she added by way of explanation. ‘Caused by the pressure created when the blood draining from the head is cut off, but blood is still pumping into it through the arteries.’ She turned the head to the right to examine what remained of the left ear. ‘He’s been in a hurry with this. It’s a very crude amputation. He must have pulled the ear away from the side of the head with his free hand and cut down along the shape of the skull with a single stroke of his knife. The wound is not very accurate.’ A part of the ear still remained attached to its stump. On the right side, half the lobe remained clinging stubbornly to the side of the head by the smallest flap of skin.