Peter May - The Killing Room

Margaret nodded, and then said, ‘Before going internal, perhaps we should take her fingerprints. It’s unlikely that any of these women have criminal records, but it is a possibility. And since identification is paramount here …’

Lan looked at her, surprised. ‘But that is not possible.’

‘Why?’

Lan lifted the fingers of the right hand. ‘The degree of decay, Dr Campbell. It would be impossible to take clean prints.’

Carefully, Margaret took the hand from him and examined it minutely, noting for the record an area of callus between the top knuckle and the tip of the third finger. Then she started easing the wrinkled skin away from the rotting flesh of the fingers. ‘The process of degloving has already begun,’ she said. ‘All we have to do is help it on its way.’ And slowly, delicately, she eased the skin of the whole hand free from the decaying muscle and tissue inside. The fingernails came away also, so that she was left holding what looked much like a very thin, discoloured latex glove with neatly trimmed fingernails. It hung limp in her hand. Everyone around the table watched with fascinated horror a technique which was new to them. ‘If someone would bring an inkpad and card …’ Margaret left the request hanging.

Lan nodded towards the uniformed forensics man, who hurried out and returned a few moments later with an inkpad and several fingerprint cards. The young man looked perplexed when Margaret handed him a pair of latex gloves and asked him to put them on. Again he looked to Dr Lan for guidance and again was given the nod. He pulled on the gloves and Margaret said, ‘Now slip your right hand inside the degloved skin.’

There was something close to panic in his eyes now, and Margaret saw perspiration beading across his forehead. He hesitated, but a sharp word in Chinese from Lan prompted him to do as he was told, and he carefully slipped on the skin of the dead woman’s hand like another layer of glove. ‘Now,’ Margaret said, ‘take a set of fingerprints as if they were your own.’

The tension in the young man was apparent as one by one he rolled the ‘gloved’ fingers of his right hand across the inkpad, and then repeated the process on the white card, creating a perfect set of the dead woman’s prints.

Apart from a faint humming of the lights, there was complete silence in the room and Margaret said, ‘After we have finished here, and before we carry out any further autopsies, we should examine the hands of all the victims for signs of trauma or other evidence, and then repeat this process. It will speed up any possible identification.’

Lan looked at her, and she saw in his eyes for the first time, a glimmer of respect. He nodded his solemn agreement. ‘I agree, Doctor,’ he said.

Margaret’s standing in the room had suddenly risen, and she returned to the body of the poor woman on the table to begin the internal examination.

There is a twenty-three inch ‘Y’-shaped sutured incision of midline anterior torso, running from each shoulder to the breastbone and down to the symphysis pubis.

She turned to Lan. ‘In my experience, Doctor, Chinese pathologists normally employ a single post-mortem incision running in a straight line from the laryngeal cartilage to the pubic bone. Similar to the practice of pathologists in Europe.’

Lan nodded. ‘That is correct.’

‘The “Y” incision is peculiarly American. The cut that I would make during autopsy.’

Lan nodded again, but added, ‘I have made a “Y” cut myself on occasion. But I agree, in China it is the exception rather than the rule.’

Margaret carefully began unpicking the suture to ease open the chest cavity.

Upon removal of the suture, the edges of the incision are seen to be oily with decompositional change, but are otherwise erythematous, and there are multiple areas of clotted blood on the incision’s edges.

She glanced up at Lan, and again the colour rose on his face. The exchange of looks was brief and wordless, but Li did not miss it. He decided to save any questions for later.

There are several areas of black gritty material in areas of haemorrhage of the incision edges of the abdominal wall. The sternum has been cut vertically and bears no sternotomy wires. The heart, lungs, kidneys, liver and pancreas are absent.

‘What are sternotomy wires?’ Li asked.

Again, before Margaret could answer, Mei-Ling said, ‘They are loops of wire that are used to close the sternum after open chest surgery.’

Margaret inclined her head slightly. ‘You know your surgery, Miss Nien.’ And Mei-Ling blushed.

Margaret returned to a systematic examination of the internal organ systems, working her way through the remains of the pericardial sac and the various arteries and pulmonary vessels left by the removal of the heart. Suddenly she stopped as she uncovered the ends of what looked like two very small sutures of blue-coloured thread. She examined them for a moment, a frown of puzzlement on her face, and glanced at Dr Lan. His dark eyes gave no clue as to his thoughts.

The major pulmonary vessels each bear a knot of suture, appearing to be a monofilament polypropylene, approximately half an inch in length.

She detailed the missing lungs and sectioned the neck before moving down to the stomach and intestine, noting the absence of the liver, gallbladder and pancreas, finding nothing abnormal until she began pawing her way through the retroperitoneal fat to make sure that the kidneys really were absent. There she found further suture knots on the renal arteries, and for a moment lost her scalpel as it slipped through fingers made greasy by the fat.

The spleen is normal size, shape and position … She stopped and thought about that for a moment. The capsule is grey-purple and wrinkled. Sectioning reveals an oozing red-purple, autolytic cut surface with no recognisable follicular pattern.

She moved, then, down to the pubic area and said, ‘Virgin territory. No one’s been down here before us. At least, not with a scalpel.’ With the bladder exposed, she stuck a needle into it to try to draw out some fluid. None was forthcoming, and she made a small incision with her scalpel so that she could look inside. Satisfied that there was, indeed, a small amount of fluid there, she twisted the needle off the syringe and drew out about 10 cc of cloudy amber urine with the syringe alone, and handed it to an assistant for dispatch to the lab.

Now she cut out the bladder to expose the uterus which was pink-tan in colour, and shaped like an upside-down, flattened pear. At its lower end it opened into the cervix, a small tough ring which was pale tan in colour and shaped like the lips of a carp. ‘Looks like someone’s lost their mom,’ Margaret said grimly.

‘How can you tell?’ Li asked, peering more closely.

‘The cervix is normally round in nulliparous women — that is, a woman who hasn’t had kids. When a woman has had children, the cervix is stretched and takes on the shape of a fish mouth. Like a carp. See it?’

Li nodded. This woman had probably delivered a child who would never see her again, who might not even know what had become of his or her mother. It was too easy to forget that these slabs of rotting meat on a table had once been living human beings just like them.

Margaret pulled the body of the uterus up, away from the vagina, felt for the cervix and cut across the vagina just below, leaving a small cuff of vagina around it. The fallopian tubes with their attached ovaries were connected to the uterus at the opposite top corners. She smiled to herself and said, ‘I always see this picture of a kind of homely, faceless bald kid. See …? His ears would be the tubes and ovaries, and the cervix would be where his neck is.’