Peter May - The Lewis Man

‘Like his hands and feet had been tied?’

‘Exactly. He may have been hanged, hence the abrasions on his neck, or else he may have been dragged along a beach using that same rope, which would explain the sand in the broken skin on his knees and feet. In any event, it is far too early to be submitting theories on the cause of death. There are multiple possibilities.’

A darker patch of skin on the right forearm was attracting his attention now. He wiped at it with his swab, then turned to lift a scrubbing sponge from the stainless-steel sink behind him, and began roughly rubbing away the top layer of skin. ‘Sweet fucking Jesus,’ he said.

Gunn canted his head to try to get a better look at it. ‘What is it?’

Professor Mulgrew was silent for a long time before looking up to meet Gunn’s eye. ‘Why were you so keen to know how long the body might have been in the bog?’

‘So I can clear it off my slate, Professor, and hand it over to the archaeologists.’

‘I’m afraid you might not be able to do that, Detective Sergeant.’

‘Why?’

‘Because this body has been in the peat for no more than fifty-six years — at the very most.’

Gunn felt his face colour with indignation. ‘You told me not ten minutes ago that you were not a bloody carbon-dating machine.’ He enjoyed putting the emphasis on the bloody . ‘How can you possibly know that?’

Mulgrew smiled. ‘Take a closer look at the right forearm, Detective Sergeant. I think you’ll see that what we have here is a crude tattooed portrait of Elvis Presley above the legend Heartbreak Hotel . Now, I’m pretty certain that Elvis wasn’t around in the time before Christ. And as a confirmed fan I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, that ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was a number one hit in the year 1956.’

Professor Mulgrew took almost two hours to complete the autopsy after breaking for a lunch of onion bhaji, lamb bhuna with garlic fried rice, and kulfi ice cream. George Gunn had a cheese sandwich in his office, and was having trouble keeping it down.

The leather-like quality of the skin had made it impossible to open up the chest using a simple scalpel, and in the end the pathologist had resorted to the use of a pair of heavy scissors to cut through it before switching to his accustomed scalpel to reflect the remaining skin and muscles away from the ribcage.

Now the body lay opened up, like something that might be found hanging from a butcher’s hook, internal organs removed and breadloafed. But this had been a strong, healthy young man, and nothing found internally had detracted from the notion that his death had been caused by anything other than a brutal murder. A murder perpetrated by someone who might, just conceivably, still be alive.

‘Bloody interesting corpse, Detective Sergeant.’ Beads of sweat had gathered in the creases on his brow, but Professor Mulgrew was enjoying himself. ‘Didn’t have quite as interesting a last meal as I did. Flakes of soft meat, and minute translucent fibre-like material resembling fish bones. Fish and potatoes probably.’ He grinned. ‘Anyway, happy to give you a hypothesis now on how he might have died.’

Gunn was mildly surprised. From everything he had heard, pathologists were almost invariably reluctant to commit themselves to anything. But Mulgrew was clearly a man supremely confident of his own abilities. He closed up the ribcage, folded the skin and tissue back across the chest towards his initial incision, and poked with his scalpel at the wounds.

‘He was stabbed four times in the chest. From the downward angle of the strokes I would say that his attacker was either very much taller than him, or the victim was on his knees. I favour the latter, but we’ll come to that. The wounds were inflicted by a long, thin, double-bladed knife. Something like a Fairbairn-Sykes, or some other kind of stiletto. This one here, for example’ — he indicated the topmost wound — ‘is about five-eighths of an inch in length and pointed at both tips, which almost certainly indicates a thin, double-bladed weapon. It is five inches deep, passing through the apex of the left lung, the right atrium of the heart and into the ventricular septum. So it’s quite long, and typical of the other three wounds.’

‘And that’s what killed him?’

‘Well, any one of them would almost certainly have been fatal given a few minutes, but I suspect that it was this deep incised wound crossing the front of the neck that did for him.’ He turned his attention to it. ‘It’s more than seven inches long, extending between the mastoid area on the left, just below the ear, to the sternocleidomastoid area on the right.’ He looked up. ‘As you can see.’ He smiled and returned to the wound. ‘It completely transects the left jugular vein, severs the left carotid artery, and nicks the right jugular. It’s about three inches at its deepest, and even cuts into the spinal column.’

‘Is that significant?’

‘In my opinion the angle and depth of the cut would suggest that it was made from behind, and almost certainly with a different weapon. Which is backed up by the stab wound in the back. That wound is one-and-a-half inches long and has a squared superior tip, and a pointed inferior tip. Which would suggest a large, single-edged knife, better suited to cutting so deeply into the neck.’

Gunn frowned. ‘I’m having trouble getting the picture here, Professor. Are you saying the killer used two weapons, stabbed him in the chest with one, then grabbed him from behind and cut his throat with another?’

A smile of mild condescension settled on the pathologist’s face behind his mask, visible to Gunn only in eyes that glimmered on the far side of the giant tortoiseshells. ‘No, Detective Sergeant. I am saying that there were two attackers. One holds him from behind, forces him down to his knees while the second stabs him in the chest. The stab in the back was probably accidental as the first assailant prepared to draw his knife across the victim’s throat.’

He moved around the table to the dead man’s head, and began peeling the skin and flesh back over the face and skull from an initial incision.

‘Here’s the picture you should probably keep in your mind. This man was bound by the wrists and ankles. He had a rope tied around his neck. If it had been used to hang him, the abrasion would have canted up towards the suspension point. But it doesn’t. So I’m suggesting to you that they used it to drag him along a beach. There is a fine silver sand in his nose and mouth, and in the broken skin on his knees and the tops of his feet. At some point they forced him on to his knees and repeatedly stabbed him before cutting his throat.’

The picture that the pathologist painted with his words was suddenly very vivid to Gunn. He wasn’t sure why, but somehow he pictured it at night, with a phosphorescent sea breaking over compacted silver sand glowing in the moonlight. And then the blood turning white foam crimson. But what shocked him almost more than anything else was the thought that this brutal slaying had taken place here, on the Isle of Lewis, where in more than a hundred years there had been only two previous murders.

He said, ‘Would it be possible to take fingerprints? We’re going to have to try to identify this man.’

Professor Mulgrew did not answer immediately. He was focused on reflecting the scalp away from the skull without tearing it. ‘It’s so bloody desiccated,’ he said. ‘Brittle as hell.’ He looked up. ‘The fingertips are a bit wrinkled from fluid loss, but I can inject a little formalin to rehydrate them and you should get perfectly acceptable prints. Might as well take a DNA sample, too.’

‘The police surgeon already sent off samples for analysis.’