Peter May - The Blackhouse

Muttering almost inaudibly into a hand-held recorder, the professor examined first the feet and then the legs, noting reddish-purple bruising on the knees, before coming to the opening in the abdomen. ‘Hmmm. The wound starts higher up on the left side of the abdomen, with the terminus lower on the right, tapering away almost to a skin scratch at the very tip.’

‘Is that significant?’ Fin said.

The professor straightened up. ‘Well, it means that the blade used to inflict the wound was slashed across the abdomen right to left, from the killer’s perspective.’

Fin suddenly saw his point. ‘It was left to right in Edinburgh. Does that mean one was right-handed, the other left?’

‘We can’t tell handedness, Fin. You should bloody well know that by now! You can slash either way with the same hand. All it means is, they were different.’ He ran a latexed finger along the upper edge of the wound, where the skin had darkened as it dried. ‘The wound inflicted on the Edinburgh victim was deeper, too, more violent, severing the mesentery from the retroperitoneum. You’ll remember, there were about three feet of small intestine hanging between the legs in loops that had been partially severed and drained.’ Fin recalled the smell of it at the scene, streaks of pale green and yellow marbling the blood on the pavement. And at the post-mortem the small bowel, emptied of its juices, had been a dull, dark gold in appearance, quite unlike Angel’s. ‘There’s just a wedge of omentum which has pushed out here, and a bulb of the transverse colon.’ The professor worked his way around the wound and its protrusions. He measured it. ‘Twenty-five and a half centimetres. Shorter, I think, than in Edinburgh, but I’ll need to check that. And this man’s much heavier. He would have presented a bigger target area.’

The external examination moved on to the hands and arms. The professor noted bruising around both elbows. There were old scars on hands ingrained with oil, and he scraped some of the black accumulation of it from beneath bitten fingernails. ‘Interesting. These certainly do not look like the hands of a man who put up a desperate struggle to ward off his attacker. There is no sign of trauma, no skin beneath the fingernails.’

Careful scrutiny of the chest showed no trauma there either. But there was clear bruising on the neck, the same reddish-purple as the knees and the elbows. A row of four round bruises on the left side of the neck, two of them close to half an inch in diameter, one larger oval on the right side. ‘Consistent with having been caused by fingertips. And you can see the little crescent-shaped abrasions associated with them. Made by the killer’s fingernails. There are tiny flakes of skin heaped up at the concave side.’ The professor glanced up at Fin. ‘It’s interesting, you know, how little pressure it takes to strangle someone. You don’t have to stop them breathing, just prevent the blood draining from the head. The jugular veins that carry blood away from the head only require about four and a half pounds of pressure to cut them off. Whereas the carotid arteries carrying blood to the head require about eleven pounds to put them out of action. You’d have to apply about sixty-six pounds of pressure to cut off the vertebral arteries, and thirty-three pounds to choke off the trachea. In this case you can see the florid petechial haemorrhaging around the face.’ He peeled back the eyelids, beneath a large purple bruise on the right temple. ‘Yes, and also here around the conjunctivae. Which would suggest that death might have been caused by cutting off the venous drainage.’

He moved back to the neck. ‘Interesting, though, that again there is no indication that our angel put up any kind of a fight. Someone defending themselves might be likely to scratch their own neck as they tried to prise away their attacker’s hands. Which is another reason one would have expected to find skin beneath the fingernails. Interesting, too, that the trauma around the neck here, inflicted by the rope, the colour of the bruising, would indicate that he was almost certainly dead by the time he was strung up.’ He moved towards the bench where he had laid out the photographs. ‘And if you look at the photography, the pooling of the blood on the ground, and compare it with the way the blood and fluid has streaked down the body, one could only be drawn to conclude that the disembowelling took place once our angel had been suspended from the roof, and after he was dead. The blood was not under pressure when the wound was inflicted, otherwise there would have been tell-tale spatter patterns on the floor. It simply drained from the body through the wound.’

Gunn said, ‘So you’re saying that the order of things was that he was strangled to death, then hung from the rafters and disembowelled?’

‘No, I’m not saying anything of the sort.’ The professor was short on patience. ‘I’m thinking aloud. Jesus Christ, we’ve only just started the fucking examination.’

The assistants carefully turned the body over, and loose flesh fell away from folds of fat around the midriff and settled on cold steel. Great flabby white buttocks were dimpled and streaked with wiry black hair. The same pubic body hair that grew in tight curls around the neck and shoulders. There was no visible sign of trauma except, once more, at the neck.

‘Ahhh …’ The professor shook his head, disappointed. ‘I had half hoped to find the roots of wings beneath his shoulder blades.’ He moved on up to the scalp and started working carefully through the hair, parting and reparting it as if he were looking for fleas.

‘Think you might find horns instead?’ Fin said.

‘Would you be surprised if I did?’

‘No.’

‘Ahhh …’ This time the professor had found something that did not disappoint him. He crossed to his toolkit, removed a scalpel and then returned to the body to start paring away an area of hair high up on the back of the scalp, revealing a purple-red patch a little bigger than the size of a walnut, and an oval indentation that was soft beneath the fingers. The skin was broken, and there was evidence of dried blood. ‘A nasty little crack on the skull.’

‘Someone took him out from behind,’ Fin said.

‘It would appear that way. Bruising his knees and arms and forehead as he went down, pretty heavily by the looks of it. The shape of the indentation in the skull would indicate that he was hit with a metal tube, a baseball bat, something round like that. We’ll get a better idea when we open up the skull.’

With the body turned face-up, and the head supported on a shaped metal block, Professor Wilson began peeling back the layers of Angel’s hidden secrets. He made a ‘Y’ incision, cutting in from each shoulder to a point at the breastbone, and then drawing the blade down through the centre of the chest, stomach and abdomen to the pubes so that he could lay back the flesh on either side to reveal the ribcage. He used a pair of heavy shears to cut through the ribs before dislocating them at the clavicle, removing the breast bone and both halves of the shield that the human body has evolved to protect the delicate internal organs. One by one those organs were removed — heart, lungs, liver, kidneys — and taken to the workbench at the far end of the room to be weighed. Each measurement was chalked up on a blackboard, before the organs were sectioned into wedges, like slices of bread, for examination.

Angel had been in average condition for a man of his age and weight, lungs darkened from years of smoking, arteries hardened, but not in imminent danger of shutting down completely. His liver showed the ravages of too much alcohol consumed over too many years, the pale grey-brown colour of mild cirrhosis, nodular and scarred. The professor had to dig through thick layers of retroperitoneal fat to retrieve the kidneys.