Mark Sennen - Touch

After thirty minutes Calter got bored and said she would walk out of the queue and back to the station. Savage could do nothing but wait, and after another hour the traffic dissolved away and she drove the remaining couple of miles to Derriford Hospital. She struggled to find a space for the car despite the acres of parking that surrounded the ugly, brutal looking complex. Notwithstanding the hospital’s primary purpose, it was no place to be born, be ill or to die. For post-mortems the ambience could not have been better.

Doctor Andrew Nesbit was perfect for PMs too. His straightforward and methodical manner gave him a detachment that at times like these Savage envied. She didn’t think anybody enjoyed eviscerating the dead, but if anyone did it was Nesbit. Savage put her gown and mask on in the anteroom and went into the lab proper where the pathologist hunkered over a stainless steel gurney, his long arms working the corpse like a mantis playing with a fly.

‘Ah, Charlotte, your DS left a while ago but you are welcome to stay for this one if you like.’ Nesbit looked up from the cadaver, an old man with severe facial injuries, body gone a sort of yellowish-white, the veins and bones visible through the translucent skin.

‘Did this man fall into the gutter in a drunken stupor or did he get waylaid and set about by a group of bored youths? Twenty years ago I’d have said the former, these days the latter explanation seems more likely. What do you think?’

‘You tell me, Doc, I thought that was your job.’ Savage moved closer to the dead man. Seventy or so and looking like age would have caught up with him sometime soon anyway had the tarmac not intervened first.

‘Not a pleasant way to die.’ Nesbit bent down again and using a pair of tweezers extracted a piece of grit from the man’s discoloured cheek. ‘Lying in the roadway having a cerebral haemorrhage while the good folk of Plymouth go about their business unaware you are anything other than another homeless statistic sleeping off a drunken binge. Whether an accident or foul play, either way his death was not a glorious ending.’

‘I don’t suppose such a thing exists for any of your patients.’

‘Or for any of us. There are good ways and bad ways but only one exit.’

‘If you added a line about “many path’s to the Lord’s feet” you’d be a passable preacher.’

‘As you know, Charlotte, I’m of an entirely scientific bent. As far as I am aware the only journey this man can make is one involving the breakdown of his biological components into their constituent molecules. Of souls I know nothing.’

That was Nesbit through and through. He had once joked to Savage that the inscription on his gravestone would be ‘Observation, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment, Results, Conclusion.’ He dealt with cold bodies and cold facts with no place for emotion. Savage thought Nesbit’s approach admirable because it prevented the niggling little thoughts from burgeoning into nightmares. It washed away the doubt, the fear and the uncertainty from death in the same way his assistants would hose the blood from the dissection table after an autopsy. Only sterile, gleaming, stainless steel remained, a shining truth developed from scientific reasoning rather than from a figure on the cross. It left no room for tears and perhaps that was the point. Savage didn’t care much for religion either, but she knew such detachment wouldn’t work for her and already the emotion was rising within.

‘You’ve got some results on the girl?’

Nesbit sighed, paused, and with a theatrical flourish worthy of a RSC veteran he turned and dropped the piece of grit into a stainless steel kidney dish on a side bench. The bowl rang out a clear note that sounded quite haunting. Nesbit let the note ring for a second or so and touched the bowl to bring an end to the unknown man’s elegy. He put the tweezers down with a further flourish and turned to Savage.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘Now, I found no sign of trauma causing death, externally or internally. You might be surprised to hear that, given the cut on the stomach we noticed at the scene, more of which later. I also discovered something quite fascinating, intriguing possibly.’ Nesbit moved over to another body, this one covered with a green cloth.

Savage went over to join him, hoping he wouldn’t need to lift the sheet, although she knew he would do so anyway.

‘Now, let’s see.’ Nesbit pulled back the cloth and revealed the girl’s naked body. He picked up a clipboard and read aloud. ‘Kelly Donal, eighteen. Height one hundred and-’

Savage winced, not at the doctor’s words, rather at the sight of the body. Kelly didn’t look so beautiful now, not with the rough, Y shaped scar running along her shoulders, down her chest and across her stomach. Nesbit’s assistant had sewn her up well enough, but the work wasn’t going to win any needlepoint prizes.

‘-point three kilograms. All in all a healthy young woman with no abnormalities and no worries.’ Nesbit cleared his throat. ‘Apart from being dead, of course.’

‘Time of death?’

‘Patience, Charlotte, patience.’ Nesbit scanned his clipboard again. ‘First, the cut we noted on the abdomen. Remember?’

‘I think you said the wound hadn’t bled.’

‘Yes. No blood because the incision happened post-mortem.’

‘You sure?’

‘Of course. The wound would have bled profusely had she been alive at the time. Even if the blood had been cleaned up externally, internally there would have been significant haemorrhaging.’

‘Your guess at the weapon?’

‘I deal in evidence not conjecture, as you well know, Charlotte.’ Nesbit bent his head and peered over the top of his glasses at Savage; a scolding glance, but a smile forming too. ‘However, I noted a small exit wound on the girl’s lower back meaning the instrument was pushed all the way through the girl’s body. Thus the evidence points to a thin, sharp blade approximately twenty centimetres long. ‘

‘Kitchen knife?’

‘Quite possibly, but I wouldn’t call the knife a weapon since the cut was made after she died.’ Nesbit flipped a page over on his clipboard and adjusted his glasses. ‘Now, you asked about the time of death?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, remember the core body temperature readings I took at the scene were not much use? The body was colder than the ambient air.’

‘Yes, I think we thought she might have been outside in the frosty weather.’

‘Right. Well I found some blowfly larvae up in the nasal cavity. I am no expert in the area, but I believe they are at the stage of development called first instars.’

‘I am guessing from my limited knowledge she hadn’t been dead long then.’

‘I don’t know. The maggots themselves are dead.’

‘You’ve lost me, Andrew.’ Savage was struggling to understand. ‘The maggots are dead?’

‘Yes, correct. It is possible the frost killed them, but I don’t think so. We will need to get some accurate weather data and I will contact a forensic entomologist to determine if my theory is possible.’

‘What theory?’ Savage was becoming exasperated and she wondered for a moment if Nesbit might be playing a game with her.

‘My hypothesis is Kelly Donal was frozen.’

‘What?’ Savage stared at Nesbit. ‘By the frosty nights?’

‘No, no. Not cold enough to kill the larvae. She was deep frozen. That would explain why they are dead and also the reason for the odd, puffy constituency and appearance to the skin, as well as the low core temperature I observed.’

‘Deep frozen? Like a pack of oven chips?’

‘Wouldn’t touch them myself, but yes.’

‘So we can’t know when she was killed?’

Nesbit seemed to ignore her and instead walked over to the lab bench at the side of the room. He pointed to a large glass jar and Savage tried to suppress a heave in her stomach at the sight of the grey lump within.