Simon Beckett - The Chemistry of Death

Coming on top of everything else, it was another, unlooked-for blow. And then, while this was still being absorbed, came a far worse one.

I was just about to start afternoon surgery when the call came. I'd spoken to Mackenzie only the day before, when the student's body had been identified, and it was a mark of how far I'd let my defences slip that I assumed this would be something relating to that. Even when he said he needed to see me straight away I didn't make the connection.

'Surgery's about to start,' I said, phone tucked under my ear as I signed a prescription form. 'Can it wait until later?'

'No,' he said, and hearing his bluntness I stopped writing. 'I need you out here now, Dr Hunter. As soon as possible,' he added, as a sop to courtesy. But it was clear that politeness wasn't a priority for him right now.

'What's happened?'

There was a pause. I guessed he was weighing up how much he could tell me over a public phone line.

'We've found her,' he said.

There are around a hundred thousand different species of flies. Different shapes, different sizes, different life-cycles. Blowflies, or blue- and green-bottles as the most familiar types are more commonly known, are part of the Calliphoridae family. They breed on decaying organic matter. Rotting food, faeces, carrion. Almost anything. Most people can't see the point of them. They're disease-carrying irritants, as ready to feed on fresh dung as fine cuisine, which they do in both cases by regurgitating onto it.

But, as with everything else in nature, they play their role. As repulsive as it may seem, flies play an essential part in the breakdown of organic matter, helping to speed the process of dissolution, returning the dead to the raw materials of which they're composed. They're nature's own recycling mechanism. And, as such, there's a certain elegance to their single-minded devotion to their task. Far from being pointless, in the greater scheme of things, they're more important than the hummingbird or deer on which they'll one day feed. And from a forensic perspective, flies are not just an unavoidable evil, they're invaluable.

I hate them.

Not because I find them irritating or disgusting, although I'm no more immune to those aspects than anyone else. Or even because they're a reminder of our ultimate physical fate. I hate them because of the noise.

The flies' music was audible as I made my way across the marsh. At first it was almost felt rather than heard, a low thrumming that seemed part of the heat itself. It grew steadily more pervasive as I approached the centre of activity, a senseless, idiot drone which seemed to constantly waver in pitch without actually changing. The air became busy with darting insects. I waved away those that were drawn by the sweat on my face, but by now they were accompanied by something else.

The smell was at once both familiar and repellent. I'd smeared my top lip with menthol, but it cut right through. I'd once heard it likened to an over-ripe cheese left to sweat in the sun. It wasn't – not really. But that was as close as anything came to describing it.

Mackenzie acknowledged me with a nod. The crime scene team went about their tasks in grim-faced silence, faces flushed and damp in the hot coveralls. I looked down at the object that was the reason for all this activity, from the perspiring police officers to the frenzied swarm of flies.

'We haven't moved it yet,' Mackenzie said. 'I wanted to wait until you got here.'

'How about the pathologist?'

'He's been and gone. Said it was too decomposed for him to tell us anything for the moment, except that it was dead.'

It was that all right. It had been a long time since I'd been to a crime scene and looked on what had until recently been a living, breathing person. Sally Palmer's body had already been taken away by the time I'd arrived, and examining it later, in the sterile environment of a lab, was a far more clinical business. Even the remains of Alan Radcliff had been buried for so long they'd become a mere structural relic, with precious little evidence of humanity left about them. This, though, this was different. This was death in its busiest, awful glory.

'How did you find it?' I asked, pulling on a latex glove. I'd already suited up at the nearby trailer. We were several miles from the village, in a bleak region of drained marsh almost diametrically opposed to where the first body had been found. The lake glinted indifferently a few hundred yards away. This time I'd come prepared, and underneath the coveralls I was wearing only shorts. Even so, I was already slick with sweat, just from walking the short distance.

'The chopper spotted it. Fluke, really. They had some sort of systems glitch, so they were on their way back. They wouldn't have flown over here if not. This area's already been searched.'

'When was the last time?'

'Eight days ago.'

That gave us an upper limit of how long the body had been here. Perhaps also how long it had been dead, although that was less certain. People have been known to move bodies, sometimes more than once.

I snapped my other glove into place. I was ready, but felt no enthusiasm for what I was about to do. 'You think it's her?' I asked Mackenzie.

'Officially, we'll have to wait until a formal identification. But I don't think there's much doubt.'

Neither did I. There had already been one reprieve when the grave had yielded the long-dead student. Somehow I didn't think there would be another.

Lyn Metcalf was unrecognizable. Her body lay face down, half-hidden by hummocks of marsh grass. She was naked, but on one foot was a single running shoe, incongruous and somehow pitiful. She'd been dead for several days, that much was obvious. Death had wrought its usual grim changes, a reverse alchemy transforming the gold of life into a base and stinking matter. But at least this time her killer hadn't added his own obscene modifications.

There were no swan wings.

I shut down the part of me that kept trying to superimpose a memory of the smiling young woman I'd bumped into only the week before and went to examine the body. There were what looked like several slashes in the darkened skin. But the most obvious wound was to the throat. Although the body lay face down, the extent of it was still all too apparent.

'Can you say how long she's been dead?' Mackenzie asked. 'Just roughly,' he added, before I could say anything.

'There's still soft tissue left, and skin slippage is only just starting.' I gestured at the wounds, now boiling colonies of maggots. 'And with this amount of larval activity, we're probably looking at between six and eight days.'

'Can't you narrow it down?'

I was about to point out that he'd asked for a rough estimate only a second before, but stopped myself. This wasn't pleasant for any of us. 'The weather's been constant, so assuming the body hasn't been moved, to get to this stage I'd say six or seven days in this heat.'

'Anything else?'

'Same sort of wounds as we saw on Sally Palmer, though not quite so many. Severed throat, and the body's pretty desiccated again. Not as much, obviously, because it's not been dead as long. But I'd take a preliminary guess that it bled out.' I examined the blackened vegetation around it, seared by the alkali-rich chemicals released by the body. 'We'll need to test iron content to be sure, but I'd guess she was killed somewhere else and dumped here, like last time.'

'Same person did it, would you say?'

'Come on, I can't tell you that,' I said.

Mackenzie grunted. I could understand his unease. In some respects this was similar to Sally Palmer's murder, but there were enough departures from it to raise doubts that the same man was responsible. From what we could see so far there were no facial injuries. More significantly, the bird or animal fetish that had been evident before was conspicuously absent. From a detection point of view, that presented worrying problems. Either something had happened to force the killer to change his methods, or he was so erratic that there was no pattern to his actions. The third possibility was that the murders were the work of two different people.