James Nally - Dance With the Dead - A PC Donal Lynch Thriller

‘If you look closely at her ankles, wrists and neck you’ll see ligature marks. The marks are red, so the ligatures would have been applied when she was alive. She was held somewhere else, tortured, killed, cut up with considerable expertise. Her body was drained of all its blood prior to being dumped here, probably sometime between 3 and 5 this morning. There’s no grass discoloration beneath her. She hasn’t been here for very long.’

Two young men in forensic overalls burst in, the second dragging a black plastic body bag behind him like a sleigh.

‘ Dedwina !’ they cried.

‘Oh Christ,’ she muttered, ‘these clowns.’

‘We’re like the DHL of death,’ the first explained to me.

‘Dead Haulers of London,’ beamed the second.

‘Oh look,’ said the first, pointing to the dead woman’s face, ‘it’s the Joker.’

‘It’s me, sugar bumps!’ called the other, imitating Jack Nicholson’s star turn in the Batman movie.

The lead man got in on the impromptu Jack/Joker tribute: ‘As my plastic surgeon says, if you gotta go, go with a smile.’

‘Stop this at once,’ snapped Edwina, flashing the steel beneath her cultivated cosiness, ‘Show some respect for the deceased.’

She resumed her appraisal: ‘You can tell your Chief that this woman wasn’t a drug user or a streetwalker.’

She registered my surprise, and seemed to enjoy it.

‘She was a fit, healthy young woman. Good skin and teeth. Manicured hands. Very toned legs, I’d say a sportswoman of some kind, or a dancer.’

‘So how did she end up here?’

‘I think that’s your department,’ she said, a little sharply.

The corpse couriers stood between her two halves, taping transparent plastic bags around her smooth hands and painted feet while humming a tune I recognised but couldn’t place. As they bagged her head, the humming got louder. Finally, as the chorus arrived, they took one shoulder each and sang into the dead woman’s face: ‘Stuck in the middle of you.’

Edwina planted balled fists against her hips and sighed. But her dominatrix stance and whip-crack tuts failed to chastise our madcap crime scene gagsters.

‘I hope we haven’t mortally offended you?’

‘This is how we get through our day,’ protested the straight man, and I could see his point.

They rolled both halves of Jane Doe up in a large plastic sheet, gaffer taping it shut as you might an IKEA return. They hefted the load into the body bag, zipped it shut and hauled it away like a condemned old carpet. I almost expected them to break into a chorus of ‘Heigh Ho’.

‘There’s scant enough dignity in death without it being reduced to panto,’ harrumphed Edwina.

She looked at me conspiratorially. ‘Now, let’s turn our attention to the notable features not for public consumption. You may have noticed the penny-sized gouges on her fleshier parts. At first I thought she had been hacked at by something very pointed, like an ice pick. But on closer inspection, I could make out very tiny but very sharp serration marks. I’ve only ever seen wounds like this on a drowned body, when fish have nibbled at the flesh. I need to do more tests but it’s very strange.’

‘Maybe they kept her body somewhere with rats or mice?’

‘I’d recognise rodential incisions. Also, she bled from these wounds,’ she said, looking at me gravely. ‘She was alive when they occurred.’

She throat-coughed back her composure: ‘There are a few other elements that may interest you, detective.

‘We removed very tiny fragments of unidentified matter, deep red in colour, from inside those hammer wounds to her skull. They look to me like flecks of paint, but are almost certainly too minute to test.

‘We removed an A3 battery from her anus. The significance of its insertion is not my department. However, my assistant reminded me that we came across the same thing about three months ago. The victim on that occasion had been a street prostitute named Valerie Gillespie.’

She fixed me with a hard stare and sighed. Pathologists are natural storytellers. She’d been building up to this final twist.

‘Between the clasped thumb and index finger of this woman’s right hand, we found human hair, just a few strands.’

I couldn’t stop my mind skidding across assumptions like a well-hurled pebble: ‘This has to be the hair of her killer, surely Edwina? Or someone party to her murder? An accessory?’

She eyed me as you might an over-exuberant toddler. ‘Hair identification isn’t an exact science. Far from it. There could be hundreds of people out there whose hair follicles would appear very similar to these under a microscope. However, it may prove useful for confirming or eliminating a suspect.’

‘I see,’ I said, nodding solemnly as if mentally storing her points. But I’d already drawn my own cast iron conclusions. The victim here had clearly known her killer. The hair belonged to someone in her circle. Find the owner of the hair clasped between her stiff dead fingers, and we’d find her killer.

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