Danielle Ramsay - Vanishing Point

Brady let go of the old wound and gripped the sides of the washbasin, steadying himself as he forced himself to come back to the present.

To Simone.

Brady desperately needed to talk to Madley. Whatever was going on had to have something to do with him.

A gutted and mutilated copper being dumped in Madley’s toilets wasn’t an everyday occurrence. This was a warning to Madley. The question was why?

He leaned over the sink and splashed his face one more time. He needed to clean himself up. He looked bad enough with the purple and black bruising and cuts, without the blood.

His phone suddenly vibrated in his pocket.

He took it out: Conrad. A sudden reminder that he had a case of his own to work on.

But he couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow the two cases were connected.

Chapter Thirteen

Brady shivered involuntarily.

Unlike Wolfe, he didn’t have the stomach for this. He was grateful that he’d left the bacon stottie that Conrad had brought him earlier, certain he wouldn’t be able to keep it down.

Brady glanced at Conrad who was stood next to him, grim-faced, lips tightly sealed in nothing less than a grimace.

Not that Brady could blame him. It wasn’t just being witness to the autopsy that was clearly disturbing Conrad. That in itself was bad enough. It was having to be in the same room as Wolfe. For some reason he and Wolfe didn’t quite see eye to eye. And Brady knew for a fact that Wolfe didn’t appreciate Conrad watching him work.

Brady had suggested that Conrad wait in the cafeteria, which unbeknown to the public was located right next to the morgue. But Conrad had refused. He didn’t have to say it, but Brady knew he didn’t trust leaving him on his own while Simone Henderson’s father was still on the premises. Rake Lane might have been a huge, sprawling maze of a hospital but Conrad clearly believed that it wasn’t large enough to keep Brady away from trouble.

Brady looked down at the dissected body, wishing he was anywhere rather than in front of a mortuary slab looking at a body that resembled a Damien Hirst piece of art. His face hurt like hell and his ribs burnt every time he breathed. But he didn’t have time to feel sorry for himself.

‘You don’t look so grand. You want Harold to fetch you the bucket, laddie?’ Wolfe said mockingly, as he looked across at Brady.

Despite having lived in the North East for the past thirty years, Wolfe’s Edinburgh roots had never left him. His soft, well-educated Scottish lilt was a constant reminder that he was originally from north of the border.

Brady swallowed hard and shook his head, avoiding Conrad’s concerned look.

The ‘sick bucket’ was always on stand-by for new coppers or for the particularly gruesome autopsies, where the bodies had been left to fester for weeks, allowing insidious, eye-watering bodily gases to build.

‘No … I’m fine.’

‘Aye, I can see that!’ Wolfe said with a wheezy laugh.

Wolfe suddenly went from a wheezy gurgle of laughter to struggling to breathe. Brady watched as the pathologist bent over as he tried to free up some air in his lungs. Despite suffering from asthma, and having carried out countless autopsies on lung and throat cancer patients, Wolfe was still a hardened smoker. His twenty a day was seen by him as moderate. As was his daily couple of lunchtime pints.

‘You want to cut back,’ Brady advised, concerned by his old friend’s sudden loss of colour from his face and his bluing lips.

‘I have cut back … I used to smoke forty a day … didn’t I?’ panted Wolfe, still bent over. ‘Aye, and it’s no doing me any harm!’ wheezed Wolfe, still managing a wry smile.

Brady watched as he pulled out his blue Becotide inhaler and breathed in four long puffs to open up his airways.

Finally, he straightened up. He frowned at Brady’s look of concern.

‘It’s not me you should be worried about, Jack. Take a look in the mirror. You look worse than half the stiffs we get in here.’

Brady unconsciously touched the open wound above his eye.

‘I can put a couple of stitches in that for you?’ Wolfe offered.

Brady shook his head. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ Brady replied. ‘You’ve got your work cut out as it is.’

‘Well, laddie, it’s your funeral when DCI Gates clocks you,’ Wolfe replied, disgruntled. The look of disapproval on his face was aimed directly at Conrad. As if for some reason Conrad was responsible for the condition of his boss’s face.

Wolfe dropped his gaze back to the work at hand. He was dressed in a white surgeon’s gown and skull hat with white rubber boots which had a yellow stripe down the back with his name, Dr A. Wolfe, written in black ink. On his small, but long-fingered, delicate hands he wore white latex gloves.

To anyone’s eye he looked like a surgeon. The difference was, his patients couldn’t be saved.

Brady winced as he looked at the gutted insides of the victim. Her ribs had been forced apart and her organs had been removed leaving behind a scene of bloody carnage. A pool of black blood swilled around in what was left of the empty carcass.

‘You sure you don’t need the bucket?’ queried Wolfe.

He had an uncanny knack of knowing when someone was going to puke.

‘No, just aching a bit. That’s all,’ Brady said.

‘This isn’t like you, Jack. Normally you’d take someone down before they even had a chance to look at you,’ Wolfe wheezed.

Brady held his breath as he tried not to react. Wolfe had performed most of the autopsy, which accounted for the disconcerting smell emanating from the systematically butchered body. The internal organs still had to be replaced back into the chest before the deep Y-shaped incision which worked from the shoulders down to the groin could be stitched up and the body could be stitched back together. But first the internal organs would have to be individually weighed and documented. The slightest detail noted.

Brady looked across at Harold, the anatomical pathology technician. Not that Wolfe ever used him. Harold’s job was mainly to stand around and watch as Wolfe cut up and investigated every unusual detail on whatever stiff Harold had removed from one of the thirty body refrigerators in the hospital. Harold was a tall, gaunt-looking young man with long reddish-blonde hair tied back in a ponytail and a long red goatee beard plaited in two strips.

‘What have you found?’ asked Brady as he walked round to Wolfe.

He was busy examining the victim’s internal reproductive organs which were still in situ.

‘The victim wasn’t pregnant at the time of death but she had had an abortion within the last month I’d say,’ replied Wolfe.

‘Both her fallopian tubes and ovaries are scarred by severe endometriosis. As is the uterus which also shows evidence of extreme trauma. So I’m surprised she was able to get pregnant given the scar tissue. But you see here?’ Wolfe said, pointing. ‘There is an area of haemorrhage on the anterior surface of the cervix where it joins the body of the uterus. This haemorrhagic area measures approximately two centimetres and there is also a tear in the cervix measuring three centimetres in length.’

Brady stared at the mutilated body, wondering what kind of short life she had lived.

‘See this scarring on the cervix here?’ questioned Wolfe as he looked up at Brady.

Brady nodded.

‘Caused by an abortion – a bad one at that. She would have had extensive bleeding afterwards. Still evidence of haemorrhaging pooling by the cervix, as I already pointed out. In all honesty I’m surprised she survived. I’ve had autopsies where women have died from botched abortion jobs like this one. She would never have been able to have children after that.’