The Blackhouse (6 page)

‘Gotcha, you little bugger!’ The professor straightened up and held his tweezers up to the light, with what looked like a small white bead pinched delicately between its prongs.

‘What is it?’ Gunn said.

‘It’s a ghost.’ He looked at them, grinning. ‘Of a pill. One of these extended-release pills. The shell is full of micropores that let the medicine leak out slowly. This one’s empty. But these pill casings can sometimes survive in the stomach for hours after they’ve served their purpose. We see them all the time.’

‘Is there any significance in it for us?’ Fin said.

‘Maybe. Maybe not. But if this really is the killer’s vomit, then it could tell us something about him that we wouldn’t otherwise have known. Whatever medicine this contained may or may not show up on a tox screen, but we’ll still know what it was he was taking.’

‘How?’

The professor held up his magnifying glass to the tiny shell. ‘You can’t really see it with this, but stick it under a dissecting scope and we’ll almost certainly find numbers or letters etched on the surface, even a drug company symbol. We can check the markings against those listed in drug books to identify the medication. It might take a little time, but we’ll get there.’ He dropped the ghost pill carefully into a plastic evidence bag and sealed it. ‘You see, we’re clever bastards these days.’

‘What about DNA?’ Fin looked at the dried lumps of undigested food stuck to the fabric of the fleece, and could not begin to guess what they were. It seemed that no matter what you ate, it nearly always came back up looking like diced carrots in porridge. ‘Will you be able to get any out of that lot?’

‘Oh, I imagine so. We’re sure to find mouth mucosa cells in the saliva. We’ll get DNA from the nuclei of any of the cells lining the mouth, or the oesophagus, or the stomach itself. They slough off all the time, and will certainly be part of the vomitus.’

‘Will it take long?’ Gunn said.

‘If we get the specimen to the DNA lab some time this afternoon. Extraction, amplification … we should have a result by late tomorrow morning.’ The professor put a finger to his lips. ‘But don’t tell anyone, otherwise everyone’ll want their results that fast.’

Fin said, ‘The CIO says he’s going to take anything up to two hundred DNA samples to run past whatever you extract from this lot.’

‘Ah.’ Professor Wilson smiled, and his beard bristled. ‘That’ll take a little longer. And, besides, we have not yet established that this isn’t the victim’s own vomitus.’

Two white-coated assistants wearing large yellow rubber gloves wheeled the body in from the six-shelved refrigerator across the hall and transferred it to the autopsy table. Angel Macritchie was a big man. Bigger than Fin remembered him, and probably fifty pounds heavier than when he had last seen him. He would not have disgraced the front row of a rugby scrum. The thick black hair he had inherited from his father was a good deal thinner now, more silver than black. His skin was a pale putty grey in death. The lips that taunted, and the fists that damaged, were slack and powerless now to inflict the emotional and physical pain that they had dispensed with such ease through all those childhood years.

Fin looked at him, trying to remain dispassionate, but even Angel’s dead presence made him tense, and knotted his stomach so that he felt physically sick. He let his eyes wander to the dreadful opening across his abdomen. Inflated loops of shiny small intestine, pink tan in colour, had burst through the opening in the abdominal wall, held by a sheet of fat that Fin knew, from the Edinburgh post-mortem, was called the mesentery. There also seemed to be a balloon of large bowel pushing through. Dried blood and body fluid streaked his thighs. His tiny, flaccid penis looked like a dried fig. Fin turned to see DI Gunn standing towards the back of the room, almost pressed against the window. He was very pale.

Professor Wilson drew blood from the femoral veins at the top of the legs, and vitreous fluid from the eyes. Fin always found it hard to watch a needle entering an eyeball. There was something peculiarly vulnerable about the eyes.

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.

The slimy, fluid-filled purse of the stomach was drained into a stainless steel bowl. Fin recoiled from the smell, but Professor Wilson seemed to savour it. He sniffed several times, like a dog, his eyes closed. ‘Curry,’ he said. ‘Could be lamb bhuna.’ His eyes twinkled as he caught Fin’s revulsion.

DI Gunn said in a small voice, ‘He had a curry at the Balti House in Stornoway about eight o’clock on Saturday night.’

‘Hmmm,’ said the professor. ‘I wish I’d tried it last night.’

Fin exhaled deeply with distaste. ‘Smells like alcohol, too.’

‘According to witnesses he had a fair few pints at the Crobost Social after he got back from town,’ Gunn told them.

‘Well,’ the professor said, ‘I’d say the contents of his stomach are pretty much intact. Partially digested. No medication residue grossly identified. Ethanol odour is noted. Whatever cretinous cocktail of curry and alcohol he threw down there, he didn’t throw it up again. So I think we might begin to lean towards the thought that the vomitus found on his clothing was, indeed, that of his killer.’

The pathologist began, then, to cut the guts free of their layers of fat, unlooping them and slicing them open along their length with a pair of scissors. The smell of excrement was almost unbearable. It was all Fin could do to stop himself from gagging. He heard Gunn gasping, and turned to see him with a hand placed firmly across his mouth and nose. But he clearly intended to stick it out.

Finally, the discarded intestine was dropped into a lined bucket and removed. ‘Grossly unremarkable,’ Professor Wilson said, apparently unaffected. He turned to the neck, pulling the flap of skin from the ‘Y’-shaped incision up over the face to reveal the damage caused to the bony and cartilaginous structures by the act of strangulation, and the subsequent hanging, although he quickly established that the neck itself was not broken.

An incision was made to the back of the head, running from one ear to the other, and the pathologist peeled the scalp down over the face to reveal the skull. He moved Fin back from the table as one of the assistants took an oscillating saw around the skull cap before removing it and allowing the brain to plop out into another stainless steel bowl. The professor examined the skull and nodded his satisfaction. ‘As I thought. There’s an area of subgaleal haemorrhage over the left parietal bone, two and a half to three and a half centimetres, roughly the same dimensions as the scalp contusion. And a small amount of deep subdural haemorrhage. The parietal bone shows a matching fracture, pretty much consistent with what I suspected. A metal tube, a baseball bat, something of that nature, used to club him down from behind. If he wasn’t completely unconscious, he’d have been in no condition to resist.’