The Coroner (23 page)

    A
door opened ahead of her. Professor Lloyd, an eccentric- looking man in his
sixties, burst enthusiastically out of his office in shirtsleeves. He had an
unruly shock of white hair and a bent pair of half-moon spectacles balanced on
a small, sharp nose.

    'Mrs
Cooper?'

    'Yes.'

    'So
glad you could come. It's been most interesting, really most interesting. Would
you like to come and see?'

    'Um—'

    'Not squeamish,
are you?' He laughed. 'Hold on.'

    He
darted back into his office and re-emerged with two sets of clean scrubs and
latex gloves. He thrust one of each at Jenny.

    'The
post-mortem report your officer sent me, the one Peterson wrote, is that really
all he said?'

    'Yes.
Why do you ask?'

    'You'll
see. But I have to say I'm most surprised, I always used to think of him as
very thorough.'

    He
yanked on his gloves and scrubs at double-quick speed and hurried across the
corridor. 'She's in here.'

    He
pushed through slap doors into the autopsy room. Jenny was hit by a draught of
fetid air. Pulling on her scrubs, she took a deep breath and followed him in.

    The
body was so decomposed as to no longer appear human. Aside from the
overpowering smell, it was more akin to one of the mummified remains in a
museum cabinet than a fresh corpse. It lay uncovered on the table. The skin,
where it was intact, was black or a dark mossy green; as the muscles and
subcutaneous fat beneath had decomposed, it had the appearance of having melted
across the skeleton. The fleshy tissue of the breasts and thighs had collapsed
entirely and rotted through to the bone. The hands retained their slender
shape, but the skin had broken away and started to slough off at the wrists and
slide over the fingers.

    All
of this was bearable, just, but the sight of Katy's face made Jenny recoil. Her
hair was still blonde, but the scalp was peeling from the front of the skull.
The eyelids had all but been eaten away, as had the eyes, leaving two grisly
hollow sockets. The cartilage of the nose was virtually intact, but the softer
tissue of the lips had decomposed, revealing even white teeth which appeared
fixed in a clenched grin.

    Apparently
oblivious to the smell, Professor Lloyd leaned over the body and closely
studied what remained of Katy's features. 'I only wish I'd got a look at her
before. Never mind - at least I've got some of the picture.'

    Jenny
placed a gloved hand over her face and took a breath through her mouth. 'What
did you find?'

    'Let's
put it in context. We know the primary cause of death was an overdose of
heroin, but if I'm right what we're really looking for is some clue as to what
went on before it got into her bloodstream.'

    She
nodded, wishing he'd get on with it.

    He
picked up a slender instrument that looked like something with which a dentist
might scrape out a cavity and used it as a pointer. 'The first thing I noticed
was a chip out of this front tooth.' He tapped the left of her two front teeth.

    She
steeled herself and looked. Sure enough there was a chip perhaps two
millimetres wide off the bottom left-hand corner.

    'The
edges are jagged, suggesting a very fresh break. Anything could have caused it,
of course, but -' he reached over to the steel counter next to the sink and
picked up a kidney dish, which he waved under her nose - 'there's the missing
chip itself. Guess where I found it?'

    'I've
no idea.'

    'In the
back of her mouth, between her molar and her cheek. The normal human reaction
is to spit out any foreign body in the mouth, but it was still there, which I
would say is a pretty good indication that she was hit, and with some force.'

    'When?'

    'Obviously
not long before death. And for the fragment still to be in her mouth I would
say there is a strong chance either she was unconscious when it happened, or
the blow, or blows, rendered her so.'

    'Why
didn't Peterson spot it?'

    'To
be fair to him, one doesn't pay the teeth much attention during a routine p-m,
sometimes none at all. None of us exactly has the luxury of time.' He placed
the kidney dish carefully back on the counter. 'So, we have a possible blow.
Now we need evidence to corroborate. Even in its present state the body has
yielded us not one but two further clues.' He pointed to the right shoulder,
which, Jenny now noticed as she walked around to the other side of the table,
had been substantially dissected, revealing the joint. 'I was looking for
evidence of a struggle and I found it. You'll have to look carefully for this.'
He poked his pointer at the mid-section of the joint. 'Two of the glenohumeral
ligaments have been wrenched from the bone.'

    Jenny
saw some stringy bits of tissue but couldn't have identified them as ligaments.

    Professor
Lloyd was becoming increasingly excited. 'This is consistent with a violent
wrenching injury, such as when the wrist is forced up the back. And then there's
the hair.' He set down the pointer and, gently taking hold of the skull in two
hands, tilted it to the right. 'You see?' He pointed a finger at a bare, black
patch of scalp. 'There's a clump of hair missing. It's a good inch across. Your
officer says it wasn't found by the police at the scene.'

    'No.
I've seen no record of it.'

    'Her
hair is quite long. It wouldn't be immediately obvious, but when you look at it
in context you begin to build up a picture - her wrist forced up her back, the
assailant pulling so hard on her hair that a handful comes out. As it wasn't
found near the body, this violence may well have taken place elsewhere.'

    'And
the blow to the face?'

    'More
likely to have taken place at the scene, or it could all have happened at once.
Impossible to say.'

    'Before
she was injected?'

    'Yes
. . .' Professor Lloyd straightened up, fixing her with an intense, serious
gaze. 'The final thing: our lab was good enough to test her various samples
this morning and they came up with some interesting results. As you know, hair
gives us a sixty- to ninety-day chemical history of the body. We found that
Katy had taken marijuana and cocaine regularly, almost without interruption
throughout that period, but no heroin. Blood and tissue samples are somewhat
less reliable at this stage, but heroin was detected and a high concentration.
We estimate in the region of 2,ooomg.'

    'Meaning?'

    'Enough
to kill a small horse.'

    Jenny
forgot about the smell. What she had now was evidence of murder.

    She
said, 'Is there any way of telling if there was any sexual violation?'

    Professor
Lloyd gave a regretful smile and shook his head. 'I am afraid there are some
secrets the dead take with them.'

    'How
do you think she died?'

    'In
all likelihood struggling against a very brutal and determined assailant.
Someone armed with a massive dose of heroin who planned his actions very
deliberately.'

    'Could
you have a report for me by tomorrow and be able to give evidence to my inquest
on Monday morning?'

    'Certainly.'

    Jenny
looked at the body and thought of the smiling photograph on Andy and Claire
Taylor's mantelpiece. What was it about beautiful young girls that made men
kill them?

    All
she told Steve was that she was dealing with the unexplained death of a
fifteen-year-old girl. He didn't buy newspapers and she hadn't seen a
television in his house, so it was a safe bet he hadn't heard about the case.
Unlike some lawyers, she had always taken her duty of confidentiality
seriously. As coroner it was even more important. Experience had taught her
that you could trust no one with professional secrets, not even loved ones.
David, too, for all his faults, had never blabbed about his patients. They
hadn't done pillow talk. In the last few years they hadn't done much in bed at
all.

    Steve
let her sit there without disturbing her thoughts about sex, death and what it
meant for her to find herself caught in the middle of a gruesome killing when
all she had wanted was a quiet life. She had chosen certainty, a job and a
house that would see her through several decades, but in the space of a week
she had found herself in the midst of chaos and she was anxious. Anxious in
that deep-down, stirring-of-the-silt way she had been in the months before her
breakdown. It was like the melancholy which seeped into the mind when a
thunderstorm had yet to come over the horizon: you felt its pressure on your
spirits long before you knew what was coming. And it pierced all the layers:
there was no state of happiness, joy, drunkenness or drugged-up dopiness that
could deliver escape. It tugged like a heavy stone tied around your neck.

    Steve
turned off the dual carriageway and took off across country, traversing the
side of the wide Usk valley heading towards the ridge that separated it from
the Wye valley on the far side. It was a deep green, barely populated landscape
of fields and meadows divided by dense hedgerows and dotted with coppices that
hadn't changed in hundreds of years. He wound down his window and breathed in
the fresh air that smelled of cow parsley and ripe grass.

    He
said, 'I don't think I could live without that. That's what I hated most when I
lived in Bristol - the smell of the place.'

    Jenny,
trying to push her dark thoughts aside, said, 'I know what you mean.' She wound
her window down and put her face to the rushing wind, closing her eyes.

    'You
want to go for a walk? There's a place up here I'd like to show you.'

    'In
these shoes?'

    'I
put some boots in the back.'

    'You
did? When?'

    'When
we were leaving. I knew you wouldn't have brought any.'

    'You
don't know my size.'

    'I
can tell from the look of you. You're a six, like my ex.' He leant an elbow on the
open window, at ease with the world. 'What's the problem - you got something
better to do?'

    They
parked in a gateway at the top of a hill, near a hamlet he said was called
Llangovan. He reached into the back seat, where he had stashed a carrier bag
containing two pairs of ankle-high leather work boots. 'She left them behind on
purpose, said if she took them they'd only remind her of wallowing in the mud
like a peasant.'

    Jenny,
never comfortable in other people's cast-offs, removed her heels and eased a
bare foot into the stiff leather. 'That was her story.'

    'What
do you mean?'

    'No
woman likes to think she'll be forgotten.'

    He
took her along a footpath around the edge of a field of sheep, skirting a wood
that stood on the summit of the hill. As they walked he pointed out landmarks
and talked about trees, the way that oak and beech were planted side by side so
that the wide canopy of the beech would starve the oak of light and force it to
grow a long, straight butt with no branches shooting out and spoiling the
grain. Much of the Wye valley was planted for ship's timber and charcoal to
fuel the wire and iron works that had stood alongside the river in Victorian
times. When the industry died the woods survived. It was a rare and beautiful part
of the world where nature had reclaimed a once industrial landscape; he took it
as a sign of hope.

    They
stopped at the highest point of the field and sat on the grass to take in the
view across the fifteen miles to the soft purple silhouette of the Brecon
Beacons. The vast expanse of sky had many moods: patches of clear blue
interspersed with puffs of cumulus and clusters of heavy-laden, slate-grey rain
clouds. Their shadows drifted lazily over the fields, giving and taking away
the sun. Now and then a bright shaft of light would penetrate the thicker
clouds and shoot a golden column down to earth. Steve said it was called 'God
light'; you saw it on sentimental greetings cards but with good reason: nothing
a human being could ever make would be as beautiful. Perhaps that was the
reason he'd given up architecture - his buildings would only spoil what
couldn't be improved.

    Jenny
said, 'You're quite a romantic, aren't you?'