Dead if You Don’t

92

Sunday 13 August

15.00–16.00

Cleo normally found it easy to chat to anyone she met. She had a friendly, caring countenance and people tended to warm to her instantly. Partly, that was because people interested her; Cleo had a theory that everyone had a story, that everyone had had something happen in their time, however pedestrian their lives might outwardly seem, if you could just get it out of them. It could be an adventure they’d been on, an extraordinary relative, a terrible tragedy, a serial killer they’d been to school with or an inexplicable mystical experience. It was there, if you could mine it, and she had always been good at doing that. But her one failure to date, the one person whose story she had not yet mined, despite many hours spent with him over the past few years, was Home Office Pathologist Dr Frazer Theobald.

All she knew about this quietly spoken figure, with his threadbare dome, hooter of a nose and Groucho Marx moustache, was that he was married to a lecturer in microbiology and liked solo dinghy sailing in his time off. She was also starting to realize that he might be either greedy or insecure — or perhaps both. There were only thirty-two similarly qualified pathologists in the country. Which meant that, with around six hundred homicides a year in the UK, as well as many more seemingly suspicious deaths, they all got a decent share of the lucrative payments for Home Office postmortems.

Usually, Brighton and Hove City Mortuary averaged around twelve to twenty Home Office postmortems a year, compared to around 950 regular ones, but today an unprecedented six, including Florentina Shima’s which had taken place earlier, were lined up. The human remains from the crusher site, the crusher operator, Stephen Suckling, and the three gunshot victims from Boden Court.

The recently completed postmortem of Suckling revealed, in Theobald’s initial opinion, that he had died from a massive overdose of barbiturates. The hospital report was that someone had switched his drip bag. The SIO, Detective Inspector Bill Warner, was continuing his investigation.

As each postmortem took around two to four hours, and sometimes longer, Cleo had suggested bringing in a second Home Office Pathologist to ease the workload — as well as freeing time for her, too — but Theobald would not hear of it. She was going to be stuck here with him, and the rest of the team needed for these postmortems, for the next two days without respite, she thought gloomily as she began removing each of the white plastic parcels containing body parts of the victim identified as Ryan Brent from the crusher site, and placing them on the stainless-steel postmortem table.

Aside from the two small nuggets about his wife and sailing, the only other conversation Cleo had ever managed to prise out of Theobald was an explanation of why, in his fourth year at London’s Guy’s Hospital, he had decided to specialize in pathology; she hadn’t been able to tell whether he was joking or not when he’d told her that being a pathologist had two big plus points over being a doctor to the living. The first was that you didn’t have to make house calls. The second was that you didn’t have to bother with a good bedside manner.

And that latter, Cleo Morey often thought, really defined Theobald. Over the years she had been lumbered with this pedantic and totally humourless man on many of Roy’s homicide investigations. But despite Roy’s irritation at the man’s snail-like speed, he told her he could trust Theobald implicitly to do two vital things. The first was to establish beyond doubt the cause of death. The second was to provide evidence that, when produced in court, would be bullet-proof to attacks from even the smartest defence briefs.

Theobald began positioning each of the parts very carefully, until finally all those recovered so far were laid out like a jigsaw puzzle, with bits missing, on the shiny steel. A right arm; a torso; a left leg. No head, left arm or right leg had so far been found. Each of the pieces, they could all see clearly, bore evidence of cuts with a sharp knife, possibly a box-cutter or a Stanley knife, Cleo thought.

There was a new SIO attending the examination, DCI Mark Hailwood. The HM Customs Officer had now left after signing off the sachets of cocaine discovered during Florentina Shima’s postmortem, with a street value, he had estimated, of around £350,000, into temporary police custody. Other than that, the team remained unchanged.

With Roy full-on with his kidnap enquiry and the workload here looking like an all-nighter at the very least, Cleo stepped into her office and phoned Kaitlynn. She asked her if she could remain with Noah and Bruno until the morning, and probably throughout tomorrow, then returned to the postmortem room, in time to hear Theobald dictate his first observations.

‘The presence of blood around the incisions on the body indicates to me these were made whilst the victim was still alive,’ he announced into his machine, seemingly oblivious, as always, to his interested audience. ‘Torture?’

That was Cleo’s thought, too. Over the past couple of years there had been four partially intact bodies with similar cut patterns post-mortemed here. She stepped out, back into her office, closed the door and dialled Roy.