Picture You Dead

62

Sunday, 3 November

In this room that always felt to Roy Grace like it was perpetual winter, a grey and bleak winter with its grey walls, grey steel tables, sinks and worktops, and the grey faces of the cadavers unlucky enough to fetch up here, the Home Office pathologist worked in steady, quick, concentration.

Thinking hard about the dubious coincidence of Archie Goff’s body being dumped outside Daniel Hegarty’s house, Grace shivered from the refrigerated air. Even on the brightest summer day, the dense frosted glass of the exterior wall leached all the colour from the sunlight, and the bright overhead lights added only starkness, no warmth. He tried to breathe through his mouth, as he always did in here, to shut out the cloying smells of death and disinfectant.

Nadiuska De Sancha had been looking at her watch regularly, and then at the clock on the wall, as if to double check it, and he wondered if she was on some kind of a deadline. She had certainly been proceeding refreshingly quickly, assisted by Cleo, who had cancelled the lunch with her sister. They were positively galloping through the postmortem compared to Dr Frazer Theobald, who carried out his so slowly that one of the team had once joked it was hard to tell which was the corpse and which the pathologist.

Including the brief time she’d spent with the body in situ on the pavement, less than five hours had elapsed in total, and De Sancha was almost done. It was coming up to 5 p.m. If they’d had Theobald, Grace doubted they would even be halfway through by now.

Archie Goff lay naked on the steel table, with his hair shaven directly above the gash behind his right ear, giving that side a bizarrely fashionable look. There was also a contusion at the base of his neck. His clothes had been removed when he’d first been brought here, each item carefully bagged and labelled for later forensic examination for fibres, hairs and blood spots that might yield clues about who had killed him.

Nadiuska dictated into her machine at intervals throughout the process, providing Roy Grace and everyone else present with a steady commentary. Despite her decades of living in England, she still retained some of her origins in her accent, and it was a voice, Grace thought, that even in a situation as grim as this, was laced with charm as well as frequent flashes of humour.

‘The deceased was found on a pavement in a Saltdean residential street, so one of my tasks is to try to establish if that is where he actually died. Was it on this street or in another location and his body later deposited there? I don’t have sufficient information to give a clear time of death but,’ her eyes twinkled, ‘our good friend Dr Rigor Mortis is very happy to share some of his little clues with us. When I first began my examination, the deceased had fairly well-developed rigor mortis over his whole body – the fingers, jaw joints, arms and legs all stiff, the joints all difficult to move, and he was completely cold to touch.’ She turned to Grace.

‘Roy, it would be helpful if we could establish how long he had been lying on the pavement, because the length of time he was exposed to the elements would help us to be more precise about the rigor mortis development.’

‘I have a team doing a house-to-house in the area, Nadiuska,’ he replied. ‘They’re asking if anyone saw anything, and also whether anything was picked up on any private CCTV cameras.’

‘Excellent.’

Grace saw her look at her watch again, then shoot a glance at the wall clock once more. ‘What’s your gut feeling about where he died, Nadiuska? The pavement or somewhere else?’

‘It’s more than a gut feeling, Roy. I’m fairly confident from what I’ve seen so far that he died in another location and was subsequently deposited on the pavement – possibly thrown out of a car. One thing that leads me to that is he was lying in the street in a different position to the one in which he lay at the location where he died.’

Grace glanced at Branson and saw him frown; he was pretty sure why she had deduced this but asked her all the same, for confirmation. ‘OK, interesting, what makes you think that?’

‘A major clue is the presence of what I would term inappropriate hypostasis.’ She pointed at the purple mottling colour around part of Goff’s stomach. ‘Hypostasis develops gravitationally after death, in the parts of the body lowest to the ground. When the heart stops pumping, the blood pools instead of circulating, and it collects wherever gravity draws it. This purple blotching around the stomach indicates the deceased lay on his front for some hours after death, allowing the blood to pool in the stomach area. But, on the street, he was lying on his back. If he had died in that position, we could have expected to have seen hypostasis on his back, but there isn’t any present.’

Grace nodded in agreement. He looked at the gash and the congealed blood behind Goff’s right ear. ‘Have you been able to determine the likely cause of death?’

She pointed at the injury. ‘That didn’t happen from a fall – it looks to me that he was struck deliberately – if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that wound could have been made by an object with a sharp edge.’

She turned to the CSI, James Gartrell. ‘James, please take a series of close-ups with right-angle scale of this injury.’

The photographer complied meticulously. Grace knew this would allow for any images to be subsequently produced on a 1:1 scale and compared by the forensic scientists. This could be invaluable evidence if the object that had caused this wound was subsequently found.

Next, she pointed at the dead man’s right nipple. ‘See that tiny mark? This looks to me like a burn – possibly from an electrode clamp.’ She walked down the body and pointed to a burn mark on his scrotal sack. ‘This too indicates he may well have been tortured.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Grace saw Branson wince. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Poor bastard.’

‘I can only imagine the pain,’ she said.

‘Not sure I even want to imagine it!’ Glenn Branson added.

Next, she pointed to a blackened circle in the middle of his chest. ‘That looks to me like a cigarette burn.’ Then, with a gloved hand, she raised the dead man’s left arm. ‘You noticed his fingers, Roy, when you first saw him on the street. All four fingers of both hands crushed, the nails blackened, as you can see. Did you ever hit one of your fingernails with a hammer, or slam one in a door?’

‘Yeah, I did,’ Branson said. ‘I was sitting in the back of my dad’s car when I was about twelve. Had my arm out of the rear window and curled round, holding the driver’s door frame. Then my dad got in and without realizing, slammed the door on it. It was probably the worst pain of my life – and I lost two nails.’

Nadiuska nodded. ‘Yes, it is the worst pain. Something like that happened to me once, too. But you don’t get the fingers of both hands slammed in a car door, or any door. I’m only speculating, but I would say this was done to him as part of his torture.’

‘That’s a classic gang method of torture,’ Branson said. ‘I’ve seen that before.’

Grace added, ‘From my experience it’s a form of punishment widely used in turf wars by Eastern European drugs and human trafficking gangs, including the Serbs and Romanians.’

The pathologist next pointed at red marks on the dead man’s wrists and ankles, and in a line across his chest. ‘I’d say these were made by restraints of some kind, cord or wire ligaments.’

All of Goff’s internal organs had been removed, sliced into segments, scrupulously examined visually, weighed and then – apart from his dissected heart, which was still in a steel basin, bagged in white plastic – inserted inside his hollow midriff before it was stitched up, to ensure that all of him, barring the fluid samples she had taken for lab analysis, would be present when he was finally released to the undertaker for burial or cremation. All of the segments of his heart would eventually be placed in there, too.

She walked over to the weigh scales, on which lay the stainless-steel bowl containing the pieces of Goff’s heart, and carried it back over, placing it on a table, nodding for everyone to look, then shooting another glance at the clock. ‘This level of torture, the pain combined with the fear it would have caused the victim, would have been sufficient to bring on a heart attack in a man of his age and health.’ She picked up a scalpel and sliced slowly through one of his heart valves. There was a distinct crunching sound as she did so. Looking at both detectives, sharply, she said, ‘Did you hear that?’

‘That sound?’ Branson asked.

She nodded. ‘Calcification. Badly furred arteries constricting the blood flow. This gentleman was a heart attack waiting to happen.’

Roy Grace considered this for some moments, then asked, ‘Would you be able to say this was definitely causal, Nadiuska? I’m asking because if and when we bring his killer – or killers – to trial, we need to make sure we can prevent a defence brief from saying he died because he had a heart problem, and that his clients never had any intention of killing him.’

‘It’s good you’ve raised this, Roy.’ She pointed a finger down at a segment of Goff’s heart, a reddish brown colour, with white blotches. ‘I found a fresh thrombus – blood clot – blocking one of his main coronary arteries, actually the left anterior descending artery. This reveals the immediate cause of death as a myocardial infarct.’

‘Can you translate that into layman’s language?’ Grace asked.

‘I can, Roy, but I’m not sure it’s going to be helpful in the way you need. This gentleman died of a classic heart attack. The left anterior descending artery is pretty much the worst coronary artery to have a blockage in – that’s the reason the more cynical members of the medical profession refer to it as the widow maker.’

‘Great,’ he replied flatly. ‘So a smart brief could argue that he had a heart condition that the torturers could not have known about, and that’s what killed him, right?’

‘I’m afraid so, Roy. He could have died at any moment – during any exertion like climbing a staircase, or,’ she smiled, ‘at the moment of orgasm.’

‘Yeah, well, when I peg it, I’d like to go that way,’ Glenn Branson said.

‘Wouldn’t we all?’ Nadiuska retorted. ‘The reality is that most of us with heart conditions will die in a hospital corridor, with a hungover medical student jumping up and down on our chest.’

Grace and Branson laughed.

She looked at her watch, then at the clock again and switched off her recorder. ‘This is as far as I can go today. Perhaps the fluid samples I’ve taken will indicate something more helpful, when we get the toxicology report back from the lab. But for now, I have to tell you that the apparent cause of death is heart attack induced by torture.’

‘Thanks, Nadiuska,’ Grace said.

She raised her gloved hands in the air. ‘I’m sorry, I know you need more than this, but let’s see what we get from the lab. Would you forgive me if I have to run? It’s my birthday actually, and my husband has arranged something for tonight.’

‘Your birthday? Your thirtieth?’

‘Ha! I wish – and thank you for the compliment.’

He grinned. ‘Happy birthday!’

‘Happy birthday, Nadiuska!’ was echoed by everyone else present.

Cleo turned to her husband and said quietly, ‘I’ll see you at home – I may be a little while.’ She pointed at the gash on Goff’s head. ‘I want to check something out.’ She gave him a strange look, as if she was trying to indicate something.

He frowned, then smiled, taking the hint. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’m not going back to the office. I’ll take Humphrey for a walk and get supper ready.’

‘We’ve got those nice cheeses we bought at the market last weekend, in the fridge. All hard ones, no soft ones.’ She patted her swollen belly by way of an explanation. ‘And there are those oatmeal biscuits you wanted to try in the cupboard.’

‘I’ll make up a platter. Anything you want me to get on the way home?’

‘No, we’re good.’

He lowered his mask and blew her a kiss.

Glenn Branson followed him into the changing room where they began disrobing by kicking off their boots. ‘Bummer,’ the DI said.

‘Archie Goff,’ Grace said, reflectively, ignoring the comment. ‘A proper crim, with a speciality in country houses. What’s he done to get himself tortured to death?’

‘Burgled the wrong person?’ Branson suggested.

Grace nodded. ‘Quite possibly. Something feels odd to me about where his body was dumped, doesn’t it to you? Outside Daniel Hegarty’s house.’

‘It seems to be stretching coincidence rather far.’

‘It does. We’re investigating the cold case of an art dealer who was hawking around a possibly rare Fragonard painting. We’ve now got a couple, the Kiplings, who brought what might be a rare Fragonard to the Antiques Roadshow. Someone burgled – or attempted a burglary – at their house soon after their appearance on the show. Now we have a dead burglar outside the house of a major art forger.’

Branson questioned, ‘We need to be sure we’re not making too big a leap here, despite the coincidence, don’t you think?’

Grace shook his head. ‘Put yourself in the crim’s mind. You’ve just tortured someone for burgling you or, more likely, your boss, and he’s died on you, which you weren’t expecting to happen. So now you have a problem on your hands – a corpse to dispose of. Let’s imagine it happened in Sussex, in the country – country houses are Archie Goff’s MO. You’ve got woodlands, forests, and you’ve got the sea. But no, you decide to ignore all of these options and drive your deceased tortured victim into a nice, middle-class residential area and dump him on a pavement where he was absolutely bound to be found.’

Branson nodded. ‘I get your point.’

Grace, fumbling with the bow at the back of his gown, said, ‘Whoever did this wanted the body to be found. It’s a message to someone. A very loud and clear message. Mess with me and this will be you.’

‘A message to Daniel Hegarty, is that what you’re saying?’

‘We’re on the same page.’