Looking Good Dead

19

It was a shiny, fat, black beetle, two inches long, with spiny feet and a ribbed back, and it had a single curved horn protruding from its head.

Frazer Theobald picked it up, delicately, with a pair of tweezers and held it aloft for all to see. The creature was motionless.

Grace who had never cared for beetles, took another step back. In truth he was not good at creepy-crawlies in general; he had been scared of spiders all his life and was very definitely wary of beetles. And this was – oh Jesus – one seriously horrible-looking creature.

He caught Cleo’s eye and saw a flash of revulsion in her face.

‘That’s what, exactly?’ Branson said, his voice quavering, pointing down at the dissecting table, involuntarily rescuing Grace from asking a potentially dumb question.

‘Her rectum, of course,’ the pathologist said dismissively.

Branson turned away, looking repulsed. Then he watched as Theobald brought the beetle towards his nostrils, the long fronds of his moustache twitching, close to becoming entwined in the hair-like spines on the beetle’s legs.

The pathologist sniffed deeply. ‘Formaldehyde,’ he announced. Then he proffered the insect to Grace for verification. The Detective Superintendent fought his revulsion and sniffed also. Instantly he caught the whiff that reminded him of his school biology dissection classes.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. Then he looked down again at the dissection table.

‘That’s why I didn’t detect it on a visual examination of the rectum – it had been inserted too far up.’

Grace stared at the neck of the tube on the table, the dead young woman’s sphincter. ‘In your view, Frazer, inserted before or after her death?’

‘I can’t tell.’

Then he asked the question that was on everyone’s lips. ‘Why?’

‘That’s for you lot to figure out,’ Theobald said.

Branson was standing on the far side of the room, leaning against the work surface adjoining the sink. ‘Remember Silence of the Lambs?’

Grace remembered it well. He had read the novel, one of the few books that had genuinely scared him, and had seen the film.

‘The victims all had a moth stuffed down their throats,’ Branson said. ‘It was a death’s head moth.’

‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘It was the killer’s signature.’

‘So maybe this is our killer’s signature.’

Grace stared at the beetle, which the pathologist was still holding aloft. He could swear for an instant that its legs were twitching, that the thing was still alive. ‘Anyone know what kind of beetle it is?’ he asked.

‘A stag beetle?’ Cleo Morey suggested.

‘Not with that horn.’ Darren, the Assistant Mortician interjected. ‘I studied entomology as part of my course. I don’t remember anything like that in the UK. I don’t think it’s native.’

‘Someone’s imported it?’ Grace said. ‘They’ve gone to the trouble of importing it, then inserted it up her rectum? Why?’

There was a long silence. Finally the pathologist inserted the insect in a plastic bag and labelled it. ‘We need to find out all we can about it,’ he said.

Grace was thinking hard. Over the years he had from necessity read as much as he could find on the mentality of murderers. Most murders were domestic, perpetrated by people who knew their victims. These were one-offs, frequently crimes of passion committed in the heat of the moment. But a small percentage of murderers were the truly warped ones who killed for gratification and thought they could outwit the police – sometimes to the extent of playing games with them.

These were the killers who often left some kind of signature. A taunt. This is my clue; catch me if you can, you dumb mother of a cop!

Grace looked at his watch. There was one person he knew who could tell him, probably instantly, what kind of beetle this was. Whether that would be of any real help or not, he had no idea, but just maybe it would yield a clue.

‘We need to keep this from the press,’ he said. ‘Total radio silence on this, everyone, OK?’

All nodded. They understood his reasoning. With a clue as unusual as this they would know instantly that if a caller claiming to be the killer could describe this, he was their man. It could save them hours, if not days, of sifting through false leads.

Grace told Branson to get one of the team at the Incident Room to trawl the UK for any other murder victims where there had been a beetle found at the scene. Then he asked the pathologist a stupid question. He knew it was stupid, but it still needed to be asked. ‘The beetle was definitely dead before it was inserted?’

‘I doubt anyone would keep a supply of formaldehyde up their rectum,’ the pathologist replied, just very slightly sarcastically. He pointed at a small glass vial on the dissecting tray which contained a murky-looking fluid. ‘There is no trace in there – that’s the bowel lining mucus.’

Grace nodded and did a quick mental calculation. If he left straight after the press conference there would be time to show the beetle to the one man he was certain would be able to identify it.