No trace

16

Mr Sundeep Mehta could usually be relied upon for a joke and a few wisecracks. When Brock and Kathy arrived at the autopsy room the pathologist was in the middle of a story about a man and a frog that he was relating to his unsmiling pathology technician and the bored photographer. For the benefit of the newcomers he quickly recapped, taking no notice of the grim looks on their faces.

‘Man walking down street, frog stops him and asks him to buy it a drink, takes it to a bar, frog also starving, man buys it sandwich, frog says it’s exhausted and could he give it a bed for the night? Man agrees, takes it home. Frog asks for goodnight kiss. Good Samaritan hides disgust, kisses frog, frog turns into beautiful princess. “And that, Your Honour, is how I came to be found in bed with an underage girl.” Ha!’

Nobody laughed.

‘Oh, come on you lot!’ Dr Mehta protested.‘What’s the matter with everyone this morning? Is it your dismal weather getting you down?’

‘Where did you hear that one, Sundeep?’ Brock growled.‘The Dirty Raincoat Club?’

‘Ah, Brock, your other case, of course. How tactless of me. But still, if we can’t laugh in the face of life’s tragedies we have no business coming to a place like this. So, let’s get to work.’

Betty was laid out on the table just as she had been found, hands bound and face blindfolded. Mehta removed the strip of cloth from around her head and set it aside for examination. Kathy confirmed the identification.

They photographed the corpse, turned it over and photographed it again. Mehta cut the tape from around the wrists, clipped nail and hair samples, and took a number of swabs. Then the technician washed the body and Mehta began a detailed examination. A mood of dispassionate routine established itself as he tonelessly described the injuries. He began with the head, noting a small contusion behind the left ear.

‘Enough to knock her out?’ Brock asked.

‘Mmm, possibly.’ The pathologist stroked the area, parting the strands of hair. ‘We may see more when we look under the skin. It’s not a big bump.’

He moved on to the throat, which had a broad band of bruising and discolouration.

‘This is not a simple hanging,’ he said.‘There are several overlapping rope marks. Notice the edges of the marks. No inflammation, no vital reaction. It looks as if she was hanged after she was dead.’

He peered more closely. ‘Difficult to detect external signs of strangulation beneath these rope lesions. Signs of petechial haemorrhages here and here… Now, these marks…’He began to work his way over the body, peering closely at each of the small brown marks in turn. Then he asked for the plastic evidence pouch containing the electrical lead with the exposed wire, and placed it against several of the wounds. Finally, he straightened up and said,‘It’s not easy to interpret electrical burns, you know, and we don’t see them very often. Mostly domestic accidents, housewives poking about in the toaster with a fork, that sort of thing. There was one fascinating case I recall of attempted autoerotic stimulation by connecting a penile vibrator to a mains plug- what a silly man! But the direct application of an electrode to the body is more unusual than you might think. Certainly I’ve never seen anything like this before…’

‘Come on, Sundeep,’ Brock interrupted. ‘You have a theory.’

The man smiled. ‘A hypothesis, perhaps, yes. There is a characteristic mark for electrode burns…’ He pointed to a burn on Betty’s left breast.‘It comprises a central area of necrosis where contact occurred, surrounded by a ring of white, which in turn is circled by a halo of dilated blood vessels.’

Everyone moved in closer to see what he meant, and the photographer took a close-up picture.

‘I can’t see the halo,’ Brock said, peering through the half-lens glasses on the end of his nose.

‘Exactly. Now look at these other burns,’Mehta went on, pointing generally across the abdomen and legs. ‘They all have the central brown burn, but none have the pink halo. Although I’ve never seen this before, it suggests to me that, as with the rope marks to the neck, there was no vital reaction. She was already dead.’

Kathy felt relief. She noticed the technician’s eyes widen behind her clear plastic visor, showing more than professional interest for the first time.

‘Why electrocute a dead body?’ Brock said.

‘Quite!’ Mehta beamed. ‘That’s for you to puzzle out, I think, Brock.’

There was silence for a moment, then Kathy said, ‘Would the electric shocks cause the body to convulse?’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean, even after death?’

‘Yes, yes. Didn’t your biology teacher at school show you the trick where you attach battery leads to a dead frog’s leg to make it jump?’

Brock and Kathy exchanged a glance, both thinking the same thing.

Dr Mehta completed his external examination at the discoloured soles of Betty’s feet, then took up a scalpel and moved back to her throat, where he began carefully slicing into the flesh. ‘Yes, internal bruising, and both the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage have fractures, which suggests manual strangulation,’ he said. The technician moved in beside him with bone cutters to help open up the chest and remove the major organs. Kathy sat on a stool, barely paying attention to the familiar process while her mind returned to that room in the basement of the derelict house, trying to imagine what had been played out there.

Completing the routine of examining, weighing and slicing, Mehta was able to offer a closer approximation to the time of death. The cheese and onion pie Betty had eaten with Reg Gilbey around seven p.m. was found in the final stages of the small intestine, and this, together with the state of rigor mortis and the body temperature, led him to believe that death had occurred at around one a.m. Cause of death was manual strangulation.

The doctor sat back onto a stool, bloody gloved hands dangling between his knees. ‘Is that enough for you, Brock?’

‘Almost, Sundeep. Just let me be sure what we have. Betty has a bath and goes to bed around eleven p.m. About two hours later her neighbour hears noises from her house, perhaps the intruder. There is a scuffle in her bedroom, a vase is broken, perhaps she receives a blow to the head. Does he strangle her there?’

Mehta thought. ‘Seems probable, doesn’t it? There’s no indication of a struggle when he took her next door, no significant bruising or abrasions.’

‘That’s right. He had to take her downstairs, out into the yard, haul her over the wall into the building site and carry her down into the basement. Why?’

‘I’ve no idea. That’s your job, old chap!’

‘Humour me, Sundeep. I value your insight.’

The doctor gave a smug little smile and straightened in his seat.‘Well, to avoid being disturbed, I suppose? Perhaps he didn’t want the neighbour to hear him, or people in the street to see a light-the basement next door had its window boarded up.’

Brock frowned, not altogether convinced.‘All right, let’s say he wants time with the body undisturbed. So he takes her next door, and presumably he already knows of this place and how suitable it would be, and there he prepares, in effect, a torture chamber for the corpse. He binds her hands behind her with insulating tape. There was no sexual interference?’

‘No signs of that. Perhaps he thought she was still alive and was hoping to get something from her. Information of some kind-where she kept her money and jewellery, perhaps.’ With Brock’s encouragement, Mehta was enjoying playing the detective.

‘But why the camera?’

‘If there was a camera. We don’t really know that.’

‘Well, he discovers that in fact she’s dead. So he hangs her anyway and administers-how many was it?’

‘Twenty-three.’

‘Twenty-three shocks to her corpse. Can we infer anything about his state of mind? I mean, if those were stab wounds you’d be telling us he was in a frenzy, wouldn’t you?’

‘Maybe… it would depend on the depth and pattern of cuts. In this case, I don’t see any evidence of a frenzied attack. Look at the pattern, Brock; not in a cluster, but rather evenly and thoughtfully distributed, wouldn’t you say? Here to an elbow, there to the calf, the thigh. Almost like an experiment to test the reactions of different limbs.’

‘And possibly photographing these reactions.’

‘Exactly! One might almost say that he is a serious student of pathology.’

‘Quite,’ Brock murmured.‘Many thanks, Sundeep.’

‘Stan Dodworth,’ Kathy said as they emerged from the mortuary.

‘That’s what I thought.’ Brock took a deep breath of the street air, trying to vent the smells from his lungs.‘As if he’s started to make his own corpses.’

‘Why would he pick Betty?’

‘Because he likes older subjects, and he knew she lived alone, and conveniently next door to a place he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed.’

‘Yes, he was down in that cellar with Gabe and Poppy and Yasher just over a week ago.’

‘That would mean he’s still in the area. And now every solitary old person is at risk. We have to find him quickly, Kathy. We’d better have another talk to the people he was closest to in the square.’

Kathy checked her watch. ‘I was going to take Reg Gilbey through Betty’s house to see if he might notice anything.’

‘You do that. I’ll see you later at the station.’

Gilbey was in his kitchen, a glass of golden liquid on the table in front of him, a cigarette held in an unsteady hand. He looked as if he’d aged ten years in a week, grey skin, grey bristles on an unshaved cheek, bent shoulders. Kathy felt sorry for him, but then remembered Betty’s words; ‘I watch him you know, I know his secrets.’ It seemed entirely possible that she had been referring to Gilbey, the neighbour with whom she shared a long and troubled history. Stan Dodworth wasn’t the only one who might want to see Betty dead.

‘Your sitter’s gone?’

Gilbey gave an abrupt little nod. ‘Couldn’t do any painting, hand was shaking too much. Just seems to have hit me…’ He reached for the tumbler of whisky and lowered his head to it so as to reduce the chances of it spilling in his trembling hand. He swallowed, gave a rasping cough. ‘Wouldn’t stop talking about her.’

‘The judge?’

‘Mmm. How well did Betty know the girl? Were they very close? Did she talk to me about the kidnapping?’

Good questions, Kathy thought, and wondered at Beaufort’s curiosity. There had been something insistent about it, she remembered.

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Yes, of course Betty talked about it, we all did. But with Betty, you never knew what was real and what was fantasy. She was obsessed, you see, with the idea of the stolen child. Had been ever since… that business I told you about. So when the reports of the other missing girls appeared in the news, she got it all tangled up with her own fantasies, even before Tracey disappeared.’

‘Do you feel able to come next door with me?’

‘All right.’ His eyes darted up to hers with an anxious look. ‘You don’t think those Turks could have done it, do you?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Only… well, they made no secret of wanting to buy her house, and she was always fighting with them about one thing or another-noise, mud in the lane, blocked drains, smells. I’ve heard her screaming at that Yasher character more than once…’His voice petered out.‘No, doesn’t seem likely, does it?’

‘Come on, let’s take a look at her house.’

The SOCO team were finishing as they reached the back door. She led Gilbey slowly from room to room, trying to prompt his memory and taking notes as he identified this item or that. The dolls spooked him, watching with their blank smiles, and Kathy had to force his attention to the drawings and paintings. He pointed out a number that she’d hardly noticed on her previous visit, when she’d been concentrating on signs of disturbance. Some especially caught his eye. ‘Oh yes,’ he said as they came upon an abstract in a dark corner of the living room, ‘William Scott, of course, I’d forgotten about this one.’ She noted the unfamiliar names, checking the spelling: Wallis, not Wallace; Brangwyn not Brangwen. By the time they came to the last room, Betty’s own bedroom, Kathy had listed a dozen original works of mid-twentieth century British art, which Reg assured her would together be worth well into six figures. They had also come across a similar number of empty picture hooks. He mentioned the details of those of the missing paintings he could remember.‘I helped her sell them, through my own dealer.’

‘Fergus Tait?’

‘Fergus Tait! Fergus Tat, more like. Certainly not, I wouldn’t deal with that cowboy. My bloke’s in Cork Street, in the West End.’

Gilbey was looking uneasily at Betty’s bed, stripped of its sheets and pillowcases for laboratory analysis. He seemed very pale, and Kathy saw his eyelids flutter, his body begin to sway.

‘Sit down, Reg,’ she said, and quickly grabbed a chair into which he almost toppled.

‘It’s been a shock,’ he whispered.‘I still can’t believe it. Hanged, you say?’

‘I think you need a doctor.’

‘No, no. I need a drink. Take me home.’

Kathy looked at the colour returning to his cheeks and nodded. Then she said, ‘What was the painting in this room?’ She pointed at the empty hook on the wall beside the bed.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been in here before.’ He caught her watching him.‘And that’s the honest truth.’

She took him back to his kitchen and got the name of his dealer in the West End, just in case. Then her phone rang, Brock on the line.