Not Dead Enough

79

It was nearly three thirty by the time that Nadiuska De Sancha had completed her post-mortem and left the mortuary, along with DCI Duigan and the Coroner’s Officer.

From the ligature marks on Sophie Harrington’s neck and the petechial haemorrhaging in her eyes, the Home Office pathologist was drawn towards the conclusion that the poor young woman had been strangled. But she would need to wait for blood toxicology reports and test results on the contents of her stomach, and the samples of fluids she had taken from the woman’s bladder to eliminate other possible causes of death. The presence of semen in her vagina indicated the likelihood that she had been raped either before or after her death.

Cleo and Darren still had several hours of work ahead of them. There was the post-mortem to be carried out on the ‘unknown female’ washed up from the sea. In addition they had the grim task of the post-mortem on the six-year-old girl who had been killed on Saturday by a car. And they had four other cadavers to deal with, including that of a forty-seven-year-old HIV-positive man whom they had earlier placed in the sealed isolation room for his post-mortem.

The parents of the little girl had wanted to come up to visit late yesterday afternoon, and Darren had let them in. They had come for a further visit a couple of hours ago and Cleo had seen them. She was still feeling upset now.

Dr Nigel Churchman, the local consultant pathologist, who would carry out these much less intensive post-mortems, was due here in half an hour. Christopher Ghent, the forensic odontologist, who had come to assist in the identification of the unknown female, was currently in the office, having a cup of tea, tetchy at being kept waiting.

Cleo and Darren removed the woman from her fridge and unwrapped her. The smell of her rotten body instantly permeated the place again. Then they left Ghent to get on with his work.

Ghent, a tall, intense, bespectacled man in his mid-forties, with thinning hair, had an international reputation on two counts. He had written a well-respected book on forensic dentistry, in an attempt to rival Montreal odontologist Robert Dorion’s definitive Bitemark Evidence, which had long been the profession’s standard reference work. He was also an accomplished bird-watcher – or twitcher – and a world authority on seagulls.

Fully gowned up in his hospital greens, Ghent worked swiftly but thoroughly, against the background sounds of Darren crunching the ribs and grinding away at the skulls of the other cadavers with the band-saw. The mood was particularly sombre in here, with none of the banter between the team that usually went on. The presence of a small child’s body subdued them all far more than that of a murder victim.

Ghent took a series of photographs, both normal and with a portable X-ray camera, then noted details of each tooth on a chart, finishing by taking a soft clay impression of the upper and lower sets. Acting on instructions from the coroner, he would later send his detailed records to every dentist within a fifteen-mile radius of the city of Brighton and Hove. If that failed to produce results, he would gradually broaden the circulation list until, if necessary, every registered dentist in the UK was covered.

There was as yet no international system of coordinated dental records. If no dentist in the UK could make an identification, and fingerprints and DNA failed to produce results, the woman would eventually end up in a grave paid for by the city of Brighton and Hove, recorded for posterity as one tiny fraction of a tragic statistic.

Nigel Churchman had calculated recently that he had performed over seven thousand post-mortems in this mortuary during the past fifteen years. Yet he approached each cadaver with the same, almost boyish enthusiasm, as if it were his first. He was a man who genuinely loved his work, and believed that each person who came under his scrutiny deserved the very best from him.

A handsome, fit man, with a passion for racing cars, he had a youthful face – much of it concealed at the moment behind his green mask as he peered down at the unknown female – making him seem much younger than his forty-nine years.

He flapped away some bluebottles from around her brain, which was lying on the metal examining tray above her opened chest cavity, and began work. He sliced the brain carefully with a long-bladed carving knife, checking for foreign bodies, such as a bullet, or damage from a knife, or evidence of haemorrhaging which could indicate death by a heavy blow. But the brain seemed healthy, undamaged.

Her eyes, which had been eaten almost entirely away, yielded no information. Her heart seemed robust, typical of a fit person, with no scaling in the arteries. He was not able to gauge her age very accurately at this stage. Judging from the condition and colour of her teeth, her general physique, the condition of her breasts, which were partly gone also, he was guessing mid-twenties to early forties.

Darren carried the heart to the weigh scales and marked it up on the wall chart. Churchman nodded; it was within the correct range. He moved on to the lungs, cutting them free, then lifting them with both gloved hands on to the examining tray, dark fluid dripping from them as he set them down.

Within a couple of minutes of starting to examine them, he stopped and turned to Cleo. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t drowned. There’s no water in the lungs.’

‘Meaning?’ Cleo asked. It was a stupid question, blurted out without thinking, the result of her distress after being with the dead girl’s parents, her hangover, her stress at the workload, and her worries about the spectre of Sandy clouding her relationship with Roy Grace. Of course she knew the answer, she knew exactly what it meant.

‘She was already dead when she went into the water. I’m going to have to stop this p-m, I’m afraid. You’ll need to inform the coroner.’

A Home Office pathologist – probably Nadiuska De Sancha again – would have to take over the post-mortem. Unknown female was now elevated to the status of a suspicious death.