Snow Storm

23

Doc Brown was enjoying the stress in some ways, he said, as he made his way down to the business end of the mortuary. A friend of his had recently died on the golf course, a month after retiring at fifty five from a lucrative but stress inducing position in the banking sector. Apparently the sudden lack of exertion and regular doses of adrenaline had forced the man’s heart into a state of abject confusion, whereby it really didn’t know what to expect at any given moment. Being suddenly let off the hook in such a way had forced his heart to go the other way and simply shut down.

Jones thought the closer the Doc got to retirement himself the more he seemed to drift in and out of stories and theories on life. He seemed wistful but less stressed out generally, with the notion of retirement adding a spring to his step whenever the subject was broached. He reminded her of her granddad. Same sense of mischief. Same hairline too.

“So what do you know Detective?” he asked as they arrived at the slab, or rather stainless steel wash down surface as they all were in this day and age.

“Oh this and that,” she replied, noncommittally.

“I bet,” he said, raising an eyebrow in a way he must have spent time practising. “I was referring specifically to our John Doe here and his particular brand of maxillofacial surgery.”

Jones regarded the victims face. “Not much if I’m honest Doc. Busy morning all told.”

“You and me both. Someone’s intent on keeping heaven stocked up with fresh souls.”

“Full Metal Jacket?”

“Indeed. A bit before your time though I would imagine.”

“Before I was born,” she confirmed, “But a classic nonetheless.”

The doctor frowned hard at this, as though making some kind of mental note. “Can’t go wrong with an ageing classic though,” he suggested with a wink.

She wondered why it was ok when he did such things but gave her the dry heave when Campbell did the same. She supposed because one of them clearly didn’t mean it.

“Well, a cursory examination of his face may allow you to overlook the fairly minor seeming well healed scarring around our victim’s lower jaw.” Brown produced some x-rays taken at different angles to the victim’s skull. The Jaw showed several solid white patches. He pointed these out with his pen. “Titanium mini-plates.” He picked out the various points on the victim’s face, relating them in turn back to the relevant x-ray. “Holding everything together. Not just the lower mandible, but his left cheekbone as well.”

“Hazard of the job?” Jones suggested, wanting to suggest something useful in some desire to prove that she was a good pupil.

“And what job would you suppose that to be?” he asked, raising both eyebrows in a demonstration of just how craggy a forehead could become.

“Drug dealing scumbag? Or maybe I’ll hedge my bets and go for generic organised crime scumbag. Then again, there have been a lot of drug related goings on around these parts of late.”

“Perhaps if I was to tell you that these injuries were not sustained by a baseball bat to the face but rather by a blast. A bat would be unlikely to create such damage. Look at the number of plates.”

“Bank robber? Safe cracker? Generic scumbag who sustained multiple baseball bat blows to the face?”

Brown laughed. “The wrong kind of damage.” He pointed at the x-ray. “You see the size of some of the fractures; tiny. There’s been a fairly evenly distributed trauma to the side of the skull. With a bat you would probably find bigger fractures at a specific, or indeed, as you suggested, several specific points. This kind of injury is more commonly found with the kind of specific shock trauma associated with a blast.”

“Wouldn’t there be more markings on the face? Scarring say?”

“You’d be surprised. I’d say he wasn’t directly exposed to the blast, wasn’t sitting in a bank vault when they blew the bloody doors off so to speak.”

“Don’t they tend to pack explosives round safe doors, forcing the blast sideways? That might shield your would be safe cracker from the blast to a degree but create a shock wave.”

Brown laughed again, like an indulgent parent. “It might, but it didn’t in this case.” He paused, allowing her to think about this and probably knowing what was coming next.

“How do you know that?”

“Because this is the kind of specialised thing they deal with at University Hospitals Birmingham. This is very precise, not the kind of thing your parochial surgeon can knock up in an afternoon. You have to go to the place where they do this kind of reconstruction. It’s the kind of surgery that generally results from a tour of duty with her majesty’s armed forces and the associated evils of warfare. It began with trench warfare on the likes of the Somme. Soldiers’ heads were very suddenly the most exposed part, presumably as they popped them up in attempts to discover what precisely was going on in no-man’s-land. Facial trauma became a much more common thing. Traditionally they used scaffold structures on the outside of the skull to support the healing bones. More recently these have been inserted as pins and plates and yet more recently again they started using a version of the original technique in Iraq and Afghanistan, where injuries sustained often involve large amounts of skin. The structures are more malleable, easier to work with. Everything comes full circle in the end.”

“So you think he was a soldier?” Jones asked, trying to absorb this and highlight the important information.

“I did.” Brown replied, “Until I phoned University Hospitals Birmingham and had it confirmed about five minutes before you arrived.” He handed her a printout with the deceased’s details; name, age, rank and back story. “He was a Sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers. IED blast. He was sitting in a Landrover when it happened. They aren’t the most heavily armoured things but as luck would have it he was shielded from the worst excesses of the blast by a colleague who by all accounts wasn’t so lucky. I imagine you’ll want to contact the family etcetera, make sure he’s our man, but I’d say the chances of those x-rays matching anyone else quite so perfectly are pretty slim.”

She made her way back to the station with a sense of grim resignation. She would doubtless have to deal with a bereaved family now, a job she generally liked to try to avoid, given the gut and heart wrenching nature of dealing with another human being’s most primal emotions. It wasn’t natural, forcing people together in such a way at such a time. She might luck out and find that he had no family but cursed herself for having such a thought. Who was she to wish that on anyone? Why had they given such credence to Campbell’s theory? Some people did just get murdered. That was the one thing culture tended to like to gloss over, a fact society liked to try to ignore because perhaps it was more convenient that way. Better that we should believe our actions lead to something deserved, so we all stay in line. Morality and even religion, for all its faults, were very good controls, rules for the masses, but the fact was, bad things happened to good people too.

She tried to shake the doubt off. Campbell’s theories, though she hated to admit it, had a habit of being close to the mark. She would keep an open mind as always, in an effort to counter balance his dim view of human nature. Chances were though, the victim was involved in something he shouldn’t have been. And if Campbell was right? How had a soldier, already badly injured but having come through the worst of it, gone so far off the rails as to wind up in all of this?

How did society allow this to happen? Was it the result of post-traumatic stress or some kind of anger he’d come back from a war zone with along with his injuries? Who knew? Thousands of young people she supposed.

She stopped for a fag outside the station before entering. Really she felt she could do with a vodka to go along with it but gone were the days when she could handle an afternoon on anything other than soft drinks. Maybe it was less about ageing than the intensity of the job. Her afternoons seemed to be very full.

“You alright hair?” was what Campbell greeted her with when she walked back into the incident room.

She chose to pretend she had ignored this, surreptitiously checking her appearance with the mirror app on her phone to avoid doing anything that would imply he’d caused her anything more than a second’s instinctive annoyance, and found nothing amiss. She looked in his direction and found he was looking up at her from his chair expectantly, like a dog looking forward to a game of fetch.

“What?” was all she could come up with, though she injected as much scorn as she possibly could into that one word.

“Just, you’ve been spending so much time with the boss lately.” He looked conspiratorially at DS McKay who continued to act as though he was alone in the room, determined not to play ball. “Me and John here thought we should christen you hair.”

“I see.” she answered, thinking anything but. “I’ve not been spending that much time with him.”

“Oh I don’t know hair. I think you’re maybe protesting a wee bit too much.”

“Ok,” she shrugged, playing along on the basis he just might shut the fuck up quicker. “What does that have to do with my hair?”

“Not hair,” he boomed, nudging a still seemingly oblivious McKay in an effort at boisterous solidarity. “H A R E as in Burke and. A regular pair of resurrectionists you two.”

“Oh I see.” She replied. “Well I hope you didn’t spend all morning on that one.”

“No concern of yours if I did,” Campbell huffed. “You’re not my boss yet lassie.” Looking for one last chance of back up from McKay, which was consistently absent, he returned to his paper.

“No,” she agreed, before making herself a cup of tea without offering one, just to make the point. “Not yet.”

Davie wasn’t having the best of mornings. First of all the Bobcat had started playing up again, hydraulic problem or something, which meant he couldn’t reply on its loader to do the donkey work and would have to start carting bales to bed up the cows by hand. Colin had buggered off with the quad bike, taking that option out of the game too, so it was all down to muscle, the old fashioned way. His dad said it would do him good. About time he did some exercise that didn’t involve pulling levers, pushing throttles or lifting pints.

To be fair he wasn’t in the best condition these days, should never have jacked in the rugby this year but they’d dropped him from the first team and even though he knew he was taking a hacksaw to his nose just to piss off his face he still had his pride to think about.

Looking at his dad’s belly was enough to remind him that you really did need to keep active. Even then you probably couldn’t rely on exercise too much. You probably needed to cut out the chocolate biccies at eleven o’clock too, judging by the way the fat ginger yin’s gut was starting to stretch at the poppers on his boiler suit. Surely the old boy should just go for a bigger size and stop kidding himself, trying to hold it all together with a big belt he’d brought back from a trip to California many moons ago when he was still young and not out of touch the way he was now.

Not that Davie would attempt to tackle him, even now. He’d never admit it, but the old yin still put the fear of god in him, towering above as he seemed to, even though they were technically the same height and Davie probably had a year or twos growth left in him if he could only give up the fags.

He tried texting Andy a few times through the course of the morning but nothing doing. Huffy bastard. Alright, so they had to leave him there when those Polish boys had given chase, but there were a few of them and they looked like they meant business. They had taken it all a bit seriously if he thought about it. It had only been a bit of fun. Not like anyone meant any real harm was it? Fair enough they had kind of battered Andy, or at least knocked him out and left him to sleep it off but the guy probably did deserve some kind of revenge. He had lost his two front teeth after all. He shouldn’t think that way though. Andy was a mate and you should always stick up for your mates. Even if they were being particularly whiney you had to have their backs.

Still no response though, even after he’d kept his mobile on all night, turned the ringer up just in case, still nothing. Maybe he’d been in such a huff with them he’d just phoned that sister of his to come and pick him up before they had plucked up the courage to go back looking for him. He might have said though. Would have saved them some time. She could pick Davie up any time she liked. Not that it was likely, she was a couple of years older and a couple of light years out of his league. What could you do though? You couldn’t write yourself off like that. You had to keep trying.

He decided he’d text Andy again one last time and leave it at that. If the huffy wee bugger didn’t want to play ball that wasn’t Davie’s problem. Some people just needed more of a sense of humour about them.