The Art of Murder

Chapter 22

The traffic was appalling. Pendragon's parking permit bought them a space but it was a hundred metres from the Forensics Lab along Lambeth Road. Even running through the freezing drizzle, by the time they reached the front of the three-storey modern building, they were wet and chilled to the bone.

'Did you know, sir,' Turner remarked, wiping his forehead and following the DCI to the reception desk, 'there's a theory that running in the rain gets you wetter than walking?'

'Really, Turner? How incredibly fascinating.' Pendragon turned to the receptionist and showed his ID. The girl printed them each a pass which she slipped into plastic wallets. The policemen attached them to their jackets. 'Dr Newman is working in Lab B103,' the receptionist said. 'Probably best to take the stairs.' And she pointed towards a row of lifts and a broad stone stairwell to their left.

One flight down, the stairs opened out on to a wide corridor painted a calming shade of green. Anaemic pictures of flowers and birds hung along one wall. The other was taken up by a row of double doors spaced about twenty feet apart. Each was painted dark green with a number at head-height; 103 was around the first bend in the corridor. Pendragon depressed a buzzer to the right of the door. A few moments later, Colette Newman appeared and ushered them into the lab.

It was a huge room, brightly lit and dominated by a large stainless-steel bench at its centre. The two policemen crossed the echoing floor. Pendragon nodded to Dr Jones who was leaning over the remains of Noel Thursk.

'We use this lab for special cases,' Dr Newman said. 'And I think you'll agree, Chief Inspector, that this is definitely a special case.'

Pendragon stared down at the flattened corpse. He had seen it in the grounds of St Dunstan's and when it had been brought down from the tree, but here, in the harsh neon glare and placed on a square, steel-topped bench, it had somehow lost the last vestiges of humanity he had associated with it. That helped. Turner, meanwhile, was standing very quietly beside him, unable to take his eyes from the gruesome sight.

'So what have you found?' Pendragon asked the two experts.

'Well, as you can see, the body has been reduced to something amorphous, which means any normal procedures are pretty redundant,' Jones said, rubbing his beard. 'But fortunately Dr Newman has some very sophisticated machinery which is perfectly suited to studying flattened bodies,' he concluded.

'We did a succession of hi-res X-rays,' she explained. 'And then used a type of MRI, similar to the procedure employed in neurology units in hospitals.' She led the three men to the far wall, depressed a switch, and a panel two metres long and a metre high lit up. She then removed a sheaf of transparencies from a drawer and pinned them to the light screen. 'These are the detailed X-rays,' she said, pointing to a collection on the left. 'And these are the MRI stills.' She indicated a clutch of rectangles on the right.

Newman stepped back and Jones ran his fingers close to the images. 'You'll notice that although the body has been flattened to a thickness of a couple of centimetres, the arrangement of the internal structure has been retained.' He pointed to an image of the entire corpse. 'Here are the arms, legs and torso.' The body parts were only vaguely recognisable, the bones shattered into hundreds of pieces or powdered completely, organs flattened and stretched obscenely.

'So what does that tell us about the way it was done?' Pendragon asked, turning first to Newman and then to Jones.

'It's clear from these images that the flattening was not done by a pounding machine or a large punch.'

'How do you know that?' Turner interjected.

Dr Newman pointed to the periphery of the image Jones had referred to. 'There are no overlapping edges,' she said. 'Try to visualise someone placing a body on a punching machine – something like the devices they use in factories to knock out metal shapes from steel sheets, for example. Every time the punch lands, it makes an edge. We would see an irregular arrangement of those edges around the periphery, here.' She indicated the extremities of the body with her finger. 'It would be a bit like kneading dough. You'd get a repeat pattern around the edge. But this body was worked flat either by being passed through a set of rollers or by being run over repeatedly with a steamroller.'

Newman led them back across the room to a bench dotted with test-tube racks filled with coloured liquids. At one end stood a cluster of electronic devices. 'We've also conducted a battery of chemical tests,' Jones explained as they approached the bench. 'Combining these with the images, we've been able to extract a few samples that may throw up some leads.'

On the bench lay three Petri dishes. In the first two were flakes of coloured material; the third contained a few threads of fabric.

'We found these – paint in two different colours. The green we've narrowed down to what our universal palette catalogue calls "Cider Apple Green". The other is plain white, but it comes from a metal surface. We've isolated traces of pressed steel. Almost certainly paint from a motor vehicle.

'The grey fibres in the other dish are treated cotton. Under the microscope we can see a water-resistant wax coating on the threads. It's most likely fibre from a tarpaulin.'

Pendragon looked admiringly at Dr Newman. 'That's very clever,' he said. She reddened slightly.

Jones coughed. 'There's more, Pendragon.' He picked up a sheet of paper from the counter and handed it to the DCI. Jones leaned in and pointed to a series of graphs. 'The arrangement of spikes, there,' he said, 'indicates a large quantity of heroin.'

'Heroin?' Pendragon exclaimed, staring at the pathologist.

'Even more interesting is this,' Jones said, and handed him another sheet covered with a series of coloured lines.

'What's this?'

'An analysis of Kingsley Berrick's blood. Same spikes. An almost identical heroin level.'

'You think the two victims were junkies?' Turner asked.

'A fair assumption, Sergeant, but no. These concentrations of heroin would kill instantly.'

'So it was the means of dispatching them?' Pendragon commented, studying the charts.

'Remember the needle wound in Berrick's brain?' Jones said. 'I thought he died from a massive haemorrhage. But it seems clear now that the hole was caused by the introduction of the drug. If Thursk still had a brain, or come to that a head I could study, we might find a similar mark.' Then, after a moment, Jones added, 'There's one other interesting result.'

'Oh?' Pendragon said, looking from him to Colette Newman.

'Dr Newman suggested we did a rape test on Berrick's body.'

'A rape test?'

'It didn't occur to me back at the Path Lab, but…'

'It struck me as being prudent in light of, well… Mr Berrick's sexual orientation.'

'Okay,' Pendragon said doubtfully.

'Berrick had intercourse shortly before he was murdered. We ran DNA tests.'

'And?'

'We found traces of Noel Thursk's DNA.'

Turner suddenly laughed, then put his hand to his mouth and rolled his eyes. Pendragon glared at him and turned to Dr Newman. 'Wheels within wheels,' he said, running his fingers over his forehead.