The Carnival Master

4.

He looked down at the corpse on the table.

For Oliver, death held no mystery. He had become accustomed to it: so many dead over the years. He could still recall his first, how he had looked into her face and had seen the person instead of the flesh; someone with a history, who had had a life and a personality, who had dreamed and laughed and felt the sun on her face. He had seen the stretch marks of distant pregnancies, the scar on her knee from an even more distant childhood injury, the lines around her mouth from a lifetime of laughing. Then he had pushed his knife into her and had begun to cut her up and she had ceased to be a person. After her, after his first, it had become so much easier. He still looked at a face before he started to cut, but he never looked into one. Now they were all simply so much cold flesh: doubly chilled from death and from their refrigerated storage until Oliver was ready for them.

He drew a deep breath before starting. The dismemberment of a human body was much harder work, physically, than most people imagined. Deprived of its vitality, a corpse was a heavy, dead mass, its density varying radically from the almost liquid, to gristly, to the solid and unyielding. Organ and bone, skin and fat, cartilage and sinew: cutting through the material of a human corpse required robust tools, some even power-driven. Oliver had all he needed to hand. Breadknife. Electric saw. Hand-held saw. Shears. Scissors. Knife.

He started as he always did, walking around the table and observing the lifeless body. The dead man was still fully dressed and Oliver noticed that some of the material from his blood-soaked T-shirt and kitchen overalls had been forced into the deep gashes. Oliver counted the cuts out loud, some of which gaped open, exposing the subcutaneous layer of pale marbled fat and the darker, denser mass of sinew and muscle beneath. Some of the slashes exposed white bone and as Oliver leaned closer to examine the wounds he saw where the bone had been chipped by the cleaver, the primary evidence of sharp-force trauma.

There were two other men in the room; together they helped Oliver turn the cadaver onto its belly. He examined its back. There were fewer wounds there, but they were still significant.

‘Let’s get him undressed,’ Oliver said and the two other men helped him cut and remove the dead man’s clothes. After the body was naked, Oliver repeated his observational circuit of it, again speaking his thoughts out loud.

It had been one of the first things Oliver had learned as a forensic pathologist: to take time and use his eyes. To make observations. He had often compared his work to that of an archaeologist, where technology, science and professional skills combined to uncover a complete history. But first, like an archaeologist viewing a landscape and identifying a likely dig site, you had to know where to look.

‘Deceased is male, early twenties, light build. There are multiple wounds indicating sharp-force trauma…’ As he looked at the corpse, Oliver voiced his thoughts into the Dictaphone. ‘Incised wounds and lacerations suggest the deceased was in motion for much of the attack and are primarily anterior but with several posterior.’ Oliver nodded to the technician and the other attending pathologist and between them they used a tape to take the body’s measurements. He took his time, examining every mark, every bruise, and noting it out loud into the Dictaphone. The man on the table had been hacked to death but Oliver saw no horror, no pain, only injuries and traumas to be methodically and individually enumerated, location on the body noted, and their length and depth measured. For Oliver in his work, death had become nothing more than a point in time: a moment that divided every injury, every mark, into ante-mortem, perimortem or post-mortem. Within seconds of death occurring, a whole new chronology began: cells started to break down; blood that had been pumped on an endless cycle for a lifetime sank to the lowest points of the body and empurpled the skin with post-mortem lividity; the chemistry of the muscles became altered causing rigor mortis; bacteria in the blood and organs began to produce gases that inflated cavities and soft tissues.

Oliver started at the head and worked his way to the feet, talking his way across the topography of the body. Observing, remarking, measuring. He marked on a body map each of the incised wounds, where the cut had been clean and sharp-edged, and lacerations, where the weapon had sliced through the flesh but had caused tearing to the wound edge. To a forensic pathologist, there was always a distinction. When he had finished he nodded to the technician who lifted the corpse’s head and eased a body block under the neck.

As he worked, Oliver thought back to his childhood and remembered his father carving meat. A long time ago. The technician swept a scalpel in a U-cut around the base of the scalp while Oliver began slicing a T-shaped incision into the body: one cut across the upper chest, from below the outer edge of one collarbone across to the outer edge of the other; then he made a long steady slice from the throat to the groin. He peeled back the skin and the subcutaneous tissue to reveal the ribcage. The process was a lot more awkward than usual because of the numerous other slashes that had been made to the body by the attackers. He also couldn’t free himself of the butterfly flutter in his chest whenever he thought about what had happened in the hotel. He picked up a pair of shears that looked as if they should be used to prune rose bushes and started to snip through the ribcage. Two cuts: one right and one left of centre along the mid-clavicular lines where the ribs were composed of cartilage. He lifted out the sternum and exposed the pericardial sac which he in turn cut open with the smaller scissors.

Oliver knew he would get caught eventually. He was an intelligent man, and his work brought him into contact with the police all the time. He knew they weren’t stupid, and he also knew that every time he did what he did the chances of arrest increased exponentionally. He used the long sharp knife, known as the bread knife, and cut out the heart. The pathologist assisting Oliver sucked out some of the blood from the heart with a syringe and placed it in a sample tub. Oliver eased back the skin of the neck. One of the blows from the victim’s attackers had sliced into his neck, so Oliver opened up the throat, cutting from the jugulum up to the chin. He could see where the cleaver had severed the sternomastoid muscle almost completely. Here lay the immediate cause of death. The victim had died by exsanguination, resulting from the multiple incised wounds, but the slice into the subclavian artery had been what had caused him to bleed out fast. Oliver imagined the death, something he was not normally inclined to do: the victim would have been in extreme shock, would have felt extremely cold, and unconsciousness and death would have come pretty swiftly.

Maybe the police already had their suspicions; maybe Oliver had said something or done something or had left something behind that would lead them to him. Maybe they were watching him. Waiting for him to do it again.

He made a midline incision into the peritoneal cavity and used the bread knife to sever the organs of the neck and removed the victim’s tongue and throat. Then he carefully lifted out the slippery mass of the lungs, bronchi and aorta, all of which were left connected. Oliver took great care while cutting free from the mesenterium the seven metres of upper and lower intestines and removing them from the body. He had learned from experience that a rupture could result in content escape, the stench of which was somewhere between that of vomit and excrement combined and ten times as potent. He then excised and removed the liver, pancreas, spleen and stomach from the upper abdomen, again keeping them connected. No, he thought, it doesn’t make sense. If the police suspected him then he would have been immediately suspended from work.

While the assistant carried out weighing duties, Oliver removed another connected set of organs, this time the kidneys, urinary bladder and abdominal aorta. The subject’s body cavity was now empty and the grey-white of his spine was exposed. Oliver turned his attention to the head, removing the brain and inspecting the inner aspect of the skull. Once the exenteration was finished, Oliver cut sections for histology and later microscopic inspection, dropping the samples into formaldehyde. There was no need for the whole brain to be fixed in formaldehyde and sliced in two weeks’ time for detailed study: there were no significant cranial traumas, so he took slices from the brain to be sent for toxicology along with the body fluids. It took Oliver another hour to lift the skin from around the slice wounds for detailed inspection.

After the autopsy was completed, Oliver washed up and drove home to his flat. The city slid by, glistening-wet dark in the night. He smiled to himself. The butterfly sensation had gone. A voice deep inside seemed to reassure him: no, he said to himself, they won’t catch you. You’re too clever for them. And soon it will be Karneval.