The Day After Tomorrow

4

London.

THE SAME bright moon illuminated an alley just off Charging Cross Road in the theater district. The passageway was L-shaped and narrow and sealed off at both ends by crime scene tape. Passersby peered in from either end trying to see past the uniformed police, to get some idea of what was going on, of what had happened.

The faces in the leering crowd were not what had McVey’s attention. It was another face, that of a white male in his early to mid-twenties with the eyeballs bulging grotesquely from their sockets. It had been discovered in a trash bin by a theater custodian emptying cartons after the closing of a show. Ordinarily Metropolitan homicide detectives would have worked it, but this was different. Superintendent Jamison called Commander Ian Noble of Special Branch at home, and Noble, in turn, had phoned McVey’s hotel to wake him from a restless sleep.

It wasn’t just the face, it was the head to which it was attached that had been the primary source of the Metropolitan detectives’ interest. First, because there was no body to go with it. And second, because the head appeared to have been surgically removed from the rest. Where the “rest” was anybody’s guess, but the burden of what was left now belonged to McVey.

What was all too clear, as he watched scenes-of-crime officers carefully lift the head from the trash bin and set it into a clear plastic bag and then place it into a box for transportation, was that Superintendent Jamison’s detectives had been right: the removal had been done by a professional. If not by a surgeon, at least by someone with a surgically sharp instrument and a sound knowledge of Gray’s Anatomy.

To wit: at the base of the neck where it meets the clavicle or collar bone is the juncture of the trachea/esophagus leading to the lungs and stomach and the inferior constrictor muscle (which) arises from the sides of the cricoid and thyroid cartilages. . . .

Which was precisely where the head had been severed from the rest of the body and neither McVey nor Commander Noble needed an authority to confirm it. What they did need, however, was someone to tell them if the head had been removed before or after death. And if the latter, to ascertain the cause of death.

To perform a postmortem on a head is the same as autopsying an entire body except there is less of it.

Laboratory tests would take from twenty-four hours to three or four days. But McVey, Commander Noble and Dr. Evan Michaels, the young, baby-faced Home Office pathologist called from home by beeper to do the job, were of the same opinion. The head had been separated from the body subsequent to death and the cause of death was most probably the result of a lethal dose of a barbiturate, most likely Nembutal. However, there was a question as to what made the eyes bulge out of their sockets the way they did, what caused the slight trickle of blood at the corners of the mouth. Those were symptoms of a lethal breathing of cyanide gas, but there was no clear evidence of it.

McVey scratched behind an ear and stared at the floor.

“He’s going to ask you about the time of death,” Ian Noble said dryly to Michaels. Noble was fifty and married, with two daughters and four grandchildren. His close-cropped gray hair, square jaw and lean figure gave him an old-school military bearing, not surprising in a former colonel in army intelligence and graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, Class of ’65.

“Hard to tell,” Michaels said.

“Try.” McVey’s gray-green eyes were locked on Michaels’. He wanted some kind of answer. Even an educated guess would do.

“There is very little blood, almost none. Hard to assess the clotting time, you know. I can tell you it had been where it was found for some time because its temperature is very nearly identical to the temperature in the alley.”

“No rigor mortis.”

Michaels stared at him. “No, sir. Doesn’t seem to be. As you know, Detective, rigor mortis usually commences within five to six hours, the upper part of the body is affected first, within about twelve hours, and the whole body within about eighteen.”

“We don’t have the whole body,” McVey said.

“No, sir. We do not.” Responsibility to duty aside, Michaels was beginning to wish he’d stayed home this night, thereby letting someone else have the pleasure of facing this irascible American homicide detective who had more gray in his hair than brown and who seemed to know the answers to his own questions even before he asked them.

“McVey,” Noble said with a straight face, “why don’t we wait for the lab results and let the poor doctor go home and finish his wedding night?”

“This is your wedding night?” McVey was dumb-founded. “Tonight?”

“Was,” Michaels said flatly.

“Why the hell did you answer your beeper? They didn’t get you they woulda got the next guy.” McVey wasn’t only sincere, he was incredulous. “What the hell did your wife say?”

“Not to answer the page.”

“I’m glad to see one of you knows which end to light the candle.”

“Sir. It’s my job, you know.”

Inside McVey smiled. Either the young pathologist was going to become a very good professional or a browbeaten civil servant. Which, was anybody’s guess.

“If we’re done, what do you want me to do with it?” Michaels said abruptly. “I’ve never done work for the Metropolitan Police before, or Interpol either for that matter.”

McVey shrugged and looked to Noble. “I’m with him,” he said. “I’ve never done work for the Metropolitan Police or Interpol before either. How and where do you file heads over here?”

“We file heads, McVey, like we file bodies, or pieces of bodies. Tagged, sealed in plastic and refrigerated.” It was much too late for Noble to be in the mood for humor.

“Fine,” McVey shrugged. He was more than willing to call it a night. At first light detectives would be starting in the alley, interviewing everyone and anyone who might have seen activity around the trash dumpster in the hours before the head had been found. In a day, two at most, they would have lab reports on tissue samples and scalp hair follicles. A forensic anthropologist would be brought in to determine the victim’s age.

Leaving Dr. Michaels to tag, seal in plastic and refrigerate the head in its own drawer, with a special addendum that henceforth the drawer was only to be opened in the presence of either Commander Noble or Detective McVey, the two detectives left, Noble, for his renovated four-story house in Chelsea; McVey, for his small hotel room in a deceptively small hotel on Half Moon Street across Green Park in Mayfair.