The Lewis Man

FIVE

Professor Mulgrew took almost two hours to complete the autopsy after breaking for a lunch of onion bhaji, lamb bhuna with garlic fried rice, and kulfi ice cream. George Gunn had a cheese sandwich in his office, and was having trouble keeping it down.

The leather-like quality of the skin had made it impossible to open up the chest using a simple scalpel, and in the end the pathologist had resorted to the use of a pair of heavy scissors to cut through it before switching to his accustomed scalpel to reflect the remaining skin and muscles away from the ribcage.

Now the body lay opened up, like something that might be found hanging from a butcher’s hook, internal organs removed and breadloafed. But this had been a strong, healthy young man, and nothing found internally had detracted from the notion that his death had been caused by anything other than a brutal murder. A murder perpetrated by someone who might, just conceivably, still be alive.

‘Bloody interesting corpse, Detective Sergeant.’ Beads of sweat had gathered in the creases on his brow, but Professor Mulgrew was enjoying himself. ‘Didn’t have quite as interesting a last meal as I did. Flakes of soft meat, and minute translucent fibre-like material resembling fish bones. Fish and potatoes probably.’ He grinned. ‘Anyway, happy to give you a hypothesis now on how he might have died.’

Gunn was mildly surprised. From everything he had heard, pathologists were almost invariably reluctant to commit themselves to anything. But Mulgrew was clearly a man supremely confident of his own abilities. He closed up the ribcage, folded the skin and tissue back across the chest towards his initial incision, and poked with his scalpel at the wounds.

‘He was stabbed four times in the chest. From the downward angle of the strokes I would say that his attacker was either very much taller than him, or the victim was on his knees. I favour the latter, but we’ll come to that. The wounds were inflicted by a long, thin, double-bladed knife. Something like a Fairbairn-Sykes, or some other kind of stiletto. This one here, for example’ — he indicated the topmost wound — ‘is about five-eighths of an inch in length and pointed at both tips, which almost certainly indicates a thin, double-bladed weapon. It is five inches deep, passing through the apex of the left lung, the right atrium of the heart and into the ventricular septum. So it’s quite long, and typical of the other three wounds.’

‘And that’s what killed him?’

‘Well, any one of them would almost certainly have been fatal given a few minutes, but I suspect that it was this deep incised wound crossing the front of the neck that did for him.’ He turned his attention to it. ‘It’s more than seven inches long, extending between the mastoid area on the left, just below the ear, to the sternocleidomastoid area on the right.’ He looked up. ‘As you can see.’ He smiled and returned to the wound. ‘It completely transects the left jugular vein, severs the left carotid artery, and nicks the right jugular. It’s about three inches at its deepest, and even cuts into the spinal column.’

‘Is that significant?’

‘In my opinion the angle and depth of the cut would suggest that it was made from behind, and almost certainly with a different weapon. Which is backed up by the stab wound in the back. That wound is one-and-a-half inches long and has a squared superior tip, and a pointed inferior tip. Which would suggest a large, single-edged knife, better suited to cutting so deeply into the neck.’

Gunn frowned. ‘I’m having trouble getting the picture here, Professor. Are you saying the killer used two weapons, stabbed him in the chest with one, then grabbed him from behind and cut his throat with another?’

A smile of mild condescension settled on the pathologist’s face behind his mask, visible to Gunn only in eyes that glimmered on the far side of the giant tortoiseshells. ‘No, Detective Sergeant. I am saying that there were two attackers. One holds him from behind, forces him down to his knees while the second stabs him in the chest. The stab in the back was probably accidental as the first assailant prepared to draw his knife across the victim’s throat.’

He moved around the table to the dead man’s head, and began peeling the skin and flesh back over the face and skull from an initial incision.

‘Here’s the picture you should probably keep in your mind. This man was bound by the wrists and ankles. He had a rope tied around his neck. If it had been used to hang him, the abrasion would have canted up towards the suspension point. But it doesn’t. So I’m suggesting to you that they used it to drag him along a beach. There is a fine silver sand in his nose and mouth, and in the broken skin on his knees and the tops of his feet. At some point they forced him on to his knees and repeatedly stabbed him before cutting his throat.’

The picture that the pathologist painted with his words was suddenly very vivid to Gunn. He wasn’t sure why, but somehow he pictured it at night, with a phosphorescent sea breaking over compacted silver sand glowing in the moonlight. And then the blood turning white foam crimson. But what shocked him almost more than anything else was the thought that this brutal slaying had taken place here, on the Isle of Lewis, where in more than a hundred years there had been only two previous murders.

He said, ‘Would it be possible to take fingerprints? We’re going to have to try to identify this man.’

Professor Mulgrew did not answer immediately. He was focused on reflecting the scalp away from the skull without tearing it. ‘It’s so bloody desiccated,’ he said. ‘Brittle as hell.’ He looked up. ‘The fingertips are a bit wrinkled from fluid loss, but I can inject a little formalin to rehydrate them and you should get perfectly acceptable prints. Might as well take a DNA sample, too.’

‘The police surgeon already sent off samples for analysis.’

‘Oh, did he?’ Professor Mulgrew did not look pleased. ‘Unlikely to provide any enlightenment, of course, but you never know. Ah …’ His attention was suddenly taken by the skull, revealed finally by the peeling back of the scalp. ‘Interesting.’

‘What is?’ Gun reluctantly moved a little closer.

‘Beneath our chap’s surgical scar here … a small metal plate sewn in to protect the brain.’

Gunn saw a rectangular, dull grey plate about two inches long, sewn into the skull with metal sutures looped through holes at either end of it. It was partially obscured by a layer of lighter grey scar tissue.

‘An injury of some kind. And very probably a little mild brain damage.’

At Mulgrew’s request Gunn stepped out into the corridor and watched through the window that gave on to the autopsy room as the pathologist took an oscillating saw around the top of the skull to remove the brain. When he went back in, the professor was examining it in a stainless-steel bowl.

‘Yes … as I thought. Here …’ He poked at it with his finger. ‘Cystic encephalomalacia of the left frontal lobe.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning, my friend, that this poor bugger didn’t have much bloody luck. He had some kind of head injury that damaged the left frontal lobe, and probably left him … how can I put it … one sandwich short of a picnic?’

He returned to the skull, and with a delicate scraping of his scalpel, pared away the film of tissue growing over the metal plate.

‘If I’m not mistaken, this is tantalum.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A highly corrosion-resistant metal pioneered in the first half of the twentieth century in cranioplasty. Quite often used during the Second World War to repair shrapnel wounds.’ He leaned closer in as he scraped deeper into the metal. ‘Highly biocompatible, but tended to produce terrible headaches. Something to do with electroconductivity, I think. The development of plastics in the sixties superseded it. Now it’s used mainly in electronics. Aha!’

‘What?’ Gunn overcame his natural reticence to get even closer.

But Professor Mulgrew simply turned away to rummage in his pathologist’s toolkit, which sat up on the counter beside the sink. He returned with a three-inch-square magnifying glass which he held between thumb and forefinger to hover it over the tantalum plate.

‘Thought so.’ There was a hint of triumphalism.

‘Thought what?’ Gunn’s frustration was evident in his voice.

‘The manufacturers of these plates often engraved them with serial numbers. And in this case a bloody date.’ He stepped back, inviting Gunn to take a look.

Gunn took the magnifying glass and held it gingerly above the skull, screwing up his face as he leaned in close to see for himself. Beneath a ten-digit serial number were the Roman numerals MCMLIV.

The pathologist beamed. ‘That’s 1954 in case you hadn’t worked it out. About two years before he had his Elvis tattoo. And judging by the amount of tissue growth, three years, maybe four, before he was murdered on the beach.’