The Scent of Death

Chapter 7

There was still no sign of Ward by the time I’d walked back to St Jude’s. I changed into fresh coveralls, gloves and overshoes and pulled on my hood and my mask. Then I went back into the hospital’s dark interior.

It was like stepping into a pit. Even climbing the stairs somehow felt like being underground, far beneath fresh air and daylight. At the top, I paused when I saw the windowless corridor stretching ahead of me. It seemed to go on for ever. Floodlights were dotted along its length, disappearing into the distance like a night-time landing strip. Giving an involuntary shiver, I set off down it.

The sound of hammering told me the wall still hadn’t been dismantled. As I drew nearer to the ward, a floodlight in the corridor illuminated a haze of cement dust in the air. It was even thicker inside. Two burly police officers were pounding away at the wall with lump hammers and chisels. Their shadows jerked under the glare of the floodlights as they hacked out the mortar around each breezeblock, removing them one at a time to make a crenellated hole. The sheet of protective plastic draped on the other side as a dust barrier shimmered with each blow like a dirty shower curtain.

A number of white-suited officers and SOCOs had gathered in the ward, almost indistinguishable from each other in their coveralls, hoods and masks. I managed to pick out Whelan among them, but he turned away when he saw me. Evidently, he wasn’t in a mood to talk. He wasn’t the only one. A palpable tension, as thick as the dust, hung in the air as we waited.

There was a disturbance in the corridor outside. ‘Excuse me, coming through, let the dog see the rabbit, thank you…’

I recognized the voice even before I saw its owner. It was low but strong, with a throatiness that suggested a bad cigarette habit. Falsely, because the person it came from was a devout anti-smoker. The police officers and SOCOs standing in the ward’s doorway hastily stepped aside as a small woman bustled through. She seemed tiny compared to the officers who hurriedly moved out of her way, yet she neither slowed nor gave them a glance as she breezed through, taking it for granted that they’d clear a path. She stopped beside me, setting down a leather Gladstone-style bag that looked almost as big as her. Her dark face crinkled in a smile behind her mask.

‘Hello, David. Been a while.’

It had. Riya Parekh had been one of the first forensic pathologists I’d worked with. She’d been a senior figure in her field even then, much older than me and already at the top of her profession when I’d been starting out. That was a long time ago now, longer than I cared to remember.

A lot had changed since then.

Including Parekh herself. Even under the concealing mask and hood, it was apparent how she’d aged. Never a tall woman, she seemed to have physically shrunk, developing the beginnings of a stoop around her shoulders. The jet eyebrows were now grey, and her eyes surrounded by wrinkles, with dark shadows etched underneath them.

I returned her smile, genuinely pleased to see her. ‘Hello, Riya. I didn’t know you were working on this.’

‘I wouldn’t have been if Conrad hadn’t bolloxed things up.’ She gave a sniff. ‘Typical.’

Some things, at least, hadn’t changed. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh, you know. Older. Creakier. The same.’ The eyes scrutinized me. ‘You’re looking well.’

‘So are you.’

‘Liar.’ But she looked pleased as she turned away to consider the partly demolished breezeblock wall. ‘Puts me in mind of Edgar Allan Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher. Are you familiar with the story?’

‘Not really, but I’m guessing someone gets walled up.’

‘Entombed, actually, but close enough. Although it isn’t in a hospital, so let’s hope the similarities stop there.’

‘Similarities?’

‘Poe’s victim was still alive.’

I thought about the restraints I’d seen strapping the bodies to the beds when I’d been in the chamber helping Whelan with Conrad. But there was no point speculating: we’d know soon enough. We watched as another breezeblock was lifted out and carried to the growing pile. A big enough section of wall had now been removed to allow access. Flushed and out of breath, one of the SOCOs heaved the block on to the pile with the others and turned to Whelan.

‘That should do it.’

Whelan came to speak to Parekh while the worst of the dust and the debris was sucked up with a heavy-duty vacuum. Again, he didn’t seem inclined to acknowledge me, but I was too distracted by the crenellated black hole to wonder why.

‘No SIO?’ Parekh asked him. ‘Where’s DCI Ward?’

I’d wondered about that myself. It must be an important meeting to keep her away from this.

‘She’s on her way,’ Whelan told her. ‘She’d still like a word with you when she gets here, Dr Hunter. You might want to wait for her outside.’

I didn’t like the sound of that. For the first time I began to wonder what Ward might want to talk about, but Parekh spoke before I could quiz the DI.

‘Nonsense, we’re about to go in. If DCI Ward can’t be here on time then she should invest in a better watch.’

Whelan seemed to be about to speak before thinking better of it. He turned to face the hole, not meeting my eye as a SOCO drew aside the plastic sheet like a translucent curtain. Beyond it was blackness. The section of wall where the breezeblocks had been removed now looked like the mouth of a cave.

‘Who has a torch?’ Parekh asked, holding out her hand.

‘I think we should wait until the ceiling’s been shored up and we’ve got some lighting in there,’ Whelan said. Blue-suited figures were already lifting steel props from a stack and carrying over portable floodlights. ‘We’re going to rig up a tent over the beds, as well. We want to keep any more plaster dust from coming down on the bodies.’

‘Then I can take a look while you’re doing it.’

She left no room for argument. Whelan still didn’t acknowledge me as torches were supplied.

‘Don’t go far in. And keep away from where the ceiling’s collapsed,’ he warned Parekh as she switched on her torch.

‘You can stay out here if you’re worried,’ she told him.

I heard a muttered ‘Shit’ under his breath as he followed the pathologist through the hole. Turning on my own torch, I went after them.

My breathing sounded too loud in my mask as I stepped through the opening. The smell of decomposition was still noticeable, but fainter than before. This was the odour of old death, not recent. I’d only had a glimpse of the chamber before, too busy with Conrad to study it closely, even if there had been enough light. The torch beams showed a chamber perhaps thirty feet long by twenty wide. The walls were bare and peeling, the ceiling high for a room that size. At one side was a mound of rubble, broken timber and torn insulation from where the ceiling had fallen in.

Then Parekh’s torch picked out the beds. The three of them were lined up in a row, their tubular metal frames the heavy and institutional design of outdated NHS stock.

Two of them were occupied.

Our torch beams converged on the nearest. Clothed in a stained sweatshirt and jeans, the motionless figure lay face up on a bare, fouled mattress. Its large stature suggested the body was male, although I knew that didn’t necessarily follow. It was secured to the bed by two broad rubber straps, of a type used to restrain unconscious patients during surgery. One was fastened across the torso and forearms, the other below the knees. The hair had mostly slipped off the skull and so had the skin, which had the colour and texture of waxed leather. The head was tilted back, teeth bared as if in a cry or snarl.

A wadded-up cloth had been crammed in the mouth. It had come loose as the lips and cheeks had shrunk and now lay between the teeth like a dirty bridle.

The second body was considerably smaller but also strapped down and gagged. Like the first, its skin had sloughed off the bones like too-big clothes. But this individual had a lot more hair. Coarse and dark, it lay pooled on the mattress around the skull.

Parekh started forward, but Whelan deferentially held out an arm to stop her. ‘Sorry, ma’am, we need to get the ceiling shored up before we do anything else.’

‘I’m not proposing to swing from it, I just want to take a closer look,’ the pathologist retorted.

‘And you’ll be able to. Just as soon as we’ve got things set up.’

Parekh clicked her tongue in annoyance but this time didn’t argue. She’d put on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and the torchlight glinted off them as we played the beams over the bodies.

Unlike the pregnant woman’s remains, these hadn’t mummified. The concealed chamber was much colder than the loft, lacking both the baking heat and airflow of the roof above. Although the sloughed skin had begun to dry out, the decomposition of these two bodies had been able to continue uninterrupted, progressing through bloat and putrefaction to their current state. The only similarity with the woman’s body from the loft was that, like the mummification those remains had undergone, this process had also ended some time ago.

There was also another, major difference. I’d been shining my torch over the bodies and the floor below their beds, checking for empty pupae casings. There weren’t any. Nor did the bodies show any ravages of blowfly infestation. A single fly in here would have been enough: its eggs would have hatched into larvae, fed and pupated, then repeated the cycle again and again, until all the available soft tissue had been consumed.

If that hadn’t happened, it meant the room had been well sealed.

I turned my torch back on to the nearest body. Both hands had contracted into semi-claws, the yellowed fingernails calloused like talons. The sweatshirt cuffs had ridden up, exposing forearms reduced to bone and tendon beneath the baggy skin. The skin itself had darkened to a rich caramel colour, although that was a normal feature of decomposition and had no bearing on its original pigmentation.

‘Don’t think we’re going to have much luck getting an ID from fingerprints,’ Whelan said, shining his own torch over the hands of both victims. The sloughed skin was draped from them like badly fitting gloves, stiffened from where it had dried in the air.

He was wrong, but there’d be time for that later. I was more interested in how the rubber straps had cut into the victims’ arms. The skin had contracted away from the wound like a pushed-back sleeve. Both victims were wearing jeans, and where the straps passed over the legs the denim was frayed and stained with dried blood.

‘So what are we looking at here?’ Whelan asked, his voice hushed. It was a natural reaction in that place. ‘Some sort of torture scenario?’

Parekh made a hmming noise in her throat as she shone her torch beam on to the restrained arms of first one body, then the other. ‘Possibly. But I can’t see any trauma except for the lesions from the straps.’

‘Poor sods must have done it trying to get free,’ Whelan said.

‘They might have, but these aren’t just surface abrasions,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s hard to tell with the skin slippage, but it looks like the edges of the straps have cut into the underlying muscle. That would have been excruciating. To inflict that sort of damage on themselves they’d have to have been frenzied. It’s like a snared animal trying to gnaw off its own leg.’

He shook his head. ‘Can you blame them?’

‘Perhaps not, but there’s no sign of torture. Not physical, anyway,’ Parekh said, peering at the nearest victim’s body. ‘No pulled teeth or fingernails, and no obvious cause of death. I can’t rule out something like strangulation at this stage. But the fact the only visible trauma looks to have been self-inflicted makes me suspect they might have been alive and conscious when they were walled in.’

‘Christ.’ Whelan sounded shaken. ‘How long for?’

Parekh gave an elaborate shrug. ‘That depends. If they died of thirst or starvation it could have been several days or longer. Impossible to say right now, but it wouldn’t have been quick.’

‘Could they have suffocated?’

‘If the room was airtight, then yes, I suppose so.’

‘I don’t think it was,’ I said. I’d wondered the same thing, because there weren’t any flies in here. And flies would have found their way in through the smallest crack. But if the chamber had been airtight the atmosphere in it would have been much fouler than it was, since the gases produced during decomposition would have been trapped in there as well.

I ran my torch beam over the walls and ceiling. ‘Over here.’

Set low in one corner was the grille of what looked like an air or heating vent. Going over, I angled the torch into it. A fine mesh screen was fixed to the inside, and I could see a dark mass banked up in the duct behind it. In the torch beam it glinted with pinpoints of iridescence.

‘It’s full of dead flies,’ I said, climbing to my feet. ‘It kept them out but there’d have been enough air getting in here for two people to breathe.’

‘So they didn’t suffocate,’ Whelan said. ‘I’m not sure if that’s good or not.’

Neither was I. Suffocation would have been relatively quick, causing gradual hypoxia as the oxygen in the chamber was replaced by carbon dioxide. Starvation and thirst would have taken longer. Strapped down and helpless, when the last breezeblock had been eased into place the two victims would have been left in utter darkness, without hope of rescue or escape.

No wonder they’d torn their own skin trying to break free.

Parekh and I left the chamber to the SOCOs and technicians while floodlights and ceiling props were set up. She stood in the ward’s doorway, frowning as she stared back inside.

‘Seems an awful lot of trouble to hide two bodies. Especially when the building was going to be pulled down anyway.’

‘Perhaps whoever built it didn’t think that far ahead. Or they might have assumed the remains wouldn’t survive the demolition.’ I said. They probably wouldn’t have. Even the bones would have been pulverized, and the chances of anything being spotted among tons of debris were remote.

‘True,’ Parekh conceded. ‘But why bother building the wall in the first place? A place as big as this, there’s no shortage of hiding places. It’d have been much easier to bury them somewhere in the grounds. Or conceal them in the loft like the other victim.’

I’d been thinking the same thing. The woods behind the hospital would have made a convenient burial ground.

‘Perhaps whoever killed them didn’t want to risk being picked up by CCTV,’ I suggested. The cameras were dummies but they wouldn’t have known that. ‘And it’s still possible these two victims aren’t connected to the woman’s body in the loft.’

Parekh gave me an admonishing smile. ‘Now you’re playing devil’s advocate. They were all interred. Two people walled up, quite possibly while they were still alive, and I understand the woman had been locked in the loft. And then there was that empty third bed. That looked to me as though it was meant for somebody.’

I thought about the splashes on the wooden stairs leading up to the loft, the possibility that the pregnant woman had fled in there to hide from some pursuer. But that was still just speculation at this stage.

‘Dr Hunter.’

I looked round. Whelan had been talking to a police officer who’d arrived a few moments ago. He glanced in my direction as they spoke, then came over.

‘DCI Ward’s waiting for you downstairs.’

‘She wants to talk now?’ I looked back through the hole in the breezeblock wall. Light now came from inside, and SOCOs were busy videoing and taking photographs while the ceiling props were put in place. It wouldn’t be much longer before we could go back inside.

‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

Whelan’s face gave nothing away, but I was starting to have a bad feeling about this.

‘Don’t be long,’ Parekh instructed as I left. ‘I don’t like being kept waiting.’

The floodlit corridor seemed a longer walk than usual as I made my way downstairs. After the perpetual night inside the hospital, the bright sunlight outside came as a surprise. Blinking, I looked around for Ward. She was standing by one of the trailers, talking to the Crime Scene Manager. As I headed over I noticed several dark grey vans parked at the bottom of the steps. They were sleek and new, with a discreet logo on their sides showing a stylized DNA molecule’s double helix with the name BioGen. Underneath, in smaller lettering, it read Biological and Forensic Services.

‘Dr Hunter?’

A smartly dressed man in a navy suit and tie was coming towards me. He looked familiar, and then I remembered seeing him at St Jude’s with his entourage on the night Conrad had fallen through the loft. He wasn’t so grim-faced now, fit-looking and in his late forties, with the easy walk and confidence of a natural athlete. The fair hair was impeccably cut and his face was so closely shaved it looked chiselled. A strong smell of cologne came off him. Not excessive, just pungent.

‘We’ve not met, but I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m Commander Ainsley,’ he said, extending his hand.

He had a firm grip that stopped barely the right side of a challenge. As we shook I wondered what had brought such rarefied company all the way out to St Jude’s. In the Metropolitan Police’s unique structure, Commander came between Chief Superintendent and Deputy Assistant Commissioner. That put him several ranks above Ward’s DCI. The investigation was evidently attracting the Met’s big guns.

‘I wanted to thank you personally for helping Professor Conrad,’ he said with a brisk, professional smile. His teeth were straight and white, and he had disconcertingly blue eyes. ‘It was a bad situation that could easily have been a lot worse. Well done.’

I nodded, a little bemused. I wasn’t used to being thanked by high-ranking police officers. ‘How is he?’

‘As well as can be expected.’ The blandness of the answer made me wonder if he knew. From the corner of my eye I saw Ward look across and hurriedly detach herself from her conversation with the CSM. ‘I’m surprised to find you still here rather than at the mortuary. When’s the post-mortem scheduled for the loft victim?’

‘Not till tomorrow morning.’ I was about to add that I still had two more victims to help recover, but some instinct stopped me.

‘Well, I’m glad of the opportunity to say hello. I hope you understand why we decided to bring in a private forensic service provider, by the way,’ he said glancing over at the vans. ‘BioGen have an excellent reputation, and first-class people, by all accounts.’

I was still wondering how to respond when Ward reached us. She was out of breath from hurrying and I saw her cheeks colour as she overheard her superior.

‘Ah, Sharon. I was just saying how much we’ve appreciated Dr Hunter’s contribution.’ Ainsley turned to me. I realized that it wasn’t just the colour of his eyes that was disconcerting. Until he blinked, his eyelids left the whole of his iris visible, like bright blue marbles. It gave his stare a doll-like, slightly manic quality. ‘Perhaps you should consider a move into the private sector yourself. I’m sure there’d be plenty of openings for someone of your experience.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said, looking at Ward.

‘Good man. I’m sure Sharon can arrange an introduction to BioGen’s CEO?’

He raised his eyebrows, making it a question. Ward kept her face studiedly neutral. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Excellent. Well, good to meet you, Dr Hunter. I’ll look forward to reading your report. I’m going to be taking a personal interest in this inquiry. Back seat, of course,’ he added with a brief nod at Ward.

He shook my hand again before he left. I watched him go, striding confidently across the car park towards the grey vans.

‘I was going to tell you,’ Ward said quickly, as soon as he was out of earshot.

‘You’re bringing in a private forensic company?’ It was only now starting to sink in. No wonder Whelan had wanted me out of the way.

‘Only for the victims we found walled up. You aren’t being fired, we still want you to work on the original inquiry. But until we know whether or not there’s a connection between the woman in the loft and these new victims, it makes sense to treat them separately.’

I looked at the vans with the BioGen logo. ‘What if they aren’t separate?’

‘Then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’ She sighed. ‘Look, for the record, it wasn’t my idea. The decision was made above my pay grade, but I don’t disagree with it. The investigation’s literally tripled in size and we’re faced with an entire hospital as a potential crime scene. And after Conrad’s accident there’s a lot of nervousness. Using a company that can handle all the lab work as well as providing technical and forensic support means there’s one less thing to worry about.’

I was beginning to understand what a Met Commander like Ainsley was doing at St Jude’s. Although Ward’s first outing as Senior Investigating Officer had started out as a routine inquiry, it was now something very different. Her superiors were understandably nervous, but having a high-ranking police officer looking over her shoulder was hardly going to help her confidence. Or ease the pressure.

‘I haven’t heard of BioGen,’ I said. I still wasn’t happy, but I knew the argument was already lost.

‘They’d heard of you. Said all sorts of nice things, but they still weren’t happy about keeping you on.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘I didn’t see why they should have it all their own way, though.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, meaning it. It would have been easier for her to have gone with a private company, especially if there’d been pressure from above. Suddenly, Commander Ainsley’s enthusiasm for me to join the private sector didn’t seem quite so coincidental.

Ward shrugged it off. ‘They’re an unknown quantity, and I’ve worked with you before. Just don’t balls it up.’

She didn’t sound like she was entirely joking. ‘Who’s their forensic anthropologist?’

‘Daniel Mears. Comes very highly rated. A real perfectionist, by all accounts. Do you know him?’

I shook my head: the name meant nothing to me. ‘Where’s he based?’

‘Not sure, but you can ask him yourself.’ She nodded towards the BioGen vans. ‘This is him now.’

A young technician and an older man were walking towards the hospital steps. Their coveralls were the same grey as the vans and bore the BioGen logo on the chest. Their hoods were down at the moment, revealing that the older of the pair was about fifty, tall with aquiline features and a shaved head. I was surprised I’d never heard of him before. Forensics had exploded in the last few years, with newly qualified graduates in all its disciplines flooding the market. But this was an older individual, and if he’d been around for any length of time I’d have expected to have come across him.

‘Hello, Dr Mears,’ Ward said. ‘This is David Hunter. He’s been working on the other half of this investigation.’

I was on the verge of offering my hand, but the newcomer didn’t stop. ‘See you up there,’ he said to the young technician, and carried on walking.

The younger man had halted in front of us. Realizing my mistake, I tried to recover from my gaffe. And my surprise. God, how old is he? Mears must have been in his mid- or late-twenties at least, but he didn’t look it. Fresh-faced, he had flaming red hair and a complexion to match, milky skin dotted with freckles that made him seem even younger. He was carrying an aluminium flight case similar to mine. It wasn’t a standard piece of kit, but I knew one or two other people in my line of work who had them. The lightweight aluminium was tough and waterproof, protecting my camera, laptop and various other pieces of equipment I carried around with me. But whereas my case was battered and scuffed from years of use, the one Mears had was as pristine as everything else about him. In his fresh grey overalls, he put me in mind of nothing so much as a schoolboy decked out for the first day of term.

Ward had said he came highly recommended, though. He must be, or he wouldn’t be here.

‘Dr Hunter,’ he said stiffly. His voice was unexpectedly deep, as though to compensate for his youthful appearance. The pale cheeks had darkened in a flush that told me my slip hadn’t gone unnoticed. ‘I read one of your papers on decomposition a couple of years back. Interesting.’

I wasn’t sure how to take that, but let it go. ‘Always good to meet another forensic anthropologist.’

‘Actually, I’m a forensic taphonomist.’

‘Oh. Right.’

Ward had got his job title wrong, but it was an understandable mistake. In a basic sense, taphonomy was the study of the processes a biological organism undergoes after death, up to its eventual fossilization. In a forensic context that meant looking at any and all post-mortem changes to a human body, from decomposition to trauma. It encompassed a broad range of forensic disciplines, but there was nothing particularly new about it. In a lot of respects, it was only what I already did myself.

Yet I wouldn’t have called myself a forensic taphonomist and, while I was aware of a few people who did, it was more common in the US than the UK. Still, earlier in my career I’d experienced bias myself from more established experts who didn’t like the idea of change. I’d no intention of becoming one of them.

‘So is your background anthropological or archaeological?’ I asked.

‘Both. I take a broad-spectrum approach, including palaeontology and entomology,’ he said, snapping a skin-tight glove into place by way of emphasis. They were the same steel grey as his coveralls: BioGen obviously took their corporate image very seriously. ‘The old single-disciplinary approach had its time, but it’s outdated now. Forensics has moved on. You need to be able to bring a wide range of skills to the table.’

‘I thought I did,’ I said lightly.

He smiled to himself. ‘Really.’

Now there was no mistaking the implied put-down. Ward was frowning as she looked at us.

‘Well, I’ll leave the two of you to it.’

She headed towards the police trailer. Mears and I regarded each other. I was struck again by how young he looked. Give him a chance. He might be just nervous and overcompensating.

‘Have you been inside yet?’ I asked, nodding at the blackened walls of St Jude’s.

Mears’s blush had faded, but the faintly supercilious air remained. ‘Not yet.’

‘It’s pretty grim. They’ve just finished opening the walled-up chamber in the paediatric ward. I’ll be interested to hear what you make of it.’

‘You’ve been in there?’

‘Only just inside the false wall.’

That wasn’t strictly true. I’d gone down into the chamber to help Conrad, but I didn’t think there was any point mentioning that. Something told me Mears would be territorial, and we’d started off badly enough as it was.

‘Really?’ Colour was flooding back to his cheeks. ‘I know we’re supposed to extend professional courtesy to each other, so I won’t make a formal complaint this time. But I’d appreciate it in future if you’d stay out of my crime scene.’

I was too surprised to speak. The only reason I’d been there in the first place was because no one told me I’d been replaced.

‘Technically, I think it’s DCI Ward’s crime scene,’ I said, trying not to lose my temper. ‘But don’t worry, I’ve no reason to go in again. It’s all yours.’

‘Good. In that case we won’t have any problem.’

He brushed past me. The back of his neck was red as his hair as he carried his shiny flight case up the steps.

Then the Gothic entrance of the hospital swallowed him into its dark maw.