The Scent of Death

Chapter 2

Most people would regard my profession as odd. Macabre, even. I spend as much time with the dead as with the living, exploring the transforming effect of decay and dissolution in order to identify human remains and to understand what might have brought them to that state.

It’s an often-dark calling but a necessary one, and when I saw Ward’s name on my phone I knew straight away what it meant. She’d been a DI when I’d first met her, after a body part had been left, quite literally, on my doorstep. But she’d recently been promoted to DCI, heading up one of the Met’s Murder Investigation Teams. If she was ringing on a Sunday evening, then it wasn’t a social call.

It was a sign of how blasé I’d become that I’d felt barely a flicker of concern. A few months ago it had been Ward who’d warned me that the fingerprint found at my flat belonged to Grace Strachan. Since then we’d been in occasional touch as she’d kept me up to date with developments to locate the woman who’d tried to kill me. Or lack of them, as it turned out. So much so, I never even considered that she might be phoning up now about anything other than work.

She wasn’t. A body had been found in the loft of an abandoned hospital in Blakenheath, in North London. The old infirmary had lain unused for years, the haunt mainly of substance abusers and the homeless. The unidentified remains looked to have been dead for some time, and their poor condition meant a forensic anthropologist was needed. Seeing as it was in my neck of the woods, could I pop over to take a look?

I said I could.

It wasn’t how I’d wanted to spend my last evening with Rachel for three months. But she’d told me it was better for me to work than have both of us moping around the apartment with last-night blues. Go on, she’d said, don’t keep them waiting.

The dusk had been turning to dark as I drove to St Jude’s. I didn’t know Blakenheath, but its streets were the usual multicultural mix. Takeaways and shops displaying West Indian, Asian and European signage jostled for space alongside dingy units that were shuttered and closed. The number of these increased the further out I went, until the streetlights lit only deserted streets. Then I came to an expanse of high wall that ran parallel to the road. It was topped with old iron railings, through which unpruned tree branches poked, as though trying to escape. I thought it might be a park until I came to an entrance. Curving above two tall stone gateposts was a rusted wrought-iron arch, on which St Jude’s Royal Infirmary was spelled out in large, ornate letters.

On the wall next to it, a more poignant message was written on a forlorn and ragged banner: Save St Jude’s.

A young police officer stood sentry next to one of the stone posts. I gave my name and waited until she’d checked my clearance. ‘Just follow the drive,’ she told me.

As I pulled through the archway my headlights illuminated a sign bearing a hospital map, grown so faded it was barely there. My initial impression of a park wasn’t so far off. Mature trees hid the boundary wall, and I guessed the site used to be filled with green spaces and hospital buildings. Now it was a wasteland. Whatever buildings once stood here had been demolished, leaving untidy mounds of brick and concrete on either side.

It was like driving through a bombed-out town, unlit and deserted. The beams from my headlights were the only relief from the darkness. The trees and high wall screened out light from the surrounding streets, making the grounds feel more isolated than they really were. Rounding a shadowy mound of rubble, I saw police cars and vans parked on the forecourt outside the surviving hospital building. It was Victorian, three storeys high with wide steps descending from a Grecian-style central portico. Boarded-up windows stared blankly from blackened stone walls, but despite its dilapidated state it still possessed a severe grandeur. There were elaborately carved cornices, while the portico was supported by fluted stone pillars. Above it all, the angular silhouette of a clock tower rose from the pitched roof, outlined against the night sky like a stern finger.

I gave my name again and was shown to a police trailer to change into coveralls and protective gear. Whelan met me on the steps leading up to the main hospital entrance, introducing himself as Ward’s deputy SIO. Covered with graffiti, the big double doors had been pushed right back. Inside it was cold and clammy. The air smelled strongly of damp, mould and urine. Lights had been set up in what had once been the foyer, revealing stained, sagging plaster and a debris-strewn floor. Off to one side was a glass-panelled cubicle with a sign above it proclaiming Medical outpatients.

But the beer cans and empty bottles that were scattered around, and the charred remains of campfires, showed that the hospital still had some occupants. My footsteps echoed hollowly as I made my way up the stairs that wound around a lift shaft, long disused. More lights had been set up on each landing, where dust-covered signs pointed off to X-ray, Endoscopy, ECG and other long-forgotten departments.

‘Typical hospital,’ Whelan said, out of breath when we reached the top of the stairs. Even though it was only three storeys, the high ceilings made it a long haul. ‘If you weren’t ill when you arrived, the climb’s enough to kill you.’

He set off down a long corridor, along which yet more lights had been lined. We passed abandoned wards, where small glass panels set in heavy doors gave a view into blackness. Plaster crunched underfoot, and in places the rotten ceiling had collapsed to expose bare wooden slats. There weren’t so many empty cans and bottles up here, but then it was a long way to climb without a good reason.

The lights ended at an extendable aluminium ladder, incongruously new and shiny in the squalid setting. It ran up into a rectangular access panel in the ceiling, from where the walkway of stepping plates had been laid down in the loft to where Ward and the rest of her team were waiting.

Along with the body.

I studied it again now, rubbing my head where I’d banged it on the roof timber.

‘We’re just about to make a start,’ Ward told me. ‘Do you know Professor Conrad?’

I did, but only by name. The forensic pathologist had already been an established figure in his field when I was first starting out in mine and had a fearsome reputation for his short temper. He’d be well into his sixties by now and didn’t appear to have mellowed with age. Bushy grey eyebrows were knitted in a frown as he regarded me from above his mask.

‘I’m glad you could finally join us.’

He had a dry, reedy voice that made it hard to tell if that was a rebuke or not. Once again, out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw movement in the loft’s shadows, but this time I ignored it. I’d embarrassed myself enough for one day.

Ward raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Well, since we’re all here, we’d best crack on. Come on, budge up.’

She gave a SOCO standing next to her an unceremonious nudge. There was a general shuffling as space was made for me. The stepping plates had been arranged around the plastic-wrapped body, providing a platform to work from. But the low roof timbers and chimney stack made it a tight squeeze, and it was hotter than ever under the surrounding lights.

‘The hospital’s been closed for years, so the only people using it have been rough sleepers and drug addicts,’ Ward said, as I moved closer for a better look. ‘There was a fair bit of dealing going on from here until the demolition work started on the site a few months back. We could be looking at this being either a fatal overdose or a falling-out someone tried to cover up.’

Neither were rare events. I considered the desiccated features half hidden in the plastic. ‘Who found it, one of the demolition crew?’

She shook her head. ‘They’re supposed to have checked the loft, but I doubt they came this far in. No, it was someone from the bat-conservation society. Came up here to do a survey and found more than he bargained for.’

‘Bats?’

‘A colony of long-eared ones, apparently.’ Her voice held a note of wry amusement. ‘They’re a protected species, so we’ve got to be careful not to disturb them.’

I glanced into the shadows above me. So I hadn’t been imagining the movement earlier.

‘The developers are planning to level the whole site and build a big office complex,’ Ward went on. ‘There’s been a lot of local opposition, so the bat thing was just the latest in a series of delays. The protesters are delighted because it’s meant a last-minute stay of execution for St Jude’s. Until the bats are rehoused, or whatever it is they do with them, the whole development’s ground to a halt.’

‘Fascinating as that may be, I cancelled a dinner engagement for this,’ Conrad said in clipped tones. ‘I’d appreciate not spending all night up here.’

Indifferent to the angry look Ward gave him, the pathologist stiffly lowered himself down next to the body. I went to the other side and knelt beside it as well. Surrounded by a halo of wispy hair, the face inside the plastic was wizened as parchment. The eye sockets were empty, and only stubs remained of the nose and ears. Beneath the loft’s pervasive smell of dust and old timber, another odour emanated from within the tarpaulin, sweet and dusty.

‘Clearly been dead for some time,’ Conrad said, as though passing comment on the weather. ‘Completely mummified, by the look of it.’

Not quite, I thought, but kept the thought to myself for now.

‘Is that natural?’ Ward sounded doubtful. The pathologist either didn’t hear or chose not to answer.

‘It can be,’ I answered for him. Mummification could happen naturally for a number of reasons, from the acidity of peat bogs to extreme cold. But this was down to something else. I looked around the dark loft, seeing how the cobwebs nearby were stirring slightly in some faint air current. ‘These are pretty much ideal conditions for mummification. You can feel how hot it is up here, and it’ll be dry even in winter. And a big old loft like this has plenty of ventilation, so there’s enough airflow to draw out the moisture.’

While I was talking, Conrad was calmly opening more of the tarpaulin, revealing the shoulders and chest. The body lay on its back, slightly twisted and huddled inside the folds of plastic like a dead bird in a nest. The tarpaulin still covered the stomach and lower body, but it was already clear this wasn’t a large individual. From its size it looked to be either a juvenile or a small adult. The body wore only a ragged yellow T-shirt, stained by fluids produced as it decomposed. The short sleeves displayed arms and hands that had been reduced to sinew and bone. As with the face, the parchment-like skin had dried out to resemble cured leather.

‘The hands look arranged,’ Ward said, studying how the claw-like hands appeared to have been folded across the bony chest, as though the body were resting in a coffin rather than wrapped inside a plastic sheet. ‘Someone took time to do that. That suggests remorse or at least respect. Could be whoever did it knew her.’

Her? I looked at Ward in surprise. There was nothing to suggest the body was female, and given its condition we might not know for days. Not unless we found some form of ID.

‘It’s a little premature to start using the feminine pronoun until we’ve established the gender, don’t you think?’ Conrad said, giving her a withering glance.

Ward’s blush was visible even with half her face hidden behind the hood and mask. It could have been a slip of the tongue, but not one an SIO should have made.

She tried to hurry past her blunder. ‘Can you give me a rough idea of the time since death?’

The pathologist answered without looking up. ‘No, I can’t. Perhaps you didn’t hear when I said it was mummified.’

Now Ward looked angry as well as flustered. But Conrad had a point. Once the body reached this level of desiccation, any further physical changes would be so slow as to be virtually imperceptible. There were cases of natural mummification where human remains had been preserved for hundreds of years, or even longer.

‘Hard to imagine anyone hiding a body up here while St Jude’s was still a working hospital,’ Whelan said, filling the awkward silence. ‘Must have been after it shut.’

‘When was that?’ I asked.

‘Ten, eleven years ago now. Caused quite an upset.’

‘OK, that’s an upper limit, but it doesn’t help much,’ Ward said. ‘What’s the fastest the body could have mummified like this? Could it have happened in less than ten years?’

‘If the conditions were right,’ I told her. ‘The loft will have been pretty hot over summer, which would speed things up. But, looking at it, I’d say it’s probably been up here for at least two summers. There’s hardly any smell, even in this heat, which makes me think the mummification finished some time ago.’

‘Great. So we’re looking at a time since death of anywhere between fifteen or sixteen months and ten years. That really narrows it down.’

There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I didn’t try. Conrad was pulling back more of the tarpaulin. The stiff plastic was dirty, coated with what looked like cement or plaster dust and smears of blue paint. I was more interested in what wasn’t there, but then the pathologist peeled back the sheet covering the lower half of the body, and any other details were momentarily forgotten.

The legs were partly drawn up, bent together and angled off to one side. They looked to be mainly bone beneath the short denim skirt, which showed similar staining as the cropped T-shirt. That had ridden up even more, bunching just below the chest to expose the stomach. Or what was left of it. Most of the abdominopelvic cavity, from below the ribs to the top of the pubic bone, was gaping and open. Within it, what remained of the internal organs were so atrophied and degraded as to be unrecognizable.

But that wasn’t what made everyone fall silent. Lying inside the cavity were what looked like tiny pale twigs. I felt something twist inside me at the sight, and Ward’s indrawn breath told me she’d recognized them as well.

‘Rats have got to it,’ one of the SOCOs commented, craning to get a better view. ‘Looks like one died inside.’

‘Don’t be bloody stupid. And show some respect.’ Whelan’s tone was withering.

‘What? I was only—’

‘It’s a foetus.’ Ward spoke quietly. ‘She was pregnant.’

She seemed moved, as though the development had undermined her usual professional detachment. Whelan gave the offending officer a glare that promised there’d be more said later, then turned to Ward. ‘Looks like you were right about it being a woman, ma’am.’

It did, though Ward could hardly have known. ‘How old’s the foetus?’

‘Looking at the size and development, probably six or seven months,’ I told her.

Conrad had ignored the exchange. He turned away from the abdominal cavity as though what it held was incidental, focusing his attention elsewhere.

‘The pregnancy’s helpful,’ he murmured, more to himself than anyone else. ‘If she was of child-bearing age that narrows things down somewhat. Fully clothed, underwear still in place, so no obvious signs of sexual assault. Although that’s not conclusive, of course.’

‘She’s not wearing much, though. No coat, just a T-shirt and a skirt,’ added Ward. ‘No tights, which suggests she could have died during the summer months.’

Whelan made a seesawing motion with his head. ‘Unless she was killed somewhere with heating and then brought here. My wife won’t wear a sweater indoors even in winter. Just cranks the central heating up and lets me worry about the bills.’

Ward didn’t seem to be listening. ‘What about the, uh, the stomach? Could rats have caused that or is it some kind of wound?’

‘Ask me after the post-mortem,’ Conrad said. But then he sniffed, considering. ‘Rats would be more likely to go for an open wound, so it’s possible she was stabbed. But let’s not jump to any more conclusions, shall we? For one thing, there aren’t any visible bloodstains on the clothes, which suggests, if there was an injury, it didn’t bleed significantly.’

He was right. It would be easy to assume that we were looking at some sort of horrific wound, but I knew the tricks nature could play. At the moment there was only one thing I was certain about.

‘She was moved.’

Everyone looked at me. I hadn’t intended to announce it so bluntly, but the tiny skeleton, still in its mother’s womb, had affected me more than I’d thought.

‘Her body was somewhere else before this,’ I went on. ‘It was brought here after it mummified.’

Conrad gave a grudging sniff. ‘Yes, you’re right.’

‘Are you sure?’ Ward asked.

I nodded. ‘The foetal bones aren’t in any sort of anatomical position. They’ve been jumbled up, more than I’d expect, even allowing for scavengers. That suggests they were disturbed by fairly violent movement when there was no fluid left in the womb to cushion them.’

‘The body was rolled up in plastic,’ Whelan said. ‘Maybe it happened then?’

‘Possibly. The body wouldn’t have mummified if it had been in the tarpaulin all the time. Moisture would have built up inside, so it would’ve decomposed normally. If that had happened the plastic would be smeared with fluids, the same as the clothing.’

‘So it mummified first and then was wrapped in the tarp?’ Ward asked.

‘It must have. Then there’s those.’ I indicated a few dark, rice-like specks trapped in the folds of clothing. ‘There should be a lot more blowfly casings than this. If her body had been here all the time they’d be scattered all around it.’

Ward frowned. ‘Would there even be flies in here? It’s pitch black. How could they see?’

‘They wouldn’t have to, they’d have been guided by the smell.’ It was a common assumption that blowflies weren’t active in darkness, but it took more than a lack of light to deter the persistent insects. ‘These are probably bluebottle casings. If it’s too dark for them to fly they’ll walk to a dead body instead.’

‘There’s an image,’ Whelan said with a grimace.

Ward gave him an irritated glance. ‘Why are there flies if the body was mummified? Wouldn’t that put them off?’

‘Not if it decomposed first,’ I told her. ‘You can see from the staining on the clothes there was some initial decomposition before the body started to dry out and mummify. That would be more than enough.’

Blowflies could smell decomposing remains from up to a mile away, zeroing in on the scent to lay eggs in the eyes, nose and any other openings they could find. And while the lack of blood on the woman’s clothing suggested she didn’t have a major wound, even a small one would have attracted the flies’ attention. It would have taken longer to reach her in the loft, but they’d have begun laying eggs long before any rats came along. Once they’d hatched, the ravenous larvae would have fed on the dead tissue, enlarging the original wound and continuing the cycle of feeding and reproducing until the body had mummified. And then they’d abandoned it.

Ward was still frowning. ‘So you’re saying she was killed somewhere else and then brought here?’

‘Not necessarily.’ I glanced at Conrad to see if he wanted to answer. But the pathologist had gone back to poring over the remains. ‘Wherever her body was at first it had to be somewhere with pretty much identical conditions to this. Dry, a good airflow and hot enough for mummification to kick in quickly. That’s asking a lot.’

‘You think her body was up here all the time, just moved from another part of the loft?’ Ward asked.

‘Based on what I can see, I think it’s possible, yes.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense.’ Whelan sounded irritated. ‘What’s the point? If someone was worried her body might be found, why didn’t they take it somewhere else? And why wait until it was mummified before moving it anyway?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘But I still think you should search the rest of the loft for blowfly casings.’

‘OK, we’ll check.’ Ward was watching the pathologist. He was paying no attention to our conversation, leaning forward to examine the body’s folded hands. ‘Have you found something, Professor Conrad?’

‘There’s considerable trauma to the finger ends. Some of it could be from rodents, but I don’t think it all is.’

‘Can I take a look?’ I asked.

He edged aside so I could get closer. Given the body’s condition, it was hard to gauge what damage was post mortem and what wasn’t. Some of the desiccated fingers had been gnawed by small teeth, and the fingernails had begun to come loose during the initial decomposition. But the finger ends themselves appeared torn, while the nails themselves were broken and splintered, with one missing completely.

‘I don’t think we can blame rats. It looks like at least some of it could have been done while she was still alive,’ I said.

‘You mean she was tortured?’

‘You insist on asking questions we can’t possibly answer,’ Conrad said waspishly. His knees cracked as he pushed himself to his feet. ‘I’ve seen enough. Once the hands are bagged you can move the body to the mortuary. I think it’s safe to say—’

He broke off as a shadow darted overhead with a fast, flickering sound, like the pages of a book being riffled. The bat was gone in a second, but it startled the pathologist. He stumbled backwards, arms flailing as his foot went off the edge of the stepping plate. There was a dry crunch as it broke through the thin ceiling, layers of filthy insulation coming to life in a billow of dust as his leg plunged into them. Whelan managed to grab his wrist as he toppled backwards, and for a second I thought he had him.

Then, with a crash of breaking timber and plaster, Conrad and the whole section of loft beneath him disappeared.