Core of Evil (8 page)

‘Are you all right?’ asked an unfamiliar voice.

‘Fine. Fine. The smell just got to me for a moment.’ He blinked a couple of times, forcing the sound of church bells to the back of his mind.

The room he had entered was large, and tiled in white from top to bottom. Several large ventilation units had been fixed to the ceiling, positioned above stainless-steel tables that stood in the centre, as organised and as massive as ancient obelisks. Each table had a raised lip around the edge and a tap with an attached hosepipe and shower head, also in stainless steel, at one end. Two of the tables had shrouded
bodies on them; one much larger and more irregular than the other.

The woman standing between the tables was smaller than him, with a stomach so pronounced and so rounded that it was almost as if she had thrust a basketball under her white coat, and bulbous blue eyes that gazed at Lapslie with disconcerting mildness. She smiled, and Lapslie thought that he had never seen such a sweet smile on a woman.

‘Polio,’ she said, her voice tasting of brandy and soda.

‘Pardon?’

‘I noticed you looking over at me yesterday, when I finally arrived at the scene of the crime. You were probably wondering what caused me to look like this. The answer is polio. I contracted it as a child. I was probably one of the last children in England to catch it.’

‘I’m – sorry.’ He wasn’t sure what she wanted him to say.

‘Six months flat out in a hospital bed, and several operations to fuse my spine together. It could have been worse. Of course, if I’d been born a year or two later, it could have been a lot better. Such is the uncertainty of life.’ She held out a hand. ‘We’ve not met. Doctor Jane Catherall. Pleased to meet you.’

She walked towards Lapslie with jerky steps and held out her hand. He shook it, noticing as he did so
that she had double cuffs on her shirt, pinned together with delicate gold chains. A woman who cared about her appearance. ‘DCI Lapslie,’ he said.

‘I’ve been expecting you. Your colleague is already here.’ She kept hold of his hand, and Lapslie had the absurd impression that she was expecting him to bend down and kiss it. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think I always greet everyone with the unfortunate story of my health,’ she added. ‘I wanted to make the point that our bodies are a permanent record of everything that happens to us. Broken bones, illnesses, diseases … they’re all there, preserved in the flesh. And if all we have to work with is the flesh, then we can work backwards and recreate the person from the list of things that happened to them.’

‘Thank you for the lecture.’ He could feel her charm beguiling him, but he wasn’t going to succumb. ‘We didn’t get a chance to talk yesterday,’ he said tersely. ‘I was too busy dealing with the press when they turned up to deal with you when
you
finally turned up.’

Dr Catherall looked away. ‘I apologise for arriving so late. Alas, one of the physical effects of the polio is a weakness in the intercostal muscles. I have to wear a face mask connected to a respirator when I sleep. It maintains a positive pressure in order to ensure that I keep breathing but it does lead to a very disturbed night’s sleep, and I find it difficult to wake
up in the mornings. I missed the first four calls on my mobile.’

‘Then buy a louder mobile,’ Lapslie said unsympathetically.

Dr Catherall gazed up at him with those disquietingly mild eyes. ‘The victim had been there for many months,’ she said. ‘Two more hours was not going to compromise any evidence on the body, and it ensured that when I did arrive I was not making any mistakes through lack of sleep. Let me do my job, Detective Chief Inspector, and I will provide you with everything you need to do yours.’

The long silence that grew between them was broken by the doors to the mortuary opening and Emma Bradbury entering the room. She didn’t look like she had taken her suit off since the day before. The mortuary assistant who had let Lapslie in was following her.

‘Boss,’ Emma acknowledged.

‘Sergeant. Been here long?’

‘Half an hour or so. Dr Catherall let me use her office to make a few calls.’

Lapslie nodded. ‘Well, shall we get on with it?’

Dr Catherall led Lapslie and Emma over to the first table and nodded towards the shrouded body. ‘Your crash victim,’ she said. ‘I took the liberty of conducting the post-mortem this morning, before you arrived.’ She glanced sideways at Lapslie. ‘As I understand it, he was the victim of a car crash, rather than
of a suspected murderer. It occurred to me that you would not want to be stood around waiting while I fiddled about in his innards.’

‘Correct. Was there anything unusual about the body?’

‘Nothing that caused me concern. Bruises and abrasions caused by the crash, some burning from the airbag, and a massive trauma to his neck, cutting through his carotid artery. All consistent with what was found at the scene. I have, of course, sent blood samples off for testing. We may get traces of alcohol, or drugs. Happy?’

‘Ecstatic. What about the other one?’

With a flourish, she pulled the white cloth off the bulky, irregular shape on the second table. ‘
Et voila!
’

Seeing the corpse in the forest, a natural thing nestled amongst other natural things, had seemed almost normal. Seeing her here, laid out naked on harsh metal, surrounded by the plastic sheets that had been disinterred with her and crusted with dirt, Lapslie was struck by a sense of wrongness. Nobody deserved to be left like this. Death should have some dignity, surely.

What remained of her was mottled grey, and dry. Her hips and shoulders made tent shapes under her skin, and her stomach had decayed away, or perhaps been eaten away, to reveal the lumpy shape of her spine. Her face was dominated by the rictus-like
grimace of her mouth, where the skin had pulled back to reveal black gums.

Framed in the plastic sheets, she seemed smaller than she had done in the forest.

‘Well,’ Dr Catherall said quietly as her assistant wheeled a stand supporting a tray of surgical instruments across to her. ‘With no further ado, let us commence.’

For the next hour, Lapslie and DS Bradbury watched from the sidelines as Dr Catherall painstakingly unwrapped the sheets and cut her way through the old woman’s cadaver, taking samples as she went and talking quietly into a minidisc recorder while her assistant took occasional photographs. Her work was meticulous and detailed, and her manner was more like a woman doing a difficult crossword puzzle than a medical expert slicing up a body.

Lapslie felt himself falling into an almost hypnotic trance as he watched, lulled by Dr Catherall’s effortless technique. He had expected her hands to be clumsy, based on her shape and her medical history, but her movements were precise to the point of minimalism. Every gesture was exactly what was needed, no more and no less.

Emma Bradbury, on the other hand, fidgeted endlessly. After a few minutes she found a laboratory stool and perched on it, but she couldn’t seem to get comfortable. Every now and then she would shift position, scratch her head, tug at her ear or search
her pockets for something that she never seemed to find. She was plainly bored, and not very good at disguising it.

After twenty minutes or so, as Dr Catherall had penetrated to the last layer of plastic sheet around the body, she suddenly stood back. ‘Good Lord,’ she murmured. She leaned closer to examine something within the sheets. ‘Good Lord,’ she said again, and gestured for her assistant to move closer. He started taking photographs as Dr Catherall carefully removed a number of objects from between the plastic sheets and the corpse and transferred them to the third post-mortem table.

‘You might want to take a look at this,’ she said, turning to Lapslie. He moved to join her, but before he could get to the table his mobile rang. Dr Catherall cast a dark glance at him.

‘DCI Lapslie,’ he said.

‘Lapslie?’ The voice was familiar: dry, like grass cuttings, and slightly tinny, which probably meant that he had Lapslie on speakerphone. ‘Alan Rouse. You called yesterday.’

Dr Catherall gestured abruptly towards the door.

‘Sorry, sir – could you hang on for a moment. I’m in the middle of a post-mortem.’ He strode towards the door and out into the corridor. ‘That’s better,’ he said as the doors swung shut behind him. ‘Sir – it’s been a long time.’

‘Too long.’ Lapslie could imagine Rouse leaning
back in his chair in his white, glass-walled office. ‘How’s Sonia?’

A stab of unexpected pain; an icy knife in his heart. Lapslie’s breath caught in his throat. ‘She’s – okay.’

‘And the kids?’

‘Fine. Thanks for asking.’

‘And what about your … ah, medical condition?’

‘Unchanged – which is why I was startled when I got a call from a young copper attending a car crash.’

‘Ah yes. She called me when your name popped out of the computer.’

‘That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about. Why was my name in the computer in the first place?’

There was a pause on the other end of the line: the aural equivalent of a shrug. ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Rouse said eventually. Lapslie found that his tongue was tingling, as if he’d dipped it in something mildly spiced, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. ‘Presumably something about the case resonates with some previous investigation you’ve been involved with. Some unsolved murder, or suchlike.’

‘I can’t say I can hear the sound of bells ringing.’

‘Perhaps it’s a glitch. Computers are the bane of a policeman’s life, these days.’

Another momentary silence, but this time Lapslie had the impression that Superintendent Rouse was
waiting for him to make some comment. ‘I was under the impression that I was on indefinite sick leave,’ he said eventually. ‘You know that my synaesthesia makes it difficult for me to work in an office environment.’

‘I know that’s what we talked about, Mark, but you understand that we can’t have you off sick indefinitely. We’ve been looking for some kind of job you can do without being in the office, but it’s not been easy. I know you’ve written a couple of reports for the Chief Constable, but there’s pressure from the Home Secretary to get as many people back in work as we can. So when your name was flagged up as someone who might be able to contribute to this case, well, I took it to be a sign. A sign that it was time you came back to us. I’ve arranged a desk for you here in Chelmsford, and you’ll have access to a Quiet Room if you need it. We’ll sort out something for you once this case is over.’

‘And until then I’m the investigating officer?’

‘Correct.’

‘As DCI? Isn’t that over-egging the pudding a bit?’

‘Look on it as a way of easing yourself back into harness.’

‘Nice talking to you, sir.’

‘Pop in, when you’re in the office. Let’s have a chat.’

Lapslie slid the mobile back into his pocket and took a deep breath. It looked like he was back on the
job. Not entirely unexpected – he’d been waiting for something like this to happen – but not entirely welcome either.

Sighing, he entered the pathology lab again.

Laid out on the stainless-steel table were the objects that Dr Catherall had removed from the stomach of the dead body: five desiccated corpses of what were either field mice or voles, along with two rats and something larger that Lapslie assumed was a polecat, or a ferret, or something along those lines. The smaller animals looked to Lapslie like no more than matchstick bones in twists of matted fur.

‘Apparently we’re looking for a serial killer, sir,’ said DS Bradbury dryly.

Dr Catherall favoured her with a level glance. ‘These animals had managed to worm their way through gaps in the sheeting and get to the old woman’s body,’ she said. ‘I found them clustered around the stomach area, where they had started eating their way through. And they all died before they could do much damage.’

‘Died how?’ Lapslie asked.

‘That,’ Dr Catherall said, ‘we will determine in due course. For now, I have a post-mortem to complete. It is not the kind of thing that you can come back to later.’

She worked in a logical progression, starting at the crown of the corpse’s head and finishing at the soles of its feet. Half way through the process, the cadaver
was splayed open, with Dr Catherall wrist-deep in its dry innards examining whatever remained of the organs, but by the time she had finished, the corpse was very nearly back to the condition in which it had started the post-mortem, albeit with a massive Y-shaped incision, stitched up with thick black thread, marring the body from groin to chest, where it split and continued up to either shoulder, passing above the flaps of its breasts.

As Dr Catherall finished with the body, Lapslie thought that she looked smaller: drained by the process. It seemed to him as if she didn’t have much in the way of stamina within that diminutive frame of hers.

‘What can you tell me about her?’ Lapslie asked, as Dr Catherall washed her hands thoroughly and wearily.

‘Let us start with the state of decomposition,’ she replied. ‘The body is in remarkably good condition, considering where it was found. The plastic sheeting in which she was wrapped would have provided something approaching an anaerobic environment, which would have slowed decomposition down and deterred all but the most determined or –’ she indicated the small corpses on the next table ‘– smallest predators. Given the condition of the skin and the flesh, and taking account of the effects of the environment, I would estimate that she has been dead for between seven and ten months.’

‘Which is about what we thought,’ Emma said.

Dr Catherall sniffed. ‘Sometimes pathology is about confirming the obvious, rather than bringing rabbits out of hats. Judging by bone density and porosity I would put her towards the end of her natural life, somewhere between seventy and eighty years of age. The progression of arthritis in her joints confirms this. Her lungs had been damaged by childhood rheumatic fever, and she had suffered from numerous other diseases during the course of her life – rickets, some small skin melanomas and so on – but none of them carried her off. She had also been suffering from low-level malnutrition for some years, I would estimate, but that did not carry her off either.’