The Grave Tattoo (37 page)

‘I’m trying. I spoke to Dr Wilde, the pathologist who’s working on the bog body. She’s going to do the post mortem on Letty. If there’s anything, anything at all to suggest foul play, she’ll be all over it.’

Jimmy’s face cleared. ‘That’s a start, at least.’

‘There’s one other thing. Dan and I went to see Jenny Wright down at Coniston this morning. She was next on my list. I don’t think she should be left on her own down there until we know what’s going on.’

Jimmy pulled a face. ‘God, that old witch.’

‘She was very insistent that someone should fetch her to the funeral tomorrow. Maybe you could go down this afternoon and bring her back with you?’

‘That’s not a bad idea.’ Jimmy groaned. ‘But she’s such a disagreeable old bag.’

‘Even so, you don’t want her murdered, do you?’

‘I suppose not. Couldn’t we get the cops on it?’

‘They’re not going to care for her like her family will,’ Dan said.

‘OK, I’ll go now.’ Jimmy looked stricken at the thought.

‘I could come with you,’ Dan said. ‘Lighten the load.’

Jimmy shook his head. ‘Thanks, but I can live without the Spanish Inquisition that would provoke.’ He got to his feet, patting Dan on the shoulder. ‘I’ll call you later.’ He leaned down and kissed the top of Dan’s bald head.

In silence, they watched him drive off. ‘He’s a nice guy,’ Dan said.

‘I know.’

Dan screwed up his eyes against the sparkle of the water. ‘I admit, I started it because I thought he might be a useful source for us.’ He gave a deep sigh. ‘But I’m getting to like him far too much.’

For once, Jane couldn’t be bothered with the self-indulgence. She got up and started back to the car. Halfway there, she turned and said, ‘You know what, Dan? Four old people are dead. Somebody tried to kill me last night. When it comes to your love life, you’re confusing me with someone who gives a shit.’

37

River had developed a knack for getting her own way. It had something to do with determination, but even more than that it had to do with a profound understanding of what made people tick. Judicious flattery, professional courtesy and the willingness to grant favours, often before they were even asked–all these helped her to bend the world to her will. By the time she’d finished her phone call, the pathologist on the other end was convinced she was doing him a favour by performing the post mortem on Letty Brownrigg.

Since Letty’s body had already been transferred to the hospital mortuary, it didn’t take long to have everything set up. By the time Jimmy set off for Coniston, River was preparing to examine the dead woman. Her assistant and the uniformed police constable Ewan Rigston had asked to be present were discussing football with casual disregard for what was about to take place. River looked across at the nonchalant policeman and said, ‘Have you witnessed a post mortem before?’

‘Aye, I have,’ the stolid young man replied. ‘More than most. They always send me. My dad was a butcher. Bodies don’t bother me.’

‘I’m glad about that,’ River said. ‘I hate having to hang about while people run off to lose their lunch.’

‘No chance of that with me. It’s just meat, isn’t it? I mean, whatever it is that makes you human, that’s long gone by the time they hit the slab,’ he said casually. ‘We’re all just bags of blood and guts once we’re dead. I’ve never understood the way people get all squeamish about their loved ones having to have post mortems.’

‘Some people do have religious objections,’ River pointed out as she began to probe the woman’s skull with her fingers for any signs of contusions or abrasions.

‘And that makes even less sense, when you think about it,’ the policeman said. ‘OK, I accept some people believe in the resurrection of the physical body. But if you’ve got this all-powerful god, surely he’s capable of putting the pieces back together the way they were? It should matter even less to the religious because they’re the ones that’re supposed to have faith that their god can do anything. That’s the trouble with religion. You bring God in the door and logic flies straight out the window.’

River grinned. ‘How come you’re still just a constable? I’m not used to philosophical discussions from men in uniform.’

‘I like being a grunt,’ he said. ‘This way, I spend more of my time with people, not paper. I don’t have to worry about the politics of policing or keeping the brass happy. When I go home at night, I don’t have to fret about the burden of command. It’s not a bad life.’

‘Some might call that a lack of ambition,’ River said. Suddenly something caught her attention and she stopped listening. She bent over to look more closely, reaching for a magnifying glass. ‘That’s interesting,’ she murmured.

‘What is?’ the policeman asked.

‘A very faint bruise right above the carotid sinus,’ she said, pointing it out to him.

‘Funny place to have a bruise,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s not like you’re going to knock yourself there. What do you think caused that? Has somebody tried to strangle her?’

River shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. There are no other corresponding marks. Well, we’ll have a better idea once we open her up.’

But River’s confident prediction was not entirely borne out by events. As she left her assistant to close the Y-incision, she shared her conclusions with the PC. ‘Heart failure, pure and simple. Her heart showed signs of cardiomyopathy, arteries pretty furred up. Heart stopped beating.’

‘Isn’t that what happens to all of us, ultimately?’ the philosophical policeman said.

‘Yes, but for a variety of reasons. Absent any other obvious cause of death, like massive gunshot wound or signs of poisoning or asphyxiation, all we’re left with here is heart failure.’

‘OK. So the death certificate will be forthcoming, will it?’

‘I’ll see to that.’ River peeled off her latex gloves. On the face of it, there was nothing suspicious about Letty Brownrigg’s death, but a niggle of unease troubled her. Jane Gresham’s concerns hadn’t dissipated into thin air as she had hoped. What she planned to do next was entirely outside her remit and against professional protocol, but she wanted to satisfy herself.

Once the policeman had left and she had changed back into her street clothes, River walked back to Gibson’s. She nodded to the young man who greeted the grieving and headed for the viewing rooms. When she looked in on Tillie Swain, a middle-aged woman was sitting in a chair, head bowed. River slipped back out into the corridor and made for Eddie Fairfield.

The coffin sat in splendid isolation, a wedge of afternoon sunshine splashing the body with colour. Swiftly, River crossed to the coffin and looked inside. A white ruff shrouded Eddie’s neck but it took only a moment for her to move it out of the way and study his neck. She pulled out her magnifying glass and looked more closely. It was very faint, but it was there. A small bruise on the carotid sinus, about the size and shape of a pair of fingertips. ‘Oh, shit,’ she muttered. She took out her digital camera and shot a range of pictures, from close-ups of the bruise to longer shots that established it as being indisputably a feature of Eddie Fairfield’s body. ‘Oh shit,’ she repeated, rearranging the ruff.

Back in the hallway, she collared the young man. ‘Where’s Edith Clewlow?’ she asked.

‘All screwed down ready for the funeral tomorrow morning,’ he said laconically.

River smiled winningly. ‘Any chance you could open her up for me?’

He recoiled slightly, as if she’d suggested some improper sexual act. ‘What for? I thought you were just supposed to be doing the bog body?’

‘Call it professional curiosity,’ she said. ‘I’ve got this theory, and I want to check something. Just five minutes, that’s all I need.’

He looked doubtful. ‘I shouldn’t, really…’

She laid a hand on his arm. ‘I realise that. But I need you to trust me. If I’m wrong, nobody need ever know. But if I’m right, we’ll be sparing the family a lot of heartache. Nobody likes having to order an exhumation…’

He looked startled. ‘Exhumation?’

‘Shh,’ River cautioned. ‘Not a word people like to hear in a funeral parlour.’

He stole furtive glances up and down the hall. ‘Promise you won’t tell?’

‘I won’t tell.’ She followed him into a smaller room at the end of the corridor where Edith’s pine box rested on trestles. From a cupboard, he took a ratchet screwdriver. Unscrewing Edith took only a couple of minutes and it took even less to lift the lid off the coffin. River studied the old woman’s neck through her magnifier and nodded to herself in confirmation. ‘Bollocks,’ she muttered. Out came the camera and again she framed a sequence of shots.

The young man was dancing from foot to foot by then. ‘Are you done?’ he kept saying after every photograph.

River stepped away from the coffin and pocketed her camera. ‘I am now. Let’s get her boxed up again.’

They were back in the hall within ten minutes, just in time to see the single mourner leave Tillie Swain’s room. ‘I’ll be right back,’ River said to the young man as he headed off to usher the other woman out and she returned to Tillie.

Tillie was a disappointment, however. Because of the position in which she’d been lying after death, the blood had pooled under the skin, causing post mortem lividity in the very area that interested River. It was impossible to tell whether there was a bruise. ‘Three out of four, though,’ she said under her breath. Jane Gresham had been right. There was something going on here.

Two hours later, River walked into Ewan Rigston’s office. His face lit up when he saw her, then almost immediately became guarded as propriety kicked desire into submission. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you,’ he said, his delighted tone removing any negativity from the words.

‘I wasn’t exactly expecting to be here.’ She sat down heavily. ‘You know I did Mrs Brownrigg’s post?’

‘Aye. I was a bit surprised, I thought the professor would have done it. He usually does.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m qualified and he thought it would be straightforward.’

Ewan raked around the papers on his desk. He pulled a handwritten note out with a flourish. ‘Which it supposedly was. Heart failure, you said.’ He gave her a shrewd look. ‘But that’s not right, is it? You wouldn’t be here if it was straightforward.’

‘There was a reason I wanted to do the post myself. I had a visit this morning from Jane Gresham.’

‘Now that’s interesting.’

‘She said you’d been on her case. She was more than a little freaked out when she came to see me. She’s scared someone is bumping off these old people to try and get their hands on this manuscript.’

There was a long pause. ‘She’s not the only one. And did you find anything to support that idea?’

River nodded bleakly. ‘There was a strange little bruise on Mrs Brownrigg’s neck. Not something that would set off alarm bells, but enough to give me pause for thought. So I went back to Gibson’s and took a look at the other three cadavers. And I found a similar bruise on two of them. I couldn’t be sure of the fourth one just by looking because of post mortem lividity.’ She pulled some papers from her satchel. ‘I took a few pix.’ She fanned them out for Rigston. ‘Letty. Eddie Fairfield. Edith Clewlow.’

‘What does it mean? This bruise? Is it an injection site or what?’

River shook her head. ‘No sign of a needle mark in any of them. But it seems to be over the carotid sinus.’

‘Which is what, exactly?’

‘Your common carotid artery runs up the side of your neck, here–’ River pulled aside the collar of her shirt to demonstrate. ‘And just down here, more or less in line with your ear, it splits in two. The external carotid stays on the surface, the internal goes under your skull. Now, if you apply pressure to the carotid artery at the sinus…’ she paused to indicate what she meant–‘it can cause bradycardia. That’s slowing of the heartbeat, in lay terms. But there is a school of thought which maintains that, in cases of the elderly or those with underlying heart disease, pressure on the carotid sinus can provoke fatal cardiac arrhythmia.’

‘A school of thought?’ Rigston said weakly.

‘It’s what’s called a postulated mechanism, because obviously you can’t do experiments to see if it really does kill people or not. So nobody is entirely sure if it works. There have been documented cases of people using it for heightened sexual pleasure, though not with fatal results. But then, you tend not to want your sexual partner to end up dead, so you’d stop applying pressure at the first sign of them losing consciousness. If it does work in the way that’s been postulated, it’s a very good way to kill someone who’s elderly or has heart disease. No traces, you see. No petechial haemorrhages like you get with asphyxiation, no broken hyoid bone like you get with strangulation. It just looks like a heart attack.’

‘Would you need to be strong to kill someone like that?’

‘Not really. I don’t think it would take a lot of pressure. And it wouldn’t be hard to subdue the victims. It would probably be enough just to hold them down.’

‘So a woman could do it?’

‘If she was reasonably fit and strong.’

Rigston rubbed his jaw. ‘And you think these old dears have been murdered in this way?’

‘I’d say it’s certainly possible. It’s too much of a coincidence that I’m seeing the same odd bruise in three out of the four.’

Rigston’s expression hardened. ‘I had a feeling in my water about this. That’s not coincidence. That’s suspicious.’

‘I agree. On their own, the bruises would be relatively insignificant, but taken in tandem with what Jane told me…well, you have to take it seriously.’