A Dreadful Past (19 page)

‘Do we,' Dr D'Acre turned to Hennessey, ‘have an identification for the deceased?'

‘Not yet confirmed, ma'am,' Hennessey replied. ‘The forensic science laboratory at Wetherby phoned just before I left the police station informing us that they had found a letter in the deceased's jacket pocket, addressed to one Brian Guest at an address in Holgate.'

‘Near the railway station?' Dr D'Acre commented.

‘Yes, ma'am,' Hennessey confirmed.

‘I've been there a few times over the years in my capacity as a forensic pathologist – it's that sort of area.' Dr D'Acre smiled. ‘So … Mary …' Dr D'Acre spoke into the microphone, which hung at mouth level on the end of an angle-poise arm bolted into the ceiling between two filament bulbs, for the benefit of Mary, the audio typist, ‘… there is no confirmed identification at this time so we'll stay with the unique reference number, if you please, Mary, whatever that is, whatever is next on the list.' Dr D'Acre paused for a few moments and then stated, ‘The deceased is a male of north-western European racial extraction. He appears undernourished and to be in his mid-to late forties. He is noticeably short in terms of stature. Can you pass the tape measure please, Eric?'

Eric Filey obediently turned and took a yellow retractable metal tape measure from the surface of the bench which stood behind him and handed it to Dr D'Acre.

‘Thank you, Eric.' Dr D'Acre took the tape measure and began to draw it outwards. ‘You know, I confess I think I could manage this bit all by myself. He being such a short man in life … but let's be as accurate as possible – it could be crucial to his identification. Can you hold this end by the head, if you will, please? I'll take the other end to the feet. What reading do you get, Eric?'

‘Four feet eleven inches,' Eric Filey reported, ‘or about one hundred and fifty centimetres.'

‘Thank you.' Dr D'Acre released her end of the tape measure and it retracted. Eric Filey replaced the tape measure on the bench. ‘So that is a height of four feet eleven inches or one hundred and fifty centimetres,' Dr D'Acre again spoke into the microphone. ‘No heavyweight boxer here.' She forced open the jaw and peered into the mouth. ‘Dental records won't be able to help you with his identification, Mr Hennessey. Some missing teeth … ancient, really ancient fillings but nothing recent – nothing that seems to be within the last eleven years that dentists are required to keep records for … There is a massive build-up of plaque. He was not a man who took care of his teeth. He had advanced gum disease and would have had very bad halitosis. I'll extract a tooth which will give us his age plus or minus one year – that should help with confirming his identity. I note the beginning of rigor establishing itself which puts the time of death to within the last twelve hours but, as I have said, that is not really for me to determine … The how, yes, but not the when. That is for fictional pathologists in misleading television dramas.' She turned to Hennessey. ‘And that's as close as you're going to get.' She said it with a smile. ‘We provide the why but never the when.'

‘Yes, ma'am.' George Hennessey nodded slightly and returned the smile. ‘I fully understand.'

‘Good.' Dr D'Acre returned her attention to the corpse upon the dissecting table. ‘I confess those television police dramas have done much damage to people's perception of the role of the forensic pathologist.' She pondered the corpse and then continued: ‘Self-inflected tattoos are noted on the forearms of the deceased, one of which seems to be in the rough shape of a cross … no initials but definitely self-inflicted as if they are so-called “gaol house tats”, and thus strongly indicating prior convictions. SOCO will be here later to take fingerprints so you'll likely find his identity that way,' Dr D'Acre informed him. ‘His fingerprints are very likely to be on the Police National Computer.'

‘Yes, ma'am,' Hennessey replied, ‘I have a very strong feeling that we'll know him … I instinctively feel that he is connected to an ongoing inquiry.'

‘Well … I dare say you'll find out very soon whether you're right or not. So to continue … the abdomen is beginning to swell with the build-up of gases, again indicating death within the last twelve hours, but only indicating,' Dr D'Acre emphasized. ‘I'll take a quick peek in the stomach. I am performing a standard midline incision.' She took a scalpel from the instrument tray and made an incision into the flesh from the neck down to the middle of the corpse. She then drew an incision from that point down to the left thigh and a second down to the right thigh. She then peeled the skin back from the incisions. ‘Yes,' she commented, ‘the stomach is beginning to expand. Can we have the extractor fan on, please, Eric?'

Obediently, as he was earlier, Eric Filey walked a few feet to this left and flicked a switch. An extractor fan began to whirr softly and steadily.

‘Deep breath, gentlemen.' Dr D'Acre turned her head to one side and penetrated the stomach with the scalpel, allowing gases to escape with a loud but short-lived ‘hiss'. ‘Well, that was not bad,' she announced once she had exhaled and had taken another breath. ‘Not as bad as the so-called “bloated floater”. Poor man. He was pulled out of the Foss one summer, so bloated with gas that he could have exploded at any time. You have doubtless heard the story, Chief Inspector. We put the fans on full blast, Eric left the laboratory, then I took a deep breath, stabbed the stomach and ran out after Eric. It was a full hour before the air in here was breathable once more, probably more than an hour, in fact.'

‘Yes, ma'am.' Hennessey replied diplomatically, having heard the story of the ‘bloated floater' quite often.

‘There was no way of identifying him so they gave him a name, John Brown, and buried him in an unmarked grave with two other paupers. I must visit his grave; I have not been there for a while. In fact, I think I'll go there after I have completed here – we have no other work to do at the moment. Would you like to accompany me, Chief Inspector?'

‘Yes, ma'am,' Hennessey replied. ‘Yes, I would like that.'

‘Good, we'll do that, you and I. So … to the present corpse,' Dr D'Acre continued. ‘Well, I think I can detect the reason for his look of undernourishment … he didn't masticate.'

‘Sorry, ma'am?' Hennessey asked. ‘Masticate? What does that mean?'

‘Chew,' Dr D'Acre explained. ‘He swallowed his food without chewing it first. It's the reason why the Almighty in his wisdom gave us teeth. It's not so we can tear flesh from bone like the early hunter gatherers did, but rather so we can chew our food. It's the chewing action which releases the nutrients in food. You cannot assume the stomach will do that job … you, me, all of us must chew our food if we are to obtain the most benefit from it.'

‘Yes, ma'am,' Hennessey replied. ‘I'll remember that.'

‘I can even venture to say that his last meal was a pizza. So inefficient was his eating practice that I can detect thin strips of ham and bits of pineapple. He would have felt full but his food would have passed straight through him without depositing any goodness on the way. He would have pretty well flushed all the goodness in that meal down the toilet.' Dr D'Acre moved away from the stomach and pondered the throat of the deceased. ‘This will be the cause of death, I am pretty well certain: a severed carotid artery. Death would have been almost instantaneous – a few seconds of consciousness when he would have known what had happened … and then … and then … eternity. May God rest his wretched soul. You know, I won't make a definitive statement but I can detect a right-to-left tearing of the flesh around the wound which suggests a left-handed attacker, if the attacker was standing behind him.'

‘That is interesting,' Hennessey commented. ‘That could be very useful. I will make a special note of that observation.'

‘Only an indication,' Dr D'Acre emphasized. ‘Only a possibility.'

‘Nonetheless, possibly very useful,' Hennessey replied. ‘It is something to note, as I said.'

‘Well, that concludes the post-mortem. My finding is one of death by the severing of the carotid artery. I will, of course, send a blood sample to the forensic science laboratory at Wetherby and ask that they trawl for poison but I am pretty well certain that it will be a negative result, there being no outward signs of poisoning. And the identity has still to be confirmed. So, Mr Hennessey, let's get out of these greens and I'll see you in the car park. We can leave Eric to wrap up here. Yes?'

‘Yes.' Hennessey smiled. ‘In the car park.'

Thirty minutes later Louise D'Acre parked her 1947 red-and-white Riley RMA by the kerb outside Fulford Cemetery. She and Hennessey walked from the car to a patch of closely mown grass within the cemetery which itself was surrounded by solid, Victoria-era housing. They stood in silence, side by side.

‘They planted him just here. This is his final resting place.' Louise D'Acre looked down at the grass, breaking the silence. ‘Just here with two other paupers, but they were already there and so John Brown's coffin got the top place. He was somebody's son, maybe even someone's brother, possibly even someone's father, but he became lost in the world and nobody noticed him missing. Nobody had reported him as a missing person so they called him John Brown and put him in the plainest of pine coffins and laid him atop of two others like him. I felt I had to attend the funeral … There was me, the priest, the four men who lowered the coffin and another man from the funeral directors who sprinkled a little soil.' She fell silent for a few moments. ‘I like to lay a flower when I come,' she continued. ‘This time I didn't bring one. I will bring a flower next time I visit … which will be in a few months' time, that being the sort of frequency I visit.'

George Hennessey moved his right hand slightly away from him so that the edge of his hand touched the edge of Louise D'Acre's left hand.

‘Don't put too much emphasis on my observation that the killer might be left-handed.' Louise D'Acre kept her hand pressed against Hennessey's. ‘A right-handed person standing in front of the victim moving the blade in a so-called “backhanded” motion will cause similar injuries.'

‘I'll bear that in mind,' Hennessey replied. ‘But thank you anyway.'

‘Twenty years ago?' The publican of the George and Dragon sat in the public bar which was not yet open for the day's business. A middle-aged woman in a smock ran a vacuum cleaner up and down the same area of carpet as if reluctant to leave the room, seemingly anxious to overhear some snippet of conversation between the publican and the police officers. A young man in a black shirt and a red bowtie with a gold nameplate busied himself racking up behind the bar while a young woman, also in black and also behind the bar, pulled line cleaner through the pumps and emptied it into galvanized iron buckets. The publican himself was evidently dressed in his ‘off-duty' clothing: faded denim jeans, sandals without socks and a loud yellow T-shirt on which ‘I Woke up like This' was emblazoned in black. ‘Let's see … twenty years … well, yes, I was head honcho here by then, probably about two years in the post. I had just taken over from old Ken Short. He really turned this pub round and made it a money-spinner. He was able to retire when he was still in his fifties, so maybe not-so-old Ken Short. He and his wife had a villa in Spain. They have both returned to the UK now. He's pushing eighty, as is Muriel, his wife, and his health particularly is failing. So yes … I was here then.'

‘It's a gang of four we are interested in,' Yellich advised. ‘We were told they drank here from time to time about twenty years ago. They were regular enough to know you, we are told, and address you by your first name, but our informant was at pains to point out that you didn't seem to like them and were not wildly happy about them coming here. They were three men and one woman. Two of the men were tall … one was apparently a bit of a loudmouth, and then one small man and a short woman. The woman wore a jacket with the logo of an American baseball or football team on the back. You know, something like the San Francisco 49ers or the Green Bay Packers … some such name like that.'

‘This is a big ask.' Frank Peabody glanced up at the dark-stained wood-panelled ceiling. ‘I'd like to help … but remembering one customer or a group of customers from twenty years ago, well, that's not easy. You know, my brother-in-law is a school teacher. He's older than me and been a school teacher since he was in his early twenties. He once said to me about his past pupils, “You remember the types, you remember the good ones and you remember the bad ones, but the rest, and that is by far the majority, just fade from your memory”. I said I knew exactly what he meant because it's the same in the licensed retail trade – you remember the good customers and you remember the troublemakers but the rest … and they are also by far the majority, the rest, well … they just fade from your mind, but it certainly sounds like I should remember the gang you mention … three men and a woman, who knew me by my first name …'

‘If it helps you,' Carmen Pharoah sat opposite Frank Peabody and found herself becoming increasingly annoyed by the cleaning woman who steadfastly refused to move away and work in another room, ‘the person who told us you might remember the four people we are looking for described a very minor incident one evening. He said that one of the tall men, the loudmouthed one, in fact, was wearing a jacket, and he put his pint of beer in the top inside pocket of his jacket then lifted the lapel, thus bringing the glass up to his lips, then further lifted the lapel, thus tipping the glass towards him and then drinking from it, and when he'd done that he said to you, “A new way of drinking it, Frank”.'

‘Oh …' Frank Peabody, clean-shaven with short blonde hair, raised a finger. ‘My heavens …' He glanced down at the dark red, deep pile carpet. ‘It's all coming back to me now, it's all flooding back. That crew … and yes, your information-giver was right – I didn't like them in the pub but they gave me no reason to refuse to serve them. And yes, they used to come in, quite often late at night, not usually early doors drinkers, but occasionally they did come in during the early evening and if they called in here for a quick one when on their way somewhere they often used to boast about beating people up or threatening to beat people up, often saying, “We'll beat somebody up on the way home tonight”.'