Night Visit (27 page)

Her
lips tightened at the second use of her first name. ‘Inspector Forrest,’ she said very formally, ‘I am a pathologist. I deal in the evidence of the tissues. That’s my job. I might try to understand what’s happened, but in this case I might lead you horribly astray because I don’t really know. At the PM I tried to reconstruct the events. At first I thought you might be right.’ She smiled. ‘Even the falling-off-the-operating-table theory. But I couldn’t work out any scenario that fitted all the forensic evidence. I just couldn’t. It’s far too weird,’ she finished helplessly.

Forrest
cleared his throat. How many cases had they worked on together? Sixteen? Seventeen? And she couldn’t bring herself to call him David? Once he would neither have noticed nor have cared. Now he did both. And it annoyed him. He stood up.

She
tried to mollify him. ‘Maybe what you could do with is a forensic psychiatrist. It’s their job to understand the warped and sick mind.’

Almost
at the door Forrest turned. ‘And you believe that’s what this is the result of? A warped and sick mind?’

She
didn’t even bother to answer.
It
had
to
be
. Forrest ploughed on, still attempting to draw her out. ‘Any idea what weapon was used?’

Karys
shook her head. ‘As I said, maybe a baseball bat, an iron bar. Something like that to the back of the head. And you saw the tie for yourself.’ She knew she was deliberately not answering his question.

‘
And...?’ He was suddenly understandably squeamish. ‘And the, umm, the other wound?’

Karys
took her glasses off to rub her tired eyes. ‘He was a plumber,’ she said. ‘A Stanley knife is sharp, isn’t it?’

But
the vision that appeared in front of her eyes was provoked not by Colin Wilson’s profession but by the suggestion of the person who had drawn together the edges of the wound. ‘Or a scalpel,’ she said in a voice not much more distinct than a whisper. ‘He could have used a scalpel. Like a...’ She suddenly found she couldn’t go on. She felt sickened by it all.

But
the concept of a ‘surgeon’ had been born.

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