The Chalon Heads (21 page)
Sixteen stainless-steel dissecting tables are set out in two long rows, flanked along the walls by continuous ranges of stainless steel benches and sinks. Tomorrow, Monday, the busiest day of the week, every one of the tables will be occupied by a corpse, but today only one is in operation. On the big table, Eva’s head, lying pathetically on its side, looks forlorn and lost.
Mehta introduces Brock to his assistant, Annie, a young woman with thick, shoulder-length hair. Annie gives Brock a quick, toothy smile and gets on with her preparations, setting out instruments and sample jars on the worktop. She has heard Mehta’s patter a hundred times before.
‘We’re just waiting for the results of the Hep C and HIV tests. Shouldn’t be long now,’ Mehta explains, and almost immediately a woman in a white lab coat appears at the plastic doors, and nods to Mehta. Annie watches as he examines the paper the woman offers him. He nods and asks a question or two, then returns to Brock’s side. ‘All clear,’ he says.
Annie has already interpreted the results from his body language, and has put on a white face mask and plastic goggles. She stands at the end of the table, takes Eva’s head firmly between her raw pink rubber-gloved hands, and holds it upright, face up to the ceiling. Mehta moves round to the far side of the table, pulling on his gloves, and waves Brock forward.
‘Now, I did mean what I said about needing more, Brock,’ Mehta says. ‘You see, they’ve cut through the neck high up, so we’re missing both the hyoid bone and the thyroid cartilage, which, if we’d found them to be damaged, could have been indicative of manual strangulation. In fact, one of the things I’m sure you’ve already considered, Brock, is that the reason we’re being given only this much of her could be to establish her death and identity without revealing something else.’
Brock grunts. ‘Like?’
‘Like the cause of death, or maybe something else entirely—perhaps she was raped, or was pregnant, for example. But all may not be entirely lost. Although we are missing the thyroid gland itself, pressure on it during an assault can result in abnormally high levels of thyroid hormone in the blood, so we can test for that. However, as you can see, there’s no great congestion of the face, nor swelling of the conjunctiva of the eyes, which would have indicated occlusion of the air passages and obstruction of the veins from the head.’
‘Isn’t the obvious cause of death having her head cut off?’ Brock asks bluntly.
Mehta chuckles. ‘Actually, that’s the one cause we can rule out. She was already dead, probably for several hours, when the head was separated. Look, you see, no lividity.
But if we turn her over . . .’
Annie rotates the head face down against the steel table, and Mehta lifts the long black hair away from the scalp, revealing a darker purplish discoloration on this side.
‘After she died, she lay on her back and the blood drained to that lower side, becoming a permanent lividity stain after a few hours. Now, if the neck had been cut initially, the lividity pattern would taper away towards the open wound, where the blood could drain away. But as you see, there’s no sign of that. The severing of the head took place after lividity had established itself, and was carried out using a broad-bladed weapon of some kind . . .’
He points to the flesh of the throat. ‘You see the length of the strokes. Heavier than a carving knife, I would imagine, lighter than an axe. A cleaver perhaps. And the spinal cord severed with a single heavy anterior blow with the same instrument.’
The pathologist pauses while Brock looks closely at the exposed white bone.
‘All right,’ he says, straightening up. ‘And the time of death?’
The pathologist shakes his head sadly. ‘Rigor has disappeared from the facial muscles, and there is no sign of the onset of putrefaction. But the temperature that the doctor who attended the scene took from the inside of the mouth was only five degrees centigrade, on a warm summer’s morning, so it’s quite possible that the head was frozen or chilled, and if that was the case, I couldn’t hazard a guess. Sorry,’ Mehta continues. ‘We’ve taken swabs of the cosmetics, to see if we can match them to those found in the house and the apartment.’
‘Could you say how long they might have been applied before death?’
‘That would be clever, now wouldn’t it? But I’m afraid not. I can tell you that her eye makeup hadn’t been disturbed by tears, and her lipstick could have been smudged by a kiss, but I couldn’t add any scientific substance to what you can observe for yourself.
‘Shall we proceed?’ Mehta asks, and takes hold of the head while Annie turns away for a scalpel. While Mehta holds Eva steady, Annie plants the tip of the knife firmly into her scalp above the left ear, and draws it slowly across the top of her head until she reaches the right ear. Then she works back across the cut, easing the scalp away from the skull with the blade, until the whole forward half is loosened. She puts the scalpel aside and takes hold of the flap of scalp with both hands and folds it neatly forward, until it lies, inside out, over Eva’s face. She picks up the scalpel again and detaches the back half of the scalp similarly, pulling it away so that the top of the skull is entirely exposed.
Annie turns back to the bench and lifts a power tool from a wall bracket. It has a circular saw blade at one end, and a heavy waterproofed cable extending from the other to the wall. Mehta nods to Brock to step back, while he continues to hold the head still for his assistant.
Brock turns away. He has known young officers to become fascinated, even obsessed, with this place and others like it, taking every opportunity to attend autopsies, not because they were ghoulish but because they thought that they sensed, in the calm efficiency and control of the procedures, and the lurid reality of the evidence, that such places contained some great truth about their own mortality. But this is an illusion, Brock thinks. The only truths here are the little ones, commonplace and sordid, that Mehta and his colleagues can tease out of the fabric of broken bodies.
Annie’s bone saw is screaming as it cuts two clean arcs across the top of Eva’s skull. At last it stops, and Annie sets it aside. She prises a steel tool into the cut, turns it, and the top of the skull cracks open like a coconut shell. She lifts away the separated piece, and looks inside to the brain.
Brock is thinking of Starling’s final comments, about people being merely sacks of potatoes. The sentiment is undeniable in here. Yesterday, perhaps, this beautiful young woman was a personality, changing other people’s lives; today she is being taken apart with cool precision on a stainless-steel disassembly line for failed human machines. The miracle isn’t that these human contraptions stop functioning all of a sudden, but that they somehow keep going for as long as they do.
Which is Keller’s modest aim in life, apparently: to keep going until tomorrow. It seems a reasonable ambition.
Annie has removed Eva’s brain from the skull, and turns to lay it in the pan of a weighing machine on the side bench. Dr Mehta releases his grip on Eva’s head and flexes his arms as Annie puts her hands under a running tap, then takes up a marker pen and writes on the white board fixed to the wall above the bench:
name: Starling
brain: 1386
Meanwhile Mehta has begun work on Eva’s brain. He holds a long, straight-bladed, square-ended carving knife, which he uses first to separate the brain into its component parts—cerebrum, cerebellum and stem—and then to cut them neatly into quarter-inch slices. He spreads them out on the steel worktop, with the expertise of a chef on a TV cooking programme. Each slice has the pattern of a spreading tree, like a sectioned floret from a cauliflower. Mehta lifts three pieces and drops them into a jar of fluid in front of him. The rest he leaves for Annie to scoop into a small plastic bag while he runs his gloved hands under the tap and returns to the head on the table.
‘All looks normal. But I was wondering earlier about her nose . . .’
‘What about it?’
‘Let’s take a look, shall we?’
Gently he folds Eva’s scalp back over her missing section of skull, and considers her face. ‘Dear, dear.’ He chuckles. ‘Those naughty dogs! Didn’t leave us much of the left side, did they? Labradors, you say? I’ll be a bit more respectful next time I meet one. But the right nostril is quite intact.’ He lifts a scalpel and slices into it. ‘Ahaa! Have a close look, Brock!’ Mehta beams.
‘If I must. What am I looking at?’
Annie stands impassive in the background while the two men peer at Eva’s nostril. She removes her protective glasses and watches unblinking as her boss clowns around. Brock is aware of this, thinking that she looks like every efficient female assistant contemplating an older male supervisor, silently willing him to stop wasting time so that she can get on with her next job. He wonders if Kathy ever looks at him in that way.
‘The membranes in the lining of her nose. They’re damaged, see? In fact . . .’ Mehta delicately scrapes the flesh with the tip of his scalpel ‘. . . there’s been so much tissue damage that the cartilage dividing the nostrils has been eaten into. And it looks as if she may have an abscess in the bone of the sinus.’
‘Cocaine?’ Brock suggests.
He nods. ‘She had quite a habit.’
‘So, she wasn’t such a good girl, after all. A heavy user, you say?’
‘A gram-a-day girl,’ the pathologist pronounces decisively. ‘Probably been on the stuff for at least a year.’
‘Really?’ Brock says. ‘That is interesting.’
‘Didn’t you expect it?’ Mehta asks.
‘We haven’t found any drugs so far.’
‘What about signs of bleeding?’
‘Nosebleeds?’
‘Yes. Especially at night, while she slept. Cocaine shrinks the blood vessels on contact when it’s inhaled. The circulation to the membranes would be impeded, and tissue would die and become detached. A girl this dedicated, her pillow would very likely have blood on it in the morning.’
‘Interesting. Something to look for. Many thanks.’
‘Not to mention the money,’ the pathologist goes on. ‘A gram would set her back—what? A hundred quid? That’s forty thousand a year. Strictly cash. Good grief, that’s more than my kids demand for their pocket money!’
Five minutes later Dr Mehta is still chuckling about that as Annie puts the plastic bag of Eva’s brain back inside her head, packs out the cavity firmly with shredded cotton waste, replaces the skull top and sews up her scalp with twine. By the time she’s finished, and has hosed down the head and table, Eva’s right profile looks almost herself again, wet from a swim in her pool, apart from the nasty damage to her nose.
K
athy spotted Brock on the far side of the reception area, talking into his phone. From the set of his shoulders and the look on his face she thought he was having an argument, and waited for several minutes while his conversation continued. Eventually he snapped the instrument off and turned towards her, frowning deeply. He hardly acknowledged her as they went out into the street, and continued to be preoccupied as they walked to the car.
‘Been raining, has it?’ he asked suddenly when they reached it, as if he’d only just noticed the wet pavements and tarmac shiny black.
‘Yes, we had a thunderstorm. More on the way. Didn’t you hear it?’
‘You can’t hear anything down there. Did you track down Sally Malone?’
‘I’ve got two addresses, both in South London. One her home in Peckham, and the other a business address, Sew Sally.’
Kathy got behind the wheel, conscious of him watching her as she put the car into gear and moved off. She continued to have the unsettling impression that he was examining her as she drove south towards Vauxhall Bridge.
‘I called at the Cinema Hollywood on the way. They were taking the manager in to make a statement. She says that she knows Eva well, but insists that they never saw her accompanied by a man.’
Brock said nothing.
‘Anything useful from Dr Mehta?’ she asked eventually, when his silence showed no sign of breaking.
Brock grunted and turned to stare gloomily out of the window at the post-modernist office building that MI6 flaunted at the south end of the bridge. ‘It seems that Eva used cocaine.’
‘Really?’
‘As much as a gram a day.’
‘Hell. Surely Sammy must have known.’
‘One would think so. We’ll have to search the house and the flat again. Leon and his pals need to come up with more than they have so far.’
Kathy wasn’t sure if there was criticism in this. The old man definitely seemed out of sorts. ‘That reminds me, Leon phoned. He wants to meet us after we’ve seen Malone,’ she said. ‘He suggested six o’clock at Queen Anne’s Gate. He said it’s important, but he wouldn’t let on what it was.’
Brock grunted again. He was wiping the side of his face with a handkerchief, then examining the white cloth. He caught her sideways glance at him as she drove.
‘I thought . . . Stupid question, but I haven’t got any spots of blood on me by any chance, have I?’ he asked.
‘No. No, there’s nothing.’
He put the handkerchief away. ‘I always feel I need a shower when I come out of that place.’
‘Doesn’t he give you a face mask?’
‘He doesn’t bother when they’re HIV negative. But the test is a quick one, and not a hundred per cent reliable.’
‘He seems to know what he’s doing.’
‘Hmm. His assistant is good. Annie. Have you met her?’
Kathy shook her head. Large dollops of rain were beginning to smack the windscreen again, the tyres swishing as they hit puddles on the road surface.
‘Very efficient. Don’t know how she puts up with old Sundeep.’
‘No choice, I expect,’ Kathy said, and immediately became aware again of Brock’s glance in her direction.
Sally Malone’s home was one of a curving terrace of small late-Victorian houses, each with its own rather absurdly grand portico sheltering its front door. There was a builder’s skip at the kerb in front of hers, and several of the houses appeared to be in the process of restoration. Estate agents’ boards cluttered the silent street. There was no reply to their knock, so they returned to the car and drove west along Peckham High Street towards Camberwell.
