The Reborn (6 page)

Dr Sissons acknowledged their entry with a nod. His corroborator today was Dr Sylvia Barnes. Rhona had met her before and they exchanged smiles through the masks. Sylvia was in her thirties, married to an engineer, with young children. Rhona and Sean had had dinner at their family home in Newton Mearns. It had been a pleasant evening, if a little domestic for her taste. It was around the time Sean had fancied himself as a father, particularly when fuelled by whisky. Rhona had feared that freshly bathed and sweet-smelling youngsters coming to say their goodnights to the assembled dinner party would only serve to encourage him. He hadn’t brought the subject up in the taxi on the way back to the flat, but she’d known it was on his mind.

The other two men were the PF and a SOCO to record the post-mortem via photographs and video. The purpose of the exercise was to establish how the victim had died. A decision on suicide, accident, murder or natural causes was the normal outcome. In many cases, this one included, it seemed a foregone conclusion, but that didn’t matter, the procedure was the same.

Sissons began sampling the body. Blood, hair (body and head) and swabs from all orifices. Then it was time for the hands. The marks on the palms had not gone unnoticed. Now they were up for discussion. The SOCO took further photographs, while the pathologist verbally recorded their existence. Rhona waited to see if anyone realised what the marks might be, before she asked for a mirror and held it up in front of the right hand.

‘It says “daisy”,’ exclaimed Slater.

Rhona moved the mirror to the left hand. ‘This one says “chain”. The words are in mirror writing. I haven’t processed the material used to write them but I’d hazard a guess and say it was probably a make-up pencil such as kohl.’

‘You think this was done by her assailant?’ Slater said.

‘It’s not smudged, so she couldn’t have used her hands after the words were written.’

‘Daisy chain. Is anyone else thinking what I’m thinking?’ Slater said.

‘What exactly
are
you thinking?’ Sissons’s voice was clipped.

‘Daisy chaining. You know. Group sex?’

Just hearing Slater say ‘sex’ made Rhona shudder. She tried to dispel the image of him indulging in group sex, or any kind of sex for that matter.

‘I checked out the term on the internet. It’s quite common. Used often for florists and organisations that involve children. Although DI Slater’s right, it does have strong sexual connotations in some contexts. The mirror writing aspect is even more interesting. Research suggests it’s an inherited ability which very few people have. Leonardo Da Vinci wrote many of his notes that way and it got him into trouble with the Church, because of its satanic associations. And pacts with the devil were traditionally written backwards.’

‘You’re suggesting the death has satanic overtones?’ Slater said.

‘I’m just telling you what I found.’

While the scientific officer took finger and handprints, Rhona revealed she’d retrieved coloured fibres or hairs from under a fingernail.

‘So which were they, fibres or hairs?’ asked Slater.

‘When I’ve had time to examine them, I’ll tell you.’

She turned her attention to the scientific officer, who was now taking a footprint since Kira had been found with one shoe missing. Rhona was struck by how small the girl’s feet were. Sissons had recorded her height as a little over five feet, but her feet were tiny even for someone that size. She had measured the shoe picked up in the maze as 22 centimetres, which meant Kira wore a 2.5 in British sizing.

‘We already know the baby was only a week shy of full term,’ said Rhona.

Sissons nodded and spoke into the microphone. ‘No bruising on the front of the body, apart from a small pressure mark round the mouth consistent with a mask. Blood tests should reveal whether chloroform was ingested.’

‘Would you say her attacker knew what they were doing?’ asked Slater.

‘It’s a classical incision. Not the preferred method now, but effective. Yes, I’d say they knew, or made a very good guess.’

Sissons lifted the dark mass of the placenta and weighed it. ‘502 grammes, 21 centimetres long, 2.23 centimetres thick.’ He moved on to the umbilical cord. ‘57 centimetres in length. The end neatly cut.’

‘And was the baby likely to be alive when it was born?’ Rhona asked.

‘A full term baby would have a strong chance of survival, even under these circumstances.’

Sissons rolled the body over.

‘Is that a tattoo?’ Rhona pointed to a mark at the base of the spine.

Sissons pulled the overhead light closer. ‘It’s a flower.’

It
was
a flower, around two centimetres in diameter, yellow-centred with a cluster of white ray florets, some tipped with red.

‘
Bellis perennis
. An eye of day,’ Rhona said.

‘What?’ Slater said.

‘A day’s eye, or daisy. So called because it heralds the day.’

‘So we have a daisy tattoo and the words “daisy chain” in mirror writing on the hands,’ Slater said.

The external findings having been recorded, Sissons began to open up the body. The stomach contents, removed and weighed, would end up with Rhona at the lab. At first glance, the meal resembled burger and chips, favourite food of the masses.

‘Her boyfriend said she went to buy candyfloss,’ Slater said.

‘I don’t see any evidence of that, but Dr MacLeod will confirm.’

‘If he’s lying about it, he could be lying about other things.’

‘Did he admit to being the father of the child?’ Rhona asked.

Slater shook his head. ‘He said it wasn’t his, but he didn’t care. Can we confirm this without a baby?’

‘I took blood from the umbilical cord,’ replied Rhona. ‘We can use it in a paternity test.’

‘So we can tell?’ Slater repeated.

‘Yes.’

The time spent on a post-mortem depended on the pathologist. Each had their own way of working and their own speed. Sissons was neither too fast nor too slow. Despite this, Rhona could sense Slater’s desperation to get away. She had caught a strong smell of cigarette smoke in the changing room. Chances were he just needed a fag. At one point she wondered if Sissons had picked up on this and was deliberately slowing down the proceedings.

Slater’s nicotine craving eventually won. He muttered something about needing the toilet and absented himself. They were at the final stages anyway and knew little more than they had surmised in the incident tent, the fibres Rhona had lifted from the body being the only possible material link with Kira’s assailant.

Slater’s boiler suit lay discarded in the changing room, his overcoat gone from the peg. Rhona stripped hers off and checked her phone. There were no messages. She did a quick mental calculation. Court proceedings could be delayed for any number of reasons. Janice had promised to call as soon as she had any word.

Outside, the air was sharp with frost. She remembered leaving the High Court with McNab after the Mary Healey case on a day like this. They’d celebrated the outcome with coffee at the Central Café, one of the few surviving old-fashioned Italian cafés that had served Glasgow well. She turned in that direction.

She was relieved to find no sign of Rocco, the proprietor. She didn’t know if she could cope if he mentioned McNab. She slid alongside a red formica table that held the usual accompaniments for Rocco’s famous fish suppers: salt, vinegar and sauce. Spurning the menu card, she ordered a large mug of black coffee, while questioning her sanity in coming here. She had a sense of starting to live her life backwards, a sure sign of growing old, or going mad. McNab would have made fun of her for it.

They had sat at this table the last time, McNab looking half dead through lack of sleep and worry. She’d smelt whisky on his breath and known that as soon as she left, he would supplement his coffee with more.

If he were sitting opposite her now, they would be discussing the latest case. She tried to imagine what his take on it would be, what questions he would ask. McNab had a habit of getting right to the point.

‘Why was she in the Hall of Mirrors on her own?’ The voice in her head was as clear as if he were there. ‘Kids would go in there together for a laugh, but not by themselves.’

It was such an obvious question. Rhona hoped Slater had thought to ask it.

6

The strategy meeting had been called for mid-afternoon, leaving time for the post-mortem to establish the cause of death. That gave her a couple of hours in the lab before she had to show her face again. Her repeated checks on her mobile had been futile. Rhona resisted attempting to call Janice. If she was in court, her phone would be switched off anyway.

She settled down to some work, relishing the silence. Kira’s case wasn’t the only one in the running at the moment, but it was the most serious and therefore the one occupying her mind. Knife crime was fairly common in Glasgow. The analysis of stab wounds, and the knives used to inflict them, was well documented. But Kira’s death was unique. Rhona could find no record of anything similar happening in the UK in her computer searches.

Her examination of the body had produced three interesting pieces of evidence. The hair or fibre from under the fingernail, the scrawled mirror writing done with what she suspected was a make-up pencil, and a deposit of something she believed might have come from the handle of the knife the perpetrator had wielded.

Professional knives such as those used in slaughterhouses and in hunting required handles that weren’t slippery even when covered in blood. Shark skin provided the perfect material for this. Sharply pointed placoid scales, also known as dermal teeth or dentricles, gave the shark’s skin the feeling of sandpaper.

Magnified under an electron microscope, the unique shape of the scales she’d found was clearly visible. The perpetrator had deposited microscopic dentricles on the body as they performed the Caesarean. The police hadn’t recovered the weapon but at least they knew a bit more about it. She took a micrograph of the enhanced image to show at the meeting, then examined the fibre.

The detailed analysis and comparison of fibre evidence fell into three or four sequential phases. First came microscopy to compare samples and establish type, followed by microspectrophotometry (MSP) to record a colour graph. Thin layer chromotography (TLC) could then be used to strip out the dye using an appropriate mixture of solvents, and for man-made fibres, the use of infrared spectroscopy to confirm the chemical identity already established from the fibre’s appearance under the microscope.

Most work on hairs was to do with comparison. Hairs turned up everywhere, inside balaclavas and stocking masks, on clothing, in bedding and often on blunt weapons. Matching of hairs could place an accused at the scene of crime, just as a victim’s hairs found on an accused provided a link between them.

Human and animal hairs were essentially the same. Both consisted of an inner core, known as the medulla. This was surrounded by a cortex enclosed in a thin outer layer called the cuticle. The easiest way to imagine the form was to use the image of a pencil, where the lead was the medulla, the wood the cortex and the paint the cuticle.

The item under the microscope was not man-made fibre, despite its bright red colour, as she had first thought. It was a hair dyed bright red. When present in human hairs, the medulla was amorphous in appearance, the width generally less than one-third the overall diameter of the hair shaft. Very fine human hair and naturally blonde hair contained no medulla at all. The hair she was viewing under the microscope had a distinctive medulla and had come from an animal. Which animal, Rhona had no idea.

She didn’t hear the door open, so engrossed was she in her study. The suited figure was behind her before she registered its presence.

‘Chrissy!’ Rhona stood up and threw her arms around her visitor. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Sam’s at the university showing Michael off to anyone in the Faculty of Medicine who might be remotely interested, so I thought I’d pop in and see you.’

Above the mask, Chrissy’s eyes searched hers.

‘I heard about the girl in the park. What have you got?’

Rhona waved her to the microscope.

Chrissy settled herself on the stool and took a long look. ‘A hair, but not human.’

‘I agree.’

‘Even though it’s bright red.’

Rhona was about to remind Chrissy when her own hair had been a similar colour.

Chrissy got in first. ‘I liked my hair that colour. I’d do it again but I might scare wee Michael.’

Rhona laughed. ‘I miss you.’

‘Not for much longer.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m coming back.’

‘But it’s too soon.’

‘My mum’s desperate to look after her first grandchild, even if he is black.’ She grinned. ‘Hey, now the USA has a black President, it’s cool to be black.’

‘And your dad?’

‘Mum put up with a lot over the years, but when the old bastard tried to stop her seeing the baby, she threw him out.’

Chrissy was the only girl in a family of wayward boys ruled by a domineering father. One son had broken the trend, Patrick, Chrissy’s favourite. He’d left, hiding his homosexuality from his parents. Chrissy had covered for him, desperate that her father and brothers shouldn’t find out and deny her mother access to her oldest son.

‘Well, it would be great to have you back,’ said Rhona.

‘So tell me about the funfair.’

When Rhona had finished, Chrissy shook her head in disbelief. ‘It sounds like an episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
.’

‘What?’

‘I got hooked on the box set of
Buffy
when I was breastfeeding. My God, can that girl kick ass. And the boyfriend, Angel, is hot.’

‘Didn’t you get enough witchcraft on the torso case?’

Chrissy had met Sam while on that case. It was his Nigerian mother who’d alerted them to the practices of a witchdoctor in Kano, helping them solve it.