Tooth and Claw (7 page)

‘I know, but there are limits.’

When he had first been diagnosed with synaesthesia, some years back, Lapslie had gone along to a support group of similar sufferers. It had been Sonia’s idea. She had somehow thought that sharing his experiences with others, and sharing theirs, would help him come to terms with his problem. It hadn’t, and he had soon left, dismayed by the whole touchy-feely experience, but one thing did stay with him. One of the men in the group, a taxi driver named Andy, had suffered from a form of synaesthesia where smells were associated in his mind with particular colours. Lapslie sometimes felt as if he understood how that might work. And to him, the smell of the mortuary was khaki: dark brown and dark green mixed together into a deep, unpleasant mess.

Three large post-mortem tables dominated the room, air conditioning vents hovering over each one like big metal snakes about to strike. Either they were switched off or the fans were so quiet that he could neither hear nor taste them. The sides of the tables were lipped to prevent bodily fluids from
dripping over the edge and their surfaces slanted to allow the same bodily fluids to trickle down to a drain at the bottom, from where they were presumably whisked away and stored for future disposal. Whatever happened to them, Lapslie didn’t want to know. He just hoped they weren’t dumped straight into the sewers.

Jane Catherall was standing over the middle table, where a naked body was laid out. She had a minidisc recorder in her hand, and was dictating notes on her first, visual examination of the body.

Standing
over
it? No, standing
beside
it. Jane Catherall was, as she had once told Lapslie, a survivor of poliomyelitis, a disease that attacked the nervous system and could have been cured, or at least treated, if she had been born a few years later when the vaccine was widely available. As it was, she had spent a number of formative years incarcerated in an iron lung, and now, in her middle age, she was just over five feet tall: enough to reach the table, but not to reach over it. Her spine was twisted, her stomach distended – a sign that her internal organs were swollen and misplaced – and her eyes protruded further than normal, giving her a perpetually surprised look. She was also the sweetest person that Lapslie had ever met, although he would never tell her so. Her character was pugnacious enough already.

‘Lemons,’ she said in her warm brandy voice without looking up.

‘Dr Catherall. You startled me.’

‘I’m pleased that my elfin ability to surprise has not waned with the passing years.’ She smiled up at him.

‘Did you say “lemons”?’

‘Yes. Your sergeant was wondering about the smell, and how we get it out of our hair and our skin. The answer is lemons.’

‘Sorry,’ Emma said, discomfited. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

‘No offence taken. Everyone asks, at some stage. It’s usually the first question asked by journalists and by the new lab assistants who start work here. We get through quite a few, as you can probably imagine.’

‘So what is it about lemons?’ Lapslie asked.

‘The citric acid and the essential oils are excellent at dissolving the odour of decay that surrounds us during the course of our work. There are various products on the market that are meant to do the trick, and there is not a week goes past when I do not receive a telephone call or an email from some company who claim to have developed the perfect solution, but the fact remains that half a lemon rubbed all over the body does the trick.’

‘You live and learn,’ Lapslie said.

‘I heard that you had been assigned to this case. It’s a pleasure to be working with you again.’

‘And you, Jane,’ he replied.

‘Would you like a coffee?’

‘No, thanks.’ Emma shook her head too, and Lapslie indicated the body on the table. ‘I’m keen to see what you make of it.’

It
. Lapslie suddenly wondered when Catherine Charnaud had changed from
her
to
it
. Back at the house, when the body had been only an hour or so from warmth and vitality, back when the blood and the saliva had still been wet, both Lapslie and Emma had regarded her as a person. Now, spread out naked on the metal table, the blood making the back of her torso and legs noticeably darker than the front as it drained downwards under the force of gravity, she was just meat. Just flesh. Despite the fact that she was young, attractive and naked, lying with her breasts and pubic area exposed, Lapslie could feel nothing for her apart from a diffuse sympathy. Whatever had been there,
whatever had provided the vital spark, had drained away from her in the same way that her bodily fluids would shortly drain away as Dr Catherall cut her open and scooped out her internal organs for examination.

‘Mark?’

‘Sorry. Just thinking.’

Dr Catherall smiled gently at him. ‘This place is very conducive to deep questions about mortality and the nature of life. Questions, but no answers. I can tell you why people died – that I can do very well. What I can’t tell you is why they lived in the first place.’

Lapslie nodded. ‘“Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say,”’ he quoted softly. ‘“Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day. The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.”’

‘Yeats, I do believe. From
Oedipus at Colonus
.’ She glanced over at Emma. ‘Mark quoted Robert Browning at me when we first met. His erudition is showing.’

‘I apologise,’ Lapslie said. ‘I realise that all policemen are meant to reach for their guns when they hear the word “culture”. I’ll try to control myself in future. Are you ready to carry out the post mortem?’

‘As ready as I will ever be,’ Dr Catherall replied. ‘
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate
,’ she murmured, turning to the tables.

‘Dante,’ Emma muttered. At Lapslie and Jane’s surprised glances, she flushed. ‘GCSE,’ she said. ‘We did it at school. “All hope abandon ye who enter here”, it means.’

‘There’s hope for the police force after all,’ Jane said quietly, and smiled.

Lapslie and Emma pulled up stools and watched, for the next hour, as Jane deconstructed the body of Catherine Charnaud as expertly and as dispassionately as a chef jointing a chicken.
She started by washing it, checking the skin carefully as she did so. Next she made a Y-shaped incision, starting at each shoulder and moving above the nipples to join up between the breasts, above the sternum, and then progressing down the stomach and further, down the pubis. Dan moved in with a pair of shears, similar to those Lapslie had seen used by firemen at car crashes to cut through sections of the car body in order to reach someone inside. ‘The jaws of life’, they were called. These were the jaws of death, and Dan used them to cut his way up Catherine Charnaud’s ribcage so that the entire front of the chest could be removed and set to one side.

Emma was shifting on her stool, edgy at the enforced stillness. She liked to keep moving, Lapslie had noticed. Even when she was sitting still her legs were quivering or her fingers twitching. On the drive over, divorced from the sound, Lapslie had been fascinated by the way her fingers kept tapping out complicated rhythms on the steering wheel.

Now that she had access, Dr Catherall removed each organ from the body cavity and examined it carefully, made verbal notes into her recorder, then handed it to Dan for weighing and sealing in a transparent plastic bag. The heart especially came in for detailed scrutiny, and several photographs. She then made a deep incision across the top of the corpse’s head, cutting right down to the bone, and then tugged at the exposed edge of the skin with all her strength, pulling the scalp down like a flap to cover the face from brow to lips with a raw mask of flesh. The crunch of gristle and flesh separating made Lapslie’s mouth tingle with sparkling wine; not Champagne, but something sweeter, like Asti Spumante. Stepping back and resting for a while, Jane allowed Dan to use a power saw to make two cuts through the exposed bones of the skull; one across the top, paralleling the first cut she had made, and the second
lower down, above the forehead. Lapslie winced as the dentist-whine of the saw biting into bone sent a torrent of savoury meat across his tongue. The two cuts intersected above and forward of the ears, allowing Dr Catherall to delicately remove the wedge of skull, and expose Catherine Charnaud’s brain tissue.

Lapslie was surprised at how easily the brain could be lifted out of the cup of the skull. Only a few cuts were necessary, and it came free, small enough to nestle in the palm of Dr Catherall’s hand as she talked into the minidisc recorder. Bizarrely, he was reminded of delving inside the engine of his Saab, undoing the bolts on the alternator and lifting it free so he could replace it. No replacements here, however. The brain too was examined, weighed, bagged and placed to one side.

And then, as meticulously as she had taken the body apart, Dr Catherall put it back together again. The segment of skull was replaced, the flap of skin covering the face was eased back into its original location and stitched to stop it coming loose, and the chest cavity was stitched back with thick, heavy strokes, leaving the corpse looking as if it had a Y-shaped zip running up its front. And then, while Dan washed it again, Dr Catherall dictated her final notes.

‘So what can you tell me?’ Lapslie asked as Dr Catherall wearily pulled her rubber gloves off and dropped them into a bin marked
Waste
.

‘I can tell you that she was young and fit, that she smoked occasionally, that she was not a virgin and that she had never had a baby, although she had been through several abortions.’

‘We could have got that from the pages of
Hello
magazine. What else?’

Dr Catherall glanced over at the body on the table. ‘Was she a celebrity of some kind?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘Of some kind, yes.’

‘Hmm. I do not watch television, or read the more celebrity-obsessed newspapers.’

‘Signs of drug abuse?’ Emma asked.

‘No signs of intravenous introduction of drugs, ruling out heroin, and her nasal cavity is in good condition so I can say with some certainty that she has not been sniffing cocaine either, at least not for any length of time. I will send blood samples off for testing.’

Emma nodded. ‘Any sign of rape or other sexual interference?’

‘There is no obvious trauma. I will send samples of her vaginal fluids off for testing as well. There may be some traces of semen, or lubricant from a condom.’

‘Make sure we get a DNA sample from the boyfriend,’ Lapslie said to Emma. ‘We’ll need to screen him out.’ Turning back to Jane, he asked: ‘The mutilation that was committed on her arm – was it done while she was still alive or finished after she died?’

‘She died while it was being committed,’ Jane told him.

Lapslie took a moment to consider the information. ‘So what killed her? The shock?’

‘Yes. That and the loss of blood. If you want me to be truly accurate then I would say that she died due to a lack of oxygen to the brain, but then almost every death that occurs in the world is ultimately due to a lack of oxygen to the brain. It can either happen quickly, when the heart stops for some reason, or slowly, as when a developing tumour gradually chokes off the blood supply, but it all comes down to oxygen starvation in the end.’

‘However …’

‘However, in layman’s terms the sheer agony of the mutilation caused her heart to fibrillate.’

‘She had a heart attack?’ Emma asked.

‘That’s what I will be putting on the death certificate.’

Lapslie grimaced. ‘And could that have been predicted by the person who mutilated her?’

Dr Catherall smiled mirthlessly. ‘Her death was not unintentional, if that is what you are getting at. Whoever did this to her would have known that if the shock didn’t kill her then blood loss would, and if blood loss didn’t kill her then whatever infection got into her bloodstream would have. She could not have lived long like that. Nor would she have wanted to.’

Lapslie walked over to the body and stared down at it, trying to make sense of what had been done. Now that the body had been washed and the blood splatter coating the limbs laved away the injuries were starker, more like something from a medical textbook. Dr Catherall had removed the tight bands that had closed off the arm above the elbow and below the wrist, and the flesh had plumped out again to the point that Lapslie could draw, in his mind, two smooth lines to close up the missing skin and muscle and tendon. ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked. ‘You know more about bodies and the way they are constructed than anyone else I know. Why would anybody
do
this?’

Jane took a few small, precise steps across to join him. ‘My initial reaction was that someone was practising their anatomy skills,’ she said, sighing. ‘But there’s no mystery about the way the muscles are laid out in the arm, and separating them out is hardly something that requires a great deal of skill. Any competent butcher could do it. If someone had taken the immense risk of immobilising a living specimen, they would surely want more of a challenge – getting into the chest cavity, for instance, or the skull. And why keep the person alive while you are doing it? The noise and the agonised thrashing around just makes it
much more difficult. No, we have to assume that having her aware of what was being done was a necessary part of the process, which just brings us back to the same point – why?’

‘Torture, perhaps?’

Dr Catherall pursed her lips dismissively. ‘If I wanted to torture someone,’ she said, ‘then I wouldn’t do it this way. Bones don’t have any nerves; not on the outside, anyway, although there are nerves within the marrow, along with blood vessels. There are parts of the body that have a much higher concentration of nerve endings than the forearm. I would probably start with the soles of the feet and work my way up. The genitalia would be next, of course, and then the inside of the mouth and nose—’

‘Thank you,’ Lapslie said rapidly. ‘That’s very clear. Remind me never to make you angry.’

‘My knowledge is entirely theoretical,’ she giggled unexpectedly. ‘You should have no worries about me becoming a rogue pathologist, stalking my prey through the shadowy streets of the city.’