by Rob Grant
'Dr Rutter?'
He turned.
I flashed my badge again. 'Harry Tequila.'
'Nice to meet you, Detective Tequila.' He wiped his gloved hands ineffectually on his blood-smeared smock and offered me the right one to shake.
I satisfied myself with a simple nod of greeting. 'I'm just following up some leads on the Fabrizi case. I was wondering if I could pick your brains.'
'That's what I'm here for.' He smiled. He crossed to the sink and started to wash his hands without taking off his gloves.
'Listen, I don't want to interrupt your work...'
'Work?' He glanced over at the slab. 'No, that's not work. That's just a little project I'm working on, on the side. Hobby, really.'
I could see the little project in the corner of my eye. I didn't want to look too hard, but the little project was definitely a dead person who was having gory things done to his backside with a scalpel. Some hobby.
'Fabrizi...' Rutter mused. 'That was the poisoning thing, right?'
'That's right.'
'Awful business. Twenty-six corpses. What a nightmare. That was not pretty, let me tell you. They came here, they were covered in dried puke and cacka. I'm not kidding, covered in it. We couldn't even wash it off them -- it was evidence, see?' He dried his hands on a paper towel and dropped it in a basket. 'This place stank to high heaven. We stank. Didn't matter how much we showered. My wife made me sleep on the sofa for a week. You want to see the bodies?'
I shook my head. 'Just wanted to look over the reports with you.'
He seemed disappointed. 'Sure, no problem. I keep the reports in my office. This way.'
He led me off across the room. An entire wall was divided into square compartments with handles on. Body booths. I was hoping we were going to go straight past them, but I didn't think it was a very realistic hope.
Predictably, Rutter stopped about halfway along. 'Listen, Detective: before we get to the reports, there's something here I want you to take a look at.' He walked along the bank, and started ducking and diving to read the labels.
I was busy steeling myself. I'd been here before. They always pull some stunt like this, forensic pathologists. Dig out the worst, most mutilated, stinking decomposed corpse they can lay their rubber gloves on and present it to you, dah dahhh! to see if you can keep your breakfast down. I've never been beaten yet, but it's not a game I enjoy.
'Here we go!' He found the drawer and laid his hand on the handle. 'This one came in a couple of days ago. I think you might find it interesting.'
He tugged at the drawer. It slid out easily on its smooth castors. He put his hand on the sheet that was draped over the body. 'It's a little out of the ordinary, so be prepared.'
I was as prepared as I was ever going to be. It was not prepared enough. He tugged the sheet right down, exposing the naked corpse all the way to its knees. 'Male, Caucasian, approximately eighty-three years of age, two seventy-two cm, a little under seventy kilos, cause of death: cardiac infarct.'
I couldn't believe what I was looking at.
He caught my expression and smiled. 'Never seen anything like that, huh?'
I shook my head, but my eyes never left the cadaver. 'Never.'
'You've spotted the anomaly then?'
'Yes.'
'Pretty easy to spot, I guess.'
'Yes. He's got a very large pair of female breasts.'
'They are large, aren't they?'
'Very.'
'Firm, too.' He leaned over and squeezed the left one. 'Try them.'
'I don't think so.' ,
'Go on.' He grasped the right breast. 'Grab a handful.'
'Another time, perhaps.'
'You're missing a treat. These beauties came from a twenty-three-year-old pole dancer. One-hundred-per-cent natural.' He really was enjoying his work. 'Sure you don't want a little squeezerooni?'
'I'll pass, if it's all the same to you.'
'It's your funeral.' He shrugged, and reluctantly tugged the sheet back over the body.
'That's your work, is it?'
'My work?' He slid the drawer back home.
'You sewed those breasts on the old geezer's body?'
'I did indeed.'
'After he was dead?'
'Certainly after he was dead. I don't think he'd've liked me doing that when he was alive, no sir. I think he'd've had plenty to say about that, don't you?'
'I imagine so.'
'Neat work, don't you think?'
In actual fact, it was surprisingly neat work. Most autopsy stitching is exceedingly crude; I've seen superior needlework on prison mail bags. But Rutter's handicraft, you could barely see the joins. However, I wasn't in a frame of mind to discuss the stitching.
'I'm just trying to wrap my head around this: you removed the mammaries from a dead pole dancer and stitched them onto that old man's corpse?'
'That's right.' He was scanning the bank of drawers again.
'Is that... Are you allowed to do that kind of thing?'
'Allowed?' He shrugged. 'Well, who knows? Nobody's told me not to do it. I mean, it would probably be frowned upon, if anybody found out about it. Here!' he found the label he was looking for. 'This one's a bobby-dazzler.' He slid out the drawer. 'You are going to cream your pants over this one, my friend.'
It was clear, even with the sheet over it, that this particular cadaver had been laid face down. Most of me didn't want to look at what I was about to be shown, but there was a small, not very likeable part of me that was undeniably curious.
He started to tug down the sheet, slowly at first. 'Female, Caucasian, fifty-six approx. Two sixty-five cm, fifty-six kilos. She's been here a fortnight, so she may be a little ripe.' As the sheet reached the small of her back, he suddenly whipped it off with a magician's flourish. 'Tah-rahhh!'
I think I actually staggered slightly. It surely was a sight to behold.
He was looking at me with a big, expectant grin on his stupid face. 'Whaddaya think?'
'It's... I don't know what to think, to be honest.'
'Well, do you like it or not?'
'I don't think "like" really covers any part of my reaction.'
'So you don't like it?'
'I wouldn't say I don't like it. I just think it's a little fucking bizarre, that's all.'
'Bizarre?' He mulled it over. He wasn't displeased. 'Bizarre.' He nodded thoughtfully. 'I'll go with bizarre.'
'Where did you get the faces from?'
'Some car wreck.'
'And how long did it take you to sew the faces onto her buttocks?'
'It was slow work, I can tell you. There's a lot of stitching in there. A lot of stitching. A lot of intricate needlework to keep the shape of the face.'
'I'm guessing you're not very busy down here, then?'
'Busy?'
'I mean, you seem to have an inordinate amount of time on your hands.'
'We're plenty busy. We are swamped, Detective. Take a look around. This? I do this in my spare time. This is my art.'
'What about the relatives?'
'What about them?'
'Well, don't they ever complain? Don't you ever get any comebacks?'
'Comebacks?'
'Like, someone comes in, says kind of: "Hey, one of you bastards has transplanted dead people's faces onto my sainted mother's buttocks, and I'm feeling fairly truculent about it"? That type of thing?'
'No, I'm pretty careful who I choose to work with. I mean, you wouldn't want this sort of thing on display in an open-coffin ceremony.'
'No. That would definitely work against the solemnity of the occasion.'
'Sure.'
'Seeing a stranger's face sewn onto your loved one's arse.'
He nodded, all serious. 'For sure. Absolutely. No, I only ever pick loners and losers. Plus, I always specify "closed coffin". Trust me, nobody wants to peek in when the pathologist writes "closed coffin".' He gazed down admiringly at his handiwork. 'This one -- it's going to be a shame to bury this one. Look a
t those faces. Look at their expressions. Don't they look like: "Duh, what am I doing here on this woman's backside?" Aren't they a scream?'
'Yeah, they're a regular laugh riot. Can we move on now?'
He took one last, lingering look, then replaced the sheet and slid the drawer away. 'You've got time for one more?'
'No, really. I've got a lot of ground to cover.'
'One more. Just one.' He scoured the body banks animatedly.
'No. Thanks, but no. OK?'
'One. Just one last...'
'Really, no.'
'This one is truly worth waiting for... Yes.' He found the drawer and tugged it out. 'Trust me: this really is fantastic.' He drew back the sheet.
Reluctantly, I turned and looked at the cadaver.
'Female, Afro-Caribbean, mid twenties. Two eighty-five cm, fifty-two kilos.'
I looked, but I couldn't see any anomalies. She had one of everything she was supposed to have one of, all her fingers and toes and two of everything else, and it all seemed to be in the right place.
'You spotted it?'
I shook my head. 'She looks normal to me.'
'It's very subtle. Take a closer look.'
I didn't want to; I'd had more than enough of this. But I decided to humour him. I leaned in and scrutinised the body. 'I don't get it, no. I can see there's been some stitching around the areolas--'
'Bingo!'
'Bingo what?'
'You found it.'
'I don't understand.'
'I swapped her nipples round.'
'You swapped her nipples round?'
'The left on the right, the right on the left.'
'You swapped her nipples round?'
'Subtle, isn't it?'
'Excuse me, because this isn't going in for me: you took this dead woman, you cut off her nipples, and you switched them over?'
'My next project, I'm going to do the same thing, only with buttocks.'
'You're planning a buttock-swap operation?'
He nodded. 'The left on the right, the right on the left.'
'Dr Rutter, you're insane.'
'I know, I know. That's what my wife said. Swapping the buttocks over, that's a real technical nightmare, she says. But like I told her: once you've performed a successful face to buttock transplant or two, you've really got the basic principles nailed.'
'Can we see the reports now?'
'For sure,' he said, and reluctantly tugged the sheet back over the body. He slid the drawer back into the wall. 'You know, Detective? It's nice to find someone who appreciates the work I do here. I don't mind telling you, a lot of people think it's screwy.'
'That's people for you, Doc. People are weird.'
'Tell me about it.'
I picked up the autopsy reports, and it will not surprise you to hear I did not linger.
FOURTEEN
Here, as far as I can piece it together, is the time line for the fatal dinner party.
Bear in mind, this is constructed from pooling together witness statements and the official police reports. There are four official police reports, each from a different officer, and they fail to align on several key points, including, but not limited to, the actual date of the offence. Believe me, if these idiots had written the Gospels, the whole of Christendom would now be worshipping Arthur Wilbert Christoburger, a one-armed albino from Latvia. The few witnesses who survived the incident have almost random recall, and it's hard to believe they're describing the same event. That's understandable enough: two of them were interviewed in oxygen bubbles in an Intensive Care Unit, while the others were brutally grilled in police interrogation rooms, facing attempted murder charges, and would naturally have been bending their memories every which way, looking to save their own sad, sorry arses.
Still, I think I have managed to wade through most of the blather and eliminate most of the blatant lies and mistakes. I'm pretty sure this is how things went:
2.15 p.m. The catering team arrives. One chef, one sous-chef and a commis.
This might seem like overkill for an informal dinner party with twenty-four guests, but this is a very swank affair. The guests include a couple of B-list celebrities, some stock market high-flyers and one or two up-and-coming movers and shakers on the Europolitical scene. The caterers bring most of the food with them, but the fish is arriving later, because the chef feels the refrigeration capacity of the apartment is inadequate to accommodate seafood safely. Diligent man, the chef, but then, in this day and age, he has to be. He doesn't want Superintendent Debary and his boys abseiling in and shooting up his kitchen for incorrect temperature control.
3.25 p.m. The party planner arrives.
Like I said, it's a Swanky Dan dinner party. In this rarefied social stratosphere, you can't even invite your next-door neighbour round for a toasted sandwich and a glass of milk without going through a party planner. She's responsible for organising the whole thing, from the invitations to the cleanup operation. She books the caterers, selects the menu, the decor 'theme', the florists, the launderers: the whole shebang, soup to nuts. She, of course, would be our primary suspect. If she'd managed to survive the fish course. Unfortunately, she will be the first to croak.
3.45-6.25 p.m. Various arrivals and departures.
This is the black hole in the investigation. Nobody was taking too much notice of the comings and goings, but during this period the following events almost certainly happen: the flower arrangements arrive, as does the flower 'sculptist', whose task, as far as I can make out, is to make sure the vases with the arrangements in them all point in the right direction.
The table linen arrives.
The interior designer arrives, but the decorations he's ordered don't, so he flumps out in a strop.
The hired tableware arrives.
The hired glassware arrives.
The interior decorations arrive.
The waiters (four: two male, two female) arrive, and are coerced by the party planner into putting up the decorations, though not without low, mutinous grumblings. It transpires that one of the female waiters is blessed with Tourette's syndrome: given to uncontrollable and sudden violent twitches, accompanied by equally uncontrollable bursts of filthy expletives and invective. This will make the soup course very interesting. Also, one of the male waiters is a registered sexoholic.
The seafood arrives. Fresh eels and a crate of razor clams. The razor clams, as bottom-feeding shellfish, will head the list of suspected murder weapons, but after exhaustive forensic attention, they will turn out to be innocent bivalves.
The interior designer arrives again, sees what the waiting staff have done to his decorations and flounces out again in another fit of pique. The party planner chases after him.
6.25 p.m. The host arrives.
He's a young gun in Eurobank. By all accounts, he's a sharp operator, and his career is on an upward trajectory so fast it would induce enough G force to crush a lesser man's spine. He's also forgotten he is hosting a dinner party tonight. He retires to his en suite bathroom with a cocktail shaker full of very dry gin martini and soaks in his jacuzzi.
The party planner returns with a mollified interior designer, who immediately starts tearing the decorations off the walls and out of the hands of the waiting staff and demonstrates his astonishing people-management skills by shrieking abuse at them, then attempting to recruit them to help him put all the decorations back up again along the lines of his original design. The waiters offer to help redecorate his back passage with sharpened pine cones, but that's as far as they're prepared to co-operate. In my humble opinion, the most tragic element of this entire tragic evening is that the interior designer is one of the few survivors.
7.15 p.m. More food arrives.
The pre-party nibbles. Miniature savoury pastries and so on. The chef has been on the phone all afternoon, chivvying these along. Apparently, it's common practice to contract out these delicate little bite-sized canaps to another supplier -- in fact, that's where the phrase 'hors d'
oeuvres' comes from -- they're time-consuming and, quite frankly, beneath the chef's attention.
The Tourette's waitress takes the delivery. As luck would have it, the delivery man also turns out to be a Tourette's sufferer. The delivery is late because he twitched at the wrong moment and flung his original consignment into the apartment building's fountain, shouting, 'Fuck piss wank testicle bitch cunt.' The handover goes relatively smoothly.
The invitations stated '8.00 p.m. for 8.30 p.m.' so there's a serious possibility that some of the more gauche guests might actually turn up in an hour, or even less.
The party planner, by all accounts, is everywhere now. Helping the interior designer hang wall coverings, placating mutinous serving staff, chasing up the well overdue drinks delivery, while simultaneously trying to avoid the unwelcome attentions of the sexoholic waiter who keeps hitting on her, and generally having a ball.
The hostess has still not arrived.
7.32 p.m. The first guests appear.
This is precisely timed in a number of accounts, presumably because it's such a squirmy event. A Mr and Mrs Lungher turn up, thinking they are being Prussianly punctual, but it turns out they've just flown in from England a couple of hours earlier, and have forgotten to reset their watches.
The party planner has no option but to invite them in for a drink. Politely, they are forced to accept. They step into a human maelstrom of panic, haste and despair. They order schnapps, and, despite being vitally required in at least seven other places concurrently, the party planner, without a host or a hostess to call on, is compelled to remain with them making the smallest of small talk and smiling bravely.
The Lunghers down the schnapps as quickly as good manners will allow, then suddenly remember an urgent engagement elsewhere, make their excuses and leave.
7.45 p.m. The hostess finally shows up.
She has been delayed at several salons and the odd boutique or twenty. She races round the room, clutching an astonishing consignment of shopping bags and boxes, blowing air kisses and screeching with theatrical delight at the hired helps' professional prowess and artistic achievements.
