Had Callum Hughes felt like that too?
She left Stoke Heath soon after. The police could deal with the remaining interviews. She had a few hours’ paperwork before attending the post-mortem this afternoon.
The news must have leaked out. At the gates of Stoke Heath someone had laid a wreath of flowers. Red and white carnations. Liverpool colours. And the mantra, Callum, you’ll never walk alone.
It seemed that Callum Hughes and her son shared the same passion for a football club.
Jericho was waiting for her when she entered her office. Though he was unsuitable as a coroner’s assistant, being a shocking gossip, he was, in other ways, extremely efficient. ‘The post-mortem’s at two o’clock,’ he said. ‘I’m to let them know if you’re wantin’ to attend and if the time is inconvenient.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said and wandered through to her office.
Her post had been opened and the letters requiring her attention laid to one side. Junk mail had already been binned and the second pile contained letters which could be dealt with at her leisure.
‘And how are things at Stoke Heath?’
‘Rather unpleasant at the moment.’
‘The young lad that knifed someone a couple of days ago?’
She nodded.
‘Hah,’ he said, pleased. ‘I thought it was the same boy. Nasty piece of work. Sharpened the knife, I heard.’
She felt she should defend the dead boy but Jericho didn’t give her the chance. ‘How did he do it?’
‘We don’t know for definite yet,’ she said pointedly. ‘The post-mortem’s this afternoon. But,’ she yielded to Jericho’s bright, curious expression, ‘it looks as though he hanged himself.’
‘Ah – these lads,’ he said with regret. ‘They will do it. Coffee now, Mrs Gunn?’
‘Thanks.’ As Jericho left she reflected how his hair was so badly cut she wondered whether he did it himself. Grizzly grey, uneven, prone to sticking out in all directions, which made her cross to the mirror and take stock of her own hair. It too needed a cut. And that meant running the gauntlet of Vernon Grubb’s scrutiny. As usual she decided it would have to be put off till next week. This week was simply too busy.
She glanced at the letter on top of the pile. It was handwritten in quite an untidy, scrawling hand. When she had read it through twice she called in Jericho. ‘Where did this come from?’
He started rifling through the bin. ‘Don’t know. Is it important? Hah.’ He emerged with a white envelope. ‘It came in this.’
She snatched it from him. It bore a first class stamp and had a Shrewsbury postmark. Aware that Jericho was watching her without bothering to disguise his curiosity she put the envelope in her handbag together with the letter.
‘Is everything all right, Mrs Gunn?’
No. It wasn’t. He was here again, her ghostly haunter.
Hello, Martha, she could almost hear the voice which had whispered to her through the trees last winter, I am here again to make sure you remember. I do have a message for you. In time I will deliver it. Be patient.
She should give the letter to Alex. Let the police sort it out.
CHAPTER FIVE
Martha didn’t always attend post-mortems. She wouldn’t have had the time. But this case would attract a great deal of media attention. Callum Hughes had been young; the schoolboy stabbing had been his first offence and his suicide had occurred within twenty-four hours of his detention. There was plenty of material for a Press feeding frenzy. The other reason that she had decided to attend today’s post-mortem was that it was easier to conduct an inquest when she had watched, first hand, the pathologist reach his decision. So she drove to the mortuary.
But she almost groaned out loud when she walked in and caught her first sight of Mark Sullivan for a couple of months. She had spoken to him a few times recently and he had sounded fine but words across a telephone line give you little idea of what state a person is in.
He moved towards her unsteadily. ‘Martha,’ he said.
Alex Randall was standing behind him, concern etching new lines in his craggy face.
He met her eyes. And unaccountably Martha felt angry. Mark Sullivan knew that this post-mortem would be important. The skinny, small corpse lying on the slab was not a little old lady who had died of natural causes in a nursing home. This was the suspicious and controversial death of a youth who should have lived for many more years. This was somebody’s child. The evidence the pathologist uncovered would be exposed to a court of law. There was a feeling that it was important that deaths in custody were aired right out in the open or murmurings were soon born. Failing justice, truth, the integrity of the entire British legal system. Everything they all stood for and held dear relied on this tissue evidence that Mark Sullivan was due to retrieve. And he had been drinking.
She and Alex exchanged a quick nod.
‘Have we time for a coffee?’
Sullivan looked bemused. ‘Coffee?’
‘Yes. A black coffee,’ Martha said firmly. Had Sullivan been a little more sober he would have picked up on the acid in her tone and known she was aware that he was too drunk to perform a post-mortem requiring any but the most basic of skills.
Sullivan shrugged. ‘OK. If you like.’
They filed into his office and Martha held back to speak to Alex. ‘Has the boy’s mother formally identified him?’
‘Yes.’
‘How was she?’
He shook his head. ‘Distraught. How would you feel?’
She didn’t even want to contemplate.
Mark Sullivan visibly improved after two mugs of strong coffee. Twenty minutes later he stood up and smiled. ‘Right then.’
As they filed back into the post-mortem room neither Martha nor Alex said anything. It was better that Sullivan approached this case with an open mind.
Post-mortems follow a rigid protocol. After the corpse has been stripped, Alex and another officer bagged up the clothes. Evidence: a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Obviously, like most teenagers, Callum Hughes did not wear pyjamas. She blinked away the vision of Sam stumping around the kitchen in similar clothes, scratching around for something to eat. As the mortician and Randall measured the youth’s crown rump measurement and weighed him Martha reflected how thin the lad had been. There was none of the tough wiriness of her son.
Stop doing this, she told herself. Stop comparing. This is not Sam but someone else’s son, the only link being their age. They were born in the same year. That is all.
Her eyes dropped downwards. This boy stabbed another. Maybe it was through desperation, maybe malice, but he is not Sam.
She turned her attention full on Mark Sullivan and reflected. He might have been teetering on the edge of alcoholism but he was still a competent pathologist.
He studied the boy’s face first, fingered a mark around the right eye socket, another, smaller one on the left brow and a third on the upper cheek. He touched a large bruise on the right shin then stood back for a while, frowning, finally crossing the room to study the police photographs pinned up on the board.
‘When he was found,’ he asked Alex Randall, ‘the back of his head was against the bed, wasn’t it?’
Both Martha and Alex nodded. ‘I wonder if the body could have twisted,’ he said. ‘These look as though they were sustained at around the time of death. I don’t suppose anyone could verify?’
‘His cell mate slept all the way through.’
Mark Sullivan’s eyebrows rose almost to his hairline but he made no comment.
He still said nothing as he severed the computer lead from around the boy’s neck, preserving the knot with great care. He handed it to the WPC who had accompanied Randall. She put it in a bag.
‘You might think to speak to the prison warders, Alex,’ he said. ‘Just check about the length of the cable to ascertain whether it was long enough to have allowed him much movement.’ His eyes drifted back to the boy’s face and Martha knew he was unhappy about the injuri
es. This puzzled her because she could see they were not serious; they had played no part in his death. But this was something she had noticed about pathologists. They like to be able to explain every lesion – no matter how small.
Randall nodded and looked down at his notes. ‘“When he was found”,’ he quoted, ‘“he was slumped against the side of the bed, the flex looped and knotted on the baseboard which is latticed wire. There wasn’t much slack”’. He looked up. ‘I can’t see him turning around myself and hitting his face on the edge of the bed but if he was standing up then dropped I suppose it’s a possibility. Theoretically,’ he added as an afterthought.
Sullivan met his eyes, looked at Martha, inviting a comment but neither of them said anything. So Mark Sullivan turned his attention back to the brain, his concentration deepening as he became absorbed. Martha understood that as the neck contained the vital evidence in a suicidal hanging the area had to be clear of blood. She noticed too that as Sullivan worked his hands steadied and his eyes cleared. Now his concentration was total. Periodically he glanced back at the police photographs which were pinned up on an x-ray board but apart from that he was quite still – except for his hands.
Now it was time to study the mark the computer lead had left. Narrow and well defined, brownish in colour with a tinge of blue at its edge and a leathery consistency to the skin. No need for Sullivan to point out the congested blood vessels above the V-shaped impression which was just above the larynx and extended almost to the boy’s ears.
Sullivan began to slice through the tissues, working as delicately as an artist as he peeled back the layers of the boy’s throat. Martha watched him, mesmerised. She had to hand it to Mark Sullivan – he had a uniquely dextrous skill. Maybe if he hadn’t liked his bottle so much he might have become a Professor in Pathology and trained students to work as perfectly as he did. He would have been able to make a real and permanent contribution to the science. As it was he had buried himself away from academia and the hub of a university career and dived into the nearest bottle neck. Again Martha felt that sudden wash of anger at the mess he was making of his life.
To cover her emotion she wandered towards the photographs herself and was again struck by how thin Callum Hughes had been. He had been underdeveloped, small for his age. Boys of thirteen vary hugely in the stages of their development. But she couldn’t help reflecting that his size had contributed to the bullying and the bullying had led to the assault and so on to his suicide. How cruel nature can be.
Once Mark had finished examining the neck he opened the chest and for a while his fingers probed various orifices. Neither Alex nor Martha spoke. They didn’t want to break the pathologist’s concentration. A couple of times Mark spoke into a small Dictaphone making audio-notes as he worked. Once he looked up. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘there were some contusions on the ribs so I did a couple of x-rays. There was an old fracture.’
Alex and Martha exchanged glances. It was the first concrete corroboration of Callum and Shelley’s story.
‘Any idea how old,’ Martha asked casually.
‘Oh, somewhere under a year.’
His attention had moved on.
The liver, brain, spleen and heart were weighed.
He moved to the leg wound, measuring the bruise, exploring the tissues beneath, his frown deepening as he worked, some of his attention obviously trying to piece together Callum’s final hours.
She waited for him to finish, peel off his gloves, throw his operating gown into the laundry bin and wash up while the mortuary assistant finished the stitching up.
But Sullivan was pondering. He deliberated over the actions, performing them like an automaton, obviously working his way through all that he had seen, delaying the moment when he would have to present his findings to coroner and police. Even behind his glasses she could read troubled abstraction in his eyes. Something was bothering him.
‘Shall we…?’ He led them back into his office and deliberately closed the door behind them.
‘What is it, Mark?’
Sullivan cleared his throat. To his side Alex Randall stood, almost quivering with attention.
‘Martha,’ he finally appealed. ‘You know as well as I do that medicine isn’t always an exact science.’
She nodded.
‘I have a conflict here,’ he said. ‘It’s easy for a pathologist to extrapolate too much from the PM. And I can’t be absolutely sure.’
‘Of what exactly?’
‘Well – put it this way. There were definite bruises on the face.’
Both Martha and Alex nodded their agreement. They’d seen them.
‘I don’t know whether he could have twisted at some point to cause the facial bruising.’
Martha and Alex waited.
‘The trouble is that the edge of the bunk is metal. Quite sharp. Obviously sharp objects tend to give a different injury from a blunt one. The bruising on the face was not done by a sharp, metallic object unless the bedding was covering it at the time of impact.’
Sullivan continued.
‘The same goes for the injury to the occiput which looks as though he fell backwards from standing. And as for the shin injury – I can’t see that being caused by the same impact. It’s so much more severe than the other injuries. I think it was a kick sustained a few hours before he died.’
Sullivan eyed Randall. ‘You could ask the prison warders whether they moved the bedding.’ Randall nodded.
‘It could explain the injuries as all being caused at the time of hanging although…’ Sullivan’s eyes drifted round the room.
‘I take it there was no resisting arrest?’
Randall shook his head. ‘Does he look the sort of guy who could resist a couple of six foot PCs?’
They all shook their heads.
‘So what are you saying, Mark?’ Martha asked.
‘Well. The cause of death was hypoxia due to asphyxia. That’s all I can say with certainty.’
‘You mean the ligature round the neck?’
‘Was almost certainly the cause of the asphyxia. I’ll put it more clearly. He died from the hanging and not from the other more minor injuries. But there is evidence of assault.’
‘Almost certainly? What are you saying, Mark? That it’s a potential homicide?’ Randall was frowning.
‘No.’ Sullivan’s tone was still careful. ‘I’m saying that I know what the cause of death is. What I don’t know are the circumstances that led up to the asphyxia. I don’t know how to explain all the injuries – even the minor ones on his face and on the back of his head. Put it like this. I’d prefer it if they weren’t there. Maybe there’s a simple explanation. It’s possible that his cell mate knocked him about a bit. Look, Alex,’ he appealed, ‘too many pathologists go for dogmatic statements that they’re in no position to make. I’m just saying what can be borne out by science. That’s all. And we can’t ignore the shin injury which was delivered with some force. He could have knocked against something – maybe the transfer van went too fast round a corner and he fell off his seat. It could explain the occipital bruising and even the shin injury but it’s probable that someone kicked him. Hard. It’s a typical footballer’s injury if they’re not wearing shin guards.’
Martha winced.
Mark Sullivan continued. ‘All I’m saying, Alex, is that you probably need to ask the prison warders a few things. Clarify matters. That’s all. I’m not pointing a finger of suspicion. We all want the same – surely?’ He glanced briefly at both their faces. ‘To be sure that we reach the right verdict.’
Alex’s frown deepened. ‘This is turning out to be even more tricky than I initially thought,’ he said. ‘I thought I was just up against a criticism from the more liberal members of our society for our penal system. What you’re giving me is a mystery.’
‘Forensics may be a science,’ Mark countered. ‘But it isn’t always as exact as we might wish.’
Alex gave a deep sigh. ‘How can we conduct an enquiry if we
don’t even know what happened?’
‘Well – whatever,’ Martha said briskly, ‘I think it would be a good idea if I spoke to the boy’s mother this afternoon. The earlier the better. I’ll open the inquest next week and we can adjourn it pending police enquiries.’
‘I suppose so,’ Alex said reluctantly, ‘though I’d have loved closure. But if you’re not happy, Mark?’
They both knew he was inviting Sullivan to modify his verdict and they also knew that Sullivan wouldn’t do that, never had done it. He took some time to reach his conclusion but once he had he would stick to it. In fact his pedantic nature was one of the ingredients that had earned him their respect. Counter-balanced by his drinking habits.
The three of them exchanged looks. Martha voiced their thoughts. ‘I don’t need to remind you. Not a word of this goes outside here. If the Press get even a sniff of it all sorts of allegations of brutality and cover-ups will emerge. I’ll tell his mother that we need to do further tests and that you, Alex, are going to be interviewing people at the prison as well as the arresting officers. This is very sensitive information. For the time being we can be non-committal.’
Her eyes drifted around the room, from the stark photographs to the corpse. ‘I don’t want this young lad buried until we are as certain as we can be of all the circumstances that led up to his death.’
She thanked Sullivan and they left the mortuary. She caught up with Randall outside. ‘Alex, how are you?’
He gave her one of the rare smiles that transformed his face. ‘I’m not bad – considering this.’ He jerked his head back towards the morgue. ‘Bit of a shame, really, that Sullivan wasn’t willing to be more dogmatic.’
‘You can’t expect him to compromise his science.’
‘No. But those bruises will cost a lot of police hours – and I bet you a dinner at your favourite restaurant that the verdict is the same. The poor lad simply couldn’t hack it. He panicked and ended it all. The bruising on the head, the face and the shin will turn out to be an irrelevance.’
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