A Fatal Cut

by Priscilla Masters

Dr Karys Harper had taken the morning off after a night on call and was padding round the flat in a white towelling dressing gown, yawning, brushing her hair out of her eyes and taking long sips from her mug of black coffee. Following on call duties there usually was a certain amount of weariness. When the telephone rang she muttered a soft curse. Always uncomfortably aware that a summons could arrive at any minute, it didn’t even occur to her that it might be a social call. No friend would expect her to be at home at eleven o’clock on a weekday morning.

  She took the call calmly, scribbling down the directions on a pad she kept near the telephone. By the time she had showered and pulled on some trousers and a thick sweater she had shaken off the yawns and tiredness, but she felt a heaviness that was never there when she was completely off-duty. She blamed it on an awareness of impending responsibility. A readiness for action.

  She drove to the scene in her black Mercedes convertible, accelerating along the Bristol Road, using the bus lane more than once to undertake drivers turning right. She couldn’t justify her driving with the usual doctor’s excuse — that she might save a life with the few minutes bought – she merely enjoyed the speed, for its own sake. She found the site easily. The area was familiar to her, no more than a few hundred yards away from her own slicing ground, the hospital mortuary. She turned into Edgbaston Park Road, left into Metchley Lane, and parked just beyond a crowd of rapidly gathering voyeurs clustered round a couple of police cars. It was strange how flashing blue police lights drew the spectators. She did her best to ignore the ripple of excitement that followed her. Having noticed her black scene-of-crime bag someone was helpfully informing the others who she was. She wasn’t ready to talk to anyone, yet. Not before she knew the facts.

  She kept her gaze on the ground, ducked beneath the police tape and slid down the short bank towards the white canopy erected over the corpse. There were two figures mounting guard over the body, a Detective Inspector in his thirties, casually dressed, slim with fair hair thinning on top, and a stout Detective Sergeant. Karys greeted both of them with a smile. They were old acquaintances.

  She set her bag down by the side of the body. ‘New experience for me, this.’

  Sensing what was coming, the two police officers shifted uncomfortably. They were familiar with Karys’s strange sense of humour.

  She indicated the yellow plastic bag with its descriptive black lettering along the side, CLINICAL WASTE. ‘Having the corpse gift wrapped and labelled.’

  There was a strained smile in return from DS Fielding. DI Forrest remained stony faced. Karys shrugged and opened her bag. ‘When was the body discovered?’

  ‘About an hour ago. By some medical students.’

  She looked up. ‘Skipping lectures?’

  Forrest shrugged. ‘Let the university sort that bit out. We’ve got enough to worry about.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She slipped on a pair of examining gloves before picking out a hunting knife, sharp with a serrated edge used to sever ties or nooses, cut bonds, preserve knots. ‘Any objections, Inspector Forrest?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve checked for prints then?’

  His face was already tinged with a sickly green. ‘I don’t know why we bother. They all use gloves these days.’

  ‘Right then. Here goes.’

  She made a slit in the thick, yellow PVC and all three peered in. Inside was a thin, bony man, lying on his back with a bloated, dead-fish face, his eyes bulging, arms folded across his chest, chin dropped down. He wore a blue-checked open-necked shirt and black ankle socks. No shoes. Otherwise he was naked — apart from a wristwatch and a tie, knotted but not tidily arranged around the collar. It had been pulled lethally tight around the neck.

  Karys stared at the victim for a few moments to absorb as much detail as she could. She wanted to forget nothing. When she had imprinted the picture on her mind she allowed herself to touch him. He felt cold. Ice cold. She tried to move his arms. They were stiff. Rigor mortis was still present. She peered closer. There was no discernible bruising but some lividity on his lower buttocks, shoulders and heels. Karys moved the tie to reveal a line of bruising, noticing it was a ‘fun’ tie sporting the Disney characters Mickey and Minnie Mouse — waltzing by the look of things. The only other visible injury was a narrow line of congealed blood in his right groin. Karys studied it closely before touching it with her gloved index finger. It was a neat, regular wound, quite straight and about four inches long. And it had been clumsily drawn together with five untidy silk sutures, their ends long enough to prickle her fingers. Karys pondered over the wound, trying to piece together the sequence of events.

  When she looked up she could see that both the DI and the DS were staring at the same scar. Neither of them spoke. They were waiting for her.

  ‘Interesting,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ they chorused.

  ‘And what exactly do you think, Inspector Forrest?’

  ‘Well, it looks as if he’s had an operation.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘What else could it be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’ll all come clear during the PM.’ Her gaze went over and beyond the DI’s shoulder to the huge, grey hospital looming against the sky. ‘Are there any reports of missing patients?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said again. Her attention returned to the groin wound. Then she palpated the face, tested the knees for depth of rigor mortis and used a rectal thermometer to gain a core-body temperature. 12°C. Her thoughts galloped through the textbook graph. He’d been dead for more than twelve hours. Could be as long as twenty-four. A quick glance at her watch. Eleven forty-five a.m. He’d died sometime yesterday afternoon to evening and the body presumably dumped under cover of darkness. Not this morning. The hospital site was too busy for the killer to have risked dumping a body in daylight. Knowing DI Forrest would press her for a more precise time of death she tried to work it out. The victim was a thin man, only partly clothed, so he would have lost body heat relatively quickly, add to that the fact that it was a chilly, damp day and the plastic would have formed poor insulation.

  Forrest must have guessed what she was thinking about. ‘Eight degrees centigrade,’ he supplied gruffly.

  She smiled her thanks.

  His temperature had almost reached that of his surroundings, so probably the man had died sometime yesterday afternoon, late-ish. This was all straight-forward textbook stuff. But her mind was working furiously to try to piece together the sequence of events. What could have led to this man being strangled, then dumped on the hospital site? A recent operation? A patient who had wandered away from the ward? Certainly he had had the recent attentions of a medic blessed with only tolerable competence. The stitches weren’t that neat. And why had he been wrapped in a clinical waste bag? It was puzzling. Incredible.

  She was curious to know what other findings would be uncovered at the post-mortem.

  While Karys rang the coroner from her carphone, Forrest was already initiating primary investigations. By that afternoon the corpse was shelled of its PVC wrap and lay naked on the mortuary slab. More importantly, he was no longer anonymous. He had an identity and personal details. The pale Caucasian man was Colin Wilson, aged thirty-five, coincidentally the same age as DI David Forrest himself. They had an address for him too: 8, Jasmine Place, Erdington. Colin Wilson had had a wife, named Laura, and a ten-month-old daughter named Heather. He was now much more than a murder victim to the investigating team, he was a family man.

  • • • •

  As soon as Karys entered the PM room she noted the tension in the waiting team of police which comprised Forrest, DS Fielding and a couple of SOCOs. As was her habit, she ignored them and busied herself with observing the primary details of Colin Wilson’s body. Thin and bony; undernourished rather than simply slim.

  Like most pathologists, Karys had her own unique way of conducting a post-mortem. A mixture of traditional methods plus personal
foibles. Those who had worked with her before knew the drill inside out; she would frown all the time she tied the bows at the back of her surgical gown; she would push her heavy glasses hard up her nose as though daring them to slip once her hands were sheathed inside the surgical gloves. Those gloves which often tore because she pulled them on too hard, as she frequently did in cases of suspected murder. She had once confessed to Paget, the mortuary attendant, in an unprecedented burst of candour, that murder upset her more than it should a pathologist. It had been a frank apology for her weakness. She knew that murder should not upset her at all, it should not penetrate her shell. That shell was her protection against emotional involvement in the case. It was her job to be a scientific observer, detached, impartial and above all, accurate. That was the theory.

  Those who knew her well were perfectly aware of her involvement with murder cases.

  Paget stood by silently. He had been embarrassed by her admission and had done little more than grunt. But he had never forgotten her confession. The memory of her disclosure returned today as he watched her psych herself up to deal with the case, standing at the foot of the mortuary slab with her gloved hands clasped together, as though praying. He remembered something else she had said at the same time, in the same burst of candour – that she felt she should spend this silent time communing with victims of violence because it helped her to piece together the full sequence of events, each blow, which, in its turn, had finally led to the victim’s death. The evidence would all be there, waiting for her in the tissues, to be laid bare by her knife. And it was this sequence of blows, of defensive injuries and trauma, that would give her the truest of clues into the killer’s mind. She must not miss things. She owed it to her ‘patients’ to glean every cell of evidence a corpse could possibly yield and help point the finger. Towards innocence. Towards guilt. Towards accident. Towards manslaughter. Towards murder. Even, she believed, occasionally, towards the murderer.

  At last, to the relief of the waiting police officers, she sucked in a long, deep breath, as though preparing to dive from a high board. She unclasped her hands and finally broke the silence to begin a superficial examination of the head and the back of the neck, talking to the waiting police officers as well as into a small dictaphone.

  ‘Cause of death,’ she began, ‘almost certainly strangulation. With this tie.’ She severed the dark blue tie with its bright Disney motif and passed it to the Scene of Crimes Officer. Underneath, the livid red line stretched almost all the way around the neck. She turned the head to the side and fingered a swelling at the nape the size and colour of a Victoria plum. ‘I think this probably happened first.’ She paused, then continued decisively, ‘Yes. That’s it. He was stunned first.’

  Forrest looked up. ‘Any idea what with?’

  ‘A blunt instrument. Could have been a baseball bat. Something like that. Hard and blunt. Wielded with some force. As for this...’ She jabbed her finger at the neat, straight wound in the corpse’s groin. ‘I’m intrigued.’ She addressed DS Fielding. ‘You’re sure his wife said he hadn’t recently been an in-patient for an operation on his groin, for example the repair of a hernia?’

  ‘No. He’d been to work today as normal. She said he hadn’t had an operation since he had his tonsils out when he was a kid.’

  Karys couldn’t resist another prod at gallows humour. ‘Well no one got his tonsils out through this wound.’

  A few of the waiting officers, unused to her medical jokes, shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘And if he hasn’t had recent surgery I can only think he must have cut himself accidentally during the course of his work. What does he do?’

  Again, it was the stout DS who answered. ‘He was a plumber, Doctor.’

  ‘Unlikely, then, that he gave himself this. But possible. Have you started enquiries at hospital A&E departments? The wound looks recent.’ Forrest shook his head and she continued, ‘Well somebody must have put these sutures in.’ She bent over to peer even closer at the wound. ‘They aren’t very neat. Maybe a medical student. Or a GP. They don’t get a lot of practice at suturing.’

  David Forrest gave a shrug. ‘We did wonder,’ he ventured, ‘if it was an attempted suicide?’

  Karys gave a low, considering sigh. ‘It’s possible,’ she said. ‘He could have self-inflicted the groin injury although I’ve never heard of a suicide using the femoral artery to bleed himself to death. But he didn’t sew himself up, did he? And he definitely didn’t inflict his own head injury – from behind – or strangle himself with the tie, or wrap himself up in a clinical waste bag, or dump his own body on the hospital site. No. Something must have happened. Some very peculiar events. But goodness knows what they were.’

  Unabashed, Forrest tried again. ‘Then what about this scenario?’ He glanced helplessly at DS Caroline Fielding, appealing for back-up. ‘I mean, people do slash their wrists. He could have done that,’ his eyes lingered on the groin wound, ‘as a variation. And then a friend, maybe a doctor or a nurse or someone with a bit of medical training, tried to save his life by sewing him up.’ Again an apologetic, tight laugh and a glance around the room for support. ‘And then when that didn’t work the friend panicked, killed him and ended up dumping the body at the hospital. It’s just an idea.’ He ended limply.

  ‘And what about the blow to the back of Wilson’s head?’

  Forrest started chewing his lip. ‘Anaesthetic?’ he ventured lamely.

  ‘It could have happened that way, I suppose,’ Karys said kindly as her gloved fingers probed the sutures again. ‘All I can tell you at this stage with certainty is that Colin Wilson was murdered. He didn’t die from natural causes. And the only other comment I can make, for all that it’ll help you, is that the wound is in exactly the position where you’d cut if you wanted to repair an inguinal hernia.’

  David Forrest spoke again. ‘You don’t think it was a doctor, or someone from the hospital, do you? That this is botched surgery and that the head injury was caused by his falling off the operating table?’

  Through Karys’s glasses her grey eyes looked enormous. ‘Inspector Forrest,’ she said gravely. ‘What are you suggesting? That one of our surgeons is making such a mess of his work he’s reduced to dumping the body of his patient in clinical waste bags on a patch of ground at the back of the hospital?’

  Forrest looked ill at ease. ‘Well you did say...’

  Karys fingered the sutures once more. ‘I have asked for full toxicology studies on the serum samples but I don’t really think that’s the answer,’ she said quietly.

  But the words ‘botched surgery’ had conjured uncomfortable visions in front of her eyes. No dreams this time. Reality. Cruel, stark reality. For the first time in months she suffered the familiar tight chest, rapid over-breathing, nausea.

  Her eyes moved across to the police specimen bag. Plumbers didn’t normally wear ties to work. Wilson’s shirt was blue denim, casual wear. She knew that the tie was another part of the killer’s debris, his personal signature, as individual as handwriting. And as handwriting scrawled a person’s character across a blank page so the killer had autographed his corpse with his own warped joke. Karys stood very still, chilled at the sudden insight she had gained into the killer’s mind.

  It took a movement from David Forrest at her side to force her back to the job. She shook herself and concentrated again on the surgical part of the post-mortem, first by standing back while the police photographer shot his pictures from all angles, until even Inspector Forrest’s exacting standards had been met.

  Then it was time to start, beginning with the head. They always started there; it was, as often as not, the source of fatal injury and she worked deftly, making decisive comments on her tape recorder as she proceeded. Head injury not fatal. She continued in greater detail. She might be glad of it during question time at the inquest. Not conceivably fatal, but enough to stun. Cause of death – she fingered the livid line, touched the petechial haemorrhages above the bulging eyes –
strangulation. No doubt about it. Quick, simple. Equipment ready to hand, a cheap, funny tie, looped beneath the chin, pulled tightly from behind. Clear marks around the ears as the victim had dropped and the tie had been pulled upwards. A fractured hyoid. Then on to the thorax and finally the abdomen. But throughout the entire procedure her eyes kept straying down to the victim’s groin as she set herself the inevitable question. What had been the exact sequence of events?

  She was in for a surprise. Naturally she had assumed the groin injury had been inflicted before death, but as she worked she began to realize that the evidence was pointing in a different direction. The groin wound had been made after death. The evidence was all too clear. Indisputable. There was little to no tissue reaction round the suture line, virtually no bleeding at all into the surrounding cells. The edges of the wound showed no sign of even early union. As she worked she became even more convinced: dead pieces of skin had been drawn together by the black silk. The murderer had killed his victim before he had attempted surgery. So if not real surgery or the union of a traumatic cut, what had been the point of the wound? Quickly she ran through one of her many forensic psychiatry lectures. Mutilation usually indicated a sadistic killer, some gratification had to have been gained from witnessing the victim’s suffering, and it was usually mixed with sexual perversion. But there had been no sexual interference at all. She had examined Wilson’s body very carefully. He had not been sexually assaulted, and he would have felt no pain from the mutilation. He had already been dead. A sadist could have derived no pleasure from his act. So why had the wound been inflicted? She glanced across the mortuary table at David Forrest, knowing he would be able to read the puzzlement on her face. ‘You can forget about A&E departments,’ she said very quietly, hearing a quiver of shock in her voice, ‘and GPs. They don’t suture corpses.’

  ‘What?’ The watching police officers stiffened.

  ‘Wilson was already dead when this was done. I should know,’ she added, ‘I’ve reopened enough recent suture lines on people who have died on the operating table to know the difference between injuries inflicted pre- and post-mortem. I’m sure of my facts, Inspector.’