David Forrest kept his eyes on her but there was nothing more she could add. So she bent over the corpse again to search for an explanation. By the time she had removed the six stitches and probed the wound itself she was no nearer an answer. The post-mortem had merely compounded the questions, made them more confused. What was more, the surgery had been only skin deep. Nothing but a token slash, superficial mimicry of a surgeon’s work. There was one curious fact that might or might not be relevant. Although the incision had not been deep it had severed the femoral artery. Had the victim not already been dead – or as good as – he would have bled to death quickly with this one, sure incision.
Still puzzled she mopped the sponge around the back of the abdomen and squeezed the blood out into the sink. No more or less bleeding than normal and that further underlined her conclusion that strangulation had been the cause of death. She knew at some point she would be standing up and stating this in a court of law, and that her opinion would be challenged. It didn’t bother her. She knew she was right. But her questions were still unanswered.
She pressed her lips together and left the table to study the whiteboard and reappraise what she knew – her own observations plus the facts the police had fed her. At the top of the board, printed in Paget’s irregular block capitals, was Wilson’s name, gleaned from a wallet found buttoned into his shirt pocket, as though the killer had wanted his victim identified quickly. DS Caroline Fielding had filled her in on the relevant details: Wilson had been a jobbing plumber who had lived, apparently blamelessly, with his wife and baby daughter in a Victorian terraced house in Erdington, four miles from the hospital. Fielding had given Karys a graphic description of her visit to the house. When she had knocked on the door it had been flung open by a frantic woman with a baby on her hip who had said, ‘Colin –’ before she had seen who it was. Then, ‘car accident’, before Caroline had had a chance to say anything else. Seconds later Wilson’s wife had been staring at her, disbelieving.
But Caroline Fielding had been sent to see Wilson’s widow for another reason, to tease out of Laura Wilson some important facts as a starting point for their investigations. Laura Wilson had last seen her husband on Monday morning when he had set off to fit an en suite bathroom. When he had failed to return that night she had been worried. Yes, of course she had been worried. But she had imagined he had been delayed somehow. She had rung the customer. Colin had been called away to repair a leak and had failed to return. They weren’t too impressed. But as a plumber’s wife she knew leaks could be tricky things, and he could not abandon a customer with such a problem. There would be a rational explanation. And then she had fallen asleep on the sofa. When she woke her husband had still not returned.
But the wife’s story did not help Karys. She moved away from the board to stare again at the corpse on the slab. She gave a long sigh, peeled her gloves off and left the post-mortem room without adding anything.
Forrest followed her into her office. ‘Well?’
She met his eyes with a tired frustration. ‘Well what?’
‘Come on, Karys.’ He was always hesitant about using her first name. Over the years of dealing with her she had never once encouraged any sort of personal friendship. At first he had recognized, then respected her distance, and the fact that she seemed to need to hide behind barriers. Lately he had found them an irritant, a hindrance even. ‘Help me.’
‘What do you expect from me?’ She ran her fingers through her lank hair. ‘I’m just a pathologist. I’ve told you everything I can about Colin Wilson’s death. Someone bopped our little plumber on the head. While he was – at the very least – unconscious, probably stunned and confused, it wasn’t a very bad head injury, they strangled him.’
‘Ye-e-es?’
‘And then, for some completely unknown and incomprehensible reason, either the murderer or someone else slashed his groin and then stitched him up. Those, Inspector Forrest, are the facts.’
Uninvited, he sat down opposite her and locked his blue eyes onto hers. The time had come for him to break down some of those barriers. They must work together, without this uncomfortable distance. ‘I know you’ve given me all the facts,’ he said patiently. ‘What I’m asking for are ideas. Tell me what’s in your head. Tell me what you think, Karys.’
Her lips tightened at the second use of her first name. ‘Inspector Forrest,’ she said very formally, ‘I am a pathologist. I deal in the evidence of the tissues. That’s my job. I might try to understand what’s happened, but in this case I might lead you horribly astray because I don’t really know. At the PM I tried to reconstruct the events. At first I thought you might be right.’ She smiled. ‘Even the falling-off-the-operating-table theory. But I couldn’t work out any scenario that fitted all the forensic evidence. I just couldn’t. It’s far too weird,’ she finished helplessly.
Forrest cleared his throat. How many cases had they worked on together? Sixteen? Seventeen? And she couldn’t bring herself to call him David? Once he would neither have noticed nor have cared. Now he did both. And it annoyed him. He stood up.
She tried to mollify him. ‘Maybe what you could do with is a forensic psychiatrist. It’s their job to understand the warped and sick mind.’
Almost at the door Forrest turned. ‘And you believe that’s what this is the result of? A warped and sick mind?’
She didn’t even bother to answer. It had to be.
Forrest ploughed on, still attempting to draw her out. ‘Any idea what weapon was used?’
Karys shook her head. ‘As I said, maybe a baseball bat, an iron bar. Something like that to the back of the head. And you saw the tie for yourself.’ She knew she was deliberately not answering his question.
‘And...?’ He was suddenly understandably squeamish. ‘And the, umm, the other wound?’
Karys took her glasses off to rub her tired eyes. ‘He was a plumber,’ she said. ‘A Stanley knife is sharp, isn’t it?’
But the vision that appeared in front of her eyes was provoked not by Colin Wilson’s profession but by the suggestion of the person who had drawn together the edges of the wound. ‘Or a scalpel,’ she said in a voice not much more distinct than a whisper. ‘He could have used a scalpel. Like a...’ She suddenly found she couldn’t go on. She felt sickened by it all.
But the concept of a ‘surgeon’ had been born.
Chapter Two
30 November 1999
David Forrest had spent hours puzzling over Colin Wilson’s murder. Day and night it lodged in his mind. But a week later he was still no nearer to understanding the sequence of events. Everything about the case baffled him: from the seemingly motiveless killing itself, through the post-mortem mutilation and the pointless suturing, the wrapping of the body in a hospital disposal sack and the dumping of the corpse on the hospital site itself. The murder seemed inexplicable.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning after the discovery of Wilson’s body he had a particularly vicious nightmare. Wilson’s corpse was central to the dream, floating in front of his eyes, a white shape that dangled in a black void, bleached skin stretched taut over the bones – ribs, hips, knees, legs, all clearly marked as though for an anatomy class. But it was the groin wound that held his attention, the black slash contrasting with the whiteness of the skin, the line constantly changing shape, as though it was a mouth – speaking. In front of Forrest’s horrified gaze the thin line curved upwards in a mocking grin. Forrest woke up, sweating. It was time to get up.
He had been assigned a large and efficient team of workers headed by DS Rupert Shaw and DS Caroline Fielding. Fielding he was happy with. Plump, sensible, married to a copper, she was above all dependable, a characteristic Forrest liked in his colleagues. But DS Rupert Shaw was a different matter. Since Shaw had joined the local force eighteen months ago Forrest had made no secret of his dislike for him. Young, too intelligent for his own good, fast-tracking through the ranks at a rate of knots after gaining a degree in sports science and business studie
s. What the hell did either of them have to do with being a good copper? It didn’t help that Shaw was black-haired, blue-eyed and six foot three, with looks maidens would willingly be deflowered for. Shaw had enough attributes to make many men resent him and Forrest was no exception. He could feel the sourness well up every time the young DS bounced in with his bright ideas.
Shaw and Fielding had been given two different approaches to the case. Shaw had been dispatched, with a team of junior officers, to dig around the hospital, speak to staff, patients, the medical students and patients’ visitors. DS Fielding, on the other hand, had spent the last few days interviewing Wilson’s family, neighbours, friends, anyone who might conceivably have some clue as to why Wilson had been murdered. So far, neither investigation had unearthed anything.
As Forrest’s car crawled along the Bristol Road towards the police station in Edgbaston he ran over the statements in his mind. They told him nothing. Like many statements they were crammed with irrelevant detail. Once they had weeded out irrelevancies there was nothing left – nothing of substance, nothing that seemed to have any bearing on the case.
He parked his car in the closest vacant spot to the front door. Shaw was ready for him inside his office and handed him the medical students’ statements.
‘The first thing any of them knew about a murder was finding the body. I’d stake my reputation on that.’
Forrest narrowed his eyes. ‘Well, someone at that bloody hospital must know something. The plastic bags almost certainly came from there, and the sutures. Someone slashed at Wilson’s groin. And Doctor Harper thinks the cut could have been done with a scalpel. So get talking.’
‘Who to?’
Forrest eyed the young detective with hostility. ‘How about the hospital manager?’
Shaw shrugged. ‘If you think...’
‘I do.’
Shaw slammed the incident-room door behind him.
It took Forrest a couple of minutes to calm down. Shaw invariably had this effect on him: made him angry, resentful, doubtful that his own ideas were valid. He always had the sneaking suspicion that, with his sharp intelligence, Shaw could handle a case better himself. That was why he never invited comment from him. Never asked him what he thought. What his opinion was. Dammit. Shaw made him feel inferior. Why hadn’t he been assigned Leven, or Tideswell, or any one of the other competent members of the team?
It took him another five minutes to forget Shaw and start thinking again about the person who had strangled Wilson only to perform mock surgery on him.
He fished a piece of paper out of the drawer. At the top he wrote the headings to two columns: Who? Why? As always, he started with family. The trouble was he couldn’t think of a why. According to DS Fielding, Wilson had been a happily married man and she had been insistent that there was nothing of the flirt about Laura Wilson. Forrest stared into space. Not like his wife, Maggie. Everyone had known what she was. Everyone except him. With his experience maybe he should check Laura Wilson out himself.
So who else?
A member or ex-member of the hospital staff? But there again the why was a little tricky. A grudge against the hospital rather than against Wilson personally? Was the dumping of the body on the hospital site meant to discredit its public image? Why would someone do that? Forrest scratched the top of his head. He couldn’t think of a reason, not for murder. Besides, balanced against this hypothesis was the fact that the hospital ran rigorous checks on all their staff. The merest hint of mental instability and they would not employ.
Forrest dropped his chin into his hand and stared at the piece of paper.
Who else? A member of the public? The trouble again was the why. Some grudge against the hospital? Forrest made a face. Plenty of people might bear a grudge against a hospital. Bereaved relatives, sacked employees, people left maimed or disabled by their brush with the health service. He found this hard to swallow. People would have options open to them other than murder.
His thoughts began to turn to other possibilities. Had Wilson’s killer watched an operation, witnessed suturing, and decided to mimic the procedure? He must have done at some time to have displayed even that amount of skill. There were plenty of television programmes that showed surgery in graphic detail. However, at some point the killer had stepped away from the world of the television documentary towards reality. And he must have prepared by acquiring the tools of his chosen trade. The instruments must have come from somewhere.
Itmust be someone connected with the hospital.
Forrest was not the only one whose thoughts seemed glued to Wilson’s murder. The work of the ‘surgeon’ had had its effect on Karys too. The day after the PM on Colin Wilson she had found herself staring out of the window in her flat, paralysed by unwelcome memories. Memories she had managed to convince herself had been buried so deep they could never be unearthed. It was a shock to find they had only had a handful of sand scattered over them, that it had taken the softest of winds to blow the grains away and leave them raw and exposed. For the second time in her life she was weighed down with a need to confess. Had she been a Catholic she could have off-loaded her guilt onto a priest and then gained absolution followed, maybe, by permanent peace of mind.
But not being a Catholic she had no priest to turn to. She had told Tonya, of course, soon after they had first met.
Tonya had listened with her head on one side and tried to soothe her. ‘Karys, it wasn’t your fault. It was just something that went wrong. An accident.’
But Tonya had not understood. And she had been forced to tell her more: that she believed it had been no accident; that it had been designed. Cleverly. And she had been the trigger, again, by a careless joke, a flippant statement. Again.
She had watched as Tonya pulled a face of disbelief, incredulity, then of disgust, ‘Drop it, Karys. Just drop it! She had advised sharply. ‘It was a long time ago. Put it right out of your mind. Get on with living, your career. The damage is done, it’s forgotten. I bet no one even thinks about it any more.’
How could Tonya be so wrong? She had thought about it frequently. And, since she had dissected Colin Wilson’s body, constantly.
It had taken a few more days before Karys felt prepared to assemble her thoughts and analyse them during a quiet period at the mortuary. Why had the murder of Colin Wilson evoked such uncomfortable memories? His was not the first post-mortem she had performed on a murder victim. She had done many. Too many. Each one a simple or a complex tragedy, but they had not disturbed her buried memories. So why now? What was it about Wilson’s murder that had left her feeling so exposed?
Was it the cheap, common humour of a cartoon tie? Or the clumsy attempt to link murder with the normal workings of a hospital? The obvious and deliberate disposal of the body in a clinical waste bag, as bright and yellow as a child’s gaudy toy, guaranteed to catch the eye? The careless dumping of the body right on the hospital grounds, in a place so obvious it had been meant to be found? On the killer’s part there had been no attempt to conceal his work. But of course, Karys sucked a square of chocolate absent-mindedly, a real surgeon had no need to hide his mistakes. They could be dealt with as this pseudo-surgeon had dealt with his, by laying them out in the open. Karys hugged her arms round herself and tried to force her mind to move on. But it refused to budge. It was stuck. Stubbornly determined to compare the present with the past. Karys allowed it to wander.
So, maybe, it was another aspect of the murder that was causing her to feel so unsettled, perhaps the fake operation itself? Or, to be more specific, the groin wound. It was a common enough incision, she had seen hundreds during the course of her work, same side, same wound.
It wasn’t that.
It was only by pondering each point in turn that she knew with a sudden flash of clarity exactly what was disturbing her. It was only partly the sheer pointlessness of Wilson’s abduction, murder and mutilation, the careless, cheap wasting of life. It was something more. Something deeper.
Altho
ugh she had protested to Forrest that she had no insight into the mind of the killer it was impossible to perform a post-mortem without gaining some understanding of both his methods and his nature: bruises indicated violence; superficial slashes a lack of purpose. Without particularly wanting to, she knew things about the ‘surgeon’. She had recognized in both the tie and the clinical waste bag a macabre touch of humour. She knew he had laughed as he had killed. Laughed as he had cut. Laughed as he had slipped the body into the bags and taped them together. And the final and loudest laugh had been retained for the moment when he had rolled the body down the bank, dumping it back on the hospital site. He had found the entire incident, its investigation and repercussions funny. That had been the point of it.
Dammit. Was he laughing now?
‘Shit.’ She looked at the foil wrapper in her hand. Crumpled. Empty. A whole bar of chocolate gone, when she had promised Tonya to limit herself to one bar a day, for the sake of her health and her waistline. A resolution she really had meant to stick to. And it was still early. Hours before the end of the day. And there were more bars of chocolate in her desk drawer. She must stop thinking like this.
• • • •
DS Rupert Shaw leapt up the hospital steps two at a time. He really hated these places. The smell of disinfectant, the doctors, nurses, the clinical whiteness only partially relieved by the Hospital Trust’s pathetic attempts to turn the place into a luxury hotel — probably at the expense of it being an efficient working hospital, he thought cynically. He was stopped just inside the door by a heavily made-up blonde who sat behind a wide desk, repeating the phrase, ‘May I help you?’ like a talking Barbie doll. He took malicious delight in flashing his ID card and watching her blue eyes turn big and round and impressed. She leant forward intimately. ‘Is it about the murder?’
A Fatal Cut Page 3
