Death Before Time

by Andrew Puckett

  ‘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.’

  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.

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