Jack's Back

by Mark Romain

  Calvin nodded. “It certainly looks that way.”

  Claxton found traces of nylon in the pubic area, and these were carefully removed, bagged and exhibited. If her underwear was ever recovered, ideally in the killer’s possession, fibre comparisons would be carried out. Her pubic hair was then combed and swabbed for semen.

  The pathologist peered down at Tracey’s exposed genitals and winced. “There’s probably no point in taking vaginal swabs, but we’ll do them anyway, just for the sake of being thorough. Even without opening her up I can see that a large and very sharp instrument has been forcibly inserted into her vagina. There is severe bruising around her crotch, and her inner thighs have been flayed as the blade was repeatedly rammed in with considerable force. When I open her up, the internal damage will be catastrophic.”

  Claxton decided to examine her limbs next, pausing to ask for a magnifying glass when he reached Tracey’s forearms. “This is interesting,” Claxton said, waving for Dillon to come over. “I’ve found track marks on her arms, which is hardly surprising considering her lifestyle, but there are also what I believe are faint handcuff marks on both wrists. Had she been arrested recently?”

  “Yes. They had her in for fraud or something yesterday. She was only released from custody a few hours before she died,” Dillon said.

  “Ah that probably explains it then,” Claxton said, losing interest.

  “Actually,” Dillon said, taking a step closer despite the revulsion he felt inside. “I’ve read the custody sheet. She wasn’t handcuffed when she was arrested. Whoever did that to her, it wasn’t the police.”

  “Maybe she wore them during a kinky sex session with a client before the killer got to her?” Emma suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” Dillon said. “This was a girl who had rough sex on street corners to fund an all-consuming drug habit. She wasn’t into anything as refined as games.”

  “Which means the killer must have handcuffed her when he abducted her,” Copeland said, stating the obvious.

  “Perhaps,” Claxton allowed, “but I don’t understand why the marks aren’t more pronounced. If you apply handcuffs tight enough to stop someone from wiggling free, they leave defined marks. If a person in handcuffs struggled, say to resist being kidnapped, it would result in chaffing or bruising; a serious struggle would have caused them to bite deep into the skin, even if they were double locked. These marks are so faint that they are hardly visible; you have to really look to find them. It is almost as if the handcuffs were heavily padded.”

  “Why would a killer who viciously mutilates his victim pad the cuffs? He’s hardly going to worry about her bruising her wrists,” Dillon said.

  “Maybe what he was worried about was leaving telltale marks,” Claxton surmised.

  “You mean he didn’t want us to know that he had used handcuffs?” Dillon said.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Claxton confirmed.

  “It’s an interesting supposition,” Dillon admitted, “but it’s very bizarre.”

  Claxton examined her arms and hands for defence wounds, and then took nail clippings and scrapings, starting with the right hand and then moving on to the left. “Well, well, look what we have here,” he said, holding the fingers of her left hand out for the others to see. Calvin, Emma, and Copeland all crowded in for a closer look. Dillon stayed where he was.

  “There’s some debris under her nails,” Claxton told them, scraping it out. “At a guess, I’d say it was human tissue. It looks like she tried to fight her attacker off.”

  “Result!” Copeland said, triumphantly punching the air. If that was the case, they had his DNA, and it was no longer a case of if they solved the murder, but when.

  Claxton examined the dead girl’s legs and feet next, and to no one’s surprise found more track lines along her inner thighs and between her toes.

  “Right,” Claxton said, “Let’s turn her onto her front. Unlike a standard post-mortem, which begins with a Y shape incision being made on the front of the torso, the start of a special post-mortem generally involves the deceased being placed face down. The initial incision is made across the shoulders, and the skin is then peeled back so that the pathologist can begin his internal examination of the body. Dillon stepped back to the very edge of the room, feeling sick. The others were so engrossed in the procedure that they didn’t even notice his abrupt withdrawal, or the greenish pallor of his skin.

  When Tracey was eventually placed on her back and cut open from the front, Claxton picked up an instrument that reminded Dillon of a pair of gardening shears and cut out the chest plate, exposing the heart and lungs. Because the victim had suffered an arterial bleed out there was hardly any blood left in the chest cavity. He called the photographer forward and directed him to take shots of all the internal injuries, which he described in great detail on his little recording device.

  When the photographer had finished, he took blood samples, which would be sent to the lab for toxicology. When that task was completed, the pathologist used a small knife to expertly remove all the internal organs: heart, lungs, pancreas, spleen, and what remained of the intestinal tract, liver and kidneys. Claxton inspected each one and weighed it. Histology samples were taken and passed to Copeland.

  Lastly, the bladder, uterus and ovaries, or rather what was left of them after the genital attack, were removed, exposing the full horror of the killer’s onslaught. Claxton sawed through the pubic bone, unfolded her vagina and called the photographer forward to record the terrible injuries. Dillon turned away, thinking that even a whore deserved a little dignity in death.

  “I can honestly say I have never seen anything like this,” he heard Claxton say. “It is quite astonishing.”

  “Talk us through it, please, doctor,” Dillon asked, turning to face them again.

  “In my opinion, the killer probably used a hunting knife in the genital attack. The blade would have been pointed, extremely sharp along the cutting edge and serrated along the other. It penetrated almost thirteen inches inside her. I can’t tell how many times because her insides were decimated by him twisting the blade backwards and forwards inside her.” He mimed the action, twisting his wrist like he was revving a motorcycle, several times to demonstrate.

  “Sweat Jesus,” Copeland whispered.

  Even bubbly little Emma, who spent more time with the mutilated and putrefying corpses that populated her morgue than she did with the living, and who firmly believed that she had become immune to anything that her job could throw at her, visibly blanched.

  “The angle of insertion suggests that she was lying down at the time of the attack; the blows were powerful, the movement frenzied. Her fallopian tubes and cervix are, to put it in layman’s terms, shredded like mincemeat. Even though she would have bled out pretty quickly from the arterial haemorrhaging in her neck, it is quite possible that she was still alive when the knife was inserted into her vagina, and I base this on the degree of bleeding and bruising both within and around the attack site. The stomach wounds, on the other hand, were almost certainly administered at his leisure after she had expired.”

  Dillon could feel the room starting to spin, and he leaned against the wall and forced himself to take slow deep breaths until everything returned to normal. He wondered how people like Claxton and Emma slept at night. Perhaps, instead of counting sheep, they counted bodies on cold metal slabs. They were so matter of fact about the whole thing; cutting up human beings as routinely and casually as teenagers dissecting frogs in the school lab.

  Copeland and Calvin weren’t much better; they were perfectly comfortable in this depressing environment and seemed to find the whole process fascinating. Even Ned, the photographer seemed pretty chilled out.

  All he felt was revulsion. And that, he told himself, was a good thing.

  “Was there any sign of the missing bits of intestine inside her abdominal cavity?” Calvin asked as Claxton moved towards the top of the table.

  Claxton shook his head.
“No. Are you sure they weren’t left at the scene?”

  “I processed the scene myself,” Calvin said. “There was nothing like that there.”

  “We know he’s a trophy taker,” Dillon said. “Maybe he took it home and is keeping it in a jar of formaldehyde.”

  “Why would anyone want to keep human flesh?” Copeland asked, and then grinned wickedly. “Perhaps he just hadn’t had time to go to the butcher’s and needed some offal to feed his dog.”

  “I said we’d come back to the head,” Claxton said as he placed the point of his knife against the skin behind the right ear and pressed down sharply. He drew the blade along the top of the head to the skin behind the other ear. Dillon was appalled to realise that he was humming while he worked. He couldn’t suppress the shudder that passed through him; this part of the autopsy always turned his knees to jelly.

  With the scalp split, the pathologist pulled on the skin at the top and peeled it down to the level of the eyebrows, folding it over like a grotesque Halloween mask. Dillon tried to ignore the sickly slimy noise that accompanied the movement. Claxton peeled the rest of the skin back the other way, exposing the remainder of the skull as Emma stepped forward wielding a big electrical saw.

  “You gentlemen might want to step back beyond the yellow line,” the pathologist suggested, indicating a line on the floor by the entrance to the washroom area.

  “Good idea,” Dillon said, dragging a protesting Copeland back with him. Although there was nothing to indicate that Tracey had any conditions that might make her a health hazard, they were not wearing masks and there was a risk of unwittingly breathing in airborne blood in the fine spray the saw generated.

  “I find this the most interesting part,” Copeland said from behind the line.

  “You’re sick in the head, you know that?” Dillon told him.

  “I agree with George,” Ned said. “This is all so fascinating.”

  “You should seek professional help,” Dillon advised him.

  The buzz of the saw was uncomfortably loud in the tight confines of the mortuary, and it seemed to go on forever. Eventually, her task completed, Emma stood aside and the pathologist pulled off the cap of the skull in preparation for removing the brain.

  “You can come back over now,” Emma told them, smiling happily.

  Anyone would think she was doing us a favour, Dillon thought, noting with some disgust that George Copeland and his buddy, nerdy Ned, were heading back to the body before she had even finished speaking.

  “I suppose we had better take a look, too,” Sam Calvin said.

  “I suppose so,” Dillon agreed, forcing himself to take a step closer, and then another, and then another, until he was near enough to see the dura matter, the tissue covering the dead girl’s brain. He watched the pathologist cut that away and lift the brain out of the cranial cavity. Claxton weighed and inspected it, and recorded his findings.

  Save for the various tissues that Sam and George had packaged as samples, the extracted organs were placed together in a single plastic bag and deposited back inside the body cavity, which was sewn up by Emma.

  The autopsy was finally over and the pathologist confirmed that the cause of death was a single cut to the neck, which was carried out anti-mortem. This had severed the windpipe and led to arterial bleed out or exsanguination. The vaginal injuries were inflicted peri-mortem and would have proved fatal had she not already received the terminal neck injuries. The incisions to her abdomen and the partial extraction of her intestine were all done post-mortem. “An interesting piece de resistance, wouldn’t you say?” Claxton said.

  “I’m sure the Psychobabble people would think so,” Dillon agreed.

  Four long hours after it started, the SPM was finally over, and Dillon had hated every painful minute of it.

  After collecting the exhibits and exchanging the usual pleasantries they made their way out to the front of the building as quickly as they could. It was raining heavily and the air was thick with diesel fumes, but compared to the oppressive atmosphere inside the mortuary it was pure heaven.

  “Those places always give me the creeps,” Dillon said, dodging puddles as they walked towards the Vauxhall Astra pool car.

  “You shouldn’t let it get to you, guv,” Copeland said. “You have to be completely detached and think of the body as a machine we’re examining for mechanical defects. You can’t let yourself be drawn in by who the person was or anything like that.”

  Dillon failed to see how anyone could avoid being drawn in, especially when the victim was young, like this one. Even after having seen it with his own eyes, he still couldn’t quite believe the extent to which this woman had been defiled. How could anyone not be disturbed by seeing a sight like that?

  “What do you think about the pathologist’s suggestion to revisit the body in a few days to see if any further evidential bruising comes out?” Copeland asked. These had been Claxton’s parting words. He’d pointed out that bruising isn’t always apparent on fresh cadavers. Sometimes it takes several days for marks to appear and even longer for them to become fully developed.

  “Not sure if it’s going to give us anything more than we’ve already got, to be honest, George. We know how she died. Logging some additional bruises won’t take us any closer to her killer.”

  “Suppose so,” Copeland said, wondering if Dillon really believed that or was just trying to avoid a return trip to the mortuary.

  “Anyway,” Dillon said, “it can always be checked during the second PM.” If someone was arrested and charged, their defence team would be able to instruct an independent pathologist to carry out a second PM to verify the findings of Dr Claxton. If no one was charged by the time the Coroner was ready to release the body to the family, the Coroner’s Office would have to arrange a second PM anyway. And the good thing about second PMs, they both knew, was that they didn’t require a DI to attend.

  Dillon checked his watch and was surprised to see it was gone four already. “George, I want you to complete a lab form tonight and get the nail scrapings up to the FSS at Lambeth first thing tomorrow morning. There’s a good chance that whatever trace material was recovered from under her nails belongs to our killer.” He pictured Winston’s badly gouged face from last night and thought about the flesh under Tracey’s nails. What were the odds that these two events were unconnected?

  A simple comparison of two samples – the DNA profile recorded on Winston’s file and the findings from the skin found under the victim’s nails – would provide all the answers they needed, but the results would take the best part of two days to come back, even though the Forensic Science Service would fast track the submission.

  It was definitely looking like Winston had killed her, but why had he left the message? And what had driven him to mutilate her body like that? He was still trying to fathom that last one out when the telephone rang.

  It was Jack.

  “The drug squad has housed Winston for us. I need you to get back to the office as quickly as possible!”

  CHAPTER 10

  It was almost five p.m. by the time they got back to Arbour Square. While George booked all the exhibits into storage, Dillon gave Jack a breakdown on what the autopsy had revealed.

  “Is he sure about the killer having medical knowledge?” Jack asked. He didn’t like that idea one little bit, and neither would Holland. He could already picture the headline if the tabloids got hold of that information: ‘DOCTOR DEATH STALKS THE STREETS OF LONDON’.

  “I’m afraid so, Jack,” Dillon confirmed. “And it makes sense. He cut her open like he knew what he was doing.”

  “Fuck,” Jack said, gloomily. “That’s all we need – a psychotic doctor.”

  “To be fair,” Dillon said, putting things into context, “Claxton did only say rudimentary medical knowledge.”

  “So, it could theoretically be a mortuary assistant, a paramedic or even a hospital porter?”

  Dillon nodded. “Or just someone who’s worked in a
funeral parlour, embalming bodies. It could even be a weirdo who’s been reading too many medical books.”

  “Well, that’s as clear as mud,” Tyler said, deciding that there was no point in speculating further. It would all come out in the wash, as his mum was fond of saying.

  Dillon sniffed his lapel and wrinkled his nose. “I think I need a shower. I’ve got the smell of death all over me,”

  “I thought it was just that ropey aftershave you wear kicking up,” Jack teased.

  “Funny,” Dillon said, giving him the finger. “So, what’s been happening here while I’ve been gone?”

  Jack explained that Reg had managed to fast-track subscriber information on mobile phones belonging to Tracey Phillips, Sandra Dawson, and Claude Winston.

  “The call data shows that Tracey rang Winston once during the early hours of yesterday morning, a call that lasted approximately two minutes. Between five and six-fifteen a.m. Winston made a number of calls to Tracey’s mobile, none of which were answered. He also made one short call to Sandra Dawson just before six a.m.”