Core of Evil

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘Apparently we’re looking for a serial killer, sir,’ said DS Bradbury dryly.

  Dr Catherall favoured her with a level glance. ‘These animals had managed to worm their way through gaps in the sheeting and get to the old woman’s body,’ she said. ‘I found them clustered around the stomach area, where they had started eating their way through. And they all died before they could do much damage.’

  ‘Died how?’ Lapslie asked.

  ‘That,’ Dr Catherall said, ‘we will determine in due course. For now, I have a post-mortem to complete. It is not the kind of thing that you can come back to later.’

  She worked in a logical progression, starting at the crown of the corpse’s head and finishing at the soles of its feet. Half way through the process, the cadaver was splayed open, with Dr Catherall wrist-deep in its dry innards examining whatever remained of the organs, but by the time she had finished, the corpse was very nearly back to the condition in which it had started the post-mortem, albeit with a massive Y-shaped incision, stitched up with thick black thread, marring the body from groin to chest, where it split and continued up to either shoulder, passing above the flaps of its breasts.

  As Dr Catherall finished with the body, Lapslie thought that she looked smaller: drained by the process. It seemed to him as if she didn’t have much in the way of stamina within that diminutive frame of hers.

  ‘What can you tell me about her?’ Lapslie asked, as Dr Catherall washed her hands thoroughly and wearily.

  ‘Let us start with the state of decomposition,’ she replied. ‘The body is in remarkably good condition, considering where it was found. The plastic sheeting in which she was wrapped would have provided something approaching an anaerobic environment, which would have slowed decomposition down and deterred all but the most determined or –’ she indicated the small corpses on the next table ‘– smallest predators. Given the condition of the skin and the flesh, and taking account of the effects of the environment, I would estimate that she has been dead for between seven and ten months.’

  ‘Which is about what we thought,’ Emma said.

  Dr Catherall sniffed. ‘Sometimes pathology is about confirming the obvious, rather than bringing rabbits out of hats. Judging by bone density and porosity I would put her towards the end of her natural life, somewhere between seventy and eighty years of age. The progression of arthritis in her joints confirms this. Her lungs had been damaged by childhood rheumatic fever, and she had suffered from numerous other diseases during the course of her life – rickets, some small skin melanomas and so on – but none of them carried her off. She had also been suffering from low-level malnutrition for some years, I would estimate, but that did not carry her off either.’

  ‘Then what did?’ asked Lapslie.

  ‘I’ll come to that in a moment.’ She leaned forward and indicated a puckered scar on the corpse’s neck, sitting in the notch of the breastbone. ‘This scar indicates the insertion of a breathing tube at some stage early on in her life. Without seeing her medical records it is difficult to be sure, but I would lay odds that it is the result of childhood diphtheria.’ She paused for a moment, considering the body. ‘The hips are worn, but they are hers, rather than replacements. Apart from the normal signs of extreme ageing, there are no indications of any age-related issues that might have caused her death – no tumours, no evidence of a stroke. And, as far as I can tell this far after death, she had a heart like a horse. In fact, if I were her doctor, and if she were still alive, I would say she had several years left in her yet. She did not die of the set of symptoms we collect together under the aegis of “old age”.’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘I am getting there.’ Dr Catherall rubbed a hand across her chin thoughtfully. ‘Exposure cannot be entirely ruled out. The degeneration of tissue means that I cannot definitively test for shock or circulatory collapse, but for reasons I will explain in a moment I do not believe that exposure is probable – at least, as a primary cause of death. It may, of course, have been contributory.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lapslie murmured. Dr Catherall gave the impression that she had either been rehearsing her little speech all the way through the post-mortem or that she carefully structured her thoughts down to subordinate clauses and subjunctive moods even as she spoke.

  ‘To cut a long story short,’ she said, seeing the look in Lapslie’s eyes, ‘you probably noticed yourself when you examined the body yesterday that there was some damage to the back of the skull. This was not accidental. I would estimate that she was battered once or twice, shortly before death, with a blunt object.’

  ‘Nothing was found at the scene,’ Emma murmured from beside Lapslie.

  ‘Any other damage to the body?’ Lapslie asked.

  ‘No stab wounds, no fractures, if that’s what you mean.’

  Lapslie frowned. ‘I was thinking more of the fingers.’

  Dr Catherall nodded slowly. ‘A strange one, that. The fingers on the right hand appear to have been removed by some sharp object. I’ll have to do further tests in order to determine whether they were sawn off, cut off or bitten off, but they’re certainly missing and I’m reasonably sure it was done after death. They certainly weren’t removed surgically – there was no attempt to close up the wounds.’

  ‘And the left hand?’

  ‘Intact,’ Dr Catherall said. ‘Which is, of course, a little odd.’

  ‘Does that mean anything to you yet?’ DS Bradbury asked.

  Lapslie thought for a moment. Apart from that maddening faint taste of lychees, caused more, he suspected, by the memory of a sound than by the sound itself, there was nothing more than a nagging familiarity. He’d talked to someone about missing fingers before, but where? When?

  Silence filled the room. Lapslie eventually broke it by tapping the metal lip on the autopsy table with his hand. ‘Do you have any idea whether the place where we found her was the actual scene of the crime? Did she die there, or did she die elsewhere and was moved there afterwards?’

  ‘That’s more a question for the CSIs to answer,’ Catherall said judiciously.

  ‘Doctor Catherall – Jane – I get the feeling that you’ve never stinted from venturing an opinion, especially when you have evidence backing it up.’

  ‘Ah, how well you know me after such a short acquaintance. There were traces of earth and vegetation beneath the nails of her left hand, which indicates to me that she was alive when she arrived in the forest. More than that, I cannot say.’

  ‘We still need to establish the identity of the victim. Did you find any clues on the body or in the clothing?’

  ‘Her clothes were badly affected by the time she had spent in the forest,’ Dr Catherall said. ‘I will send them to the forensic team, of course, but I would be surprised if there was any usable evidence on them. The labels indicate that they came from a range of department stores, although the general style and colour, as well as the patterns of wear and the repairs that had been carried out on them, suggest that they had all been worn for a number of years.’ She paused for a moment. ‘I realise that it is not my area, but I did notice cotton threads hanging from a button here, or a zip there. I suspect you may find that many of the clothes were bought second hand, perhaps from charity shops, and the threads were the remnants of the labels. Just a suspicion of mine: Forensics will have more to say.’

  ‘Doctor Catherall, I can’t imagine anyone having more to say than you,’ Lapslie said, smiling.

  ‘You’re too kind,’ she murmured.

  ‘So, we’re no closer to discovering her identity.’

  ‘That is not entirely the case.’ She turned away. ‘Dan, could you bring me the evidence box over by the fume cupboard?’

  Lapslie looked over his shoulder. The young technician was busy putting the surgical instruments into an autoclave for sterilisation. At Dr Catherall’s request he walked across to a large glass-fronted box on one side of the room and retrieved a plastic box with a standard CJA label stuck to the top.<
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  ‘Take a look at the victim’s mouth,’ Dr Catherall said to Lapslie. ‘What do you see? Or, rather, what do you not see?’

  Lapslie bent closer to the skull-like head, catching a whiff of something unpleasant as he did so. ‘I don’t see any teeth,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed.’ Dr Catherall opened the plastic box with a flourish. ‘She had lost all of her teeth somewhere along the way, and replaced them with these!’

  In the box Lapslie could see a set of dentures: bright and sparkling. Bizarrely, he wanted to laugh. They looked more like something from a joke-shop than something a person would put in their mouth.

  ‘And these help us how?’

  Dr Catherall carefully picked the dentures out of the box and turned them over. ‘Because they have a serial number,’ she said, indicating what looked to Lapslie more like a set of small scratches than anything meaningful. ‘And that special orthodontic design serial number, which is unique to these dentures, will allow us to trace them back to the dental technician who made them. And that will allow us to identify the body.’ She smiled that sweet smile up at him. ‘And when I say “will”, what I mean is “already has”. Young Dan over there made some phone calls earlier on, and we now know who this lady is.’

  ‘Doctor Catherall, I am amazed. Truly amazed. All you have to do is tell me who killed her and we’ll have solved the entire case without leaving the room.’

  ‘In true Nero Wolfe style,’ she said, blushing at Lapslie’s praise. ‘Sadly I cannot help with identifying her murderer, but at least I can provide some of the information you need. Her name was Violet Chambers. She was seventy-nine years old, and she lived in Ipswich. That is all the information I have: I did not want to trespass too much on your undoubted area of expertise.’

  ‘Doctor Catherall, you are truly amazing.’

  ‘Please, call me Jane.’

  ‘Even more amazing is the fact that you knew who she was and what killed her before I even walked into the room, and you still gave me the entire performance.’

  She shrugged: a contorted movement of her shoulders. ‘It is so rare that I get an appreciative audience. I have to take advantage where I can.’

  ‘Jane, it’s been a privilege being taken advantage of by you.’

  ‘Then perhaps I could lure you into my office, where I could offer you a cup of coffee and show you what little information young Dan here has been able to unearth about Violet Chambers.’

  ‘Are you propositioning me, Doctor Catherall?’

  ‘Oh, I was taught never to end a sentence with a proposition,’ she said, smiling.

  Lapslie turned to where his DS sat. ‘Emma, head over to Forensics. Find out whether they discovered any skeletons of animals around the crash site.’

  Emma nodded and left, obviously grateful for the chance to actually do something, rather than just sit there watching someone else doing something.

  ‘Dan,’ Dr Catherall said to her assistant, ‘could you organise two coffees for me? Cream and sugar to the side. We’ll be in my office.’

  She gestured to Lapslie to precede him. For a moment, Lapslie thought she wanted him to take her arm. He still wasn’t sure quite how seriously Dr Catherall took herself, but he suspected he might wound her pride if he laughed.

  Pushing the double doors open, he walked out of the post-mortem room and turned instinctively to his right, where a side corridor ran off the main spine of the building. As Dr Catherall let the doors close softly behind her, he moved along the corridor – slowly, so that she could keep up.

  The doors he passed were closed, labelled ‘Laboratory’, ‘Stores’ and ‘Evidence’. At the far end, a fire-door with a push-bar across it gave access to, presumably, the rear of the building. Just before the fire-door, to his left, was a door that had been left a few inches ajar. The sign said, ‘Dr J. Catherall, Senior Forensic Pathologist’. He waited for her to join him and, when she gestured for him to enter the office, he pushed the door open and walked inside.

  Based on his short experience of Dr Catherall, Lapslie had expected papers and books to be scattered all over the desk, the bookshelves, the filing cabinets and the floor. Instead, he was pleasantly surprised to find it was almost bare. A bookcase held copies of medical journals and some reference works, but apart from that there was nothing but plain work surfaces and a Dell computer sitting on the desk, its screensaver running.

  No, that wasn’t quite all. On top of the bookcase, next to the computer’s printer, was a framed photograph of a young man with black hair. He was smiling at whoever had taken the photograph. Something was written across the bottom, but Lapslie didn’t like to look more closely. It would have seemed too intrusive for such a short acquaintance.

  Dr Catherall gestured to a chair and said, ‘Please, take a seat. I will just be a moment.’

  He did so. Dr Catherall pulled open a drawer and rummaged around inside, and Lapslie was irresistibly reminded of how, less than an hour before, she had been doing much the same thing inside a dead human body. Eventually she pulled out a thin folder.

  ‘Here – this is what Dan discovered about her identity, along with a list of the clothes and possessions we found,’ she said, handing it over. ‘I’ll print another copy off for you to take away.’

  Lapslie opened the folder and leafed through the pages. Some had obviously been typed up – probably by Dan, the Doctor’s assistant – but others were copies of emails. He started to read, then looked up, aware that the atmosphere in the office had changed in some subtle way.

  Dr Catherall was staring at the computer.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘I have not used the computer this morning,’ she said. ‘I did not even switch it on when I arrived.’ She nudged the mouse, and the screen flickered to life.

  There, on the screen, was an open word-processing program, with the file that Lapslie was reading prominently displayed.

  ‘Someone has been playing around with my computer,’ Dr Catherall snapped, her mild demeanour changing suddenly to something much darker. ‘Dan!’

  Footsteps in the corridor, and the Doctor’s assistant arrived carrying a tray with two cups and saucers, plus a sugar bowl and a jug of cream. ‘Yes, Doctor?’

  ‘Have you turned my computer on today?’

  Dan shook his head. ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Do you know who did?’

  ‘There’s only been you and me in this morning. And the Detective Sergeant, of course, but she spent most of her time in here reading the paper, as far as I could tell. The computer was off when I last checked.’

  ‘Well it’s on now.’ She turned her gaze towards the bookshelf. ‘And the printer has been turned on as well. Someone has been in here and printed off a copy of the information we discovered about Violet Chambers!’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Dan blurted, putting the tray down on the desk. ‘What would they want to do that for?’

  ‘And why leave the computer on?’ Lapslie asked, frowning. ‘Why leave the file up on screen?’

  ‘Perhaps whoever it was got disturbed when Dan brought your DS in here,’ Dr Catherall said. ‘Perhaps they had to get out in a hurry and did not have time to close the computer down. They could have got away through the fire door outside. If they’d parked their car in the car park they could have been back to it in a handful of seconds.’

  Lapslie looked from the computer to the printer and then to the file he held in his hands. It didn’t make any sense. An elderly murder victim buried in the woods, that he could understand. It was the kind of thing that had happened before. A break-in at a pathology laboratory in order to copy a file, that he could understand as well, albeit at a stretch. There had been cases – usually gang-related murders – where there had been pretty sophisticated attempts to tamper with the evidence, including in one instance, he recalled, someone setting fire to the laboratory where the post-mortem was taking place. No, it was the combination of the two that was throwing him. Why would the murde
r of an elderly lady be so important that someone would gain access to a pathologist’s office to look at her file? It was like a collision between two entirely unrelated cases.

  He looked at Dr Catherall, whose face was contorted into a thunderous scowl. ‘I’m having a hard time believing this,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you didn’t leave your computer on last night when you left?’

  Dr Catherall said something scathing in reply, but Lapslie didn’t catch it. Something she had said earlier was biting at the back of his mind. Something about whoever had gained access to the office and turned the computer on – if indeed she hadn’t forgotten to turn it off the night before, or Emma Bradbury hadn’t turned it on herself for some unknown reason – parking their car in the car park outside.

  And then he realised what it was. When he visualised that car, he imagined it as being a black Lexus with a shaded windscreen.

  Just like the one that had been parked near the place in the forest where Violet Chambers’ body had been discovered. The one that had driven off before he could find out who was inside.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Daisy Wilson left her car – or Violet’s car, as she was already thinking of it with a mixture of nostalgia and distaste – in a side-street in Colchester. She could have driven it all the way, but something made her stop twenty or so miles short of her eventual destination and complete her journey by train. Partly it was the usual caution that had served her so well for so long. There was something about leaving her car where it might be connected to her that made her feel itchy and vulnerable, despite the anonymity that her new identity afforded her. Mainly, however, it was the fact that driving made her nervous, while trains calmed her down. If she was going to live in this area for a while, she wanted her first impressions to be happy ones.