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  But Mike had gone, almost running along the corridor to the office he shared with Tim Brewer. There had to be a copy there, surely …

  There was, and he breathed a sigh of relief as he found the small blue booklet marked Vacher’s Parliamentary Companion and leafed through the thin pages covered with very small print indeed, praying that the copy, dated 1989 – which was about normal for half the reference books on the shelves – wasn’t too out of date. It shouldn’t be: unless the man had got in on a recent by-election he should be listed. If he really was an MP, that was. The constable had said the woman who rang in was drunk, and fantasist drunks weren’t unheard of in the dark night watches at Ratcliffe Street.

  But she clearly wasn’t a fantasist. There he was. The Hon. David Caspar-Wynette-Gondor, Member of Parliament for Bilkley Town. Bilkley Town? Mike thought, staring at the page. Where the hell was that? He’d need another reference book for that, and he grabbed the AA book lying on the top of the bookshelf. Not the most detailed of guides but it would serve his purpose.

  Bilkley, it appeared, was a sizeable market town in the Midlands. Not too far away from London; a plum seat, he suspected. Not that that mattered at the moment. The first thing he had to do was to tell the Guv that there just might be another MP to worry about.

  3

  The headlines of the late editions of the morning papers were almost hysterical with excitement. There hadn’t been a decent murder or rape to occupy the press for some weeks, and now to get one that combined horror with politics was almost more than they could have prayed for. Everyone and his sister had been interviewed, with Mary Bodling well represented as expressing deep regrets at the loss of so able and remarkable a man as Sam Diamond, an ornament of his Party and always so utterly reliable and loyal that she had in fact feared last night that something terrible had happened to him when he didn’t appear to vote on the issue of pharmaceutical imports to the UK from other European nations about which he had cared so deeply – indeed, her inability to find him, she assured the Clarion, had made her determined to involve the police herself this very morning – and if only she had done so last night! – but of course by then the police had made their dreadful discovery; and so on and on ad nauseam.

  The reports made much of the fact that Diamond’s throat had been deeply cut and George, reading the papers as voraciously as anyone else, even though she had all the inside information anyone could possibly want, checked carefully that there was not a word about the other mutilations to the body. Well done, Gus, she thought, to have kept that quiet. Let the public know about that and the mind boggles at what the reaction might be.

  She had done the post-mortem well before six a.m. even though she had had to wait for Danny, the mortuary porter, to respond to the call to his room in a lodging house a couple of streets away. He came, grumbling furiously, of course, but eagerly enough. The rate of overtime he was paid for these special out-of-hours jobs more than compensated him for the loss of his sleep, but he wouldn’t miss any opportunity to make George’s life a misery if he could.

  He couldn’t this morning. She was altogether too fascinated by the job in hand to pay any attention to him, and after a while Danny too became so interested that he stopped his complaining and just watched, avidly.

  On the other side of the PM room Mike Urquhart leaned against the wall with his arms folded, not watching. Anyone watching his steady, if glazed, stare would have assumed he was observing every movement of George’s hand, but he had retired behind his eyes and was thinking his own thoughts. Indeed he was almost asleep.

  ‘Major vessels of the neck severed,’ George dictated into the microphone over her head as she probed carefully in the blood-boltered mess beneath Sam Diamond’s chin. ‘Exsanguination, however, not as complete as I would have expected. Hmm …’ She paused and then, using her forceps as delicately as if she were handling living tissue, lifted the flap of skin to the left side of the neck, and peered at it more closely.

  ‘Danny, hand me a wet swab,’ she commanded, and, taking it from him, began to clean the skin of the blood stains that obscured its original colour. It had a yellowish waxy tone now, though George suspected that in life Sam Diamond had had a rubicund look that would match the roundness of his jowls and the soft double chin that was almost a triple. He had been, she was sure, what would have once been called a plethoric man. Someone with too much of everything, particularly blood and gall.

  She pulled her mind back from its wanderings and concentrated, difficult though it was beginning to be at this hour of the morning after a long busy day, and a hospital dinner (was that only a handful of hours ago? It felt like half a lifetime) was not conducive to sharpness of intellect.

  But then what she had thought earlier came back into her mind, and her wits did sharpen. Somehow the body had more blood left in it than she would have expected from the degree of damage to the major arteries of the neck. If they had been cut while the heart was still beating, the loss of blood would have been greater; but there were still areas of pooling in the cadaver that suggested that perhaps the heart had stopped. Indeed, had stopped some considerable time before the throat was cut.

  The skin emerged thick and dimpled from her careful washing. She pulled on it gently to try to give it the same tension it would have had in life, jerking her head at Danny to bring round the big magnifying glass she had on a swivel arm above the table for close examinations, and peering through it.

  ‘There!’ she said after a while. ‘I was right. See it Mike, come and look!’

  Mike started, blinked fast several times and shook his head to clear it. ‘Whassa – Is something wrong, Dr B.?’ His Scottish burr sounded unusually strong.

  ‘Not wrong.’ She sounded pleased with herself, even a little excited. ‘Just interesting. Look. Through the glass, where my forceps are pointing.’

  Obediently Mike looked. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You tell me what you can see,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll find out if your opinion about what it might be matches mine.’

  ‘Well, there’s great pits there – it looks verra strange all magnified like that – and it’s a horrid colour, like old soap, and – Ah! Now I see,’ as George tilted the glass a little more and pointed again with her forceps. ‘A sort of scratch. Well, not a scratch so much as a – a depression. Half-moon shaped and yes, there’s another, and another. Mmm! The last one is a scratch, too, isn’t it? The one nearest the middle. I mean it’s broken there, the skin …’

  ‘Anything else?’ she demanded.

  He peered again. ‘Am I imagining it or is there a bit of blueness there? Not a lot, but …’

  ‘You’re not imagining it,’ she said jubilant, now. ‘Which proves I’m not either. Here and here and here.’ Again the forceps moved, tracing the outline of a smudge of faint colour and then, as Mike straightened his back, she said urgently, ‘Surely you can see what that suggests?’

  He stared at her and bit his lip. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Here,’ she said, impatient now. ‘Look at it with the naked eye. You can still see it but not so clearly. Look.’ Again she pulled gently on the skin flap to the left of where the gullet had once been, and he bent and looked. This time when he straightened his back his eyes were bright.

  ‘Strangled,’ he said. ‘The man was strangled. Manually strangled.’

  ‘Got it!’ She was absurdly pleased with him. ‘If they’re not the indentations of fingernails, and faint bruises – hard to see now because there’s been so much damage and blood flow they’ve lost their original depth – in the sort of configuration that suggests a right-handed man stood behind him and gripped him with his right hand only, and managed to choke him, I’m the Queen of Romania. He’d have fractured the hyoid bone, I’ve no doubt, bringing the pressure of his fingers over the midline, but I can’t prove that because the whole larynx is so chopped about that it’s impossible to say what happened there or when. But it certainly seems to me that this man was dead before the
slicing up happened. Now, why should someone do that, do you suppose?’

  ‘Why does anyone kill another person? Isn’t that what we have to find out?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean why kill. I mean why kill him twice? He was dead. There was no need to spend time slicing him up and risking getting himself covered in blood as well as interrupted, caught by the police, even.’

  ‘A good question!’ Mike really was fully awake now, and able to think clearly and concisely. It was the last flicker of energy he’d have before crashing out to sleep the rest of the day away. ‘Is there any other evidence you can suggest that might help answer it?’

  ‘I’ve some more to do here.’ She reached above her head for the camera that hung there on its jointed arm, and with speed and considerable dexterity shot several angles over the area on which she was working, and then picked up her scalpel. ‘Danny, get me a specimen bottle. I want to take this section of skin and hold it as evidence. Mike, watch now, to make sure the chain of evidence is safe, and observe precisely where I’m taking it from. You’ll want to make notes. I’ll dictate, shall I?’

  They worked on until at last she’d finished with the head end of the body completely, including the skull and brain. ‘That’s all that’s there,’ she said. ‘Now, let me see what’s happened to the viscera.’ And there was, she knew, a note of relish in her voice.

  Around them the big bright room glittered with its chrome fittings and the sparkle of water as Danny splashed away with his hose to get rid of the excess body fluids that obscured George’s view, and the taps in the big basins dripped mournfully. George was supremely and single-mindedly content. She had no more to ask of life than a complex puzzle and a different sort of PM from the usual; and this job offered both, in abundance.

  At length she stopped work, stretched her back, and grinned at Mike. ‘Well, no more surprises. He had a hearty meal before he died – about an hour before, no more. Lots of wine with it, too. I’d say. The specimens’ – she jerked her head at the row of labelled jars and bottles that Danny had arranged on the side – ‘will tell us how much. I’ll get Jerry working on them tomorrow. I don’t know exactly how old he was, but I’d guess about forty, though his heart and mesentery both show some excess fatty deposits, and I suspect his arteries do too. I’ll look at those in more detail later. His liver was all right. Nothing marvellous in terms of health. I suspect he was a heavy drinker. Another few years and he could well have been in trouble.’

  ‘More than this?’ Mike said and grinned, and she grinned back.

  ‘You know what I mean. For the rest, well, the testes and penis together with a sizeable amount of fat and skin and other connective tissue from the supra-pubic area were removed. The bladder has been breached but the lower gut is intact. What more can I tell you?’

  ‘Why he – the killer – should have arranged the – made the display on the shoulder,’ Mike said. ‘It’s really weird. I canna understand that at all.’

  ‘It’s quite a common mutilation in sexual crimes,’ George said. ‘I’ve come across it before. Without the shoulder arrangement, however. There I agree with you. That is weird. Because usually, they take them away.’

  ‘Why a murderer should remove such organs, in both senses.’ Mike shook his head. ‘I mean, chop ’em off and then take ’em away. That really gets to me.’

  ‘I told you, it’s not that rare. I’ve heard about plenty of murderers in other parts of the world who’ve taken away trophies of their victims. A man in China used to take away some female parts – he killed several women. And others have taken tongues and ears and –’

  ‘I’d rather not know,’ Danny said very loudly. ‘I mean, Dr B., you’ve brought some right nasty stuff into my mortuary over the years, but this is about the nastiest. And rude with it. As a decent sort of bloke what does his job to the best of his ability I don’t think I should ’ave to be exposed to more than is necessary in the way of ’orror. And the way you’re talkin’ is ’orrors, and I’ll thank you to stop it. I wouldn’t want to ’ave to discuss this with the Union, you know.’

  ‘Oh, Danny!’ George opened her eyes wide at him. ‘I keep forgetting what a delicate flower you are. Do forgive me. Not another word, or at least not here. OK, Mike, I’ve done, so you can head for bed. Don’t worry about writing your report at once. I’ll be talking to Gus about all this before you see him. And then, tomorrow – I mean later today sometime – we can all sit down and think about what we’ve got here. Because it really is one hell of a puzzle.’

  Gus didn’t get home, in spite of his plans. He snatched a few hours’ sleep after dawn on the old sofa in the shabby office that had once been his and which was now Rupert Dudley’s, while the bulk of the uniformed branch of Ratcliffe Street, as well as most of the CID, went on searching for David Caspar-Wynette-Gondor, or CWG as everyone was already calling him. And woke about eleven a.m.

  ‘Right,’ he cried, bouncing out of the office like an excited three-year-old. ‘Where is everyone? Time for a rundown on progress. Joe, fetch me a bacon sarnie and two cups o’ black coffee and a cherry Danish from the canteen and do it yesterday. I’m bloody famished. Margaret, is George – Dr B. here?’

  The DC looked up and shook her head. ‘No, Guv. She phoned and said call when you were ready for her and she’d come right over. She’s at home.’

  ‘So call her. And tell her – I mean ask her nicely if she’d bring me a plain suit and shirt and tie. I can’t prance round looking like a battered penguin all day.’ He tugged irritably at the collar of his dress shirt as the DC giggled and reached for the phone.

  ‘Roop? Where’s Inspector Dudley? And Mike Urquhart? And what about Tim Brewer? What the bleedin’ ’ell is everyone doin’, for God’s sake?’

  ‘There’s a big search on for the missing MP, Guv.’ A PC came over to put a sheaf of paper in his hands. ‘There’s been a big push on him. You said before you went to sleep you wanted everyone to –’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Gus said, remembering. ‘OK. Put a call out, get the most up-to-date stuff you can and call ’em in. I want a meet, so that we can really thrash this out properly. Just swanning around picking up stones here and there and looking under ’em isn’t going to find him, for Gawd’s sake.’

  The two constables lifted their brows at each other in exasperation because that was exactly what everyone else had said last night when Gus had sent them all out; but that had been the way he wanted it, so that had been what they had done. To have him complaining now because they’d obeyed orders was a bit rich; but then the Guv always had been like that and probably always would be.

  The sandwich and coffee arrived, together with a doughnut (‘All the Danishes gone, Guv,’ said the PC nervously). Gus grinned lasciviously at the doughnut which was dripping with jam and pallid with sugar.

  ‘What a pity,’ he said, sinking glittering white teeth into the sandwich and gobbling it at amazing speed. It was less than fifteen minutes later that George arrived, with a suit and shirt for him over her arm, and by that time he’d finished the food. (‘One of these days you’ll get an ulcer,’ George said resignedly, knowing it would do no good to try to change the eating habits all his years in the Force had taught him), and had also managed to get a shower, so was wearing just his dress trousers and unbuttoned dress shirt over his damp skin.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ he grunted as he grabbed the clothes and retreated to Inspector Dudley’s office, away from the interested stare of two constables. ‘But it’ll be your naggin’ as much as fast eatin’ as’ll do it.’

  By the time he emerged, slick, clean, even shaven – he’d helped himself to the electric razor Dudley kept in his desk drawer – and properly dressed, the rest of the team were coming in, uniforms and CID men, all looking decidedly crumpled and exhausted. Some of them had been up all night and they looked sourly at Gus’s perkiness.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right!’ he chided them. ‘Once we’ve thrashed out what’s been going on and come up wit
h a strategy, you lot can go and get some sleep. I’ve got some extra people coming over from area, so we can take the heat off you a bit. I just need a bit of info on how things are going so far. There’s coffee an’ toast coming up from the canteen for all of you. Don’t make a mess on the bleedin’ floor.’

  The roomful of people relaxed and settled. Gus had long had a reputation for taking good care of his men and women. He pushed them as hard as they could be pushed, but he knew when to stop and smooth them down and make them feel good, and George, sitting quietly watching him, glowed a little as she recognized, yet again, the skill of the man.

  She’d never imagined she would fall so ridiculously in love with such a one: rough, noisy, fast talking, and very much a Londoner. (‘I got more front than Brighton,’ he used to boast to her. ‘Believe me, ducks, I know ’ow to put meself about a bit!’) But there it was. She, as deep dyed an American (though now with a certain London gloss to her speech and style) as he was a cockney, made him an unexpected partner.

  It had happened even though she hadn’t meant it to. Now they were living together and most of the time enjoying it. Maybe marrying wouldn’t be such a bad idea at that, she found herself thinking, and then pushed the thought away. It was a suggestion that Gus brought up lazily from time to time, and she knew she’d have to face it properly one day, if only because she knew, at gut level, that both of them wanted children. But not yet, and certainly not now. Now they had murder on their minds. And she, George Barnabas, a forensic pathologist but by no means a policeman, had as good an idea to throw into their pot as any of them. And she hugged to herself her expectation of the consternation that would be caused by what she had to say.

  ‘Right!’ Gus called the big crowded room to order as Rupert Dudley came in, his suit as uncreased as though he’d spent the previous night in his bed instead of out of it in the streets. ‘Let’s have a rundown on the situation. First, as a reminder to one and all, who are we looking for?’