Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [9]
The sound of the running water stopped. Harris, suddenly aware that he was present without invitation, glanced back anxiously at the door through which he had entered.
‘Don’t feel that you have to leave on my account.’
Harris turned to see a small man standing in the doorway of an anteroom.
He was dressed in a mortician’s robe and was drying his hands on a paper towel. The man wore a hygiene mask over his mouth. A few strands of dark wavy hair escaped from beneath a paper hairnet. Only his eyes were clearly visible; icy blue and bright with intelligence and curiosity.
Harris didn’t recognize this pathologist from the hundreds of crime scenes he had attended during his long tenure at Charing Cross. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Doctor. . . ?’ Harris began.
The robed man didn’t seem to hear the question. ‘You’re not disturbing me, Chief Inspector. I’m merely doing a preliminary examination before the chief pathologist conducts the autopsy.’
‘That’ll be Salter, won’t it?’
‘Salter? Oh, that’s right. Good man. Tell me, have you ever seen anything like this before?’
‘Oh yes,’ Harris murmured. The two deep gouges at the base of the boy’s neck were all too familiar. Large sections of flesh had been hastily and untidily removed. Harris met the pathologist’s gaze. ‘This lad is the sixth. I’ve seen this five times in the last six months.’
15
The pathologist paused in his examination. Harris noticed that he ran his fingers absently through the dead boy’s blond hair. The gesture was distinctly paternal. ‘Six people have been killed like this?’
Harris tensed at the unspoken accusation, suddenly feeling that he had to defend his investigation. ‘Look, Doctor. . . ’
The pathologist just stared at him.
‘Look, er, Doctor. I’m working flat out on this case, but none of the usual procedures are producing any positive results.’ Harris found himself telling this strange nameless doctor about the investigation. ‘The fifth victim was a coloured girl. No more than seventeen. Chinese kids from one of the big laundries found her stuffed behind a bush while they were playing ball in Soho Square.’
The Doctor winced. ‘And the mode of killing was the same?’
‘Exactly like this poor lad.’ Harris looked at the body of the boy. You didn’t have to be a pathologist to know that the same man was behind both killings.
‘You said that usual police methods weren’t working?’
‘They aren’t. Not at all. Despite what you might read in the papers, Doctor, the majority of murders are easy to solve. At Charing Cross, our clear-up rate for murder is three times better than it is for burglary or arson. For all the shouting that goes on about the streets not being safe any more, the person who is most likely to do away with you is not some deranged lunatic but your nearest and dearest. Unless of course they’re one and the same person.
In most murder investigations our first step is to take the husband – and it usually is the husband – down to the station for a little chat. If it’s not the husband, then it’s a work mate, brother or friend.’
‘But stranger killings are different, aren’t they?’ the Doctor interrupted.
‘The connection between the killer and the victim is not their relationship, it is something else, something indirect.’
‘In these murders, there is no connection at all.’
The Doctor leant over the corpse to examine the boy’s neck, probing the ragged wounds with his fingertips. Harris was slightly unsettled to notice that the Doctor wasn’t wearing surgical gloves.
‘Oh, there are always connections, Chief Inspector. They’re just harder to find.’
‘Normally I’d agree with you, but not in this case. This is completely different to anything I’ve worked on before. We’ve been unable to track down any relatives for the victims, living or dead. No personal records at all.’
‘Interesting. Perhaps they’ve come from another planet.’
‘Very funny, sir. I’m a police officer,