Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [15]
She didn’t smile.
‘So? Day after tomorrow, then, Princess?’
‘Just one thing.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘A request? Nice.’
‘Yes. Please – I don’t want you to call me a tart.’
He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and chuckled. ‘Know what, girl? I’ll do you a special introductory offer – I won’t call you a tart and I won’t call you a cunt either. OK? I won’t call you a cunt. Unless, of course, you act like one.’
8
Some cops disliked post-mortems. Others were fascinated by them and could talk about them for hours, reeling out lists of technical terms like a doctor. Zoë found that once you convinced yourself to look at the body as a piece of meat – as long as you saw it as nothing else – the most overwhelming thing, sometimes, about a PM was how tedious it was. It was full of recording details, taking photos, weighing even the tiniest organs, the most insignificant glands. And the human body in death wasn’t pink and red, but yellow. Or grey. It was only the initial cut – the thoracic-abdominal Y cut – she found difficult. The zipper, the cops called it. Most of them would stand away from the table during ‘the zipper’, avoiding the release of gases. Because she hated that part, and because it was in Zoë always to push herself, it was the part when she would stand the closest to the table. No masks or mints or smelly ointment to put up her nose. The most she would allow herself was a pinch of the nose and a squint. While Lorne’s body was opened Zoë stood next to her, half of her wanting to hold her hand, squeeze it while it happened, stop it hurting. Stupid, she thought, as the mortician wordlessly lined up the implements, rib spreaders and a range of cordless Stryker saws. Like she could change any of this shit.
Pathologists hated being pressed for conclusions before the examination was complete. Just hated it. Still, it was their job to resist – and the police’s job to persist, so from time to time Ben or Zoë would fire out a question, which the pathologist would answer with a disapproving click of his tongue against the roof of his mouth and a few caustic comments muttered under his breath about the basic, unscientific impatience of the police, and why was it people couldn’t wait for a proper report instead of taking his words out of context and handing them on a plate to some jumped-up defence brief? But slowly, as the afternoon wore on, he began grudgingly to hand out small details. Lorne’s vagina and anus had tears to them, he remarked, but they hadn’t bled. Evidence that the rape could have happened just before or just after her death. He swabbed her, but couldn’t immediately see any semen in there, so maybe a condom had been used. Or she’d been raped using an object. There was an injury to the back of her head, probably the result of a fall. He guessed she’d been attacked from the front, which was consistent with the damage done to her face. And there’d been a blow to the stomach – a kick maybe – that had caused internal bleeding.
‘Is that what she died of?’
He shook his head, thoughtfully examining the inside wall of her abdomen. ‘No,’ he said after a while. ‘It would have killed her eventually. But …’ He pushed a finger into the thickened lump of blood that had gathered around her spleen. ‘No. There’s not as much blood as you’d expect with the artery to the spleen ruptured like this. She’d have died shortly after the injury.’
‘How?’
He raised his chin and looked at Ben steadily. Then, without expression, he pointed to the silver duct tape and the tennis ball, which had now been removed and sealed in a bag on the exhibits bench. ‘I’m not saying anything officially, and I need to look at her brain first, but if your nose looked like that and you had a ball jammed in your mouth, how do you think you’d breathe?’
‘She suffocated?’ said Zoë.
‘I expect that’s what my report will say.’ He clicked off the torch and turned to face them. ‘So? You want to know how it happened? He hit her like this – here across the zygomatic arch.