25
It rained, very softly, a drenching mist. The ground had become soaked before they tried to extend the surrounding plastic for some overhead protection. There wasn’t enough sheeting. All it had done was narrow the gap through which the water came, adding to themorass in which they stood. The mud of the partially redug grave came up to the diggers’ ankles and the surrounding grass was quickly churned into mire beneath the shuffling feet of the rest of them. Jackson’s inappropriately bright red and white golf umbrella kept their heads and shoulders dry, but Charlie could feel the dampness seeping in through his spread-apart shoes. The need to wear them into comfortable collapse was always a problem in the wet.
There had been formal introductions at the cemetery lodge but no conversation afterward. The German officials hunched under their own umbrellas. The plump medical examiner, whose name Charlie had caught as Wagner, kept looking accusingly at Charlie, as if their dawn misery was his personal fault. The embassy padre, now occupied in head-bent prayer, had earlier looked equally upset at Jackson’s umbrella. The priest himself didn’t have any covering. His hair and nose dripped. It was more crowded than originally intended inside the dank enclosure because of Charlie’s visit the previous day.
Charlie and Jackson had gone directly from the cemetery to the embassy and failed to find any official approach to account for the three recorded but untraceable visits, which, inexplicably in Charlie’s opinion, had caused the head of chancellery to send a second secretary today. His attendance had, in turn, ensured that of the previous day’s registration clerk, no longer patronizingly hostile but instead anxious for them to know she had gone through the entire ledger to ensure the slips hadn’t been wrongly indexed, which they hadn’t been, and a nervous official from the War Graves Commission, who’d assured Charlie there was nothing in their local Berlin directories, either, but that a full search was being carried out in London. Charlie acknowledged that the official motions had to be gone through and didn’t tell them they were wasting their time. He also didn’t tell Jackson.
The diggers were even more deeply immersed when they located the coffin, which they did at first by feel, and sunk even farther, up to their elbows, groping into the quagmire to slip lifting canvas beneath the casket.
There was a muffled, shoulder-shrugging conversation between the German officials before Wagner said to Charlie, “What are you looking for?”
Charlie shrugged back. “Whatever’s there.”
“Anything of forensic importance could be destroyed, attempting a preliminary examination in these conditions.”
“Don’t let’s try, then,” said Charlie, who’d already decided that, as he’d also decided that, remote though the possibility would have been, anything outside the coffin, at the bottom of the grave, would have been lost, too.
The embassy padre invited them all to pray as the slime-coated coffin came into view with a slurped, sucking sound, and Charlie dutifully bent his head with everyone else, wondering idly where God had been when Simon Norrington’s head had been blown off in Siberia, or, indeed, throughout the entire Second World War. Perhaps He’d been busy.
Instead of edging back against the sweating plastic to make room for the box, Charlie led the way out. The ambulance attendants, who’d so far remained dry inside their vehicle, emerged reluctantly to accept the body. Jackson promised the medical examiner he knew the way to the mortuary and the registration clerk and the War Graves officially repeated that they’d go on looking for the missing dockets and Charlie said he appreciated their continuing efforts. The cemetery official exchanged signed documents with the medical examiner.
Their wetness inside the BMW caused the windows to steam when Jackson put the heater on full. Charlie knew it wouldn’t be sufficient to dry his feet. He was lucky, he supposed, not to suffer from rheumatism.
Jackson said, “You think you’ll learn anything from whatever’s inside the coffin?”
“Just confirmation of what I already suspect, if indeed there is a body.”
The car swerved slightly at the attache’s snatched sideways look. “You think it might be
“I wouldn’t be speechless if it were.”
But it wasn’t.
The skeleton, largely in its expected shape, was still inside the now-opened coffin being extensively photographed when Charlie and Jackson were shown into the glassed observation annex raised above the forensic pathology examination room. Because of the elevationCharlie could see almost everything inside the box. What remained of the hairless skull was on its left side, horizontal to the shoulder area, which also appeared disarranged. There were isolated wisps of a thin, gauzelike cloth that Charlie presumed to be the shroud.
The medical examiner was standing back for the photographs and saw them enter. He was gowned, despite there being no risk of outside contamination of a corpse so long dead. Only when the German’s voice echoed into the viewing chamber (“There’s communication between us; there are permanent microphones on the ledge in front of you”) did Charlie see the pathologist was wearing a headset and voicepiece.
“Anything specific you want to establish?” Wagner added.
“Extent of the injuries that killed him,” set out Charlie, his list mentally prepared. “Every possible body measurement. And height. Your opinion, if you can reach it, about his possible body weight. It looks from where I am as if all the hair has gone, but if there are traces I’d like to know the color. Any orthodontistry which might help. Any indication from the bones of injury prior to his death: broken leg or arms, something like that. Anything, obviously, that might be in the coffin that you wouldn’t expect. Particularly personal objects. And anything else you can think of and I haven’t.”
Jackson sniggered at Charlie’s final remark. Wagner didn’t. After a pause the German said, “I will talk as I examine.”
The pathologist worked alone, lifting what sometimes appeared bone only a few millimeters in either length or diameter, virtually dismembering and reassembling the entire skeleton. Everything was measured and weighed in the transfer, every piece identified by its proper medical name, its size and weight itemized. What Charlie regarded as of major significance registered very early in the examination, but he did not interrupt until the pathologist finished the reconstruction.
“Severe physiogmatic trauma?” echoed Charlie.
“That’s what I said.”
“Would the face have been destroyed beyond recognition?”
“Without any doubt. There’s no trace of either cheekbone or the left jawbone, including the eye socket surround. Any teeth that remained have been shattered beyond any orthodontic comparison. There’s no nasal formation whatsoever. In my opinion he got hitdirectly in the face: death would have been instantaneous.”
“You also used the word
“You can see for yourself, from where you are,” said Wagner.
“From where I am it looks as if both hands were totally smashed.”
“They have been,” agreed the doctor. “There is no right thumb or index finger.”
“What about the tips of fingers?”
Wagner had been looking toward the panoramic window separating them. Briefly he turned to bend over the examination table before coming back to them. “No finger-nor the left thumb-extends its full length to the final joint. Perhaps he put his hands in front of his face at the last minute, to shield himself from whatever hit him.”
It was a further two hours before the examination was complete. It was established that the unknown dead man had been one and three-quarter meters tall and from chest and body structure reasonably thickset. The dead man had suffered no bone damage injury prior to his death. There was no surviving hair, nor any unexpected personal objects in the coffin.
It was still only midday when they emerged from the mortuary. The rain had changed, driven down in solid walls by a wind that hadn’t been blowing earlier. Charlie didn’t think the graveside plastic would have survived if it had been. His feet got soaked again on his way to the car.
“Well?” queried Jackson, once they were inside.
“Sometimes it’s not what you find but what you don’t,” said Charlie.
Natalia was thinking the same, in Moscow.
She looked up from the yellowed sheets that Lestov had set out in front of her. “It could simply have failed to be recorded.”
