bashing against rocks after death.’
‘The same kind of injuries you might sustain falling or being pushed into a fermentation cuve in a chai?’
The pathologist looked doubtful. ‘There are a lot of contusions here. I’m not at all sure they would be consistent with falling into a cuve. And in any case, you would expect such injuries to be antemortem.’
‘You said you couldn’t tell whether they occurred before or after death.’
‘That’s right. See…’ He moved to the shoulder injury. ‘There’s no blood around here, which would lead you to think it happened postmortem. But the victim went missing, what, twelve months ago? If he’s been in wine all this time, which from the state of him seems likely, and these injuries were inflicted before death, then the liquid would have leeched the blood from around the skin wound, and it would have ended up looking pale and bloodless, like this, just as if it were postmortem.’ He turned away to the countertop behind him and leafed through a folder of photocopied pages. ‘Yes, you see what’s interesting is that Petty suffered very similar injuries, and the pathologist who carried out that autopsy wasn’t able to decide whether they were post or antemortem either.’ He turned back to the table and from his tool trolley lifted what looked to Enzo very much like a French chef’s knife. ‘Let’s cut him open, shall we?’
With Coste laid on his back, head propped by a half-moon block placed below the neck, Garapin made incisions from either shoulder to the chest, and then down towards the pubis.
‘The body is opened with a Y-shaped thoracoabdominal incision through the skin, and subcutaneous fat measuring 3.7 centimetres thick at the level of the umbilicus. The pleural, pericardial, and peritoneal cavities are smooth and glistening, with no abnormal accumulations of fluid or gas, and there are no adhesions. All organs are present and in their appropriate positions.’
The first autopsy Enzo attended had been carried out by students, under supervision, on a preserved corpse at the University of Glasgow’s faculty of medicine. The internal organs were subdued in colour, grey and pale, the blood dark and surprisingly unred. It had come as a shock to him, then, during his first post mortem on a fresh body, to discover how vividly coloured it was inside. The fat was a bright yellow-orange, the blood dark red, muscle the colour of steak, and the guts very nearly white.
Coste’s insides, however, bore a striking resemblance to that first, preserved corpse he’d seen in Glasgow. Except that the muted grey of the organs had a pink blush to them. And the overwhelming smell that rose from the open cadaver was that of stale alcohol, like a pub the morning after a drunken party.
Wielding a pair of what looked very much like garden shears, Garapin flexed thick muscles in his forearms to cut easily through the ribs, one a time. Each one gave with a sickening crack. He took a knife to separate the breast plate from the diaphragm, and the fatty tissue sac that held the heart, before lifting the cage aside to get full access to the organs.
Holding the heart in one hand, he snipped open the pericardial sac looking for blood or excess fluid, but found none. Then he lifted the heart out for examination.
‘The endocardial surface has a usual appearance and there are no mural thrombi. The valves are thin and pliable and are neither stenotic nor dilated. The coronary arteries have a usual distribution and show minimal atherosclerotic disease. There are no thrombi. The aorta is patent, without injury, and shows minimal atherosclerosis.’
‘Meaning what?’ Enzo said.
‘That he didn’t die of a heart attack.’
The pathologist moved on to the respiratory system, removing and weighing one lung at a time. They were grey-pink and spongy. He shook his head. ‘Heavy. Waterlogged. Or should I say, winelogged. He wasn’t getting any oxygen through these.’
‘You’re saying he drowned?’
‘I’m not saying anything, except that there was wine in his lungs. Whether he breathed it in, or it seeped in over time, is impossible to tell.’
He sectioned them in turn, looking for giveaway particles, pieces of grape skin, fragments of seed, but found none, then turned to the gastrointestinal system and the stomach.
‘The rugal pattern of the stomach is normal and there are no ulcers. It contains 300 millilitres of dark red fluid. An ethanol odour is noted.’
The pathologist flicked off his mike. ‘No partially digested food material in there, just wine. So it had been some time before he’d eaten.’ He chuckled. ‘Should have known better than to drink on an empty stomach.’
Enzo was aware of Roussel’s breathing becoming shallower behind him. He said, ‘Gendarme Roussel was at school with the victim, Doctor Garapin.’
The pathologist glanced at the policeman. ‘Sorry.’ And he turned back to the job at hand, head down to examine the intestines. He cut the endless, looping tube from the fat which bound it, and slit it open from end to end releasing a thick, pungent odour that almost made Enzo gag.
Next, he removed the pancreas, liver, kidneys, spleen, and thyroid, and weighed and sectioned them on the countertop, describing each in turn, finding nothing unusual.
While he was breadloafing the organs, his assistant incised the scalp from ear to ear behind the head, and rolled the scalp down over the face, like peeling off a mask. He warned Enzo and Roussel to stand back as he took a circular saw around the top of the skull, the noise of it filling the room, along with the smoky, sweet smell of burning bone.
When he finished, and pulled the skull cap away, it was with a sucking noise and a loud ‘pop’ as it disengaged from the brain. Then he pulled the brain itself gently back towards him, beginning at the forehead, transecting it from the cranial nerves and spinal cord, so that finally it plopped out into his cupped hands.
Garapin examined the damage to its frontal and temporal lobes. ‘Small areas of subarachnoid hemorrhage,’ he said. ‘But not enough to kill him. Otherwise the brain is substantially normal.’ He turned to Enzo and Roussel. ‘ Messieurs, there’s really nothing more for you to see here. If you’d like to adjourn to my office, I’ll see you in about ten minutes, after I’ve showered.’ Enzo noticed the sweat running in rivulets down Garapin’s forehead and gathering in his thick, black eyebrows.
As they walked along the green-painted corridor to Garapin’s office, Enzo said, ‘Are you okay?’
Roussel was the colour of the walls. His hands were trembling. ‘You know, as a cop, you see stuff. Stabbings, drownings, suicides. Horribly mutilated people in car wrecks. When I first started on the job, there were nights I came home and just lay on the floor shaking. You’d think you’d get used to it.’
‘It’s never quite the same when it’s someone you know.’
‘I kept thinking about Serge when we were kids. He was a character. Always getting in trouble at school. He wasn’t much good academically, but he was clever, you know. Always had a comeback when some smartass teacher got sarcastic. The profs hated him for it.’ He took a deep breath. ‘What a shitty way to end up.’
In the end, Garapin kept them waiting nearly twenty minutes. They didn’t speak much during that time, sitting staring at charts on the walls, diagrams of human organs, musculoskeletal structures, a multicoloured plan of the brain. Attending an autopsy always left Enzo feeling vulnerable. It was a very human response. Pathologists were somehow inured to it, able to separate the living from the dead. Enzo couldn’t do that. It was invariably himself that he saw cut open on the table. A glimpse of the future, an acknowledgement of the inevitable.
Garapin smelled of shower gel and shampoo, but beneath the perfume, there lingered still the stench of death. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have to tell you that unless toxicology comes up with something unexpected, I’m going to attribute cause of death to drowning. Not because I can prove that he drowned, but that given all other factors, it’s the most likely explanation.’ He dropped into his chair and sighed, intent, it seemed, on trying to convince himself. ‘Drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion, you see. There really is no specific pathognomonic or diagnostic sign. If you eliminate all other causes, and given the wine absorbed by his lungs, you’re left with drowning.’
Enzo thought about it. It did seem like the only logical conclusion, but he was still concerned by the unexplained injuries, and whether they were inflicted before or after death. ‘I suppose it’s impossible to say how he came by those contusions.’
‘Impossible,’ Garapin agreed.
‘What about the sample of wine retrieved from the stomach?’
‘What about it?’
‘He didn’t drink that.’
‘No, I think it seeped in there over time.’
