Cleaned up and with his eyelids closed, Neil Granger’s face looked almost normal. But it hadn’t been like that when the firefighters had found him.
‘The face was painted with some kind of water-based theatrical make-up. Black.’ The pathologist looked up at the police officers. ‘Do you know of any reason for that?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Just curious.’
‘And the eyes?’ said Fry. ‘The eyes were full of blood. Were they injured separately?’
‘Injured?’ said Mrs Van Door. ‘They were removed.’
‘You’re kidding. Now you are cracking jokes.’
‘No. But don’t worry.’
‘Don’t worry? You say the victim had his eyes removed, and you’re telling us not to worry?’
‘It was done postmortem.’
‘Great. A killer who steals his victim’s eyes.’
‘And it wasn’t done by the killer, I’d say.’ The pathologist indicated a couple of evidence bags being sorted by the scenes of crime officers. They contained Neil Granger’s clothes and various traces scraped and swabbed from them. ‘You have a feather, black. And some bird droppings, white. The eyes have been torn out roughly, not cut. I’d say one or more members of the crow family did the damage.’
‘Well, that’s something.’
‘Yes. Also, the victim had blood on his hand. And not only blood, but cerebrospinal fluid.’
Fry screwed up her face in distaste. ‘From the skull fracture. He touched the injury. But didn’t you say … ?’
‘The victim was already unconscious before his head hit the stones, yes. So it’s very unlikely that he touched the head wound himself. Impossible, I’d say.’
‘Just spell that out for us again,’ said Fry.
‘Well, I would suggest the blood and cerebrospinal fluid were transferred to his hand by means of some third party.’
‘Someone else. Someone touched his head wound, and then his hand. His killer? Or one of the firefighters who found the body?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Maybe even a police officer. Some of them can’t keep their hands to themselves at a crime scene.’
179
‘But there’s one other injury to consider,’ said Mrs Van Door.
‘Really?’
Fry looked at the head, but could see only the lurid colour of the bruised and broken skin near Neil Granger’s right temple.
‘Somewhere else on the body, then?’
‘You can’t help sounding hopeful,’ said Mrs Van Door, with a small smile. ‘You’d like evidence for a murder charge, after all. That’s usually what investigators want. A manslaughter conviction just isn’t satisfactory, is it?’
‘Maybe not,’ said Fry impatiently. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’
‘There’s an ulna fracture.’
‘Wait a minute - ulna? In the arm?’
‘Correct.’
‘He had a broken arm?’
The pathologist lifted a side of the plastic sheet. ‘See?’ she said.
Neil Granger’s left forearm was badly swollen and bruised. But something else looked wrong with it. Fry bent to look more closely, then pulled away suddenly. The skin below the forearm was broken or torn. Burst was the word that came to her mind. Granger’s skin hadn’t been broken by a blow from the outside, but ripped open from the inside. The end of a bone was poking through the hole, like an obscene creature emerging from its cocoon, a white grub seeking the light.
The idea of things emerging from the body made Fry feel sick and cold. It was the most horrible thing she could imagine. During her teens she had consistently refused to watch a video of the film Alien with her schoolmates, because she had heard about the scene in which a creature burst from the body of actor John Hurt, where it had been growing in his chest. She knew she would probably have fainted, and that would have ruined the tough-girl image she was cultivating at the time. Even now, she never wanted to see the film. Nor did she ever want to see internal organs spilling from a belly wound. She never wanted to see the bones under the skin. Neither real, nor imaginary.
Fry swallowed. ‘Was his arm broken in the fall?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Van Door. ‘By another blow. Possibly from the same weapon that caused the head wound. We can make the comparisons for you here.’
‘Two blows. I don’t suppose there’s any way to tell which came first? That would be too much to expect, I’m sure.’
180
‘Actually, it isn’t.’
‘You can tell?’
