'Duncan, don't be like--' '
35
Ten am and Logan was buzzing from the three large espressos he'd downed in the canteen, trying to make sure he'd stay awake for Thomas Stephen's post mortem. Doctor Isobel McAllister presiding. In attendance: DI Steel, DCS Bain, the Assistant Chief Constable, the Procurator Fiscal, a queasy-looking PC, an IB photographer, and old Doc Fraser with his hairy ears corroborating. Full house. Isobel had 'rebuilt' Thomas Stephen on the larger of the two cutting tables, his meatless bones all arranged in the right order, the innards tucked in beneath the two halves of his ribcage. And right at the very top: the bruised and battered head. In all the years he'd been attending these things, it was probably the most surreal sight Logan had ever seen. A skeleton man with glistening innards and a human head. DI Steel wrinkled her nose. 'What the hell is that smell?' Logan scowled at her. 'I showered, OK? Twice last night and three times this morning. It's that bloody protein processing plant, the grease sinks into your skin like fake tan.' Every time he blew his nose, the smell of rendering fat came flooding back, that and the mortuary's acrid formalin reek was making him queasy ... or maybe it was all the coffee? Or maybe it was Isobel, picking over Thomas Stephen's severed head - her fingers working their way across the swollen face, as if trying to memorize his features by touch alone. He was bald on top, with a fringe of grey hair round the edges, a small white goatee beard sitting beneath a newly broken nose - his skin covered with bruises and scrapes. Isobel placed the head on the cutting table and peered at the very top. 'There's a hole here ... some sort of wadding's been forced into the wound ...' She pulled out a clot of dark red fabric. 'Circular puncture wound in the crown of the skull. Flesh isn't torn around the hole; bone isn't striated, so it probably wasn't a drill. Something solid moving vertically at high speed. Looks like a close-range bullet hole, but there are no burn marks ...' She flipped the head upside-down, peering at the neck stump, while a thin, pink-brown slime dripped from the not- bullethole. 'That's odd ... Brian,' holding a hand out to her assistant,'I need the bone saw.' Logan tried not to think about the next bit. When it was all over, and her assistant was rinsing the sticky sludge off the dissecting table, Isobel gave them the edited highlights. 'The hole in Thomas Stephen's head was caused by a rod extending four and three-quarter inches into his brain. It punched through the skull - embedding bone fragments in the surrounding tissue - tore through the edge of the left cerebral hemisphere, caused extensive damage to the cerebellum, and pretty much obliterated the brain stem. The exit wound where the skull meets the spine is much smaller than the entrance.' 'Something pointy?' For once Steel didn't look as if she was taking the piss. 'Maybe an ice pick?' 'No ... The killer withdrew whatever he'd used to punch through the skull, then threaded something else into the entry wound.' She picked up a marker pen and drew a small diagram on the mortuary whiteboard. 'The vertebrae were split vertically more or less in the middle - probably with an axe - but the damage to the upper spinal chord is uniform. Whatever it was, it was forced down,
