removed the strip of cloth from around her head and set it aside for examination. Kathy confirmed the identification.
They photographed the corpse, turned it over and photographed it again. Mehta cut the tape from around the wrists, clipped nail and hair samples, and took a number of swabs. Then the technician washed the body and Mehta began a detailed examination. A mood of dispassionate routine established itself as he tonelessly described the injuries. He began with the head, noting a small contusion behind the left ear.
‘Enough to knock her out?’ Brock asked.
‘Mmm, possibly.’ The pathologist stroked the area, parting the strands of hair. ‘We may see more when we look under the skin. It’s not a big bump.’
He moved on to the throat, which had a broad band of bruising and discolouration.
‘This is not a simple hanging,’ he said.‘There are several overlapping rope marks. Notice the edges of the marks. No inflammation, no vital reaction. It looks as if she was hanged after she was dead.’
He peered more closely. ‘Difficult to detect external signs of strangulation beneath these rope lesions. Signs of petechial haemorrhages here and here… Now, these marks…’He began to work his way over the body, peering closely at each of the small brown marks in turn. Then he asked for the plastic evidence pouch containing the electrical lead with the exposed wire, and placed it against several of the wounds. Finally, he straightened up and said,‘It’s not easy to interpret electrical burns, you know, and we don’t see them very often. Mostly domestic accidents, housewives poking about in the toaster with a fork, that sort of thing. There was one fascinating case I recall of attempted autoerotic stimulation by connecting a penile vibrator to a mains plug- what a silly man! But the direct application of an electrode to the body is more unusual than you might think. Certainly I’ve never seen anything like this before…’
‘Come on, Sundeep,’ Brock interrupted. ‘You have a theory.’
The man smiled. ‘A hypothesis, perhaps, yes. There is a characteristic mark for electrode burns…’ He pointed to a burn on Betty’s left breast.‘It comprises a central area of necrosis where contact occurred, surrounded by a ring of white, which in turn is circled by a halo of dilated blood vessels.’
Everyone moved in closer to see what he meant, and the photographer took a close-up picture.
‘I can’t see the halo,’ Brock said, peering through the half-lens glasses on the end of his nose.
‘Exactly. Now look at these other burns,’Mehta went on, pointing generally across the abdomen and legs. ‘They all have the central brown burn, but none have the pink halo. Although I’ve never seen this before, it suggests to me that, as with the rope marks to the neck, there was no vital reaction. She was already dead.’
Kathy felt relief. She noticed the technician’s eyes widen behind her clear plastic visor, showing more than professional interest for the first time.
‘Why electrocute a dead body?’ Brock said.
‘Quite!’ Mehta beamed. ‘That’s for you to puzzle out, I think, Brock.’
There was silence for a moment, then Kathy said, ‘Would the electric shocks cause the body to convulse?’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean, even after death?’
‘Yes, yes. Didn’t your biology teacher at school show you the trick where you attach battery leads to a dead frog’s leg to make it jump?’
Brock and Kathy exchanged a glance, both thinking the same thing.
Dr Mehta completed his external examination at the discoloured soles of Betty’s feet, then took up a scalpel and moved back to her throat, where he began carefully slicing into the flesh. ‘Yes, internal bruising, and both the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage have fractures, which suggests manual strangulation,’ he said. The technician moved in beside him with bone cutters to help open up the chest and remove the major organs. Kathy sat on a stool, barely paying attention to the familiar process while her mind returned to that room in the basement of the derelict house, trying to imagine what had been played out there.
Completing the routine of examining, weighing and slicing, Mehta was able to offer a closer approximation to the time of death. The cheese and onion pie Betty had eaten with Reg Gilbey around seven p.m. was found in the final stages of the small intestine, and this, together with the state of rigor mortis and the body temperature, led him to believe that death had occurred at around one a.m. Cause of death was manual strangulation.
The doctor sat back onto a stool, bloody gloved hands dangling between his knees. ‘Is that enough for you, Brock?’
‘Almost, Sundeep. Just let me be sure what we have. Betty has a bath and goes to bed around eleven p.m. About two hours later her neighbour hears noises from her house, perhaps the intruder. There is a scuffle in her bedroom, a vase is broken, perhaps she receives a blow to the head. Does he strangle her there?’
Mehta thought. ‘Seems probable, doesn’t it? There’s no indication of a struggle when he took her next door, no significant bruising or abrasions.’
‘That’s right. He had to take her downstairs, out into the yard, haul her over the wall into the building site and carry her down into the basement. Why?’
‘I’ve no idea. That’s your job, old chap!’
‘Humour me, Sundeep. I value your insight.’
The doctor gave a smug little smile and straightened in his seat.‘Well, to avoid being disturbed, I suppose? Perhaps he didn’t want the neighbour to hear him, or people in the street to see a light-the basement next door had its window boarded up.’
Brock frowned, not altogether convinced.‘All right, let’s say he wants time with the body undisturbed. So he takes her next door, and presumably he already knows of this place and how suitable it would be, and there he prepares, in effect, a torture chamber for the corpse. He binds her hands behind her with insulating tape. There was no sexual interference?’
‘No signs of that. Perhaps he thought she was still alive and was hoping to get something from her. Information of some kind-where she kept her money and jewellery, perhaps.’ With Brock’s encouragement, Mehta was enjoying playing the detective.
‘But why the camera?’
‘If there was a camera. We don’t really know that.’
‘Well, he discovers that in fact she’s dead. So he hangs her anyway and administers-how many was it?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘Twenty-three shocks to her corpse. Can we infer anything about his state of mind? I mean, if those were stab wounds you’d be telling us he was in a frenzy, wouldn’t you?’
‘Maybe… it would depend on the depth and pattern of cuts. In this case, I don’t see any evidence of a frenzied attack. Look at the pattern, Brock; not in a cluster, but rather evenly and thoughtfully distributed, wouldn’t you say? Here to an elbow, there to the calf, the thigh. Almost like an experiment to test the reactions of different limbs.’
‘And possibly photographing these reactions.’
‘Exactly! One might almost say that he is a serious student of pathology.’
‘Quite,’ Brock murmured.‘Many thanks, Sundeep.’
‘Stan Dodworth,’ Kathy said as they emerged from the mortuary.
‘That’s what I thought.’ Brock took a deep breath of the street air, trying to vent the smells from his lungs.‘As if he’s started to make his own corpses.’
‘Why would he pick Betty?’
‘Because he likes older subjects, and he knew she lived alone, and conveniently next door to a place he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed.’
‘Yes, he was down in that cellar with Gabe and Poppy and Yasher just over a week ago.’
‘That would mean he’s still in the area. And now every solitary old person is at risk. We have to find him quickly, Kathy. We’d better have another talk to the people he was closest to in the square.’
Kathy checked her watch. ‘I was going to take Reg Gilbey through Betty’s house to see if he might notice anything.’
‘You do that. I’ll see you later at the station.’
Gilbey was in his kitchen, a glass of golden liquid on the table in front of him, a cigarette held in an unsteady hand. He looked as if he’d aged ten years in a week, grey skin, grey bristles on an unshaved cheek, bent shoulders.
