Close To Home (aka The Summer That Never Was)

“Because they came in with an armful of brand-new books to sell. Stolen, I thought. Plain as day. Stolen books. I don’t have any truck with that sort of thing, so I sent them packing.”

Chapter 11

Before he cut into Luke Armitage’s flesh, Dr. Glendenning made a thorough examination of the body’s exterior. Banks watched as the doctor examined and measured the head wound. Luke’s skin was white and showed some wrinkling from exposure to the water, and there was a slight discoloration around the neck.

“Back of the skull splintered into the cerebellum,” the doctor said.

“Enough to kill him?”

“At a guess.” Glendenning bent over and squinted at the wound. “And it would have bled quite a bit, if that’s any use.”

“Could be,” said Banks. “Blood’s a lot harder to clean up than most people think. What about the weapon?”

“Looks like some sort of round-edged object,” the doctor said. “Smooth-sided.”

“Like what?”

“Well, it’s not got a very large circumference, so I’d rule out something like a baseball bat. I can’t see any traces – wood splinters or anything – so it could have been metal or ceramic. Hard, anyway.”

“A poker, perhaps?”

“Possible. That would fit the dimensions. It’s the angle that puzzles me.”

“What about it?”

“See for yourself.”

Banks bent over the wound, which Dr. Glendenning’s assistant had shaved and cleaned. There was no blood. A few days in the water would see to that. He could see the indentation clearly enough, about the right size for a poker, but the wound was oblique, almost horizontal.

“You’d expect someone swinging a poker to swing downward from behind, or at least at a forty-five-degree angle, so we’d get a more vertical pattern,” Dr. Glendenning said. “But this was inflicted from sideways on, not from in front or behind, by someone a little shorter than the victim, if the angle’s to be believed. That means whoever did it was probably standing beside him. Unusual angle, as I said.” He lit a cigarette, strictly forbidden in the hospital, but usually overlooked in Glendenning’s case. Everyone knew that when you were dealing with the smells of a postmortem, a ciggie now and then was a great distraction. And Glendenning was more careful these days; he rarely dropped ash in open incisions.

“Maybe the victim was already bent double from a previous blow?” Banks suggested. “To the stomach, say. Or on his knees, head bent forward.”

“Praying?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Banks said, remembering that more than one executed villain had died on his knees praying for his life. But Luke Armitage wasn’t a villain, as far as Banks knew.

“Which side did the blow come from?” Banks asked.

“Right side. You can tell by the pattern of indentation.”

“So that would indicate a left-handed attacker?”

“Likely so. But I’m not happy with this, Banks.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, in the first place, it’s hardly a surefire way to kill somebody. Head blows are tricky. You can’t count on them, especially just one.”

Banks knew that well enough. On his last case a man had taken seven or eight blows from a side-handled baton and still survived a couple of days. In a coma, but alive. “So our killer’s an amateur who got lucky.”

“Could be,” said Glendenning. “We’ll know more when I get a look at the brain tissue.”

“But could this blow have been the cause of death?”

“Can’t say for certain. It could have killed him, but he might have been dead already. You’ll have to wait for the full toxicology report to know whether that might have been the case.”

“Not drowned?”

“I don’t think so, but let’s wait until we get to the lungs.”

Banks watched patiently, if rather queasily, as Dr. Glendenning’s assistant made the customary Y-shaped incision and peeled back the skin and muscle from the chest wall with a scalpel. The smell of human muscle, rather like raw lamb, Banks had always thought, emanated from the body. Next, the assistant pulled the chest flap up over Luke’s face and took a bone-cutter to the rib cage, finally peeling off the chest plate and exposing the inner organs. When he had removed these en bloc, he placed them on the dissecting table and reached for his electric saw. Bank knew what was coming next, that unforgettable sound and burned-bone smell of the skull, so he turned his attention to Dr. Glendenning, who was dissecting the organs, paying particular attention to the lungs.

“No water,” he announced. “Or minimal.”

“Meaning Luke was dead when he went in the water?”

“I’ll send the tissues for diatomic analysis, but I don’t expect they’ll find much.”

The electric saw stopped, and seconds later Banks heard something rather like a combination grating and sucking sound, and he knew it was the top of the skull coming off. The assistant then cut the spinal cord and the tentorium and lifted the brain out. As he carried it to the jar of formalin, in which it would hang suspended for a couple of weeks, making it firmer and easier to handle, Dr. Glendenning had a quick look.

“Aha,” he said. “I thought so. Look, Banks, do you see that damage there, to the frontal lobes?”

Banks saw it. And he knew what it meant. “Contre coup?”

“Exactly. Which might explain the unusual angle.”

If a blow is delivered while the victim’s head is stationary, then the damage is limited to the point of impact – bones splintered into the brain – but if the victim’s head is in motion, then the result is a contre coup injury: additional damage opposite the point of impact. Contre coup injuries are almost always the result of a fall.

“Luke fell?”

“Or he was pushed,” said Glendenning. “But as far as I can tell, there are no other injuries, no broken bones. And as I said, if there was bruising, if someone hit him, say, knocked him over, then, unless there are any small bones in the cheek broken, we won’t be able to tell. We’ll be checking, of course.”

“Can you give me any idea about time of death? It’s important.”

“Aye, well… I’ve looked over Dr. Burns’s measurements at the scene. Very meticulous. He’ll go far. Rigor’s been and gone, which indicates over two days at the temperatures noted.”

“What about the wrinkling and whitening?”

“Cutis anserina? Three to five hours. Water preserves, delays putrefaction, so it makes our job a little harder. There’s no lividity, and I’m afraid it’ll be almost impossible to tell whether there was any other bruising. The water takes care of that.” He paused and frowned. “But there’s the discoloration around the neck.”

“What about it?”

“That indicates the beginnings of putrefaction. In bodies found in water, it always starts at the root of the neck.”

“After how long?”

“That’s just it,” Dr. Glendenning said, looking at Banks. “You understand I can’t be more specific, I can’t give you less than a twelve-hour margin of error, but not until at least three or four days, not at the temperatures Dr. Burns recorded.”

Banks made a mental calculation. “Bloody hell,” he said. “Even at the outside, that means Luke had to have been killed just after he went missing.”

“Sometime that very night, by my calculations. Taking everything into account, between about eight P.M. and eight A.M.”