“I hear this girl was pretty badly cut up,” Emma said.
Dillon nodded. “You could say that.” Under normal circumstances, he might have asked Emma out for a drink, but the idea of getting intimate with someone who spent her days cutting open corpses and handling dismembered or decaying body parts was a total turn off.
When the Home Office Pathologist, Dr Ben Claxton, signalled that he was ready to begin the procedure, Tracey’s body was hoisted onto a sterile metal trolley and wheeled over to an autopsy table connected to a large drainage sink. George Copeland helped Emma to remove the body bag. It would be sent off to the lab with all the other samples, to be checked for microscopic traces of skin, and for soil and fibres.
Tracey was weighed and measured and then photographed front and back. Ned took a few frames of Tracey in her clothing.
Calvin then removed Tracey’s clothing and passed it all to Copeland, who bagged and sealed each garment methodically.
Next, Calvin carefully removed the head and hand bags and passed them to Copeland. Like the body bag, they were destined for the lab.
Before handing over to the pathologist, Calvin swabbed her lips, it was not uncommon in cases like this to find the killer’s DNA on them. When he had finished, he stepped back and made a ‘she’s all yours’ gesture to Claxton.
Claxton turned on a small recording device and stated the date and time, the location and persons present, and the details of the deceased. He announced that he would be making verbal notes from which he would compile his final report at a later date, and asked that there be no unnecessary talking as this was likely to interfere with the recording and distract him.
Claxton started with a superficial check of the skull for indentations and lacerations, but found none. “I’ll come back to the head when it’s time to examine the brain,” he promised.
“I can’t wait,” Dillon muttered under his breath. When he had first walked through the mortuary door twenty minutes earlier, the bitter-sweet blend of death and Trigene had struck him as overpowering; now it barely seemed noticeable.
Dillon had made his first visit to a mortuary as a fresh-faced probationer, two weeks into his street duties course. He had thrown up as the mortician prepped an old lady – who had died in a road traffic accident – for the pathologist, and had spent the rest of the procedure with his head tucked between his knees trying to stop the world from spinning.
He didn’t throw up anymore, but the smell still affected him just as badly as it always had, and he knew that by the time he left the mortuary every pore of his skin, every follicle of his hair and every fibre of his clothes would be impregnated by the foul stench. Another very sound reason not to ask Emma out, he decided. He knew that every time he put an arm around her, he would find himself surreptitiously sniffing her, to see if she still reeked of death. He could imagine them being locked in the throes of passion and catching a sudden unexpected whiff of Trigene in her hair. Well, it would be an incredibly effective method of birth control, if nothing else.
As the others clustered around the pathologist to watch him work, Dillon kept as far away as he could, wishing he could wait outside and avoid the unpleasantness altogether.
The photographer was asked to take some preliminary record photography of the victim before the special post mortem commenced. He would then take further photographs as directed by the pathologist at various stages of the autopsy. “Sure thing,” Ned said, clicking away enthusiastically.
The SPM began in earnest with the pathologist logging the dimensions of the bruising around Tracey’s jawline. Apart from that, her face was completely untouched. By the time the mortician applied a dab of makeup and tidied up her hair, she would look quite presentable when her family came to make the formal identification; as long as they didn’t look at the carnage being concealed by the clean white sheet that would be drawn right up to her chin.
The pathologist moved down to the neck injury. He carefully examined and measured the gaping wound, and then called the photographer forward to take shots from different angles. A ruler was incorporated into each frame to show the angle and depth of the cut.
Claxton dissected and removed some layers of tissue from the neck, which Copeland packaged for him. He left the tongue in place as there was no specific reason for doing otherwise. The voice box and trachea injuries were noted, as was the damage to the carotid and jugular arteries, and the grooves the killer’s knife had made on the vertebrae.
Much of what the pathologist said into his little recording device was technical mumbo jumbo to Dillon, but in between all the medical terms, he basically stated that the killer, who had held the blade in his left hand, had grabbed Tracey from behind. He had slit her throat in one powerful and fluid motion, cutting from right to left. The marks on her face, which Jack had noticed at the scene, were grip marks from his right hand. She fell to the floor – there were impact marks on her knees – and rapidly bled out. Although she would have lost consciousness fairly quickly, it could have taken several minutes for her to die.
Claxton carried out a visual examination of the torso, concluding that the killer had probably used a surgical scalpel to make the incisions.
“So, he slit her throat with a knife but opened her torso up using a scalpel?” Copeland asked.
“That’s correct,” Claxton said.
He explained that a midline laparotomy – a vertical incision that follows the linea alba
