She raised a hand and almost waved. ‘Hello. . .’ Her eyes darted back to the little naked body stretched out on the dissecting table. Three-year-old David Reid. ‘We’ve not started yet. Are you attending?’
Logan nodded and cleared his throat. ‘I meant to ask you last night,’ he said. ‘How have you been?’
She didn’t meet his eyes, just re-ordered the gleaming row of surgical instruments on their tray. The stainless steel flashing in the overhead lights. ‘Oh. . .’ she sighed and shrugged. ‘You know.’ Her hands came to rest on a scalpel, the shiny metal contrasting with her matt latex gloves. ‘How about you?’
Logan shrugged too. ‘Much the same.’
The silence was excruciating.
‘Isobel, I. . .’
The double doors opened again and in rushed Isobel’s assistant Brian, trailing the deputy pathologist and Procurator Fiscal behind him. ‘Sorry we’re late. You know what these fatal accident enquiries are like, so much paperwork!’ said Brian, brushing his floppy hair out of his eyes. He flashed an ingratiating smile at Logan. ‘Hello, Sergeant, nice to see you again!’ He stopped and shook Logan’s hand before scurrying off to strap on a red rubber apron of his own. The deputy pathologist and the PF acknowledged Logan with a nod, apologized to Isobel and settled down to watch her work. Isobel would be the one doing all the cutting; the other pathologist, an overweight man in his early fifties with a bald head and hairy ears, was only here to make sure Isobel’s findings were correct, as required by Scottish law. Not that he would have dared say anything to her face. And anyway, she was always right.
‘Well,’ said Isobel, ‘we’d better get started.’ She pulled on her headset, checked the microphone and whisked through the preliminaries.
As Logan watched, she slowly picked her way over David Reid’s remains. Three months in a ditch, covered with an old sheet of chipboard, had turned his skin almost black. His whole body was swollen like a balloon as decomposition worked its corpulent magic. Little patches of white speckled the bloated skin like freckles where fungal growths had taken hold. The smell was bad, but Logan knew it was going to get a lot worse.
A small stainless steel tray sat next to the tiny body and Isobel dropped any debris she found into it. Blades of grass, bits of moss, scraps of paper. Anything the corpse had picked up since death. Maybe something that would help them identify David Reid’s killer.
‘Oh ho. . .’ said Isobel, peering into the dead child’s frozen scream. ‘Looks like we have an insect guest.’ Gently, she delved between David’s teeth with a pair of tweezers and for a horrible moment Logan thought she was going to pull out a Death’s Head Moth. But the tweezers emerged clutching a wriggling woodlouse.
Isobel held the slate-grey bug up to the light, watching its legs thrashing in the air.
‘Probably crawled in there looking for a bite to eat,’ she said. ‘Don’t suppose it’ll tell us anything, but better safe than sorry.’ She dropped the insect into a small phial of preserving fluid.
Logan stood in silence, watching the woodlouse slowly drown.
An hour and a half later they were standing at the coffee machine on the ground floor, while Isobel’s floppy-haired assistant stitched David Reid back together.
Logan was feeling distinctly unwell. Watching an ex-girlfriend turn a three-year-old child inside out on a dissecting table wasn’t something he’d ever done before. The thought of those hands, so calm and efficient, cutting, extracting and measuring. . . Handing Brian little plastic phials with chunks and slices of internal organs to bag and tag. . . He shuddered and Isobel stopped talking to ask if he was all right.
‘Just a bit of a cold.’ He forced a smile. ‘You were saying?’
‘Death was caused by ligature strangulation. Something thin and smooth, like an electrical cable. There’s extensive bruising to the back, between the shoulders, and lacerations to the forehead, nose and cheeks. I’d say your attacker forced the child to the ground and knelt on his back while he strangled him.’ Her voice was businesslike, as if cutting up children was something she did every day. For the first time, Logan realized that it probably was. ‘There wasn’t any evidence of seminal fluid, but after all this time. . .’ she shrugged. ‘However, the tearing of the anus is indicative of penetration.’
Logan grimaced and poured his plastic cup of hot brown liquid into the bin.
She frowned at him. ‘If it’s any consolation the damage was post mortem. The child was dead when it happened.’
‘Any chance of DNA?’
‘Unlikely. The internal damage isn’t consistent with something flexible. I’d say it’s more likely to be a foreign object than the attacker’s penis. Maybe a broom handle?’
Logan closed his eyes and swore. Isobel just shrugged.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘David’s genitals were removed by what looks like a pair of secateurs, curved blade, some time after death. Long enough for the blood to have clotted. Probably long enough for rigor mortis to have set in.’
They stood in silence for a moment, not looking at each other.
Isobel twisted her empty plastic cup round in her hands. ‘I. . . I’m sorry. . .’ She stopped and twisted the cup back the other way.
Logan nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said and walked away.
WPC Watson was waiting for him at the front desk. She was muffled up to the ears in a heavy black police-issue jacket, the waterproof fabric slick and glistening with raindrops. Her hair was tucked into a tight bun under her peaked cap; her nose was Belisha-beacon red.
She smiled at him as he approached, hands in pockets, mind on the post mortem.
‘Morning, sir. How’s the stomach?’
Logan forced a smile, his nostrils still full of dead child. ‘Not bad. You?’
She shrugged. ‘Glad to be back on days again.’ She looked around the empty reception area. ‘So what’s the plan?’
Logan checked his watch. It was going on for ten. An hour and a half to kill before Insch got out of his meeting.
‘Fancy a trip?’
They signed for a CID pool car. WPC Watson drove the rusty blue Vauxhall while Logan sat in the passenger seat, looking out at the downpour. They had just enough time to nip across town to the Bridge of Don, where the search teams would be trudging through the rain and mud, looking for evidence that probably wasn’t even there.
A bendy bus rumbled across the road in front of them, sending up a flurry of spray, adverts for Christmas shopping in the west end of town splattered all over it.
Watson had the wipers going full tilt, the wheek-whonk of rubber on the windscreen sounding over the roar of the blowers. Neither of them had said a word since they’d left Force HQ.
‘I told the desk sergeant to let Charles Reid off
