at least he had a name.
Wapping Mortuary was housed in a low, grey brick building encircled by a high wall, which made it look more like an industrial unit than anything remotely medical, thought Kershaw, as she buzzed the battered entry phone beside the big steel double gates.
A few minutes later, a mortuary technician with spiky dyed black hair and a bolt through her eyebrow was helping her into a blue cotton gown, the type surgeons wore for operations.
‘First time?’ she asked, her tone neutral.
Kershaw nodded. ‘I’m not squeamish, though,’ she added, before realising she’d spoken with unnecessary forcefulness.
Goth girl ignored the comment. ‘If you do start feeling a bit funny, just let us know before you keel over, okay?’ She waited while Kershaw pulled on blue plastic overshoes, then led the way through a tiled corridor and into the post mortem room.
Kershaw had seen the scene reconstructed a dozen times in TV cop dramas – the low-ceilinged tiled room, the naked bodies laid out on steel gurneys, some still whole, others already dissected. But it was all a bit different when you knew you weren’t looking at an artful arrangement of wax models and fake blood. And television couldn’t prepare you for the smell – a terrible cocktail of chopped liver, body fluids, and bleach.
The Goth girl paused at the first gurney. ‘DB16,’ she said. Spread-eagled on the shallow stainless steel tray, under the unsparing fluorescent lights, lay the girl with the Titian hair – or what was left of her.
‘I’ll tell Doctor Waterhouse you’re here,’ she said, leaving Kershaw alone with the body.
The girl was opened like a book from collarbone to pubis, revealing a dark red cavern where her insides had been. A purplish pile of guts lay between her thighs, as though she’d just given birth to them. The skin and its accompanying layer of yellow fat had been flayed from her limbs and torso, and now lay beneath her like a discarded jacket, and her ribcage was cracked open, each rib separated and bent back. Water tinkled musically, incongruously, through a drain hole under the gurney.
The good news, reflected Kershaw, was that she looked more like the remains of some predator’s meal on the Serengeti than a human being.
‘DC Kershaw, I presume?’
Tearing her gaze away from the carcass, she saw a tall, silver-haired man in his sixties rinsing his gloved hands at a nearby sink. Shaking off the drops, he approached her, beaming.
‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said.
‘Thanks for having me, Doctor,’ she said.
‘Not at all,’ said Doctor Waterhouse. ‘I’m always delighted to see a new detective braving the rigours of a PM.’
He handed Kershaw some latex gloves with a little flourish, like he was giving her a bunch of violets, then spread his arms to encompass the cadaver lying between them.
‘Our lady,’ he began, in a plummy voice, ‘is an IC1 female who apparently enjoyed good health throughout her life, with no evidence of any chronic condition.’ He spoke as though addressing a roomful of medical students.
‘How old would you say she was?’ asked Kershaw, wriggling her fingers into the second glove.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said with a tilt of his head. Then, seeing her enquiring look, ‘I’m afraid it’s no easier to estimate someone’s age from the inside than it is from the outside.’
Over Doc Waterhouse’s shoulder, Kershaw noticed the Goth girl at the next gurney along. Wielding a huge curved needle, she was sewing up the chest cavity of a big man with tattooed biceps. His face had such a healthy colour, that for a split second Kershaw expected him to sit up and rip the needle from the girl’s hand.
Waterhouse was saying: ‘She was certainly of childbearing age.’ He paused. ‘I found a foetus in utero that, by my calculations, would put this lady in the late stages of the first trimester of pregnancy at the time of death.’
Kershaw’s eyebrows shot up. If the girl’s boyfriend didn’t fancy being a daddy, the pregnancy might have sparked an argument that ended in the girl’s death. She pulled pad and pencil from the pocket of her gown. ‘How many weeks is that, Doctor?’
‘Between nine and twelve, judging by the foetus,’ Waterhouse mused. ‘Perhaps you’d like to see it?’
‘No, I’m fine, thanks,’ said Kershaw, with a nervous smile. ‘Have you found anything suspicious? Any signs of violence?’
Looking at her over the tops of his half-moon glasses, the smiling Waterhouse raised a latexed finger. Patience.
‘Since the body was recovered from the river, let us first examine the evidence for drowning as the possible cause of death,’ he said, with the air of someone proposing a picnic on a lake, and started to stroll up and down the gurney, hands clasped behind his back.
Kershaw groaned inwardly – she was clearly in for the full lecture theatre treatment. At that moment, she happened to catch the eye of the Goth technician. The girl responded with a fractionally raised eyebrow that said – yes, he was always like this.
‘What evidence might we expect to find, post-mortem, in the case of a drowning, Detective?’ Waterhouse went on.
‘Water in the lungs?’ said Kershaw, suppressing a note of bored sarcasm. She’d be here all day at this rate.
‘But how do we know whether the water entered the lungs post- or ante-mortem?’
He stopped pacing and looked at Kershaw. She shrugged.
‘You may be surprised to learn that we currently have no means of establishing the sequence of events,’ said Waterhouse, as thought he’d only just discovered this extraordinary state of affairs himself. ‘If we allow that our lady was in the water six, perhaps seven days, by my calculations, then it is entirely possible that the copious quantities of river water, weed and sand present in her lungs and stomach found its way there after her death.’
‘So how do we find out if she drowned or not?’
‘Well, we could run a raft of analyses, to find out whether any diatoms – a kind of river algae – have found their way into her organs.’ He pulled a doubtful grimace. ‘But since none of it is the least bit conclusive I consider it an egregious waste of public money.’
No way of telling if someone had drowned? So those TV shows where a brilliant pathologist solved tricky cases single-handed after the cops had failed were clearly a load of old bollocks, thought Kershaw. She realised that Waterhouse was looking at her like it was her turn to speak.
‘So … if there’s no such thing as conclusive proof of drowning,’ she said. ‘I guess all you can do is rule everything else out – a process of elimination?’
‘Well done, Detective,’ said Waterhouse with an approving nod.
‘However,
