Already Dead(49)

‘And we don’t know that he didn’t.’

Fry bit her lip. ‘Other injuries?’

‘Well, these contusions are puzzling me,’ said Mrs van Doon.

Reluctantly, Fry leaned forward to follow the pathologist’s gesture.

‘Yes, I see.’

Trust the woman to save the best detail for last. There were red welts on the body, each one a round mark surrounded by a halo of bruising. They looked almost like cigarette burns, but larger in diameter. And cigarette burns didn’t cause bruises.

‘Perhaps about four days old,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘The colour of the bruising is starting to turn to yellow on the inner edge, look. Bilirubin.’

‘Who?’

The pathologist restrained a smirk. ‘Not “who”, but “what”. The yellow colour is a waste product called bilirubin. It’s the same substance that turns your urine yellow.’

‘I always learn something from you that I didn’t want to know,’ said Fry.

The pathologist took no notice. She rarely did.

‘Bilirubin is the last bit of congealed blood to be broken down and dispersed by the white cells,’ she said. ‘First the dark purple – that’s the colour of oxygen in the haemoglobin. Then the green of biliverdin. It’s generally estimated to take about four days for only bilirubin to be left.’

‘Unexplained contusions approximately two centimetres in diameter will appear on my report. Obviously not the cause of death.’

‘The bruising is wider than two centimetres,’ said Fry.

‘Ah, yes. Well observed.’

A compliment was never what it seemed when it came from Mrs van Doon. Although it wasn’t evident in the tone of her voice, she was certainly being sarcastic. The diameter of the bruising should be obvious to anyone.

‘So?’ said Fry.

‘The bruising isn’t actually at the site of the contusion. With an injury like this, blood is forced away from the site by the impact and forms that circle around the contusion itself.’

‘He was being hit with something.’

‘Yes. But it was an odd choice of weapon, whatever it was,’ said the pathologist. ‘Minor bruising, that’s all. It would have been quite painful at the time, I dare say.’

‘Perhaps he was being tortured.’

The pathologist shrugged, without replying. It wasn’t for her to say. It was speculation, and that was the job of the police. The shrug expressed a degree of professional disdain, her scorn for a lack of scientific rigour.

‘Four days ago?’ asked Fry.

‘An approximation only. There’s no way we can fix time of death from the temperature of the body when it was found. A body cools in water about twice as fast as in the air – about five degrees Celsius per hour. It reaches the temperature of the water usually within five to six hours. So all I can tell you is that he was dead in the water for at least that long. You’ll have to rely on circumstantial evidence to establish the time more accurately.’

‘Dead in the water?’ repeated Fry.

‘I always like to use that phrase. It has so many layers of meaning, don’t you think?’

‘I believe it refers to a ship when it loses power.’

‘And metaphorically to someone’s career,’ said the pathologist.

‘So he was tortured?’ asked Luke Irvine when Fry reported on the post-mortem results.

‘It looks like it.’

‘It’s more than just a simple robbery, then.’

‘It never was a simple robbery,’ said Fry. ‘You don’t dump your victim dead and naked in a stream if you’re just robbing them for a few quid.’

‘A robbery gone wrong,’ said Hurst. ‘It happens all the time.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ scoffed Irvine. ‘On TV it does.’

‘It happens,’ insisted Hurst.

‘It is possible. He could have been tortured to get the PIN for his credit card. Then he died. A weak heart perhaps, or something like that – the test results might tell us. And his robber panicked and dumped his body. That would explain why he was left naked. They took his clothes so that he wouldn’t be identified. You can definitely learn that trick from watching TV.’

‘What? And then they left the clothes piled up a few yards away for us to find? Complete with his driving licence to make it easy to ID him? And his credit cards were in there too. Not to mention the cash. Pretty slapdash robbers, Luke.’

‘Could you two just call a truce for a bit while I’m out of the room?’ said Fry. ‘I want forensics chased up on Glen Turner’s computer and laptop, so we can get a proper examination of his bank accounts. Then maybe we can pick it up when I get back.’