‘Huge ones.’
‘Good. I need more light these days. Could I have the room painted? I can’t think clearly in tasteless surroundings.’
‘Choose any colour you like. How’s your present caseload?’
‘I’ll follow through this business with the National Gallery. The rest can be dumped on to someone I hate. I must say your proposal isn’t entirely unexpected. You took your time.’
‘I had to get the place up and running first. You didn’t think I’d leave you behind, did you?’ May smiled. He knew how much the daily routine at Bow Street bored his old partner, and hated the thought of Bryant’s mind going to waste. As he rose to leave, the afternoon sun threw a lurid glare across the smeary windows of the café. We finally have a chance to make a real impact on the system, he thought. He decided not to tell Bryant that they had only a two-month trial period in which to do so.
‘I made a standard Y incision from the shoulders to the chest and down to the pubis, as you can see,’ Finch began, pointing at the splayed corpse in front of them, ‘and I couldn’t believe my eyes. The organic damage is quite phenomenal.’
Finch was tall and thin, with spiky hair and bony raw hands, and his knee joints creaked like desk drawers when he sat down. A suntan gained on a recent holiday was all that prevented him from looking like Stan Laurel. As usual, the sickly smell of cheap splash-on deodorant rose from his skin.
‘I don’t see anything wrong.’ May forced himself to study the body. The whiteness of the skin contrasted shockingly with the crimson hole that had been formed by pinning back the victim’s flesh.
‘I’ve seen an awful lot of insides, John, and I know when something isn’t kosher,’ said Finch, wiping his hands on his lime-green plastic apron. ‘Tell me what you know about him.’ He moved to the scales and made a note of the calibrations before removing a kidney from the tray.
‘Maximillian Jacob, fifty-nine years old, five feet eleven inches, fourteen stone two ounces, partner of the law firm Jacob and Marks, based in Norwich. He checked into the Savoy last Friday. He was visiting London on unknown business—at least, he seems to have given his wife and partner two different stories for leaving town. No history of medical problems, nothing much out of the ordinary, but we’re still searching.’ He looked back at the corpse on the table. It seemed that the more cleanly a man lived his life, the harder it was to find anything out about him when he was dead. ‘At the moment he’s just a statistic, Oswald. I wish he’d been a criminal. At least we’d have somewhere to start.’
‘Well, you know that someone hated Mr Jacob enough to want to kill him,’ said Finch.
‘Nobody mentioned murder.’
‘Then let me be the first. Take a look at this.’ The pathologist beckoned May to advance on the cadaver. ‘Jacob’s stomach is a mass of dissolved tissue. Extensive haemorrhaging here, here, and here.’ Finch prodded beneath a bloody flap of flesh with the end of his pen. Thick streaks of yellow fat surrounded an abdominal incision. ‘And here in the heart, the liver, and lungs.’
‘What are you putting down as the actual cause of death?’
‘Cardial dysfunction. The heart couldn’t pump properly because the vascular bed surrounding it had become riddled with lesions. It had to be some kind of corrosive fluid, but as there were no burn marks in the mouth or trachea I ruled out ingestion and started searching for an injection site. It’s not hard to see once you’re looking for it. Here.’
He turned Maximillian Jacob’s head to one side and pointed to a spot below the corpse’s left ear. A swollen patch on his carotid artery was pinpricked with coagulated black fluid.
‘If you examine the wound closely, you’ll find not one puncture mark but two, like a vampire. Beauties, aren’t they?’ He twisted Jacob’s head and revealed a pair of tiny livid pinpricks.
‘And it’s become gangrenous. The flesh around it has turned to diseased mush. I carried out the routine toxicology tests, checked for alcohol, cocaine, barbiturates, and so on; nothing much there. I didn’t want to run up a bill testing for more exotic stuff, but this had me beaten. I sent blood and tissue samples to the National Poisons Reference Centre for analysis, not expecting to hear back for several days.’ Finch absently prodded the end of his nose with his pen. ‘Instead, the results were telexed back just over an hour ago. Seems this got them all excited. It’s a cottonmouth.’
‘Sorry, what?’ John had been transfixed by the cadaver on the table. It was hard to believe that poor, putrefying Jacob would be stitched back together and buried beneath a headstone engraved with a soothing phrase like Just Resting. ‘Foot and mouth?’