The first thing that hit him when he pushed open the door of the autopsy room was the thudding sound of pop music. Bending over the autopsy table, a green-gowned, plump bottom was jiggling in time to the music. Flaming hell! thought Frost. A bit of a change from misery-guts Drysdale.
The second thing that hit him was the stench of putrefying flesh, a sickly smell that lingered for days and clung to your clothing and hair, no matter how much you scrubbed. There could be no doubt which body she was examining. Overhead the extractor fans were going full blast, but they were fighting a losing battle. Leaning against the tiled wall, looking as green as his gown, was the forensic photographer.
The pathologist turned at his approach. ‘Hardly Chanel No. 5,’ she shouted over the din of the music. When she saw that he couldn’t hear her, she turned the volume down and said it again. She pointed to a ball of cotton wool and a jar of Vicks VapoRub. ‘Stick it where you think it will do the most good.’
He grinned, pulled a couple of plugs of cotton wool, dunked them in the Vicks jar and gratefully inserted them in his nostrils. The pungent aroma made his eyes water, but mercifully over powered the smell of decaying flesh.
‘I started without you – I hope you don’t mind,’ she said.
‘With this one you can finish without me,’ he told her. The body on the slab was a disgusting mess. He wondered how she could possibly glean anything from it.
‘My name’s Carol,’ she said.
‘Jack,’ he told her. First-name bleeding terms now!
The scalpel slashed a path in the neck. ‘Hard to believe it, but I reckon she was a pretty girl once,’ she said.
Frost nodded. ‘I can believe it.’ He had seen the rotting bodies of too many pretty girls in his time with Denton CID. ‘Can you tell me any thing we don’t know?’
She gave him a knowing grin and lowered her voice so the photographer couldn’t hear. ‘I’m free tonight, did you know that?’
Bloody hell! thought Frost. A sex-starved pathologist propositioning me over a rotting corpse. I’ll be dating the undertaker’s daughter next. ‘I’ll pick you up at seven,’ he said. ‘But what about the body?’
‘Female, eighteen to twenty-three, about five foot four. She probably had quite a good figure. Been dead some four to five weeks, perhaps a little longer. The entomologist should be more precise. She looked after her teeth, so you’ll be able to identify her from her dental records and then get a positive ID from her DNA.’
‘Cause of death?’ asked Frost.
Carol pointed to the neck section she had opened with the scalpel to expose bone. ‘Look!’
Frost didn’t want to look that closely, but bent forward. Putrescence and slime. He was glad of the nose plugs. Then he saw what she meant and nodded. ‘The cicoid?’
‘Yes – it’s fractured. It would take quite a bit of pressure to do that. Mind you, a karate chop would do it, but the fracturing would be different. It’s invariably damaged with strangulation. I’d say manual strangulation, in this case. Even with a cadaver in this condition I’d expect to see ligature grooving, but there doesn’t seem to be any.’ She shrugged. ‘If the body was in any sort of decent shape, I’d be certain, but in this condition I can only say more than likely.’
She beckoned the photographer over and they stepped back so he could take photographs of the splintered neck bone.
The photographer finished and returned to his wall position. Frost and the pathologist moved back to the body. She pointed. ‘The neck has been chewed and ripped – probably by a fox – which doesn’t help much.’
‘Was she sexually assaulted?’
Again she shrugged. ‘No way of knowing. I can’t even tell you if she was a virgin. She was naked when you found her, but I can’t say if she was stripped before or after death.’
‘No remnants of clothing under the body when we moved it,’ Frost told her.
‘Then almost definitely she was naked when she was dumped. The odds are she was sexually assaulted, but I can’t give you any proof.’
He tried not to watch as she cut, poked and probed the squelching tissue, but the body was a magnet for his eyes.
At last she straightened up. ‘This is a waste of time. I can’t tell you any more.’ She dictated some notes into a small cassette recorder, then called for the mortuary attendant to remove the body.
Frost waited for the overhead fans to cleanse the air before pulling out his nose plugs. Carol peeled off her surgical gloves and dropped them in a waste bin. She then shrugged off the green gown. Under it she was wearing a grey sweater and black slacks. The sweater was well filled and for a brief moment Frost’s thoughts were not of death and decay.
‘Seven o’clock, then,’ he whispered, feeling quite excited at the prospect.
She gave a conspiratorial nod. ‘I’ll be waiting.’
Outside, in the fresh air, he lit up a cigarette and inhaled a lungful of smoke. With a cry of disgust he snatched the cigarette out of his mouth and hurled it to the ground. The smoke tasted of Vicks VapoRub. He scrubbed his nose with his handkerchief, but to no avail. He could smell, he could taste, nothing but Vicks. Cursing loudly, he made his way to the car.
Kate was waiting for him. She looked up and smiled, glad her boring wait was over. ‘How did it go?’ she asked.
‘Not as many laughs as I hoped,’ said Frost. The car radio was playing the local news:
… hunt for the three missing teenagers has entered its third day. The officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Skinner, says there is no obvious link between the disappearance of Jan O’Brien, and Debbie Clark and her boyfriend Thomas Harris, who have not been heard of since they left home three days ago…
‘Switch it off,’ said Frost. ‘They’re dead.’
Kate turned and looked at him, her eyebrows raised in query
‘Just a feeling,’ he told her. ‘One of my fallible intuitions. But I reckon they’re dead. Stone-cold bleeding dead.’ He had had enough of death. He was glad it wasn’t his case any more.
‘How did you get on with the new pathologist?’ Wells asked as Frost passed through the lobby.
‘As pathologists go, she’s not a bad bit of crumpet,’ Frost told him. ‘I think she fancies me.’
‘Well, after looking at decomposing bodies all day, I reckon even you might look tasty.’
‘I’m taking her out to dinner tonight,’ said Frost.
‘Let’s hope she washes her hands first,’ grinned Wells.
‘Frost!’ Skinner’s acidic bawl echoed down the corridor and a moment later he strode through the door. ‘How is it you’re always talking, never working, when I see you, Sergeant?’ he snapped at Wells.
Wells quickly grabbed a pen and started totting up non-existent columns of figures.
‘How did the new tart like the post-mortem?’ Skinner asked.
‘She was brilliant,’ lied Frost. ‘I was ready to pass out, but she never turned a hair – not even when she saw the maggots.’
Skinner’s nose wrinkled in disgust. ‘She can see a few more, then.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Mullett wants to see you in his office in half an hour. No excuses, Frost. You be there.’
‘What’s it about?’ Frost asked.
Skinner’s eyes glinted and he flashed a malevolent smile. ‘That’s what you’re going to find out,’ he replied as he marched back to his office.
‘Why do I get the feeling it’s not going to be something good?’ said Frost.
‘The bastard’s up to something,’ said Wells. ‘He’s been in and out of Mullett’s office all morning. When I took some papers in to him he was on the phone. He cut the conversation stone dead when I came in and didn’t start it again until I left.’
Frost remembered the transfer request he had seen in Skinner’s in-tray.
‘He’s leaving. That’s what it’s about,’ enthused Frost. ‘The bastard is leaving Denton.’
Chapter 9
Police Superintendent Mullett, Denton Divisional Commander, nervously drummed his fingers on the polished surface of his mahogany desk. This was the moment he had been looking forward to for so long, but there was no way he was going to face Frost on his own. Where was DCI Skinner? He had said he would be here.