Rose’s gaze was drawn to the ground at Carmen Brown’s feet. The body was spread-eagled there, lying awkwardly on its front, one arm thrust out as if in a bizarre fist-clenched salute, the other tucked beneath the torso, legs apart. The leather jacket the victim was still wearing concealed the fatal wound Rose already knew was somewhere on his back. Bending a little closer she could see the rip through which the blade of the weapon must have passed. It was a surprisingly small abrasion, the damage to the jacket only slight.
The victim’s head was to one side and Rose could see his face clearly in the bright lights which so starkly illuminated the scene. He was lying partly in the shallow ditch running alongside the path, and his head and upper body were at a lower level than his legs and feet, explaining probably why the contents of his pockets seemed to have dropped out as he fell forwards and slightly downwards. His entire body was covered in splashes of gooey mud. The rain which had been falling so steadily throughout most of the previous twenty-four hours had washed the mud into rivulets and the corpse was soaking wet, although Rose reasoned that it would have been protected from much of the earlier downpour by the arc of rhododendron. The victim’s eyes were wide open as if frozen in fright. Obliquely Rose found herself trying to imagine what it would be like to know you were about to die a violent death, and then, remembering that this young man had been stabbed just once from behind, wondered if he had even known. The mouth of the corpse was stretched open in a skeletal grin, made all the more startling by the even whiteness of his teeth contrasting with the deep ebony of his skin.
Rose forced herself to bend further over in order to take a closer look. There was very little blood and no smell. It is a myth that sudden death causes victims to urinate or to defecate. Carmen Brown, who attended between forty and fifty deaths a year, once told Rose that she had only seen that on one occasion when she had been called to examine a young woman who had hanged herself. Hanging was the only exception and even then not always, but the sudden snapping of the spinal cord in a vertical position sometimes caused pressure on the bladder, forcing it to open. Rose shuddered. The amount of macabre information she had stashed away over the years was quite frightening.
In this case there was very little external indication of violent death — although as Rose leaned closer to that distorted face, to those staring eyes, she suffered her usual chronic reaction. The shock of death never failed to hit her.
She gagged, putting her hand to her mouth, somehow retaining the presence of mind to pretend she was having a coughing fit. Men could show human frailty occasionally and get away with it, even be applauded for it — women could not, certainly not if they wanted to reach the top in the police force, Rose believed.
She stepped back, forced herself to recover quickly, and spoke to the pathologist.
‘Died twenty-four hours ago, I gather?’ she said.
‘Time of death is an inexact science as you well know, Chief Inspector,’ replied Carmen Brown coolly.
‘And I also know you’re never far out, doctor,’ Rose responded, continuing in the formality the other had begun, although the two women frequently called each other by their Christian names and certainly did if they met off duty.
Rose looked around her carefully. ‘What do you reckon did for our boy, then?’ she asked.
‘A knife of some kind with an extremely long blade,’ answered the pathologist. ‘It could have been just an ordinary carving knife but it would have had to have been razor sharp. Probably a butcher’s knife of some kind, but then, loads of people have those in their kitchens nowadays. You can clearly see the incisory wound in the small of his back.’
Deftly, Dr Brown lifted the victim’s jacket and shirt so that Rose could see the deceptively small entry wound centrally placed just below his shoulder blades. Even on the skin immediately surrounding the stab wound there was little blood.
‘And there’s very little tearing either to the victim’s clothes or skin,’ Carmen Brown continued. ‘With a wound like this the bleeding would be almost entirely internal. That knife slipped straight in. Easy. And deadly. You’re hard-pressed to miss a vital organ of some kind if you stab somebody in the middle of their back.’ The doctor looked thoughtful. ‘Probably hit the spinal cord, must have sliced through at least one major artery — could even have ruptured a lung. Depends on the angle...’
Carmen Brown might have been giving the prognosis on a broken-down car. All pathologists were like that, able to discuss and investigate the most gruesome detail with absolute professional detachment. Rose assumed that was the only way they could work. She suppressed another shudder and had to fight back a second threatening attack of nausea.
‘So, what can you tell me about the victim?’
No longer in close contact with the body, the pathologist pushed off the hood of her white suit with the back of one hand, releasing a cascade of auburn curls somehow quite incongruous amid the sterile austerity of the crime scene. She glanced down at the body lying at her feet as she spoke.
‘He was a fit young man in his early twenties or perhaps even a little younger. About five foot seven inches, stockily built. Good teeth. An old bruise on his right temple. Wore contact lenses. And he died at once.’
Rose’s attention was momentarily diverted by the noisy banter of a familiar double-act behind her. The Cataldi brothers, the coroner’s pick-up men, had arrived.
Carmen Brown followed the policewoman’s gaze. ‘There’s nothing more I can do at the scene in conditions like this,’ said the pathologist, waving a hand vaguely at the sodden ground and dripping foliage. ‘We may as well get him bagged up,’ she continued.
Ron Cataldi, the elder and slightly larger of the brothers, passed a folded stretcher over the tape-fence.
‘So when are you two ladies going to find us a body in a nice warm sitting-room somewhere?’ he asked, an easy grin spreading across his broad face. Another of Bristol’s small Italian community, his voice still bore just the faintest hint of Mediterranean lilt.
‘What, and leave you guys with nothing to grumble about?’ responded Rose.
She liked the Cataldis, everybody did. Their job was to collect bodies whenever a post-mortem examination was required — not just the victims of violent crimes, but all accident and sudden death cases — and deliver the corpses to the nearest mortuary. All coroners’ offices employ a full-time team like Ron and Tommy Cataldi. In the Avon and Somerset constabulary, with the blunt graveyard humour common in the police force, they were invariably known as The Body-snatchers.
The Cataldis, who covered the entire Bristol area and probably collected a dozen or so bodies a week in their blue Ford Transit van with its blacked-out rear windows, got through their work by assuming an attitude of relaxed joviality. Their way of dealing with death was to lighten the moment whenever possible, and their manner was such that not only did they get away with it, to the other professionals involved they were always a welcome arrival, however grim the occurrence requiring them. Ron and Tommy wore neat dark suits at all times and at first glance, Rose always thought, they looked and sounded like Mafiosi a long way from home. Then you learned how surprisingly gentle they could be. They had a natural sensitivity about them. Rose had many times witnessed these two big and apparently bluff men coming into a situation where they had to deal with shocked members of the public and sometimes grieving relatives, and do so with a sympathetic deftness she only wished she could emulate.