Now the dead man was lifted on to a mortuary table, a marble slab with shallow gutters around the edges and a drain hole at one end. Post mortems are a messy business, as Rose knew only too well. It was the initial incision which always caused her the biggest problems. If she could get over that she would be all right.
Dr Carmen Brown, of course, had no such qualms.
‘Morning, Rose, Peter,’ she said cheerily, rather as if they had popped round for nothing more than a cup of rather good coffee.
The doctor asked for the corpse to be laid face down at first. Before opening up the body, she would of course conduct a thorough external examination, looking for anything she might have missed in the unsatisfactory surroundings of the murder scene, and paying particular attention to the wound in Marty Morris’s back.
From that alone she could not really take things much further than she had at the scene of the crime, she said. Almost certainly a knife with a long, very sharp blade had delivered the death blow. There had only been one incision. That was all that had been needed.
‘The blade penetrated several inches into the body,’ said Dr Brown, in her usual matter-of-fact way. She was using a tape recorder to chronicle her findings as she worked. ‘We’ll see exactly what damage it did when we open him up.’
Even the thought of that made Rose feel vaguely nauseous. She pulled herself together with considerable concentration of will.
‘How much actual physical strength would be required to push the blade of a knife that far into somebody’s back, Carmen?’ she asked.
‘Not a great deal.’
‘Even through a leather jacket?’
Carmen Brown shrugged.
‘Finest Italian kid,’ she remarked. ‘Would have provided hardly any extra resistance to the kind of weapon used. If you want to kill somebody quickly and efficiently with a knife, some knowledge of human anatomy is a lot more useful than brute force. But in this case it needed to be only the most elementary. Small of the back, up behind the ribs. The heart’s around there. Can’t miss something vital...’
‘So a woman could have done it?’
‘Yes, no problem in that.’ Carmen pushed and prodded the area around the wound. ‘In fact, one blow like this is the way women do kill. Men are inclined not to be able to stop once they’ve started. Gay killings are often the worst, really frenzied attacks — but then you know all this...’
Eventually Carmen and her assistant turned the body of Marty Morris over and began the nitty-gritty of the post-mortem examination. The first deep incision caused the corpse to emit a kind of whistling noise, as if air or gas were escaping. Rose had to struggle not to visibly flinch as the thorax was swiftly split from throat to pubis.
Carmen Brown, however, might have been slicing open a melon for all the reaction she showed as she parted flesh, exposed and sawed through bones and carved into organs.
‘I was right,’ she remarked conversationally. ‘The killer scored a direct hit on the spinal cord. Caught the aorta too. Our victim had no chance. Would have died at once.’
Rose found the post-mortem examination as disturbing as ever but at least managed to hang on to the contents of her stomach. What there were of them. She’d had no time for breakfast, merely grabbing tea and biscuits on the run. This was always a mistake. Curiously perhaps, she found she was usually less queasy with a full stomach than an empty one.
On the way back to the station she asked her driver to stop for fish and chips. The diet of the average police officer is not often a health-conscious one, and Rose knew it was a miracle she remained as slim as she did. However, this was not a moment for worrying about such things. Some good British grease was what she needed both to settle any remaining stomach flutters and to get her through the rest of the day. The afternoon and evening would be taken up with pure admin, and Rose was still getting used to exactly how much of it was required from a senior investigating officer.
It was gone nine when Rose got home, the end of another long day, but Simon was still waiting to eat the meal he had prepared for both of them. Sometimes it seemed to her that he only cooked supper in the first place, knowing that she was in the middle of a big case, to put pressure on her — and she almost wished he wouldn’t.
But she sat down at the dining table and did her best to attack rather dried-up lamb chops with a gusto she certainly didn’t feel.
Simon had thawed out a little during the day, as Rose had known he would. He wasn’t that unreasonable about her job, after all. And he did love her. But there was still an edge between them. And their early attempts at starting a conversation seemed to Rose to resemble a couple of wrestlers stalking each other around the ring, each waiting for the other to make the first move.
‘So, you haven’t caught your killer yet, then,’ remarked Simon, who it transpired had at least been interested enough to watch the TV news bulletins of the murder case. ‘I’d have thought a top-drawer cop like you would have had the whole thing sewn up by now.’
Rose realised that he was almost certainly being sarcastic, but decided to play the thing straight. She didn’t need a quarrel right now.
‘It’ll be a while before we do that on this one, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘We’ve found out one or two interesting things that wouldn’t have been on the news yet, though. Our victim was a male prostitute.’
‘What, a rent boy, you mean?’
‘Well, yes. But he was on his way to see a woman client — not a man.’
‘Good God!’ said Simon.
Rose smiled. In spite of his determination to be a liberal new man, Simon was pretty conventional in his attitude to women.
‘Why on earth would a woman want to pay for sex?’ he asked.
‘For exactly the same reasons men do, I should imagine. They’re lonely. They want something they don’t get at home. They find it exciting.’
Simon shuddered. ‘Good God!’ he said again.
Rose found that she was becoming irritated in spite of her good intentions.
‘Male prostitution is no different from female prostitution, Simon,’ she said coolly.
‘That’s as maybe, in theory,’ he responded. ‘But you have to admit that female prostitution is more normal.’
‘Normal,’ repeated Rose, almost sadly. ‘No Simon, I don’t have to admit any such thing. I’m sick to death of living in a man’s world, as a matter of fact. I get it day in and day out at the nick, and I sometimes think you’re just as bad in spite of your liberal pretensions. The truth is that the male attitude to women in this country hasn’t really changed in centuries.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Simon. ‘You can’t possible believe that, Rose.’
And now even he sounded as if he was patronising her. Well, damn him, he’d asked for it and he was going to get it. The first forty-eight hours of a murder investigation are always considered the most important, and they are certainly the most pressurised. This is the vital time — after that the trail is likely to cool rapidly. Rose already feared that the case might slip away from her now. She was tired and fed up. She had no patience with him suddenly. She put down her knife and fork, giving up all attempts to do battle with the unappetising lamb chops, and let rip.
‘Rubbish, is it?’ she stormed. ‘Have you never had a laugh with your mates about what they did in the knocking shops of Bangkok or Amsterdam? You wouldn’t find that distasteful, would you, because you’re steeped in double standards. All men are.
‘Our Royal Family, the so-called upper classes, they have a full-scale tradition of using brothels. The Duchess of York’s father was stupid enough to get caught out and there was a bit of a fuss, but you knew damn well that privately his male friends were probably clapping him on the back. That’s the way it is. And if it’s more or less socially acceptable for men to use prostitutes, almost lauded in some circles, then what is wrong with the situation being reversed? But how many men could accept that? I know bloody well, you can’t. However, I see absolutely no difference.