The Kinlochleven Medical Practice stood in a jumble of buildings in Kearan Road, on the far side of the street from the police station, and a prayer away from St Paul’s Episcopal Church at the end of the road. The original building had been expanded several times over the last fifty years.
The streets around it were empty, only a handful of tyre tracks in evidence, but Brodie was aware of curtains twitching, and eyes on them as they carried the body bag into the room that had been prepared for them at the back of the building. There was a strange still in the air, thick snow all around absorbing every sound, smothering it in tenebrous silence. A sense here of being shut out from the rest of the world, long mountain shadows casting their gloom on the water, while revealing tantalising glimpses of the world beyond in the ring of sunlight that illuminated the peaks and set them sharp and clear against the blue of the sky.
Brodie was sweating by the time they laid the body on the examination table and unzipped the body bag.
‘Just leave him in the bag,’ Sita said. ‘It’ll contain the fluids. Don’t want to make a mess on the floor if we can help it.’
She had opened up her Storm case on a table pushed against the far wall, and was slipping into green scrubs. She donned a heavy apron and pushed her dark, wiry hair into what looked for all the world like a plastic shower cap.
Brodie glanced into her case and saw scalpels, a 35-centimetres chef’s knife, forceps, scissors, a ladle, needles, syringes, and a selection of Vacutainers and sealable plastic bags. There were jars of formalin, and paper and plastic evidence bags. Twine and needle. For sewing up the body afterwards, Brodie assumed. He was not looking forward to the flight back to Glasgow, sharing the tiny cabin of the eVTOL with a decaying corpse.
‘What else do you have in there?’ he said.
‘Oh, a veritable Aladdin’s cave of goodies. A camera.’ She lifted it out. ‘You’ll be handling that.’ And she took out a torch. ‘Could have done with this last night. I’ll use it to light whatever we need to photograph.’ She thrust it at Brodie. ‘Also have a handheld X-ray machine. It can do arms and legs and heads. Not big enough for the torso, though.’ She pulled on plastic shoe covers and snapped her hands into latex gloves.
‘You come well equipped. No wonder this thing was heavy.’
‘Got to think of everything.’ She grinned as she lifted out a surgical handsaw. ‘In the absence of electricity, we’re going to have to open up the skull the old-fashioned way.’ She turned towards Robbie, who was standing by the door looking pale. ‘I’m going to cut him out of his clothes first, and you two can lay them out on the table over there. There’s a roll of paper in my case that you can spread out on it.’
‘Me?’ Robbie seemed shocked.
‘You are staying for the PM, aren’t you?’
‘Well, I... I hadn’t really thought...’
Brodie said, ‘First one, son?’
Robbie’s eyes darted self-consciously in his direction and he nodded.
Sita laughed and said, ‘Well, it probably won’t be your last. Got to start somewhere.’ She stopped and thought for a moment. ‘Something useful you can do. Go home and bring me a plastic bucket for the excess fluids. And a stainless steel bowl if you have such a thing. I need something to put the organs into before I dissect them. Oh, and if you’ve any gas left in that old stove of yours, you could heat me up some water. I’m going to need to thaw out my hands from time to time.’ She turned towards the body. ‘This fella’s still going to be pretty damned cold inside.’
Brodie caught Robbie’s arm as he turned to go. ‘I believe it was your wife who found the body,’ he said. Robbie nodded. ‘I’m going to need to talk to her. And I’m going to need somebody to take me up to the snow patch where it was found.’
‘Oh, Addie’ll do that. She’s scheduled to go up again anyway for a routine maintenance check on the weather station after the storm. I’ll speak to her when I go over to the house. She can come across when the post-mortem’s finished.’
Brodie nodded, and felt his heart rate rise.
Younger’s clothes, all laid out now on the table, were torn in places, badly abraded in others. An anorak over a fleece. Ski pants. His leather boots were badly lacerated, the uppers on one of them ripped completely free of the sole. Sita held the torch as Brodie photographed them.
She packed towels around the body, and got Brodie to photograph it as well. She was particularly interested in the face. ‘Look at these,’ she said, running a latexed finger over irregular-shaped random contusions and abrasions. Most were broad brush-type abrasions, several of them appearing over the prominences of the face, around the eye sockets and high parts of the cheeks. Similar injuries were in evidence, too, around the rest of his body, but less severe where he had been protected by his clothes.
Brodie nodded. ‘Injuries from a fall?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘An accident, then?’
‘Not so fast. Look closer.’ As Brodie leaned in to examine Younger’s face, she said, ‘See? There are multiple blunt force injuries, different from the others. Look at the left cheek. There are seven sets of patterned injuries consisting of four short, parallel abraded contusions, about 3.8 centimetres in length and 0.4 millimetres apart. And check out the single faint linear contusion running perpendicular to the groups.’
Brodie could see that the injuries she was describing formed some kind of a pattern. ‘What do they mean? How did he get those?’
She looked up and smiled from behind her mask. ‘Someone hit him, Mr Brodie. Punched him. Someone wearing a very distinctive pair of gloves. Gloves with some kind of protective reinforcement along the backs of the fingers, notched with four horizontal niches at each knuckle to allow the fingers to flex, and a raised ledge running along the length of each finger.’ She moved her fingertips to Younger’s forehead. ‘Two more here as well. And another along the right jawline.’
‘Is that what killed him?’
‘I doubt it. Enough to knock him off his feet, though. Cause him to fall, which would be consistent with his other injuries.’
Robbie came in with a basin of steaming hot water. ‘This’ll be too hot to put your hands in just yet.’
‘Put it on the table over there. I won’t need it till I cut him open.’ She lifted one of Younger’s hands and examined it closely, turning it this way and that, then fetched a tiny scalpel and a piece of paper torn from a notebook, before gently scraping residue from beneath the fingernails of the right hand to collect on the paper. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we’ll find that this is skin. Almost certainly harvested from his attacker’s face or neck. I’d say our man put up a bit of a fight. He’ll have left his mark.’ She let the scrapings slide from the paper into a plastic sample bag and sealed it.
Brodie said, ‘You’ll get DNA from that?’
‘We will.’
‘How soon?’
‘As soon as we get power. The wonders of technology. We have a very smart little piece of kit these days that can do on-site DNA analysis. And assuming we have power, then we’ll also have internet access, and I can run it through the database.’
‘And cause of death?’
‘You know as well as I do, Detective Inspector, that no pathologist worth her salt is going to speculate on that until the autopsy is complete.’ She turned towards Robbie. ‘Do you have that bucket and stainless steel dish?’
‘I’ll just dash back across the road and get them.’ He hurried to the door and paused there. ‘My wife will be over in about an hour, sir, if that suits.’
He nodded. ‘Sure.’ And he turned away quickly to focus on Sita’s scalpel as she made her Y-incision in the body, cutting from each shoulder to the breastbone and then all the way down to the pubis. Although he was losing the hair on his head, Younger had plenty of it on his body, a tangle of wiry fair pubic hair on his chest and belly and back, and the fluids of his autopsy ran freely through it.