Margaret turned from the table. ‘My God, she’s like a child,’ she said. She had not known what to expect, and was taken by surprise. ‘What age was she?’
Wang consulted his notes. ‘Thirty-three, Doctah.’
Margaret crossed to the table and gazed down upon her flawless face, and saw that she had been very beautiful. ‘What a waste.’ She glanced up and found Li watching her.
He saw the shock and the empathy in her eyes. Shock because it was difficult not to feel a sense of loss when something so beautiful is destroyed. Empathy because she was almost the same age as Margaret, and it is hard in that circumstance not to feel vulnerable yourself. I never knew anyone who wasn’t madly in love with her after five minutes. Perhaps even in death Lynn Pan had that effect on people.
Margaret took a deep breath. It was her first autopsy for some considerable time. She had long ago stopped seeing the victims who had passed across her table as anything more than evidence to be examined in the minutest detail, a receptacle for vital clues that might lead to the capture of their killer. It was harder coming back to it than she had imagined. Defences were down. She had been softened by motherhood and domesticity, she had allowed herself to become human again, in a way that you cannot afford when your job is cutting open other human beings.
Li knew it would be hard for her. He watched as she summoned all her professionalism and began her external examination. There was not much of her to be seen under the shower cap and goggles and mask. Her smock and plastic arm cuffs covered every inch of her white skin, latex gloves and the mesh gauntlet on her noncutting hand hid the beauty of her long, delicate fingers. It was something in the way she held herself that betrayed her tension. If only to Li.
There were several red-purple bruises on Lynn Pan’s arms and legs, where perhaps she had fought briefly against her killer. ‘No defence wounds on the hands or forearms,’ Margaret said. ‘No cuts or slashes, which would suggest she was at least unconscious before he cut her throat.’
Around her neck and jawbone there was similar coloured bruising consistent with having been caused by thumb and fingertips where she had been pinned against the base of the sundial arm and choked. A cluster of three round bruises about one and a half centimetres in diameter on the left side, a larger bruise on the right, probably made by the thumb — suggesting that the murderer might have been right-handed. Margaret was confident that where the head had been banged up against the foot of the monument, she would find an area of subgaleal haemorrhage when she examined the scalp.
‘This guy needs to cut his fingernails,’ Margaret said. There were marks on Pan’s throat, consistent in relation to the bruising with having been left by the killer’s fingernails. Tiny crescent-shaped abrasions between half and one centimetre long, flakes of skin heaped up at their concave side. Margaret cocked her head, frowning slightly. ‘Usually someone defending themselves against strangulation would leave vertically oriented scratches near the top of their own neck, at the base or sides of the mandible, as they tried to pry themselves free.’
‘She was wearing gloves, Doctah,’ Wang said.
‘Ahh.’ Margaret had missed that in the photographs. She was rusty.
The slashing of the throat was ugly and vicious. It began five centimetres below the point where the left earlobe had been severed. It made a jagged crescent around the throat, following the line of the jaw, severing the windpipe, both carotid arteries and the internal jugular, and cutting through all the muscle and soft tissue right down to the vertebrae, marking the intervertebral cartilages. The blood vessels contained clot. Margaret thought that the wound had probably been inflicted by a sharp, pointed, long-bladed knife, about six to seven inches long. And it was her view that from the angle of the cut and the tearing of the skin, the knife had been drawn across the throat from left to right.
She examined the face next, pulling back the eyelids and peering at the eyes. ‘There is florid petechial haemorrhaging of the conjunctiva and the face,’ she said. ‘Tiny burst blood vessels,’ she added by way of explanation. ‘Caused by the pressure created when the blood draining from the head is cut off, but blood is still pumping into it through the arteries.’ She turned the head to the right to examine what remained of the left ear. ‘He’s been in a hurry with this. It’s a very crude amputation. He must have pulled the ear away from the side of the head with his free hand and cut down along the shape of the skull with a single stroke of his knife. The wound is not very accurate.’ A part of the ear still remained attached to its stump. On the right side, half the lobe remained clinging stubbornly to the side of the head by the smallest flap of skin.
As she examined the hair and the external scalp, Margaret could smell the faint lingering traces of Lynn Pan’s shampoo. A soft, sweet, peachy smell that made her seem altogether too human, too recently alive. She stepped back and nodded to Doctor Wang who drew blood for toxicology from the femoral vein at the top of her right leg.
Li could not look as Wang handed the blood to an assistant and then held open Pan’s right eyelid to pierce the eyeball with a syringe and draw off a quantity of clear, vitreous fluid. They would turn her over now and examine the back of her, before replacing her front-side-up and carving her open, cutting through delicate ribs with steel shears, removing the heart and lungs and the rest of the organs, cutting round the top of her skull and removing the brain. A monotonous, routine, dehumanising process that would reduce this once vibrant young woman to a dissevered pile of flesh and bones to be stored in a deep freeze for anything up to five years, depending upon how long it took to catch and execute her killer.
Margaret worked her way through the rest of the autopsy with dispassionate detachment. Like riding a bicycle, you never forgot how. She had simply wobbled a little at the beginning. Everything about Lynn Pan was normal and healthy. Her heart, lungs, liver, both kidneys. She had been a model of fitness and good health.
Li stood watching, determinedly unemotional, trying to focus his feelings in a positive way. He closed his eyes as Margaret sliced down the length of the intestine and tried not to let the smell affect him. She had been killed for a reason — a reason that had nothing to do with the other murders, although it appeared she had been killed by the same hand. Her computers and files had all been stolen, from her workplace and her home. She knew, or had in her possession, something…information, perhaps, that someone did not wish anyone else to know. So the motive for killing her was different from the others. She did not relate in any way to any of the Jack the Ripper slayings or their Beijing copies. And yet they had so much else in common. The method of killing, the Russian cheroot. And the letter which had promised to cut the ears off the next victim, a promise fulfilled in the killing of Lynn Pan. An incontrovertible link.
‘Did we manage to recover saliva from the cheroot found at the Guo Huan crime scene?’ he asked Wang.
‘English, please,’ Margaret said without looking up.
Li repeated the question in English.
‘Sure,’ Wang said. ‘The lab confirm this morning. We have DNA match with other killings.’