‘And you are Mister—’
‘Superintendent Tu Tian. This is very good of you,’ Tu said amiably. ‘We don’t want to take up too much of your time. Have you already completed the autopsy?’
‘You are interested in Andre Donner?’
‘Yes.’
‘We just finished with him a few minutes ago, but not yet with Nyela Donner. She is being examined two tables further on. Do you need to look at her as well?’
‘No.’
‘Or at the second dead man from the museum? We don’t have his identity yet.’
Tu frowned.
‘Perhaps. Yes, I think so.’
‘Good. Please come.’
Dr Voss looked into a scanner. Another door opened. They entered a corridor, and here for the first time Yoyo smelled that sharp, sweet smell that the people on television always ward off with a bit of balm rubbed under their noses. It was bacterial decay; the smell thickened, from a mere hint to a miasma, as they went downstairs to the autopsy section, and from a miasma to a brackish pool as they entered the lobby to the theatre. A young man with an Arabic look about him was uploading children’s portrait photos to a monitor screen. Yoyo didn’t even want to think about children, here. Nor did she need to, since Dr Voss had just pressed something into her hand. She looked at the little tube, utterly at a loss, and felt her ignorance open up beneath her like a trapdoor.
‘For our visitors,’ the doctor said. ‘You know, of course.’
No, she didn’t know.
‘For rubbing under your nose.’ Dr Voss raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘I thought that you would—’
‘This is Miss Chen’s first case involving forensic pathology,’ Tu said, taking the tube from Yoyo’s fingers. As though he had done it all his life, he squeezed out two pea-sized blobs of the paste it contained and smeared them under his nostrils. ‘She’s here to get some experience.’
Dr Voss nodded understandingly.
‘You’ve not been paying attention in theory class, Inspector,’ Tu teased her in Chinese, passing Yoyo the tube. She rolled her eyes at him and rubbed a squeeze of the stuff on her upper lip, only to find out the next moment that it was, quite definitely, too much. A minty bomb exploded into her nasal passages, swept through her brain and blasted the smell of decay aside. Svenja Maas watched her with conspiratorial interest, the fellow-feeling of two beautiful people who meet in the company of the less well favoured.
‘You get used to it at some point,’ she declared, the voice of experience.
Yoyo smiled faintly.
They followed the doctor into the theatre, tiled red and white with frosted glass windows and boxy ceiling lights. Five autopsy tables were lined up next to one another. The first two were empty, but two surgeons were bent over the table in the middle, one of them just lifting the lungs from a yawning gap in the ribcage of the black woman they were working on, while other said something into a microphone. The lungs went onto a scale. Dr Voss led the group past the fourth table, where a large corpse lay under a white sheet, and she stopped at the last. Here too the corpse was covered, but she turned the sheet back and they saw Jan Kees Vogel-aar, alias Andre Donner.
Yoyo looked at him.
She hadn’t particularly liked the man, but now that she saw him lying there, a Y-shaped incision freshly sewn up on his torso, she felt sorry. Just as she had felt sorry for Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for Robert de Niro in Heat, Kevin Costner in A Perfect World, Chris Pine in Neighborhood, Emma Watson in Pale Days. All those who had so very nearly made it, but who always failed at the last moment no matter how often you watched the film.
‘If you don’t need me,’ Dr Voss said, ‘I’ll leave you with Frau Maas. She assisted in the Donner autopsy and should be able to answer any questions you have.’
‘Well, then,’ said Tu, switching to Chinese. ‘Let’s get started, Comrade.’
They leaned down to look at his face, waxy, already tinged with blue. Yoyo tried to remember which side Vogelaar had his glass eye on. Jericho had insisted it was the right side. She wasn’t so sure herself. She could readily have sworn that it was the left. It was a magnificently well-made eye, and under Vogelaar’s closed lids there was no telling which it might be.
‘Not sure?’ Tu frowned.
‘No, and that’s Owen’s fault.’ Yoyo looked askance at Svenja Maas, who had stepped back. ‘Let our friend there show you the fellow on the next table.’
‘Fine, I’ll keep her off your back.’
‘It’ll be all right.’ Yoyo gave a sour smile. ‘There are only two possibilities.’
She wasn’t getting used to the sight of corpses, or to the idea that people she had barely got to know dropped like flies. But even as she veered between fascination and disgust, an unexpected sense of calm took hold of her, deep and clear, like a mountain lake. Tu turned to Svenja Maas and pointed to the body on table four, still under its sheet.
‘Could you please uncover this man for us?’
Stupid. The trainee doctor stepped round the wrong side of the table. From where she was, she still had a good view of Yoyo. Tu shifted position to block her view.
‘Great heavens above,’ he cried out. ‘What happened to his eye?’
‘He was attacked with a pencil,’ the trainee doctor said, not without some admiration in her voice. ‘Straight through the bone and into the brain.’
‘And how exactly did that happen?’
Yoyo put two fingers onto Vogelaar’s right eyelid and lifted it. It seemed to have no particular temperature, neither cold nor warm. While Svenja Maas was explaining about angle of entry and pressure, she pressed her middle finger and thumb into the corner of the eye. The eyeball seemed to sit much too firmly in the eye socket, more like a glass marble than soft and slippery, so that for a moment she wasn’t sure that Jericho hadn’t been right after all, and she shoved her fingers deeper into the socket.
Resistance. Were those muscles? The eye wasn’t coming out, rather it tugged backwards, leaking some kind of fluid, like a cornered animal.
That wasn’t a glass eye, not on her life.
‘The shaft splintered,’ Maas said, walking over to the organ table between the corpse and the wash-basin, where something lay in a transparent plastic bag on a tray. Quickly, Yoyo pulled her fingers out of the socket, just before Maas happened to glance over at her. She thought she heard a squelching sound as she did so, reproachful, tell-tale. Tu hurried to block the sightlines again. Yoyo shuddered. Could the woman have heard something? Had there been anything to hear, or had she just imagined it, expecting an eye socket to squelch as you take your fingers out?
The surface of the calm lake inside her began to ruffle. There was something sticky on her fingers. Jericho had been wrong! While Tu twinkled at Svenja Maas, asking interested questions about her work, she plunged her fingers into Vogelaar’s left eye socket. Straight away she could feel that this was different. The surface was harder, definitely artificial. She pushed further, flexed her middle finger and thumb. All the while, Tu was asking learned questions about the improvised use of drawing equipment as weapons. Maas pronounced that everything could be a weapon, and stepped to the left. Tu declared that she was absolutely right, and stepped to the right. The pathologists at the middle table were busy with Nyela.
Yoyo took a deep breath, high on mint rub.
Now!
The glass eye popped out, almost trustingly, and nestled into the palm of her hand. She slipped it into her jacket, closed Vogelaar’s sunken eyelid as best she could and saw that she had caused lasting disfigurement. Too late. She quickly pulled the sheet back up over his face and took two steps to Tu’s side.