‘I’ll do that now,’ Ellen said.
She crouched over the body, feeling the pockets, examining the hands and wrists for rings or a watch. ‘Nothing,’ she said eventually, but then stood, a strange excitement in her body. ‘Except for one thing.’
‘Except for the missing finger,’ Freya wryly.
Challis tingled. He felt alive suddenly, and leaned over to look. The ring finger of the right hand. ‘Foxes, Doc?’
Freya Berg shook her head. ‘The finger was torn off some time ago. Years rather than weeks or months.’
59
On Monday Challis drove to the city, reaching the Institute by one o’clock. A chilly wind was blowing in off the bay, and he felt it accompany him into the Institute s viewing room, a small, glassed-in space that overlooked a huge laboratory. It was an eight-bay lab, and handled all types of reportable deaths: suicides, accidents, drug overdoses, and murders. Natural light flooded down from windows high above the dissecting tables, giving a false impression of warmth.
Freya and the Institute technicians worked in blue hospital pyjamas, green surgical gowns, and white rubber boots and disposable aprons. They worked cheerfully and efficiently. They were jokers, like cops and ambulance officers, but the humour was less black and self-protective-probably because they’re around bodies every day, Challis thought, bodies in all kinds of extremes. Not even homicide cops were faced with that. He watched as the clothing was removed from the Myers Reserve corpse, vegetable matter sponged away from the body, the scalp peeled back to admit access to the bone saw, and the chest cavity cut open in a Y incision. Organs were removed and weighed; the clothing was searched; a molecular biologist took DNA samples; a toxicologist endeavoured to find useable liver tissue, eye fluid, and bile, blood and urine samples. Finally a dental record was made as a potential aid to identifying the dead man, before the body cavity was packed and the various incisions deftly sealed with sturdy thread and a curved needle.
There were still forms to fill in, and Freya took Challis into her office, where she spoke as she ticked, scribbled and signed. He’d sat with her like this many times before. It’s not that he thought her job macabre, her pleasant, cool professionalism jarring, but he was nevertheless always pleased to note the little vanities in her life, such as her dangly earrings and beautiful Mont Blanc fountain pen.
‘You can still get ink for that?’
‘Oh yes.’
Finally she capped the pen and sat back in her chair. ‘So, there you have it. Until the tests come in I can’t be positive about time of death. Our man had all of his teeth-apart from one that was probably knocked out, for there’s some damage to the gum-indicating that he was young rather than middle aged. A cross-sectional analysis of his teeth should give us his age, plus or minus one year. Furthermore, his skull hadn’t quite knitted fully, another indication that he’s young-but not a teenager, more probably early twenties. I can’t be accurate about his height, owing to cartilage contraction and some decay of the soles of his feet, but he was medium height, a little under six feet in the old imperial measurement. The absence of maggot cocoons indicates that he was buried soon after death. Finally, he’d been shot in the heart.’
‘Leaving the best bit till last,’ Challis said.
‘Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait,’ Freya Berg said, and Challis watched her appreciatively. ‘In the centre of the chest, here,’ she went on, placing her hand between her breasts. ‘I found the bullet and it’s been sent to ballistics for analysis. At first glance they said it was a 9mm.’
Challis nodded. An intact bullet, with distinctive markings, could always be matched to the pistol that fired it. ‘Nothing else?’
‘No other cause of death that I can see. Toxicology might reveal he’d also been poisoned, but I’m pretty certain it was the shot that killed him.’
‘Personal possessions?’
‘This cash register receipt.’
Challis examined it. Nothing to indicate the shop or service; only the date-two days before Janine McQuarrie was murdered-and the amount, $2.95. A ham sandwich from a milk bar? A blank video from a bargain shop? It was a fruitless lead.
‘That leaves us with his missing finger,’ Challis said.
‘Ring finger of his right hand, to be exact,’ Freya said. ‘As I suspected yesterday, it didn’t happen recently, but some time after adolescence. And it was torn rather than cut off cleanly. Some kind of accident? Explosion? Caught in machinery? I can’t be more certain than that.’
‘It’s something to go on,’ Challis said. ‘It ties in with a witness account in another crime. And the dead girl?’
Freya shook her head sadly. ‘Drowned. She might have lived if someone had pulled her out of the water sooner.’
Drowned?
In far north Queensland a couple of days later, Andy Asche was reading the Age online. He concealed a sob and read the item again. Drowned. That’s what it said.
He stumbled out into what passed for a winter’s day in the tropics. Sure, Nat had probably been concealed by reeds and scummy water, but the cops couldn’t have been looking very hard. He blinked his eyes. He shouldn’t have run. He should have stayed behind and pulled her out onto the grass. But would he have been in time to save her life? He pictured it, her body cold, wet, floppy, heavy. He shouldn’t have abandoned her.
Then he tried to tell himself that it wasn’t his fault. Anyone would have assumed she’d escaped, run off in a different direction.
Drowned.
If he hadn’t run he could have saved her.
Vyner had also read the papers, and seen the news on TV. ‘Shallow grave,’ they went on and on about a shallow grave. Yeah, well, he defied anyone to have dug a deep grave in that reserve. Sure, the soil had been soft, but it was also interlaced with roots.
Then came an SMS: if Vyner wanted his fifteen grand, he had to pull another job for free.
Vyner fumed. It was a no-brainer, but he fumed.
That same day Challis received confirmation from dental records that the buried man was Nathan Gent, and that evening he took Ellen with him to confront Robert McQuarrie. They didn’t get further than the front doorstep.
‘Did your wife ever treat a man named Nathan Gent?’
No flicker in McQuarrie’s soft, sulky face. ‘I have no idea.’
‘Young, shaved head, missing a finger on his right hand.’
A look of distaste. ‘She treated people from all walks of life, including riffraff
‘Perhaps you befriended this man.’
‘What are you implying? That I hired him to kill Janine?’
‘Did you?’
‘No, now leave. I’m not going to say it again, if you want to interrogate me, my lawyer has to be present. Can I get that through your thick skulls?’
Meanwhile Scobie Sutton was chatting quietly with his wife, Beth slicing onions and occasionally sniffing and blinking, her hands still then slicing rapidly again. She was often teary these days, but he didn’t know if it was the onions this time or distress over her job. ‘What did you do today?’
She had thrown herself into volunteer work for their church, and he was hoping that this would keep her from falling into depression or something.
‘I went to see Heather Cobb,’ she said, still slicing.
‘Did you? I called on her this morning.’
Beth put down her knife and turned to him with the baffled smile she’d often worn when dealing with people from the local housing estates. ‘Scobie, you wonder how their minds work sometimes. Heather knows we’re married, but she didn’t say a word about your visit. I mean, normal people in those circumstances would have mentioned it.’
This was a subject that Beth and Scobie could get passionate about. People’s bad manners, careless manners, sheer indifference and ignorance and lack of social graces.