Right now she was examining the heart at another table. It was firm and normal in size. Carefully, she traced the coronary arteries from their origins at the aorta, around the outside of the heart, incising every five millimeters looking for blockage. She found none, and began breadloafing part way, examining the muscle for evidence of old or recent injury. When she reached the valves that separate the chambers of the heart she stopped sectioning and examined them. They were well formed and pliable. Although the left ventricle, which pumps the blood out of the heart through the aorta, was slightly thickened, she did not consider this abnormal. A little hypertrophy was to be expected in the left ventricle of an athlete. It was, after all, just another muscle, worked hard and developed by exercise. She was satisfied it was not his heart that had killed this young man.
She then embarked on a process of taking small sections, about one by one-point-five centimeters, from each of the organs for future microscopic examination. Although she did not consider that this would be necessary. Carefully, she placed each one into the tiny cassettes in which they would be fixed in formalin, dehydrated in alcohol and infiltrated by paraffin, creating pieces of wax tissue firm enough to be cut so thin that a microscope could see right through them.
Her concentration was broken by the sound of voices in the corridor, and she looked up as Li and Sun came in, pulling on aprons and shower caps. ‘You’re a little late,’ she said caustically.
‘You’ve started?’ Li said.
‘I’ve finished.’
Li looked crestfallen. She knew he liked to be there to go through each step with her, picking up on every little observation. ‘The services of the assistants were only available to me for a short time,’ she told him. ‘And I didn’t think I was in any condition to go heaving a body around on my own.’
‘No, of course not,’ Li said quickly. He half turned towards Sun. ‘You’ve met Sun, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Margaret said. ‘But I feel as if I have, the amount of talking you’ve done about him.’ Sun blushed. ‘You didn’t tell me he was such a good-looking boy. Afraid I might make a pass at him?’
Li grinned. ‘I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’ He looked at Sun. ‘Are you following any of this?’
‘A little,’ Sun said.
‘Ignore her. She loves to embarrass people.’
‘Well, anyway,’ Margaret said. ‘It doesn’t matter that you’re late. You’ve missed all the boring bits. We can get straight to the point.’
‘Which is?’ Li asked.
She crossed to the table where Sui Mingshan lay opened up like his fellow competitor on the other side of the city, cold and inanimate, devoid of organs, brain removed. Even like this he was a splendid specimen. Broad shoulders, beautifully developed pectorals, lithe, powerful legs. His face was obscured by the top flap of skin above the Y-shaped incision which had begun at each shoulder blade. Margaret pulled it down to reveal a young, not very handsome face, innocent in its repose, frozen in death, cheeks peppered by acne. His shaven head had been very roughly cut and was still quite stubbly in places. Li tried to imagine this young man in the apartment they had examined just an hour earlier. Perhaps his spirit had returned there and was haunting it still.
Margaret said, ‘You can see, there is no petechial haemorrhaging around the face, the eyes or the neck. He didn’t die of strangulation.’ She lifted up the flap again to expose the muscles of the neck, and the open area where she had transected the trachea and oesophagus, peeling them away from the backbones and down into the chest. ‘The hyoid bone, just above the Adam’s apple, is broken, and the neck dislocated between the second and third cervical vertebrae, as you can see, cleanly severing the spinal cord.’
She turned the head each way to show them the deep red-purple abrasions where the rope had burned his neck, high up under the jaw bone. ‘It’s all very unusual in a suicide.’
‘Why?’ Li asked.
‘Most suicidal hangings don’t involve such a drop, so the neck isn’t usually broken. Effectively they are strangled by the rope, and there would be evidence of pinpoint haemorrhages where tiny blood vessels had burst around the face, eyes, neck. Petechial haemorrhaging. As you saw, there is none.’
She nodded to one of her assistants and got him to turn the body over. She said, ‘We know that he was alive when he made the drop, because the abrasions made by the rope on his neck are red and bloody. There is no doubt that death was caused by a dislocation of the vertebrae of the neck severing the spinal cord. A broken neck to you.’
‘So…you think he kill himself?’ Sun ventured in English.
Margaret pursed her lips behind her mask. ‘Not a chance.’
Li looked at her. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘The amount of alcohol in his stomach,’ she said. ‘Can’t you smell it?’ Li found it hard to pick out any one odour from the melange of faeces, blood and decaying meat that perfumed the air. ‘I nearly sent the boys out for some soda so we could have a party.’
‘Half bottle brandy,’ Sun said.
‘Oh, much more than that,’ Margaret said brightly. ‘I nearly had to ask for bread and milk to be brought in. There was so much alcohol in the air I thought I was getting drunk. Not a good idea in my condition.’
‘But he didn’t drink,’ Li said. ‘His team-mates were quite definite about that.’
‘Well, then, I’m surprised it wasn’t the alcohol that killed him. From the smell alone, I’d say we were looking at something around zero-point-four percent. Enough to seriously disable, or even kill, the untrained drinker. Maybe somebody encouraged him to drink the first few. Perhaps with a gun at his head. And if he wasn’t used to alcohol, then it probably wasn’t long before they were able to pour it down his throat.’
‘How do you know he didn’t drink it himself?’ Li persisted.
‘Well, maybe he did.’ Margaret removed her mask and goggles, and Li saw the perspiration beaded across her brow. ‘But with that much alcohol coursing through his veins, he wouldn’t have been able to stand up, let alone climb ten meters to the top ramp of a diving pool, tie one end of the rope around the rail, the other around his neck and then jump off. Someone got him very drunk, took him up there, placed the noose around his neck and pushed him over.’
They heard the hum of the air-conditioning in the silence that followed, and the guys with the basketball were still pounding the court outside.
Eventually, Li said stupidly, ‘So somebody killed him.’
She said trenchantly, ‘When you push someone off a thirty-foot ramp with a rope around their neck, Li Yan, they usually call it murder.’
She returned her attention immediately to the body and asked, ‘Has the question of drug-taking arisen?’
Li frowned. ‘Why? Was he taking drugs?’
‘I have no idea. I’ve sent several samples down to toxicology and asked for priority analysis.’
‘You think he was, then?’
She shrugged non-committally and ran her fingers across the tops of his shoulder and upper back. The whole area was covered with acne spots and scars. ‘Acne is quite a common side-effect of steroids. On the other hand boys of his age can suffer like this.’
‘Toxicology should tell us, though?’
She peeled off her latex gloves. ‘Actually, probably not. He was due to swim in competition today, right?’ Li nodded. ‘So there would be a high risk of testing. If he was taking steroids he’d have stopped long enough ago that it wouldn’t show up.’ She shrugged again. ‘So who the hell knows?’
Outside, the basketball players were taking a cigarette break, steam rising from them with the smoke as they stood around chatting idly, one of them squatting on the ball. It put Sun in the mood, and he lit up, too, as Li dialled Section One on his cellphone. He got put through to the detectives’ room.