"I'm fine. Mint?"
"No thanks." She chewed her thumbnail, looked towards the dissecting room, and back at him. "Funny. I suppose if it was me I might be just a wee bit jealous."
"Jealous?"
"Rory's been found. He's dead, but at least he was found Mum and Dad can start grieving now." She rested her hand affectionately on his arm. "And where does that leave ye, ye poor wee soul?"
Caffery didn't answer. He didn't dare speak or even reach into his pocket for cigarette papers in case his hands were shaking. He turned for the door to the autopsy suite. "I uh I think we've got a time of death. Just guessing from the rigor."
"And?"
"Uh look, let's go back inside, shall we?"
Back in the dissecting room Krishnamurthi had moved on. He had taken nail cuttings, putting the scissors he used into the exhibits bag with the last cuttings and passing them all to the exhibits officer. He had removed the packing tape from Rory's face. DS Fiona Quinn was hopefuclass="underline" in evidence bags on a separate gurney were five white fibres Krishnamurthi had removed from the ligature furrows on Rory's wrists with a strip of low-tack tape. She could run them through mass spectrometry and gas chromatography to find chemical composition and colour hopefully match them to a suspect's clothing. Now Krishnamurthi was carefully breaking the rigor mortis in Rory's upper body and gently straightening him out on the table.
Caffery and Souness stood against the wall, Caffery sucking mints, Souness jiggling her finger in her ear as if she was embarrassed to be watching this.
Rory measured 127 centimetres from his left heel to his crown. He weighed 26.23 kilos. A Tanner scale reading would mark him down as slightly bigger than an average eight-year-old. A bloody paper towel with pale blue flowers around the edge had been scrunched against his shoulder and it clung there, pressed under his back when he was straightened.
Krishnamurthi, the photographer and the morticians moved around the table in a complex, calm ritual, each anticipating without word or signal when it was time to step in. Caffery and Souness watched in silence they had the same two questions in their minds: was the paper towel hiding the source of the blood in the kitchen? And: had Rory Peach been sexually assaulted?
"I'm looking at an averagely nourished body of a child," Krishnamurthi said softly, into the headset. His voice echoed in the scrubbed-down room. "The face shows marked turgor, and what appears to be multiple aspects of Hippocratic facies, the occular orbits are prominent, while the globes are sunken. Cheekbones and mandibles prominent. Mouth and nose appear…" he bent in and squinted at the child's face '… dry. Crusted. Skin is tight to palpation so flag histology to look for hyperkalemia and I want sodium counts, anti-diuretic hormone levels and plasma volume."
"Harsha?"
Krishnamurthi looked up at Souness. "Yes, yes. When the micros copies are back I'll tell you more." Krishnamurthi had a reputation for denying the police the immediate answers they wanted. "And when I've looked at the organ capsules."
"What are you expecting?"
"Sticky, tacky capsules, maybe bleeding in the intestinal tract."
"Meaning?"
"I'll tell you when I've had a look." He narrowed his eyes at her, making a disapproving clicking noise in his throat. "OK?"
"Fair enough." Souness held up her hands. The last thing they needed was to alienate him. "That's fair enough."
"Right." Krishnamurthi bent nearer to look at Rory's throat. "There is a poorly defined mark overlying the larynx indicating some sort of uh -occlusion of the carotid and jugular, some sort of ligature strangulation, but no petechiae in the eyes. Some scratch marks and bruising to the neck." He looked up at Souness. "But it's not the cause of death."
"Really?"
"Really."
Yes, really, Danni. Caffery looked at his shoes. That's not how Rory died. I think I already know how he died.
"I'd like later," Krishnamurthi continued, 'to get some alternative light sources on these marks, photograph the area and see if we can see anything else. Right." He stepped back and allowed the mortician to turn Rory's body expertly, efficiently, not looking at the child's face. The dissecting room was absolutely silent. Lying on his face the little lumps of Rory's spine protruded through the thin skin; the paper towel stayed stuck in place. Krishnamurthi didn't look at anyone as he peeled it away, dropping it in an evidence bag. He peered down at the wound on Rory's shoulder and after a breathless pause he stepped back and looked up.
"Yes," he said to the assembled team. "Yes. Someone have a word with the coroner. Need to have a dentist look at this."
Out in the high blue afternoon furnace Josh was in the paddling-pool in his Darth Maul trunks, his back to the woods, intense concentration on his face as he plunged Thunderbird Four to the bottom of the pool and let it bob back up to the surface. Sunlight flashed on the water, and over the fence in the park gnats hummed in the shade of the Spanish chestnuts.
Hal stood on the veranda with a cold bottle of Coke, staring at those trees. He could see flashes of white and blue out there where a police team had congregated on a small area fluttering crime-scene tape had appeared, draped around bushes. They must have found something. He sipped his Coke thoughtfully -he had been so happy to be out of central Brixton, out of the cramped flat above an off-licence on the Front Line, but now Brixton's problems seemed to be chasing them up the hill.
The Front Line. At one time they had been proud of the cachet of the address, and life for them was Hoy Hoy cockroach traps under the sink, tuna and Scotch bonnet sandwiches in the Phoenix cafe, Hal forever tracking down and arguing revisionism with Darcus Howe. Life on the Front Line. He liked that him and Ben frontiersmen, living down with the real people. They'd been there for the '95 Wayne Douglas riots he had stood in the street, holding his door keys in one hand, library books in the other, and watched the Dogstar go up in flames. Whoomp! Up into the sky. And everyone looked out of their doors and windows to see burning, curling, crisp packets floating down from the clouds.
But with Josh it all changed. Responsibility kicked at them. The schizophrenics screaming, the muggings, the rich young clubgoers and the sinister followers of Louis Farrakhan impossibly handsome black men in razor-sharp suits, standing on street corners with hands folded piously, terrifying plans darting behind their eyes suddenly none of it was glamorous, it wasn't funny. One day Josh came screaming through the room with Buzz Lightyear: Buzz en garde with his scorching new weapon. A syringe, the words Single Use Only For U 100 Insulin printed on it. After that Hal decided to work himself lame to get his family out of central Brixton. But the life belt when it came, was from Benedicte's family: an inheritance from her aunt in Norway had put them in this new house, just far enough out of the centre to keep them safe. There was lighting and security fencing, there was a bus ride separating them from the Fridge and life was, well, really rather cushiony.
"Hal!" From a window above him Benedicte was calling. He put the Coke bottle on the veranda. "Josh stay there, OK?" He went inside, climbing the stairs two at a time. She was in the bedroom, standing at the foot of the bed.
"You OK?"
"Yeah." She was wearing a T-shirt, pink knickers and sheepskin slippers, as if she'd been in the middle of changing. One side of her hair was set in rollers, the other loose. "I'm OK, but look look at the bed."
Hal could see that the whole length of her side of the bed was wet. As if Smurf had tottered up and down the bed peeing as she went. "Christ."
"Oh, God." Ben rubbed her face. "I'm sorry I yelled. I suppose it's not Smurf's fault. She's old." She sighed and began to remove the saturated duvet cover. "She gets on to the bed and she can't always get down quickly enough when she needs to."