‘They’re much more obvious now, of course,’ he observed. ‘But that’s to be expected after all this time. I did my examination a week ago.’
He was correct, thought Richard, as bruises could ‘come out’, as his grandmother used to say, and appear more prominent after a day or two.
Richard got Foster to turn the body on its side, holding the upper arm so that the pathologist could look at the back, where there were more irregular scratches, some in long tracks.
‘Where she was recovered was a very rocky place,’ offered O’Malley, still rather defensively. ‘Deep gullies with the tide surging up and down. The rocks are sharp there and those limpets and barnacles make it even worse.’
‘Some bruises as well,’ Richard pointed out. He recalled that O’Malley had not listed the injuries in any detail in his brief report to the coroner, but that was not unusual in a non-forensic autopsy in which there was no suspicion of foul play. O’Malley peered again at some small areas of discoloration on the arms, neck and face, which varied from blue and purple through to pale green and yellow.
‘Banging about on those damned rocks, no doubt!’ he declared. ‘I’ve seen it too often around this coast, it can be a very dangerous place.’
Richard made no reply, he was keeping all his options open. He produced a few instruments from his capacious bag and began reopening the neat stitching made by Foster at the first post-mortem. Carefully, he went through all the organs again, O’Malley being keen to point out the water-logging of the lungs which was still very apparent. Pryor took some small tissue samples from various organs into pots of formalin which he always carried in his bag, then turned his attention to the head. PC Mort and the CID man watched impassively as he felt all over the scalp with his fingers and parted the damp hair to look at the skin beneath.
‘I didn’t think it worth disturbing the poor lady more than necessary,’ said O’Malley, as the other doctor took a scalpel and began shaving the auburn hair from several small patches near the back point of the head. Again, Pryor recognized that many pathologists – and other doctors who still did coroner’s work – frequently omitted to open the skull and examine the brain in cases where another cause of death seemed glaringly obvious.
‘Some more bruising here,’ he commented, standing back so that O’Malley could lean in and look at a couple of bluish stains under the scalp, each about the size of a two-shilling piece.
The Irishman grunted. ‘They’re rough old places, those rock gullies. Perhaps you ought to have a trip out there to have a look at them.’
Richard remembered them well enough from his student trips to Gower – including one where he and a nurse from Cardiff Royal Infirmary spent a cosy afternoon lying in the grass above one of those gullies.
He stood back for a few minutes while Foster incised the scalp and removed the skullcap with a hand saw, though not making such a neat job of it as Solly Evans at Chepstow.
Richard spent a few minutes in making detailed notes on a clipboard, recording the position and size of each mark on a printed outline of a body, back and front, using a celluloid ruler to measure the exact dimensions of the injuries. Then he looked carefully at the inside of the scalp, taking more tissue samples, and then at the skull itself, before removing the brain and examining that on the draining board of the sink.
Finally, he managed with some difficulty to get a clean blood sample from one of the leg veins and some urine from the bladder, which O’Malley had not opened.
‘That for analysis, Doctor?’ asked Lewis Lewis, the detective inspector, the first time he had spoken since they began.
Pryor nodded. ‘I’d better fill in some exhibits labels and sign them, just in case,’ he murmured and fished in his case for some buff luggage labels. ‘I’ll check for alcohol and anything else relevant,’ he said. ‘Though in drowning, the dilution of the blood by absorbed water spoils any accuracy. Still, the urine should be OK.’
O’Malley grasped at his words thankfully.
‘So you agree with me that she drowned, Doctor Pryor?’
‘I do indeed, no doubt about it,’ he replied, thinking that this was safe ground, whatever else might materialize. After settling the tip with Foster – he reckoned the coroner’s officer had already had his pound of flesh from O’Malley – he said goodbye to them all and went out to where Jimmy was sitting in the car, reading the Daily Mirror.
‘All set, Doctor?’ enquired his driver.
‘I’m starving, did you see a café on your travels?’ Dissecting bodies had never yet put him off his food and they walked around to Wind Street where Jimmy had noticed a ‘Bracchi’ establishment, the South Walian nickname for an Italian café. He had a ham omelette and treated his driver to bacon, beans and egg, all with chips, a plate of bread and butter and a pot of tea.
‘Funny old town, this,’ observed Jimmy. ‘Can’t decide whether it’s ancient or modern!’
From what he’d seen of the place, Richard knew what he meant – the remains of a Norman castle and the oldest pub in Wales just up the street, but with ugly modern buildings springing up amongst the wide acres of bomb damage that had completely destroyed the town centre.
‘It’s called progress, Jimmy,’ he sighed. ‘And we may be seeing quite a bit more of Swansea and district before long.’
At a loose end, now that her current batch of analyses was finished, Sian wandered over to Angela’s bench and stood watching what the biologist was doing.
‘That’s this diatom test, is it?’ she asked, always eager to learn something new.
‘Pull up a stool,’ invited Angela. ‘You’d better learn how to do this, in case I’m away when Richard needs one urgently.’
The technician watched as the older woman took a conical-bottomed test tube from a rack, containing a clear yellow liquid with a button of brown deposit in the tip. She sucked off most of the upper fluid with a teat-ended pipette, discarded it and then tapped the tube with a fingernail to mix the deposit into what was left.
‘I don’t really understand the principles of this test,’ confessed Sian. ‘How can it help diagnose drowning?’
Angela carefully sucked up a single drop of the fluid with another pipette and placed it in the centre of a glass microscope slide, covering it with a wafer-thin glass cover-slip.
‘It’s still not accepted by everyone, but I think it’s reliable if done carefully,’ she said. ‘When someone drowns in water containing these microscopic algae called diatoms, it goes down their windpipe and into the lungs, taking the diatoms with it.’
‘So if they’re dead, there’s no breathing, so the diatoms can’t be found in the lungs!’
Angela laughed. ‘I wish it was that easy! No, even if you throw a corpse into the river, the water still percolates down into the lungs. So finding diatoms in lungs doesn’t mean anything.’
‘So what’s the point of looking?’ demanded Sian, pointing to the tube, which had a label saying ‘Lung’.
‘To check that the water actually contains diatoms, though we always look at a water sample as well. If it doesn’t, there’s no point in looking further. Some waters don’t, though even tap water often contains a few, especially if the pipe hasn’t been used for a time.’
She pointed at the test-tube rack, where there were three other tubes. Sian looked at them and read the names written in grease-pencil… marrow, liver, kidney.
‘Are these what you’ve been boiling up in the fume cupboard?’ she asked.
‘Yes, you have to dissolve little samples of internal organs taken at the post-mortem in nitric acid, which gets rid of all the organic material and leaves the diatoms.’
‘Why don’t they vanish as well, then?’ demanded the knowledge-hungry technician.
‘Because they’ve got a shell of silica, which resists the acid. Now, if the victim drowns, then these tiny things get into the lungs and some penetrate the lining, they’re so small. The heart is still beating, so they get carried off in the blood stream and get filtered out in the bone marrow, liver, spleen, and kidneys.’