Cold Revenge (Willis/Carter #6)(5)
‘Good morning, DCI Carter, DS Willis,’ Harding said. Mark nodded and smiled their way. ‘You have brought me an interesting cadaver this morning,’ she continued with a wry smile. ‘There is some history to Millie Stephens?’
‘We try to keep your work interesting.’ Carter smiled.
‘Pity she ended up here, but pretty inevitable considering where she came from,’ Harding replied.
Mark handed the diagram of Millie’s body, with all her injuries noted on it, across to Harding. ‘The injuries caused by a weapon and pre-mortem are highlighted,’ he said. Carter came to stand next to Harding and look at the diagram. Willis glanced at it and then went around to the other side where Mark was taking measurements from a wound on Millie’s leg.
‘We have the GP’s notes here for Millie,’ said Harding. ‘She is thirty-three. She’s a registered heroin user. There are several injection sites that look to have ulcerated.’ She looked up as she said that, and Mark confirmed it with a nod, as he finished measuring one that had been cleaned out by the bottom-feeders in the river and now was three inches in length and down to the bone.
‘How long has she been dead, Doctor?’ Carter asked.
‘Between two and three weeks.’
‘These look like defensive wounds?’ asked Willis, directing her question at Harding, as she bent to get an eye-level look at the victim’s forearms. ‘It was impossible to tell when she was straight from the river, but you can see now that the cuts are clean. She fought back hard.’
‘Yes, the same short-bladed knife was used to cut her on several places on her body,’ answered Harding, ‘including her arms, as well as at least five knife wounds into the side of the neck, from back to front, close proximity to one another, which is why they opened up the side of her neck. They cut through the trachea and that’s likely to be the cause of death.’
‘Any thoughts about the type of weapon, the dimensions?’ Willis asked Mark.
‘Yes, two point two inches blade length,’ he answered. ‘It has a hilt on the underside of the knife, and three holes in the blade that left a pattern in some of the wounds. We see this type many times, it’s available in many retailers. There is the impression of the hilt; it’s left bruising below two of the deeper stab wounds.’
‘We’ll take a cast from where it inserted into her neck here,’ said Harding, ‘where it struck the vertebrae. This wasn’t the only weapon used on her. There are injuries at the back of the skull, but we’ll know more about those when we’ve removed the scalp.’
‘Is there evidence of a sexual motive?’ asked Carter.
‘No evidence of tearing of the tissue or bruising,’ answered Harding.
After a nod from the doctor that she was ready for him to proceed, Mark made a Y incision from each shoulder to the sternum and then, with gentle precise cuts, down to the pubis. He made small cuts through the tiny layer of fat on the abdomen. The smell was pushing Carter a few steps back.
‘Millie here missed her guru Douglas coming out of prison. What’s he been like inside?’ Mark asked, pausing as he began cutting out the blocks of organs.
‘He’s been a model prisoner, as you would expect,’ said Willis. ‘He’s also used the time to study everything that was offered to him. When he got transferred to Wandsworth, which is now a training prison, he became a chef.’
‘The tattoos on her wrists must have meant something to her, she chose not to have them removed,’ Harding said, as she looked again at Millie’s arms. ‘A lot was made of these tattoos at the time.’
‘Nicola Stone did the tattooing, apparently,’ answered Willis, who had been binge-reading about the case since they found Millie. ‘Douglas was represented by the central large link, his disciples by the red links either side, and every new disciple was marked by a new link. They were chained together in secrecy, all seven of them.’
‘And ignite the fire?’ Harding looked at the other wrist. ‘Carter, were you around at the time?’ She turned to him.
‘I was a rookie, I wasn’t assigned to the case. Also, this was Thames Valley Police, not the MET, although it spread to other forces, all connecting Douglas up to disappearances of adults connected to the farms he visited. All of them were in their teens and early twenties. They were all vulnerable in some way.’
‘I read about it,’ said Mark. ‘Douglas had this weird mantra he lived by, it was all about igniting the inner fire in someone, opening their eyes to the pleasure in pain, and then he had another line which went something like: There is no life more exciting than one close to death. Now he’s a chef . . . very strange.’
‘He was a student of the Marquis de Sade,’ said Harding.
‘No idea who that is,’ said Carter, shaking his head.
‘Really?’ Jo Harding looked at him curiously. ‘Never heard of S and M? Course you have. I can’t imagine you missing out on anything, Chief Inspector. The Marquis de Sade popularised it, wrote about it in the eighteenth century, the tapping into pain for pleasure. He was the master of it. Douglas would have seemed like an amateur next to him.’ Harding examined the womb on a separate dissection tray. ‘No actual births but she has evidence of having been pregnant.’ She looked at Mark, who nodded his agreement as he studied the inside of her pelvic cavity and cut away samples of tissue. He took blood samples, bagged and labelled them.