Frozen Grave (Willis/Carter #3)(14)

‘Who are you looking after it for?’

‘What?’ He looked like he didn’t want to say.

‘Is it Mahmet?’

‘He’s coming to get it in a couple of days,’ said the grandfather.

‘If we need to come in, Mr Balik, we need that dog under control and I don’t believe it is.’

‘Yes. It’s a good dog. It just doesn’t like strangers.’

‘Tell Mahmet we need to speak to him, Mr Balik. Tell him we will come back with a dog handler and we will have this dog destroyed if it’s found to be a dangerous type, which I’m pretty sure is the case. Are you listening, Mr Balik?’

‘Yes. Yes.’ He was struggling to keep the dog back as he closed the door.

Carter talked through the closed door.

‘You need to get help with that dog, Mr Balik.

‘Poor old fella,’ Carter said as they walked away back down the corridor. ‘We’ll start knocking on doors at the other end of the corridor. Mahmet is obviously still around if he’s left his monster of a dog here with his granddad. He can’t have gone far.’





Chapter 7


Dr Kahn had finished cataloguing Olivia Grantham’s external injuries on the body diagram by the time Carter and Willis got through the traffic and were suited up for the post-mortem.

Kahn greeted them, apologized for having to start without them, then nodded to his assistant, Mark, that he was ready for him to make the first incision. Kahn was a patient man and a lot slower than Dr Harding. He did not spend his time irritably tapping his pen or scalpel whilst waiting for Mark to get a move on. Willis and Carter hovered nearby. Willis was looking over Mark’s shoulder, watching what he was doing, out of interest. Kahn had the kind of demeanour where nothing bothered him. He was semi-retired now and looked forward to being called in to help when needed; it got him out from under his wife’s feet, so everyone was happy.

Mark picked up a scalpel from the tray and leant across the body as he started at the left-inside shoulder and guided the knife with just the right amount of pressure as he cut through the skin and fat. He made another incision from the right shoulder, down to meet his first at the sternum, then he applied more pressure to cut in a straight line down to the pubic bone. He ran the knife over the cut again, in a couple of places where the layer of fat was thicker, and then opened the skin, cutting as he went, as if he were filleting a fish, exposing her breastplate and a mass of wobbly intestines. He stopped with the rib shears in his hand and pulled out an implant from inside the breast.

‘A 34 Double D, I would say – silicone; bad choice. Saline’s so much more natural.’ He turned it over in his hands like a dead jellyfish.

Dr Kahn came forward to clamp off the lower intestine and remove it in one block. He examined the cavity as he cut out her spleen, removed the membrane and held it in his hand.

‘Damaged beyong repair.’ He passed judgement on it before cutting out her liver and making cuts at one-centimetre intervals along it. ‘Bruising – otherwise a healthy-looking liver. But there is bleeding in the peritoneal cavity. She has taken quite a beating.’

Mark snapped through each rib with the shears and lifted out the breastplate whole.

‘Any sign of clots?’ asked Kahn as he came forward to look at the heart and lungs. Mark shook his head. ‘Mind if I take a look?’

Mark loved this side of working with Kahn. He was treated with respect – his opinion mattered a lot more than it did with Harding. But Harding was a genius and if Mark died under suspicious curcumstances, he’d want Harding to find out how and why.

Kahn waited until Mark had finished cutting open Olivia Grantham’s neck and then he watched him pick up the electric saw and carfully cut into the incision around her skull. Kahn opened it with a twist of a small chisel, used like a key to pop out the skull section, and then he cut through the thick white membrane and paused as he leant over to study the brain at eye level.

‘We have already photographed the injury to her skull from the outside.’ He handed the piece of skull to Mark, who began stripping out the membrane. ‘But now we will get a better look at it.’ He was still squatting in front of the exposed brain. He wiped it with his hand.

‘I see damage here that corresponds with the position of the fracture-skull injury. This could have been enough to kill her – we will see when we get the brain out.’

Kahn took a pair of curved scissors from the tray and reached inside, to cut through the optic nerves and prise the brain out of its shell, cutting through the brain stem.

Willis was studying the skull portion with Mark.

‘It’s a crack of four centimetres straight and then a right-angled crush injury at the end of that,’ she said as she took a photograph. Mark drew it on the diagram. Whilst he was doing that, Willis was sketching the dimensions of the wound.

‘It looks like a square-shaped instrument. It’s a tool, a hammer maybe.’

‘Yeah – not sure . . .’ She was looking at her drawing. ‘It’s left a rim shape, a space in the middle where there is no bruising.’

‘Yes –’ He beamed at Willis – ‘you’re right.’

Kahn coughed. They turned to see him holding the brain in both his hands. ‘Mark . . . please take this from me.’