Good Girl, Bad Girl(21)

“You’re not police,” he says, stating the obvious.

“I’m assisting in a murder investigation.”

The manager eyes me suspiciously, as though my true mission is to steal body parts. A call is made. Permission granted. I sign the visitor’s book and look into the camera, letting my picture be captured, laminated, and hung around my neck.

The morgue is on the fourth floor of the Queen’s Medical Centre, which has always seemed odd to me because I feel like it belongs in the basement, closer to where we all finish. Dust to dust and all that.

A trainee pathologist in green scrubs collects me from the reception area and leads me down a long corridor past postmortem suites with stainless steel operating slabs and banks of halogen lights angled from above.

“You’re late,” says Ness, peeling off his gloves and tossing them into a hazardous waste bin. His dark hands are preternaturally pale from the talc that lingers on his fingers. He raises his arms and an assistant unties his stained scrubs and takes the protective glasses from his forehead.

Jodie’s body is lying on the slab with cross-stitches running from her torso to her pubic bone, showing where her organs were removed, weighed, and examined. The stitches are haphazard because Jodie has no need of a pretty scar. Under the bright lights, the whiteness of her flesh makes her look like a marble statue with a tangle of blue veins lying just beneath the surface of her skin. Small for her age with narrow hips and muscled legs from skating, her arms are scored by scratches and grazes and her eye sockets look like pools of purple dye.

Ness reaches up and switches off the microphone above his head and turns away, grimacing in pain when he puts weight on his right leg.

“Everything OK?”

“Gout,” he mutters, as if no other explanation were needed. “My doctor wants me to give up smoking, drinking, and eating rich foods. I think he’s in cahoots with my wife. Maybe they’re sleeping together.”

“If she wanted you dead she wouldn’t care so much.”

“True.”

Another assistant approaches with a clipboard, needing a signature. Ness signs with a flourish. “Tell the lab I want those bloods done by the morning.”

“What did you find?” I ask.

“More questions than answers.”

He moves around the bench and picks up a white sheet, which he draws over Jodie’s body, leaving only her face exposed. Tucking the sheet beneath her chin, he strokes her cheek like a father saying good-bye to his daughter.

Finally, he moves away, as though not wanting to speak in front of her.

“The semen in her hair will give us a DNA signature. She had nothing internally, but a small trace on her right thigh, along with evidence of a lubricant, which suggests a condom was used. There was no evidence of vaginal tearing or bruising, so the intercourse may have been consensual—at least at first.”

“Why have sex with her and then ejaculate in her hair?”

“That’s your area not mine,” says Ness, drinking from a bottle of water, not letting the plastic touch his lips. He wipes his mouth. “Jodie had dirt under her fingernails, but no skin cells or obvious defense injuries. The scratches came from brambles and branches.”

“You mentioned a blow to the head.”

“Some sort of blunt force trauma, which caused a hairline fracture of the parietal bone but no internal bleeding.” Ness indicates the back of his skull. “She might not have seen it coming. Most likely it knocked her unconscious or disorientated her. She had water in her lungs and pondweed in her hair, which suggests she either fell or was pushed from the footbridge.”

He tosses the empty water bottle in a bin. It rattles around the edge before it drops.

“Jodie didn’t remove her own clothing. Her jeans were pulled down while she was lying on her back. She didn’t get up again.”

“How did she die?” I ask.

“That’s a good question,” says Ness, in no hurry to answer it. He walks to a nearby bench and begins swapping his shoes. “Have you ever heard of dry drowning?”

“No.”

“When we inhale water into our lungs, we cut off oxygen to the body, which begins to shut down. Once we take a lungful of air, we cough up the water and usually begin breathing normally again. Everything is fine . . . except for when it’s not.”

Ness can see my confusion.

“There is a condition called secondary or delayed drowning. With young children it can happen in a matter of seconds, but the process typically takes longer in adults—hours or days. It tends to affect people who have damaged lungs or pulmonary illnesses. Jodie Sheehan suffered a bout of pneumonia eight months ago and was hospitalized.”

“You’re saying she drowned on dry land.”

“Possibly. Theoretically. I think she fell or was thrown from the footbridge. Maybe the cold water brought her round. She crawled out but was struggling to breathe because her diaphragm couldn’t create the necessary respiratory movements. This made her sluggish. Slow. Disorientated.”

“An easy target.”

“Just so.”

Ness slides his arms through the sleeves of his coat. “I can’t tell you the exact cause of death, but the temperature on Monday night fell to below freezing. Jodie was cold and wet and barely conscious. She was always going to die unless someone found her.”