The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(16)

Ryan reached for one of the lab coats hanging on a peg beside the door and scribbled their names in the log book.

“Ryan, Phillips?”

Pinter covered the room at speed, his lanky frame calling to mind visions of a giraffe ambling over the plains of Africa.

He extended a hand in greeting and, after a moment’s inspection, Ryan took it.

“Jeff,” he said. “Thanks for getting around to this so quickly.”

Pinter waved it away.

“It’s the least I could do,” he said. “Sharon was a good police officer. I’d known her for years, so I won’t pretend it was an easy task. Terrible, what happened to her. Just terrible.”

Ryan nodded. He would have liked to assign her post-mortem to somebody unconnected to the department, but over the course of her twenty-year career, Cooper had worked with every decent pathologist within a three-hundred-mile radius. That precluded the possibility of finding someone without a measure of personal bias, but he had to trust that Pinter could set his emotions aside and focus on the facts.

“What can you tell us?”

Pinter sucked in a long breath and then puffed it out again in the slightly pompous manner they had come to expect.

“Best if I show you, really.”

Phillips made a show of straightening the lab coat that had been designed for a much taller, slimmer man than himself.

“No need for that, Jeff. You could just give us a summary—”

Ryan rolled his eyes inwardly. It was no secret that Phillips couldn’t stand the sight of a cadaver.

“We need to see whether the MO is the same,” he said decisively.

Pinter nodded and led the way through the main workspace to a smaller corridor with a series of anterooms leading off it. The lemony stench of chemicals used to pickle the bodies accompanied the three men and, beneath it, a subtle scent of decay that permeated their clothes and clung inside their nostrils.

“This way.”

Pinter unlocked the door to one of the examination rooms and turned on the main light. A life spent mainly indoors had reduced Pinter’s skin to a chalky pallor that was accentuated by the unflattering fluorescent lighting, giving the unfortunate impression he was one of the dead he cared for.

“Do you want to view the images on the computer first? That might be easier.”

Phillips cast a wary eye over the shrunken, silent figure lying in state atop a central gurney and opened his mouth to agree.

“We can handle it,” Ryan said, and nodded towards the gurney. “We need to understand what happened to her, Jeff.”

Pinter nodded gravely.

“Are you ready?”

They could never be ready, but Ryan and Phillips steeled themselves as best they could before the pathologist whipped away the papery shroud.

Anger mingled with grief all over again. Somewhere over his shoulder, he heard Phillips’ sharp intake of breath.

“When did she die?” Ryan asked.

“My initial estimate as to post-mortem interval when I attended the scene was no more than five to seven hours and I’ll stand by that,” Pinter said. “Taking into account her core temperature and other environmental factors, it’s highly unlikely she’d been dead any longer.”

“What about defensive injuries?” Phillips asked, keeping his eyes fixed to the clock on the far wall.

“None whatsoever,” Pinter replied. “And I suspect this is the reason why.”

He produced a retractable pointer and indicated an ugly bruise on the skin of Sharon’s neck. In its centre was a puncture mark.

Both detectives leaned forward to get a better look.

“Pressure syringe?” Ryan looked up for confirmation and Pinter gave a short nod.

“Aye, that’d do it,” Phillips said, clearing his throat loudly. “Same bloke as before, then?”

“It’s looking a lot like it,” Pinter replied.

“Not exactly the same,” Ryan argued. “In the case of Isobel Harris, there were multiple puncture marks found on her body, not just one.”

“Maybe he ran out of time,” Phillips suggested.

“It’s possible,” Ryan agreed. “Or maybe she served a different purpose, a different kind of motivation.”

“I’ll leave the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ to you,” Pinter told them. “But I can tell you Sharon was blood type A positive and she enjoyed a bowl of porridge for breakfast after a liquid diet on Saturday night. Bruising and blood loss would indicate she was alive while the less serious injuries were incurred—removal of the ears and so forth—but once the major arteries in her legs and arms were severed, she would have died very quickly. The official cause of death is major cardiac arrest.”

They thought back to the river of blood they’d seen in Sharon’s bedroom.

“He didn’t stop then,” Pinter continued. “The hands and feet were removed post mortem, as was the upper part of her sternum and, of course, her head.”

This last observation was delivered with a degree of clinical detachment that took their breath away.

“He would have needed the right tools,” Ryan murmured. “What kind of implement would you say?”

“Undoubtedly, he used a series of different knives and a small saw. It’s the only way to get through the bone, you see.”