A Carol for the Dead, page 7
‘Malcolm, have you been back here since we left?’
‘No.’
‘Can you smell … perfume?’
He sniffed the air. ‘No.’ Then he laughed. ‘We’re not dealing with a preserved saint here, you know.’ He rolled up the envelope, stuffed it into a pocket of his duffel coat and pulled a pair of surgical gloves from a blue cardboard box in the sink at the end of the table.
I decided, for now, to forget about who might have been in the morgue and why. There were other things to think about. News of the extent of the tanning process had raised my hopes for Mona’s antiquity by another notch. And there was this latest find. ‘Speaking of leather …’ I said, holding up the plastic bag.
Sherry’s face lit up. ‘From the peat in the shed?’
‘Yes. Want to see if it fits?’ I handed him the bag.
Sherry opened it and took the thong out carefully, holding it between finger and thumb and letting it dangle so we could see how long it was. It unwound a little but remained in a curve. I could see that the ends were stretched and twisted, as if they had snapped under pressure. Sherry straightened it out; it was about fifty centimetres long.
He drew back the sheet fully and placed the strip of leather into the groove in the side of Mona’s neck. It fit perfectly. ‘No doubt about it,’ he said.
Then he examined the ends of the ligature. ‘This wasn’t done by the digger; the break is old. It must have snapped when she was being strangled.’ He handed the thong back to me. ‘But I would have expected a noose to be longer.’
‘Maybe she was garrotted by winding this tight from behind?’
‘Hmmm … yes, with a stick, perhaps. That would explain the ends being twisted the way they are.’
‘She might even have been wearing it.’ I held it up to the light and twirled it slowly. ‘Although there are no awl-holes where it might have been sewn … no sign of it having been knotted, either.’
‘I guess a knot could easily have come undone with the amount of force being used. So you could be right. She may have been murdered with her own necklace.’
‘No way we’ll ever be sure, I suppose.’ I put it back in the sample bag. ‘You’re finished with Mona now, I take it.’
‘I have no reason to hold on to “Mona”, as you call her. And no justification to spend any more time or money on having her examined, though I will have her X-rayed for you.’
A tinny version of Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ began playing somewhere in the morgue. We looked at each other in some puzzlement. Then Sherry realised: ‘Damn,’ he said, ‘it’s my mobile.’ He pulled the rolled-up envelope out of his overcoat pocket and lifted the phone from beneath it. ‘Yes?’
As he listened to the caller, I smiled to myself. Was it by accident or design that Malcolm had music from The Exorcist as his ring-tone?
In my mind I began to itemise what we knew about Mona, but it quickly became a catalogue of things we didn’t know about her. We had no idea of how she had really looked; no remains of her last meal to analyse; no teeth to record her lifelong eating habits; no body decorations, clothes, jewellery or possessions of any kind – unless you included the leather garrotte. And I began to wonder just how much scientific scrutiny the National Museum would foot the bill for, if Muriel Blunden had her way. Carbon-dating? Possibly. A CT scan? Unlikely.
Sherry was speaking in hushed tones. ‘Can’t just now … have someone with me … have to finish … Well, all right – I’ll be there in five minutes.’ He pressed the End button and said, ‘Illaun, I have to go to the reception desk in the main building. I’ll only be a few minutes. Do you mind holding on here? We’ll go through the other post-mortem as soon as I return.’
‘No problem. I have a bit more sketching to do anyway.’
Sherry put the envelope and his phone in separate pockets and left the morgue. My phone read 18.10; I rang Keelan’s mobile and left a message to say it was time for them to go home, if they hadn’t done so already. I added that I would work on the EIA over the weekend and would call or e-mail if I needed to check anything with them. Staff from WET would by now be loading the bagged peat and other samples into a van – except for the leather thong, which I would leave in its bag with the body.
I walked around the autopsy table and selected an angle that provided me with a good view of Mona, taking in the ligature mark and the positioning of both her arms. The leathery flesh was already drying out and a patch on her shoulder had lightened in colour – an effect that made the pores highly visible, like puncture marks created by a tattooist’s needle. While drawing her face, I saw that her nose was perfectly preserved and dainty – something I hadn’t taken in before, with the shock of seeing her mutilated features. It somehow counterpointed the brutality that had been visited upon her: her delicate beauty still evident despite the efforts of her assailants.
It occurred to me that Sherry had not said whether there were any defence marks on her arms, which would indicate she had tried to protect herself. I examined first her outstretched arm, then the folded one, but could see nothing. Then I noticed properly, for the first time, that the hand over her breast was clenched into a fist. Taking her hand for the second time, I inspected it from every angle. She seemed to be holding something.
My heart racing, I squatted down to the level of the table and, raising her hand against the light, tried to squint through her bunched fingers. Not a sliver of light shone through.
I dug into a pocket of my jacket, found my penknife, opened it and gently inserted the blunt side of the blade between two of her fingers. It scraped against a solid surface.
Mona was indeed clutching something.
As I stood up again, I accidentally brushed against the second autopsy table behind me and swept the already lopsided sheet to the floor. Turning to lift the sheet back up onto the table, I was unable to avoid seeing what had been lying underneath it.
One day in class, Finian Shaw had posed the question: what single action distinguishes humans from all other creatures? Aware that he had phrased the question carefully, we tried our best to interpret what he meant by ‘action’ and answered ‘writing’ or ‘playing a musical instrument’, or even resorted to ‘making tools’. But not one student provided the answer he sought, nor had he expected that anyone would.
‘The answer is,’ he said, ‘we are the only creatures who bury our dead.’
I had smiled at that, not only because it was unexpected but because it reminded me that, as children, my brother Richard and I had practised ritual burial – not of people, of course; but, with great ceremony, we had interred numerous small animals in a flowerbed at the end of our garden. Our first burial was a bumblebee, laid on cotton-wool inside a matchbox. There were others of that ilk, a ladybird, a moth; then a newly hatched nestling, scrawny and pink with paper-thin purple eyelids. Eventually we graduated to a kitten, the runt of a litter, too weak to survive. I asked our mother to provide a coffin, which she did – a shoebox lined with white satin. The two of us walked in procession, me in front holding aloft the cardboard casket, both of us chanting some out-of-key hymn. We dug, knelt, prayed, buried, and set up a cross with ice-pop sticks.
Then our pet dog died of old age. Wookie was a black-and-white mongrel with fur like an acrylic toy’s. Dad wanted her disposed of by the vet, but with our experience as undertakers my brother and I insisted on burying her in the flowerbed. There was no box – it would have been too big and awkward; we laid her on her side on a newspaper and put her into a shallow grave.
Two weeks later, for some reason I can’t recall – maybe to see a real skeleton – I proposed that we exhume her with a spade. What we unearthed was not what I had expected to see. Wookie’s usually fluffy coat was glistening wet, plastered to her body. I thought she was sweating from the heat and explained this to Richard. Then, confirming my theory, I noticed she was panting. We had buried Wookie alive!
But some instinct must have told me not to touch her. I told Richard to stay there while I went for my father, wanting to be the first to tell the news.
‘Dad, dad, she’s alive – Wookie’s alive! Come quickly!’
When I returned, dragging my father by the hand, Richard was standing there with a stick. He had just poked it against Wookie’s belly. A heaving mass of maggots was teeming out of the cavity he had created. We children stood back in confusion as the stench hit us in the nostrils.
Dad quickly grabbed the spade and piled the soil back on top of the body. ‘Don’t ever do anything like that again,’ he said crossly. ‘Some things are not meant to be seen.’
Some things are not meant to be seen. In archaeology, I had chosen a career in which what is hidden is brought to the surface again, and every so often my father’s words have caused me to reflect on the appropriateness of bringing certain things to light. And this moment in the draughty morgue was one of those occasions.
Sherry had cut through the leathery casing and opened the creature’s abdomen from sternum to pelvis. The ribcage was splayed out in a double fan; adhering to its outer surfaces were thick, suety deposits coated in a leathery rind. Beside it on the table were what had once been the soft innards – a cheesy, brown-green mass of unrecognisable organs and tubing, which, like the rest of the body, had been converted to what I assumed was adipocere. So had the tiny brain: it had been removed and sat like a lump of putty in the upturned skullcap on the table.
The tannin-dyed, uptilted visage was impossible to reconcile with that of a human infant. Reddish, downy hair covered the forehead, surrounding the finger-length horn of skin and below it the slit from which Sherry had removed the transparent plug. Two eyes fused together occupied the socket, their irises black, the sclera stained a nicotine yellow. Where the mouth should have been there was merely a groove in the suety face; the chin was attached by a fleshy membrane to the chest, just above Sherry’s incision. Spreading out from the back of the skull and onto the shoulders was another scarf of skin anchoring the head to the torso.
I looked away, my eyes searching for something else to engage their attention for a moment or two. I glanced over at the other table, noting that various fittings were missing, including the taps and attachments that would have been used to hose down bodies, the slight tilt of the table facilitating the flow of fluids into the sink at the end, under which the waste pipes were now corroded and broken.
In the dusty sink beside me were the box of surgical gloves and a roll of Elastoplast. I busied myself putting on a pair of gloves. I didn’t think I’d be using them, but it helped to pass another few seconds before my gaze was reluctantly drawn back to the object further up the table.
Two stubs of arms, each with a bud of flesh at the tip, stuck out from its shoulders, and from the hips not two but four equally short legs sprouted at a variety of angles. All of these appendages must have been in a row when the body was curled up, but Sherry had spreadeagled the limbs and taped them to the table, revealing that the four legs were joined together below the exposed pubic bone in a confused ganglion of what I took to be female genitalia. It was as if someone had plundered various parts from wax anatomy models of infants and stuck them together with no knowledge of how they should be connected.
I knew I was looking at a severely deformed human baby.
I was struck by how well preserved it was, despite being a biological wreck. I had heard of the mummifying properties of adipocere – literally, ‘fat wax’ – but had never imagined it to be so effective. Nor had I anticipated the rancid smell wafting from the table, which made me turn away again just as Sherry came back into the morgue, a little out of breath.
‘Ah, Illaun – sorry about that … local coroner knew I was in Drogheda. A man’s body was just found in suspicious circumstances. I said I’d get there as soon as I could. I see your curiosity already got the better of you.’
‘Not really.’ I had my hand clamped over my nose. ‘I accidentally uncovered it.’
‘I should have warned you,’ he said. ‘It must have come as a shock.’
‘No, it’s OK. Just wasn’t expecting an odour, that’s all.’
Sherry approached the autopsy table. ‘Yes. It’s fascinating. Odourless in one case, smelling like bog butter in the other.’
‘Adipocere, you mean?’
‘I keep forgetting you’ve done some forensics.’ Sherry was being snobbish, but I didn’t mind. A year spent studying forensic archaeology after my PhD certainly didn’t qualify me as a pathologist.
‘Doesn’t mean I entirely understand the chemistry involved.’
‘No one does.’
Something from my student days came to mind. ‘Newborns are good candidates for it, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, because there are practically no bacteria in the intestines to start the process of decomposition.’
‘Why does it have an extra pair of legs?’
‘The second set are from a conjoined but undeveloped foetus. Sometimes called a parasitic twin.’
‘Like they had in freak shows and circuses.’
‘Yes. The odd one survives beyond infancy. In times past they mostly ended up in the specimen jars of teratologists, anatomists and collectors of curiosities who specialised in “prodigies of nature” – in a word, monsters. And maybe that’s where we’ll leave it for now.’ Sherry removed his surgical gloves and in the process knocked against the infant’s body, which trembled like the carcass of the face-hugger in Alien.
And that triggered the memory of where I had seen a creature like the one on the autopsy table. Fran and I had been on holiday in Tuscany two months earlier and had seen it in a museum in Florence, on a stone carving. At first sight it had looked like a crustacean, but in fact it was a depiction of twins, joined at the pelvis but with a head at each end, unlike the incomplete version born to Mona. Apparently it was a recording of an actual monstrous birth that had occurred near the city in 1317.
We were saying goodbye in the car park when it occurred to me to ask, ‘The man’s body – where was it found?’
‘Oh, I’m not absolutely sure. The Gardaí will bring me to it. Somewhere near Donore.’
‘Tubular Bells’ chimed again. Sherry lifted his phone.
‘Sherry here. What? … Say again … Are you sure?’ He listened while his caller confirmed something. Then he slowly lowered his phone from his ear and looked at me. ‘The dead man … it’s Frank Traynor. He’s been murdered. At Monashee.’
Chapter Eight
Three yellow-striped squad cars had lined up in single file down the gravelled causeway, where Traynor’s silver Mercedes was parked about halfway between the road and the river’s edge. Reflected headlights and the narrower beams of flashlights occasionally penetrated a mist that was rolling up from the river. Garda radio chatter crackled from the cars. Figures conversing in low voices came and went, flitting past the headlights.
I was behind Sherry as he strode past the Garda cars and briefly shone a flashlight into the Mercedes. The beam bounced off blood-smeared windows, but I saw enough of the sodden interior to know the upholstery was covered in blood too. Sherry walked to the front of the car and called a name into the hazy darkness.
A grim-faced man in a suit and tie emerged from the mist. Sherry looked at him inquisitively for a moment, then lost interest: he had been expecting someone else.
I recognised Sergeant O’Hagan and murmured a greeting; he grunted in reply. I sensed he didn’t remember me – my head was bare on this occasion – and I used the opportunity to fire a question at him as he passed. ‘Sergeant O’Hagan?’
O’Hagan paused and scrutinised my face.
‘Was there anyone in the car with Mr Traynor when he came here?’
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Well, was there, Sergeant?’ said Sherry, at my shoulder.
O’Hagan scowled. ‘We have an eyewitness report. Frank stopped for petrol in Donore on his way here between four-thirty and five. He was alone.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ Sherry said sweetly.
O’Hagan continued on his way. I decided to say nothing about Muriel Blunden for now.
A cough made us turn to see a gaunt, elderly man whom I took to be the coroner, sucking on a cigarette and beckoning Sherry towards him. We followed him a few metres beyond Traynor’s car, into a haze criss-crossed by beams from at least four flashlights, all aimed at a figure lying face down. His upper torso was partly supported on his arms, which were tucked under him; his hands cupped his face as if he had died while weeping or praying, or both. I recognised Traynor’s silver tie – it was draped over his shoulder.
‘I take it you found him in this exact position?’ said Sherry.
‘Yeah, must have been trying to escape from his attacker.’ The coroner inhaled again and coughed, a long-time smoker with bad lungs.
‘Or maybe he was deposited here.’
‘Why would anyone do that?’ sighed the coroner, who would obviously have preferred the State pathologist to handle this from the beginning.
‘Have you turned him over?’ Sherry asked, kneeling down beside the body.
‘No, I could see the throat wound plain as anything. Saw the amount of blood he’d lost. There was no question about cause of death. I decided to leave the rest to you.’
‘And you’re sure it’s Traynor.’
‘Y–’ The coroner coughed up the phlegm. ‘Yes. That’s Traynor, all right. This was sticking out from underneath him.’
He held out a bloodied white envelope for Sherry to see. I could just make out ‘Frank Traynor’ typed neatly on an address label.
Sherry handed me his flashlight and pulled on a pair of surgical gloves he took from his coat pocket. ‘Point that for me, please, Illaun.’
He took the envelope from the coroner, saw that it was unsealed and deftly extracted what looked like a Christmas card. I shone the light on it. A stylised gold spiral design on a purple background surrounded the words, ‘The Peace of Earth, Air and Water be with you, and may the returning Sun rekindle all your hopes this Midwinter.’
