EXTRACT:
No One gets Hurt by Russell James

Chapter 4

At half-past six in the morning it is surprising how many people are about. Some like to get to work before the rush hour, some are working, some just coming home. The milk van glides along the street, larger vans make early deliveries, newsagents are open, and all the shift workers from the underground, buses, railway, food factories, hospitals and utilities emerge quietly into the innocent morning air. It’s a good time for bicycles and dog walkers. Some say it’s the best time of the day.
This morning a pale sun glints on the heavy brown waters of the Thames. There is traffic out there: three barges, two small motor boats and a launch. The tide has turned now, and as waters rise across the expanse of sticky mud between the river and its stone walls, flocks of grubby birds peck at scraps and deposits on the glistening slime.
Dog walkers, striding along solid pavements beside the river, look out beyond the mud to admire the channel of vigorous water which bisects the capital. They watch the way it swirls powerfully around the sturdy pillars beneath each bridge. Early walkers inhale a wet metallic smell, and at this spacious time of day they greet each other. They pause to look out across the Thames and occasionally glance down at the mud below.
When the man in the trilby first spotted it he couldn’t be certain it was what he thought. His eyesight was no longer what it had been, and he had left his spectacles at home. While he leant across the round-topped stone wall and peered down at the mud he resisted the tug of his little terrier, too small to see over and unaware that there was anything of interest below. The dog was more interested in an approaching Scottie, smaller than the terrier but no less aggressive. The woman controlling it tightened the lead, and when it felt its pace checked the Scottie tried to scamper faster, its leathery footpads scratching at the ground. The terrier barked at it.
‘Good morning!’ said his owner.
The woman tugged the Scottie closer. He said, ‘I think there’s someone down there. I can’t quite see.’
‘Excuse me?’
The woman kept ten yards away. Both dogs growled.
He said, ‘Down in the mud. Can’t make it out.’
She stared at him. He added, ‘I haven’t got my glasses on. Could you take a look?’
The Scottie yapped and the terrier barked back.
‘Well, I really don’t—’
‘Because I think it might be a body.’
She shortened the lead.
‘Sorry to be a nuisance,’ the man said.
The woman edged towards the river wall. She eyed the man warily, then peeped across. ‘Oh, goodness.’
His terrier whined. ‘It is a body? I thought it was.’
She nodded. The Scottie tried to scale the wall. She asked, ‘Have you phoned the police?’
‘No, I’ve just noticed it. You wouldn’t have a phone on you?’
She had but wouldn’t say so, because she didn’t want to get involved. ‘No, there must be a phone box somewhere.’
‘I’d better stay here – keep an eye on it. Perhaps you could phone them?’
‘You should phone them. You saw it first.’
‘I don’t like to wander off and leave it.’
She bent down to smack the Scottie. ‘I don’t think she’s going anywhere.’
‘It’s a she, then, is it?’
The woman eyed him suspiciously. ‘Of course it’s a she.’
‘I can’t see without my glasses.’
She pulled her dog away from the wall. ‘Well, you can’t just stand here staring at it. And I’ve got things to do.’
She began to walk away.
‘If you should happen to pass a phone box—’
‘No,’ she snapped. ‘You found it. You must phone.’
He gazed reproachfully after her. ‘But we’re both witnesses.’

*
When the police arrived, the incoming tide had almost reached the body. The first two officers took a glum look at the oozing mud and called immediately for their Detective Inspector and paramedics. They waited twelve minutes, watching the waters slurp closer, dreading the moment when one of them would have to clamber down onto the mud, and while they waited they erected incident tape to hold back the first tiny group of spectators. They hoped the Marine Support Unit would arrive soon.

*
By the time the big river reaches Thames Ditton its character has changed. It has surged through the City beneath impressive bridges at the Tower, Blackfriars and Westminster, and has continued steadily past Lambeth, Vauxhall and Battersea. Beyond Wandsworth and Putney the murky waters become domesticated. A last outpost of industrialisation recurs at a loop in the river around Barn Elms Water Works and the Fulham Wharves, but by genteel Chiswick the river has become a water feature at the foot of neat green gardens. From Barnes, Mortlake and Richmond it flows ever more sweetly past Twickenham with its playing fields, to the watershed at Teddington where tidal water ends. At Kingston the vast parks of Hampton Court stretch along the banks, and opposite the grandeur of Hampton Court lie the quiet suburbs of Surbiton and Thames Ditton: fringes of Greater London where dockers and watermen are unknown. Noisy pleasure boats carry tourists and power majestically between irritating little rowing boats and pristine motor boats. Also in the water are small islands with willow trees. And there are bywaters. In some of those bywaters are moored houseboats – dark ramshackle crafts with peeling paint, vaguely resented by land-owning neighbours. On one of the houseboats lives Kirsty Rice.
Her boat is a little smaller than average and on rainy days seems to sit lower in the water. It is one of a colony of barely a dozen craft, and on rainy days each of the weather-beaten houseboats bobs against its mooring as if it wants to crawl ashore. But the inhabitants have become so used to living on water, so wedded to the river, that they would no more give up their way of life than a newt would choose to live on land. The boats leak, creak and are mildly insanitary. Ceilings are low. Yet the houseboats are as cosseting and cosy as floating nests.
A nest, thought Kirsty Rice, where a mother broods upon her eggs.
She sat at her pull-down breakfast table and stirred muesli with an antique spoon – one of her mother’s spoons, Irish silver, handed down by her own mother decades before.
Mothers.
Kirsty stared at the muesli, lifeless in the bowl. Muesli was good for you. She put down the spoon, picked up a mug of coffee and drank instead. When she had woken that morning her first thought had been ‘Day Five, and nothing yet.’ Five days since her period should have begun.
But she couldn’t be pregnant. She didn’t have to be. A day or two late was not unusual. But five days: had that happened before? Perhaps not – though a few days did not prove anything.
Kirsty glanced at the wooden steps to the deck. Tucked behind them was a bulky cardboard box. It belonged to Ken, or the contents did. Spare clothes, a gaudy dressing gown, some books and computer magazines. But no washing things, no credit cards, nothing precious. Nothing he’d need to come back for. Nothing he would miss.
She was not pregnant.
Kirsty took a spoonful of muesli but didn’t want it. The milk trickled down her throat and she was left with a wad of chewy cereal and dried fruit. Her stomach clenched.
She stood up and moved briskly around the cabin, collecting things for work. With Ken no longer there, Kirsty had allowed it to become more an office than a dwelling space: her PC had replaced the television, she had a second-hand video editing deck, two whiteboards, and seven small heaps of cardboard files. Post-it notes were stuck to the walls alongside cuttings from magazines and newspapers. It was as if she had allowed her office world to push her domestic life aside.
But she was young, she thought. Why not? She was a working girl. Her exciting job absorbed her every moment. She worked irregular hours but to some extent could choose her hours – and beside, she didn’t want to reduce them: she didn’t resent time spent at work. She loved it. Her job was the most important thing in her life – much more important than moping about the houseboat, wondering why some wretched man had walked out on her. A man who used to run his fingers through her hair. She was glad that he had gone. She was glad she’d cut her hair. Now she could concentrate on the things that really mattered.
Briskly, she fitted a new battery in her video camera, then crammed the camera, spare battery and three blank cassettes into her travelling bag. She collected her notebook and her purse. When she had swallowed the last of the strong black coffee she left the mug beside the bowl of muesli on the pull-down table. They could wait till she came home.

*
Although the discovery of the body was not reported immediately on the News, the disruption to traffic was. As the rush hour reached its peak the closure of a main road along the Surrey Bank caused innumerable delays. Diversion signs directed traffic away from the affected route but gave no guidance as to which road one should take instead.
A hundred yards either side of where the body had been found, the road was sealed with wooden barriers. A further forty yards in from there, tapes were stretched across the road. Between the incident tapes and the wooden barriers stood half a dozen vehicles – one of which, an ambulance, held the recovered corpse, a woman Detective Inspector and the male police surgeon. But the two ignored the body. Inside the ambulance, out of sight, they had a furtive cup of tea.
The police surgeon sniffed. ‘Not my job to say how she died.’
‘But it was murder?’
‘It was certainly suspicious, Jennifer.’
The surgeon smiled. He and DI Jennifer Gillett had worked together before. Beside them in the ambulance the girl’s body lay on a bed beneath a sheet. The surgeon glanced at it. ‘Most irregular, you know, bringing her in before I’d examined her.’
‘You’d have been up to your shoulders in Thames water if we hadn’t. Tide’s coming in.’ Gillett shrugged. ‘And if we’d dumped her at the roadside we’d have had the press firing off their long-range cameras.’
‘Your DCI wouldn’t like that.’
Gillett sipped her tea. ‘She wasn’t drowned, then?’
‘Can’t be sure. But I don’t think she’d even been in the water. The pathologist will confirm.’ He put down his cup before her next question. ‘Well, I’ve done here, Jennifer. Time for surgery.’
As he moved for the door, Gillett asked, ‘The black and scorching – that’s what killed her?’
The doctor paused before opening the ambulance door, ‘As I say, it isn’t my job to diagnose, but it looks like it. The shock alone might have killed her. But what we don’t know is whether there were other contributory factors. You need the pathologist.’
They stepped out into morning light. A constable stood outside to stop unauthorised persons from climbing in. A few yards away, beside the river wall, they could see the Deputy Chief Inspector and his Scene of Crime Officers, all dressed like nuclear scientists in white paper overalls and overshoes, meticulously picking over the ground in an attempt to sift clues from city dirt and trash.
The DI led the doctor back to the tape. Out of earshot of her superior officer she said, ‘We’re just the warm-up before the stars arrive.’
‘It was ever thus. I defer to the pathologist.’
‘I to the DCI.’
Having reached the tape they turned back to glance at the white-shrouded officers. He said, ‘A policeman’s lot, Jennifer—’
‘Is not well paid.’
Genteel jests for a gentle morning. The doctor ducked beneath the tape and made his way back to his car. His job was done. Like most police surgeons he was a family doctor, called in to establish not the cause of death but merely that death had occurred, and whether or not the circumstances looked suspicious.
Which they did. But as he drove through rush hour London, the doctor switched on his radio to help him forget the grisly corpse. What mattered now was whether or not he already had a backlog of patients at his morning surgery.

*
DarkAlley Films had bought two days of Neil Garvey’s time. Two days, thought Kirsty, were quite enough. His easy manner was insidious: he behaved with her as he had with Trisha, as he behaved no doubt with every woman who visited his studio, as he behaved this morning with Melanie in her council flat – as if they each had been his lover: no, not his lover, Kirsty thought, just a person with whom he’d had sex. He’d had sex with Trisha, but were they lovers? What was a lover? Neil and Trisha had had sex in his videos, and from the way Trisha behaved around his house, they’d had sex at other times as well. Did that make them lovers? To them, sex seemed no more significant than sharing a cup of coffee.
Neil had had sex with this dark-haired Melanie, as he’d had sex with so many girls in his movies. There are men who keep a count of the women they have had – a kind of boasting, if only to themselves – but Garvey must long ago have stopped counting. Sex to him was part of work.
But to this young mother it was her way out. Melanie’s Deptford flat was poorly built and had never been well maintained. She led Kirsty around its few run-down rooms. The two small bedrooms were drab and the living room was just that – the room where they all lived. A suspiciously smart television stood beside an equally impressive stereo and half-full CD rack. The armchairs looked as if they had been rescued from a skip – and didn’t match – and the battered table was cluttered with food and magazines. Much of the remaining floor space was taken up by a rickety playpen, inside which was a little girl, about eighteen months – still in nappies by the smell. Her silence had been bought with a cup of orange juice and bag of sweets. The child’s brother looked a year older. He wandered around with his thumb in his mouth, and with his other hand he clutched at his mother’s skirt.
Melanie said, ‘It costs too much to have child minders.’
She had black hair, a gypsy face, and before the kids she’d probably had an attractive figure. She was heavier now. As was her make-up. Knowing Kirsty was coming, she had put on a purple dancing dress.
She glanced at the video camera: ‘Take a shot of what we have to put up with in the bathroom.’
If this were a different programme, the bathroom would have been star of the show. Its walls were black with damp and the grimy window hung crooked in its frame.
‘Been bust forever,’ Melanie explained.
She pointed to the ceiling. An ugly brown stain spread from one corner to the centre. In the corner where the stain was darkest, part of the plasterboard had crumbled away.
‘When they pull the bath plug upstairs, some of the water leaks down here. But they have to wash themselves, don’t they? It’s not their fault.’
Kirsty shrugged hopelessly: it was not her subject. Back in the crowded living room the child in the playpen started grizzling.
‘Oh precious! Did you wonder where Mummy had gone?’
Melanie picked up the child, sniffed, and told Kirsty she didn’t think she’d want to film the next bit. ‘I mean, this is dirty, know what I mean?’
She carried the child to the bathroom as Neil wandered back from the kitchen. He looked as at home in Melanie’s flat as in his own place. He was carrying three coffees. ‘She’s a good girl, Melanie.’
‘I can hear you,’ Melanie called.
‘So can the neighbours,’ he muttered. ‘Walls are thin.’
‘You never filmed here?’ Kirsty asked.
‘You’re joking. You’re the first person who’s ever wanted to do that.’
They glanced at the armchairs but didn’t use them. As they listened to Melanie changing the baby, Kirsty put her camera on the floor. She sipped some coffee and her stomach clenched. She thought: phantom contraction.
I am not pregnant.

*
Melanie sat in an armchair, baby on her knee, the little boy sitting at her feet. Kirsty had closed in on her face. Shooting the girl with kiddies crawling over her did not seem right.
‘I’m still young, and I’ve got my life ahead of me. —I’ve got a life behind me as well!’ Melanie grinned defiantly. ‘My kids have got a proper dad, you know – I was married to him and that. Too young, of course, like mum said. Parents have to be right sometimes, don’t they? I’m a parent myself.’
The little girl reared up and began pinching Melanie’s face. Kirsty pulled back a little. She couldn’t exclude the kids entirely from her film.
‘But he buggered off, of course, as men do.’
She grinned at Neil but he wasn’t listening. He was sitting at her table, leafing through a magazine.
‘He’s supposed to pay me maintenance but I don’t know if he ever does. I get my Giro from the CSA but you can’t live on that. Anyway, I saw this ad in a window and I thought I might as well give it a try. Didn’t think it could do no harm. Anyway, this bloke—’ She broke off to speak directly to Kirsty: ‘Neil, I mean. Can I mention Neil? Right. Well, he was… a proper gentleman.’ She laughed, and called to Neil: ‘You hear that? Flattery. Professor Higgins, that’s what you were!’
He looked up. ‘My Bare Lady: I’ve done that film – twice!’
She chuckled. ‘What I mean is when I answered Neil’s ad I thought this has got to be about sex, yeah? I’m going to have to…’ She nodded. ‘But no, it was nothing like that. Well, not the first time.’
Melanie chuckled, then took a breath and stared directly at the camera. Kirsty zoomed in. ‘Sex isn’t such a big deal. It’s not like you get raped or something. You just join in. Nothing nasty happens. No one gets hurt.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘I enjoyed the money!’ Melanie laughed. ‘I mean, lots of women do sex for money. But they sit in a room and wait – they don’t know who the hell will come wandering in. I’d never stoop to that, not me. This way, you’ve got time to get to know the bloke, and you can back out if you want to. But why bother? You’re in a comfortable room. You can take your time about it. Like Neil says, the more you enjoy yourself the better it’ll look on film. So you might as well enjoy it.’
‘What did you earn?’
‘Two or three hundred quid. Depends. For someone like me, that’s good money. And it’s only a start, isn’t it? I mean, let’s be honest – I want to be famous. No, don’t laugh. There’s lots of famous actresses started out in porno. Really famous. People front up famous actresses sometimes and try and blackmail ’em about those early movies – but they should worry, on a million dollars a film. Pay me a million – see if I give a monkey’s what people said. No, I’m sorry, I don’t care if it’s straight or porno as long as it pays decent. I’ve got to feed the kids, haven’t I? On top of that, what I want, what I really want, is to get famous and know that men like to look at me and give me things I want.’

Chapter 5

A CUP OF tea can calm and fortify, coffee perks you up, and a shot of whisky is unwise before an autopsy. Since Harris had been conducting autopsies for fifteen years he felt there was nothing he hadn’t seen, but he still prefaced each autopsy with a cup of tea. This morning’s cuppa was shared with four interested parties: DCI Damon Wright, senior investigating officer; DI Jennifer Gillett, recently promoted from Detective Sergeant; Sergeant Ian Lawrence, police photographer; and Nigel Flint, mortuary technician.
They drank their tea in the mortuary office. The tea was so hot they had to blow on it, although a morning chill hung about the office, as if cold air crept in from next door.
‘Still no clues to her identity?’ Wright asked.
Jennifer Gillett had already checked. ‘No reports of missing persons.’
‘Early in the day.’
Harris put down his cup, the steam rising. ‘No reason to wait.’ He seemed irritable today.
Inspector Damon Wright savoured his tea; he had an asbestos throat. ‘No hope of a visual identification?’
Gillett blew on her scalding tea. ‘Unlikely. There’s little left of her face.’
‘Too badly burnt. Oh well. A druggie?’
‘No needle scars. But it’s a typical druggie death.’
‘Vicious bastards. Still, we’ll keep an open mind. Right, Mr Harris?’
The pathologist gave a tired smile. ‘Oh, you want my opinion? I thought you two had already sussed it out.’
Wright placated him: ‘We only saw what was obvious at the scene of crime. We need an expert now.’
Harris had conducted only a superficial examination at the crime scene. By the time he’d arrived the body had been moved, and he could infer nothing from its new position or environs. Thames water was lapping over the site and the corpse had been taken inside the ambulance. As for finding clues in the woman’s clothing, they could forget it: she was practically naked. His first examination had had to take place inside the ambulance, where the body waited on a rubber bed. ‘Bruising, of course, but you’ve moved her from pillar to post.’ He had conducted on-site preliminaries: rigor, body temperature, recent wounds. He had waited while a forensic scientist tested for contact traces, but when these showed nothing unusual he had supervised the transfer to a zip-up body bag, and had returned to the mortuary in grumpy mood.
Jennifer Gillett put down her hot tea. ‘I’m ready.’
Inside the mortuary the zipped-up body lay on a trolley by the working table. Nigel unzipped the bag, then he and Harris slid the dirty corpse onto the slab. While Nigel re-zipped the empty bag and placed it in storage for trace examination later, Sergeant Lawrence photographed the body. Normally the sergeant would take photographs as each piece of clothing was removed – a grisly striptease – but this body was already bare.
‘Scraps of charred clothing remain adhered to the skin in places,’ dictated Harris onto tape. ‘Samples of this material, a kind of hessian perhaps, have been placed inside Bag A. The appearance of the cloth supports the view that the subject was severely burnt by fire. Superficial examination also suggests that at the time of burning the subject was not wearing underclothes, and the hessian-type material seems to have been all that she was wearing. The material could originally have been a heavy dress worn without underclothes or it may have been a dressing gown. But the material may have been nothing more than a wrapping put on the subject, alive or dead, before she caught fire.’
Gillett was interested that the pathologist concentrated more on the scraps of clothing than the body itself. Harris continued around the slab.
‘The subject wears no jewellery. No rings on the fingers. No marks of rings having been removed. No immediately obvious tattoos, although the skin has not yet been cleaned. No scars, except a vaccination mark to the left upper arm. There are a number of small bruises, most of which appear to have been effected after the subject was dead.’
Harris then listed the bruises. Damon Wright glanced at Jennifer who had attended few autopsies before, but she didn’t seem troubled. She was studying the body as dispassionately as was Harris.
‘The body is splattered and smeared with river mud. Although the mud probably comes from the riverside site where the body was found, samples from different parts from the body surface are being placed in Bags B through F.’
Nigel Flint diligently flaked off some mud samples. As each was bagged, Harris described the area of the body it had been taken from. As he continued his exterior inspection the two police officers grew bored. Jennifer wished she’d had time to finish her tea.
Eventually Harris and Flint started to bag fingernail scrapings. Before he could make a facial examination Harris asked Flint to bag samples of facial mud. Then he grumbled into his tape recorder that because the head was badly burnt he could take no samples of make-up, skin or surface blood. Flint washed the mud gently from her head. As he did so, Sergeant Lawrence moved in to photograph each stage. It was a delicate process. Slow.
Now came a more grisly stage: the girl had been badly burned, and her head had been at the seat of the fire. Flint had washed the mud away to reveal a crust of mud and black charred skin encasing reddish brown flesh and grey-white bone.
Harris searched for any hair. ‘The complete absence of hair to the head means that its colour in life cannot yet be reported.’ He left the head a moment to walk down beside the body. ‘What remains of her pubic hair suggests that the subject would have had black or dark brown hair.’ He returned to the head. ‘Microscopic analysis of follicles in the scalp will determine the actual colour in due course.’ He paused. ‘Colour of eyes unknown.’
In the intervals when Harris wasn’t speaking, the mortuary remained absolutely silent. All three police officers preferred to keep their eyes away from the blackened corpse, glancing back briefly – almost shyly – when Harris spoke. He was probing gently at where the woman’s face would have been. ‘I am unable to take samples of lipstick and make-up, and the charred state of the head means that I cannot ascertain whether the subject ever wore ear-rings or had her facial skin pierced in any similar way.’ He probed again. ‘The subject does appear to have a full set of teeth, which will be itemised later.’
The officers continued to avoid looking at her head. Flint and Harris worked on it and peeled away scraps of blackened husk, exposing more skull, until in a perverse way the exposed skull made the head seem more human. To Gillett, the streaks of red reminded her of The Scream by Edvard Munch.

*
As Kirsty and Neil Garvey were packing up they heard the front door open. Melanie was in the armchair with the baby, and she glanced up without interest. But the little boy seemed to grow tense.
The man who entered was in his early twenties, still showing a trace of teenage acne. His hair was very short, as if he had shaved it off two weeks ago and it had just started growing back. He looked at home and Kirsty noticed that he had let himself in. He didn’t seem surprised that they were there. Perhaps his dull eyes were not surprised at anything.
‘Still here, then?’
He stared at Kirsty. She wondered about her camera. No point hiding it away – he had already seen it.
Melanie greeted him from the armchair. ‘You’re early. But they’re going now.’
Neil grinned easily. ‘You must be Melanie’s boyfriend. I’m Neil, by the way. Neil Garvey.’
‘Yeah, I’m Gary.’ He cocked his head. ‘You could put me in your film – except I ain’t got me make-up on!’ He touched his cheek and grinned at Kirsty. ‘You the director? No, he’s the director. You’re the cameraman.’
‘My name’s Kirsty.’
‘We’re going,’ Neil said.
Gary stared at him. ‘Are you the bloke who makes these films? I mean, it’s all right: I know what she does and that.’
Melanie said, ‘Gary doesn’t mind.’
Kirsty pointed her camera at him. He shrugged happily. ‘But I ain’t taking my clothes off, mind – I’m not wearing sexy undies today!’
She left the film running. ‘So you know about the films she makes?’
‘Well, it’s money, innit? Mel lets men see her tits. So what? I ain’t bothered.’
Melanie said, ‘They’re not your tits.’
‘You show more than tits.’
Kirsty broke in to ask if Gary had watched Melanie’s films.
He grinned, then looked away. ‘Yeah, me and Mel watched a video. It’s all right. I mean, it’s all make-believe, innit?’ He peered at Neil. ‘You was in it, wasn’t you?’
‘Must have been my brother.’
Gary laughed. ‘Your brother! No, Christ, I said I don’t mind. It’s like professional, innit? It’s what she does. Someone has to do it. I mean, I’ll watch a decent video like any man, and I reckon the girls are all like Mel, yeah? When the filming’s over they go home to normal life. It don’t mean nothing.’
‘When you watch Melanie in a video—’ Kirsty wasn’t sure how much Gary had seen. ‘When you watch Melanie with another man—’
‘Like him?’
‘Like my brother.’
‘Your bleedin’ brother!’ Gary laughed.
Kirsty asked, ‘You don’t feel jealous?’
Gary’s eyes flickered, but he stared straight at the camera. ‘Well, it’s a bit weird, you know? But I don’t feel jealous. Why should I? I mean, I’m the bloke as really matters to her, aren’t I?’
He glanced at Melanie for confirmation, but she was playing with the baby. ‘If we had loads of money we wouldn’t do it, obviously – but there’s worse ways, ain’t there?’
‘How would you know?’ Melanie asked. ‘I make the pictures.’

*
‘Teeth,’ explained Harris, ‘can reveal a lot.’
He was probing inside the blackened mouth cavity, conducting a preliminary visual while his assistant Flint prepared wax to make a cast.
‘Teeth are a unique identifier – and they usually survive a fire.’ He bent closer so he could delve deeper. ‘To destroy a set of teeth you’d need a far more intense heat than this woman was subjected to. Certainly the discolouration and loss of flesh indicates quite a savage fire – but a relatively short-lived one.’ He smiled thinly. ‘She just flared up.’
No one attempted to smile back. Jennifer Gillett asked, ‘As if she was doused in a flammable liquid and set alight?’
‘An accelerant, yes, that sort of thing.’
The pathologist used his pencil light to peer inside the mouth. ‘Fire may damage the front teeth but not usually the back. The tongue acts as a heat sink.’
They nodded.
‘Fortunately, any tell-tale fillings usually cluster at the back. Yes, she’s had four. Wisdom teeth present but not yet emerged. Good. Puts her in her early twenties. So we now have size, age and race—’
‘Race?’
‘White feet. If she’d been in a worse fire it might have completely disguised her external skin pigment – even a blonde could look negroid. But we already know that this girl was white.’ He was back inside the mouth. ‘If we didn’t, the amount of gum melanin would confirm her colouring. Teeth alone can give us race – because there are national styles in dentistry. Japan and Asia treat differently from each other. America stands out a mile. France, Italy, Germany – no, this girl’s British, I would say. First prognosis, you understand?’
‘British white female, aged twenty to twenty-five,’ muttered Wright.
‘She’s had no significant operations. No body scars. She is not a drug injector. Ready with the mixture, Mr Flint?’
‘Ready when you are,’ Nigel purred.
Harris took the pot. ‘We had one last week with perfect teeth. Not one of yours, Damon?’
Wright shook his head.
‘Disappointing. Perfect teeth means no dentistry – no history. No dentistry means that either the subject was very young – which that one wasn’t – or it could indicate that she recently arrived from the third world, where she was never able to afford dentistry.’
‘Was that the case?’
Harris was pressing wax around her teeth. ‘Presumably. She did have teeth missing, but none treated. Probably never seen a proper dentist – so there would be no records. Prostitute, I think. There were obvious signs.’
Gillett interrupted: ‘This is last week’s case?’
‘Mhm, sorry, yes. Quite right. Concentrate on the matter in hand.’ He eased out the wax dental impressions and handed them to Flint. ‘We should get plenty of information from these for your missing person’s report – even if, sadly, you can’t have a photo of what she looked like.’
He stood back, smiled at them, and rubbed his hands together as if washing them. ‘Time to poke about inside and find what she really died of. In cases of burning, the internal organs usually survive, certainly in a short-lived flash fire like this. Surprisingly resilient, the human body.’
He prowled around the blackened corpse on the table like a hunter sizing up his kill. ‘She wasn’t battered to death, nor stabbed, nor shot. I don’t think she was strangled. No reason yet to believe she wasn’t killed by fire, but we must eliminate all other possibilities. She could have been poisoned. Could have been suffocated. Who knows? We do know that around the time of death this woman was subjected to a sudden fierce burst of flame. If she was alive when that happened I doubt she would have survived it.’
He paused, watching Jennifer Gillett especially to see how well she would take the gruesome process. She looked pale but unconcerned.
Harris said, ‘So we must confirm whether it was the fire or something else that killed her. Let’s start with an analysis of stomach and bladder contents to give an idea of what she was up to in the last hours before she died. We’ve already taken vaginal and rectal swabs. We have hair and tissue samples, clippings, and some blood. Do you want any more external measurements or can I go ahead?’
They indicated he could. They didn’t say anything. The only sound in the mortuary was of running water at the cleansing table.
‘We’ll remove the brain afterwards,’ he said.
Harris took his knife and made a frontal incision from the middle of her neck in a straight line down her front between her sad and flattened breasts, across her abdomen and then all the way down to the dark triangle of her pubis.
She was dead, and she had now ceased to be a person.

Click to visit the 'No One Gets Hurt' page

Other books by Russell James
(published by The Do-Not Press)

Pick Any Title
Oh No, Not My Baby
Painting in the Dark

About Russell James

Russell James discusses his inspiration for, and the main themes explored in, No One Gets Hurt.

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