The Lewis Man (3 page)

‘Murdered. Tortured first. There were deep cuts under each of his nipples. Then he was stabbed in the chest, decapitated, and his body cut in half.’ The professor wandered across to the window and peered up and down the street as he spoke. ‘Bit of a mystery really, because he had beautifully manicured fingernails. So not a working man. There is no doubt he was a meat eater, but his last meal was a mix of wheat and buttermilk. My old pal Ned Kelly, at the National Museum of Ireland, thinks he was sacrificed to ensure good yields of corn and milk in the royal lands nearby.’ He turned back to Gunn. ‘The Indian restaurant up the road any good?’

Gunn shrugged. ‘Not bad.’

‘Good. Haven’t had a decent bloody Indian for ages. So where’s our man now?’

‘In a refrigerated drawer at the hospital morgue.’

Professor Mulgrew rubbed his hands together. ‘We’d better go and take a look at him then before he starts decomposing on us. Then a bite of lunch? I’m bloody starving.’

The body, laid out now on the autopsy table, had an oddly shrunken look about it, well built, but diminished somehow. It was the colour of tea and looked as if it might have been sculpted in resin.

Professor Mulgrew wore a dark-blue jumpsuit beneath a surgical gown, and a bright yellow face mask covering mouth and nose. Above it perched a ridiculously large pair of protective tortoiseshell glasses that seemed to shrink the size of his head, and turn him, incongruously, into a bizarre caricature of himself. Without any apparent awareness of how absurd he looked, he moved nimbly around the table taking measurements, his white tennis shoes protected by green plastic covers.

He crossed to the whiteboard to scrawl up the initial statistics, talking all the time above the squeak of his felt pen. ‘The poor bugger weighs a mere forty-one kilograms. Not much for a man of 173 centimetres in height.’ He peered over his glasses at Gunn. ‘That’s just over five feet eight to you.’

‘Was he ill, do you think?’

‘No, not necessarily. Although he’s well preserved, he will have lost of lot of fluid weight over the years. He looks a pretty healthy specimen to me.’

‘What age?’

‘Late teens, early twenties, I’d say.’

‘No, I mean, how long had he been in the peat?’

Professor Mulgrew raised one eyebrow and tipped his head scathingly in Gunn’s direction. ‘Patience, please. I’m not a bloody carbon-dating machine, Detective Sergeant.’

He returned to the body and turned it over on to its front, leaning in close as he brushed away fragments of brown and yellow-green moss.

‘Were there any clothes found with the body?’

‘No, nothing.’ Gunn moved nearer to see if he could discern what it was that had attracted Mulgrew’s attention. ‘We dug over the whole area. No clothes, no artefacts of any kind.’

‘Hmmm. In that case I would say he’d probably been wrapped in a blanket of some sort before being buried. And he must have lain in it for quite a few hours.’

Gunn’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment. ‘How can you tell that?’

‘In the hours after death, Mr Gunn, the blood settles in the lower portion of the body causing a purplish red discoloration of the skin. We call it post-mortem lividity. If you look carefully at his back, buttocks and thighs you will see that the skin is darker, but there is a paler, blanched pattern in the lividity.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that he lay for at least eight to ten hours on his back after death, wrapped in some kind of rough blanket whose weave left its pattern in the darker coloration. We can clean him off and photograph it and, if you like, have an artist make a sketch to reproduce the pattern.’

Using a pair of tweezers, he recovered several fibres still clinging to the skin.

‘Could be wool,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t be hard to confirm that.’

Gunn nodded, but decided not to ask what point there would be in identifying the pattern and fabric of a blanket woven hundreds or even thousands of years before. The pathologist returned to an examination of the head.

‘The eyes are too far gone to determine the colour of the irides, and this dark red-brown hair is no indication at all of what colour it might have been originally. It’s been dyed by the peat, the same as the skin.’ He poked about in the nostrils. ‘But this is interesting.’ He examined his latexed fingertips. ‘A fair amount of fine-grained silver sand in his nose. Which would appear to be the same as the sand apparent in the abrasions on his knees and the tops of his feet.’ He moved up to the forehead, then, and gently cleaned away some dirt from the left temple and the hair above it. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘What?’

‘He’s got a curved scar on the left front-temporal scalp. About ten centimetres in length.’

‘A wound?’

The professor shook his head thoughtfully. ‘No, it looks like a surgical scar. At a guess I would say that this young man has had an operation performed at some time on a head injury.’

Gunn was stunned. ‘Well, that means this is a much more recent corpse than we thought, doesn’t it?’

Mulgrew’s smile conveyed both superiority and amusement. ‘Depends what you mean by recent, Detective Sergeant. Brain surgery is probably one of the oldest practised medical arts. There is ample archaeological evidence of it dating back to Neolithic times.’ He paused, then added as an afterthought for Gunn’s benefit, ‘The Stone Age.’

He turned his attention now to the neck, and the broad, deep wound that incised it. He measured it at 18.4 centimetres.

‘Is that what killed him?’ Gunn asked.

Mulgrew sighed now. ‘I am guessing, Detective Sergeant, that you have not attended many post-mortems.’

Gunn blushed. ‘Not many, sir, no.’ He did not want to confess that there had only been one before.

‘It is bloody well impossible for me to determine cause of death until I have opened him up. And even then, I can’t guarantee it. His throat has been cut, yes. But he has multiple stab wounds in his chest, and another in the right scapular back. There are abrasions on his neck that would suggest the presence of a rope around it, and similar abrasions on his wrists and ankles.’

‘Like his hands and feet had been tied?’

‘Exactly. He may have been hanged, hence the abrasions on his neck, or else he may have been dragged along a beach using that same rope, which would explain the sand in the broken skin on his knees and feet. In any event, it is far too early to be submitting theories on the cause of death. There are multiple possibilities.’

A darker patch of skin on the right forearm was attracting his attention now. He wiped at it with his swab, then turned to lift a scrubbing sponge from the stainless-steel sink behind him, and began roughly rubbing away the top layer of skin. ‘Sweet fucking Jesus,’ he said.

Gunn canted his head to try to get a better look at it. ‘What is it?’

Professor Mulgrew was silent for a long time before looking up to meet Gunn’s eye. ‘Why were you so keen to know how long the body might have been in the bog?’

‘So I can clear it off my slate, Professor, and hand it over to the archaeologists.’

‘I’m afraid you might not be able to do that, Detective Sergeant.’

‘Why?’

‘Because this body has been in the peat for no more than fifty-six years – at the very most.’

Gunn felt his face colour with indignation. ‘You told me not ten minutes ago that you were not a bloody carbon-dating machine.’ He enjoyed putting the emphasis on the
bloody
. ‘How can you possibly know that?’

Mulgrew smiled. ‘Take a closer look at the right forearm, Detective Sergeant. I think you’ll see that what we have here is a crude tattooed portrait of Elvis Presley above the legend
Heartbreak Hotel
. Now, I’m pretty certain that Elvis wasn’t around in the time before Christ. And as a confirmed fan I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, that ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was a number one hit in the year 1956.’

Professor Mulgrew took almost two hours to complete the autopsy after breaking for a lunch of onion bhaji, lamb bhuna with garlic fried rice, and kulfi ice cream. George Gunn had a cheese sandwich in his office, and was having trouble keeping it down.

The leather-like quality of the skin had made it impossible to open up the chest using a simple scalpel, and in the end the pathologist had resorted to the use of a pair of heavy scissors to cut through it before switching to his accustomed scalpel to reflect the remaining skin and muscles away from the ribcage.

Now the body lay opened up, like something that might be found hanging from a butcher’s hook, internal organs removed and breadloafed. But this had been a strong, healthy young man, and nothing found internally had detracted from the notion that his death had been caused by anything other than a brutal murder. A murder perpetrated by someone who might, just conceivably, still be alive.

‘Bloody interesting corpse, Detective Sergeant.’ Beads of sweat had gathered in the creases on his brow, but Professor Mulgrew was enjoying himself. ‘Didn’t have quite as interesting a last meal as I did. Flakes of soft meat, and minute translucent fibre-like material resembling fish bones. Fish and potatoes probably.’ He grinned. ‘Anyway, happy to give you a hypothesis now on how he might have died.’

Gunn was mildly surprised. From everything he had heard, pathologists were almost invariably reluctant to commit themselves to anything. But Mulgrew was clearly a man supremely confident of his own abilities. He closed up the ribcage, folded the skin and tissue back across the chest towards his initial incision, and poked with his scalpel at the wounds.

‘He was stabbed four times in the chest. From the downward angle of the strokes I would say that his attacker was either very much taller than him, or the victim was on his knees. I favour the latter, but we’ll come to that. The wounds were inflicted by a long, thin, double-bladed knife. Something like a Fairbairn-Sykes, or some other kind of stiletto. This one here, for example’ – he indicated the topmost wound – ‘is about five-eighths of an inch in length and pointed at both tips, which almost certainly indicates a thin, double-bladed weapon. It is five inches deep, passing through the apex of the left lung, the right atrium of the heart and into the ventricular septum. So it’s quite long, and typical of the other three wounds.’

‘And that’s what killed him?’

‘Well, any one of them would almost certainly have been fatal given a few minutes, but I suspect that it was this deep incised wound crossing the front of the neck that did for him.’ He turned his attention to it. ‘It’s more than seven inches long, extending between the mastoid area on the left, just below the ear, to the sternocleidomastoid area on the right.’ He looked up. ‘As you can see.’ He smiled and returned to the wound. ‘It completely transects the left jugular vein, severs the left carotid artery, and nicks the right jugular. It’s about three inches at its deepest, and even cuts into the spinal column.’

‘Is that significant?’

‘In my opinion the angle and depth of the cut would suggest that it was made from behind, and almost certainly with a different weapon. Which is backed up by the stab wound in the back. That wound is one-and-a-half inches long and has a squared superior tip, and a pointed inferior tip. Which would suggest a large, single-edged knife, better suited to cutting so deeply into the neck.’

Gunn frowned. ‘I’m having trouble getting the picture here, Professor. Are you saying the killer used two weapons, stabbed him in the chest with one, then grabbed him from behind and cut his throat with another?’

A smile of mild condescension settled on the pathologist’s face behind his mask, visible to Gunn only in eyes that glimmered on the far side of the giant tortoiseshells. ‘No, Detective Sergeant. I am saying that there were two attackers. One holds him from behind, forces him down to his knees while the second stabs him in the chest. The stab in the back was probably accidental as the first assailant prepared to draw his knife across the victim’s throat.’

He moved around the table to the dead man’s head, and began peeling the skin and flesh back over the face and skull from an initial incision.

‘Here’s the picture you should probably keep in your mind. This man was bound by the wrists and ankles. He had a rope tied around his neck. If it had been used to hang him, the abrasion would have canted up towards the suspension point. But it doesn’t. So I’m suggesting to you that they used it to drag him along a beach. There is a fine silver sand in his nose and mouth, and in the broken skin on his knees and the tops of his feet. At some point they forced him on to his knees and repeatedly stabbed him before cutting his throat.’

The picture that the pathologist painted with his words was suddenly very vivid to Gunn. He wasn’t sure why, but somehow he pictured it at night, with a phosphorescent sea breaking over compacted silver sand glowing in the moonlight. And then the blood turning white foam crimson. But what shocked him almost more than anything else was the thought that this brutal slaying had taken place here, on the Isle of Lewis, where in more than a hundred years there had been only two previous murders.

He said, ‘Would it be possible to take fingerprints? We’re going to have to try to identify this man.’

Professor Mulgrew did not answer immediately. He was focused on reflecting the scalp away from the skull without tearing it. ‘It’s so bloody desiccated,’ he said. ‘Brittle as hell.’ He looked up. ‘The fingertips are a bit wrinkled from fluid loss, but I can inject a little formalin to rehydrate them and you should get perfectly acceptable prints. Might as well take a DNA sample, too.’

‘The police surgeon already sent off samples for analysis.’

‘Oh, did he?’ Professor Mulgrew did not look pleased. ‘Unlikely to provide any enlightenment, of course, but you never know. Ah …’ His attention was suddenly taken by the skull, revealed finally by the peeling back of the scalp. ‘Interesting.’

‘What is?’ Gun reluctantly moved a little closer.

‘Beneath our chap’s surgical scar here … a small metal plate sewn in to protect the brain.’

Gunn saw a rectangular, dull grey plate about two inches long, sewn into the skull with metal sutures looped through holes at either end of it. It was partially obscured by a layer of lighter grey scar tissue.