Henley put a hand on Ramouter’s shoulder as he turned his back to her.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Ramouter. Don’t ever apologise. Not for this.’ Henley walked around and faced him. ‘What you’re going through is shit. I’m sorry I can’t dress it up for you, but that’s all I’ve got. It’s a horrible situation and no way to live but, right now, you’ve got to find a way to focus on the positive. Celebrate the small wins. Take up something new with Michelle.’
‘She wants to try indoor climbing. She’s been going on about it ever since she watched it in the Olympics.’
‘I take it that you have no interest in indoor climbing.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Ramouter if you can climb a collapsing pier over the river, then you can climb a wall,’ Henley said.
‘Yes, boss.’
‘Good. Let’s go in and if Linh asks why your eyes are red, tell her it’s hay fever.’
‘Hay fever. In October?’ Ramouter asked opening the door into the mortuary.
‘It’s either that or you can tell her that you became overcome with emotion at the thought of seeing her.’
‘I’ll tell her that it’s hay fever.’
‘I was thinking about the strange circularity of this case,’ said Dr Linh Choi as she removed the sterile surgical drape that covered the body of Sian Fox-Carnell. ‘I completed the post-mortem on her first two victims and now look, here she is on my examination table.’
‘You sound as though you’re having an existential crisis,’ said Ramouter.
‘Nah, I had one of those way back in medical school but this? This is what I would call karma.’
The harsh fluorescent light placed a luminous sheen on the naked body of Sian Fox-Carnell which, from her forehead to her feet, was a patchwork of bruises, cuts and grazes. Henley had long trained herself not to have an emotional reaction to the bodies that ended up on Linh’s table, but the crescent shaped caesarean scar on Fox-Carnell’s body violently triggered her maternal instincts. She tried to rationalise the feelings by reminding herself that Fox-Carnell had been separated from her children due to her murderous actions and that she’d been a threat to Henley’s own daughter, but the sympathy and regret swam strongly through her.
‘It’s such a quick turnaround, isn’t it?’ said Henley in an effort to cut off the unwarranted emotions that she was feeling. ‘Mondaymorning, she was sitting in a cell in Bronzefield Prison and five days later she was hanging from a rope over the River Thames.’
‘And now she’s here on my table,’ Linh said.
‘So, what happened to her?’ asked Ramouter. ‘She wasn’t killed by the hanging?’
‘No, she was already dead before she was hanged,’ Linh replied as she placed her hands under Fox-Carnell’s chin and gently raised it. ‘All of this abrasion around her neck was caused post-mortem.’
‘When exactly did she die?’ asked Henley.
‘I’ve estimated time of death to be between 10 p.m. and midnight, Thursday night.’ Linh replied. ‘And she took a lot of hits before she died. She has significant bruising along the left side of her torso, left buttock and her left thigh which was all caused pre-mortem. You can see the cut on her right shin. I removed grass and soil from the wound.’
‘What happened to her face?’ Ramouter asked, stepping closer to the body.
‘Blunt force impact,’ said Linh. ‘She has a broken nose, jaw and several of her teeth are broken. She was either hit hard in the face or fell onto something hard like a floor but an interesting thing about the bruises is that they’re a good time map.’
‘What do you mean?’ Henley asked.
‘You can split her last, let’s say last thirty hours to three significant events,’ said Linh as she picked up Fox-Carnell’s right hand and turned it over to reveal two cuts on her palm. ‘Event one: I removed debris and glass from the wounds. The shards were deeply embedded which suggests to me that she must have pressed her hand down on the ground and if we look at her jaw.’ Linh ran her finger along the blue and purple bruising. ‘This colouring is consistent with a bruise that’s one to two days old. And if you look at the top of her arms.’
Henley and Ramouter stood on opposite sides of the examination table.
Ramouter pointed at the four circular bruises on Fox-Carnell’s biceps. ‘Are those finger marks?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ replied Linh. ‘She was grabbed tightly.’
‘Restrained,’ Henley said.
