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‘Liar. You’re not sorry at all, but I am consoled by the fact that your own weekend has been ruined too.’
‘Already done,’ Keats said. ‘Been at the morgue since this morning in the company of a homeless John Doe.’
‘Suspicious?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘Just unidentified.’
Kim felt a shiver run through her. She hated unidentified corpses. The man had a name, a life before vagrancy, possibly family. She shook the thoughts away. It was a pet hate that had followed her through a childhood spent in the anonymity of the care system.
‘Okay, move out of the way,’ she said, looking around the pathologist.
‘Look, I just want to warn you—’
‘Keats, I’m a big girl – I can take it.’
He stood aside and allowed her to take his place in the huddle of people.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she exclaimed.
‘Err…Stone,’ Keats said, indicating their surroundings.
‘Trust me, I’ve got worse,’ she said, taking a step closer. ‘Shit, Keats, you could have warned me.’
At first glance, one could have been forgiven for thinking the female victim on the ground was wearing a red sweatshirt, but splashes of white on the cuffs and collar said otherwise. There were multiple stab wounds, but Kim’s gaze was instantly drawn upwards to the trauma above the neck. The woman’s mouth had been slashed right across her face. Kim’s insides recoiled at the disfigurement that gave her a clown-like expression. The flesh was jagged where it had been brutally ripped. The lower lip hung loose, sagging, exposing all the lower teeth.
For some reason, Kim’s first thought was of the family member that would make the formal identification. As if the process wasn’t painful enough. Would this be the final and lasting picture they’d keep in their mind? Kim knew that Keats would do everything in his power to minimise the trauma. The identification would take place through glass, to avoid any cross contamination, and she could picture the pathologist placing the body with the worst affected side furthest away. She’d seen bodies where a sheet or a wound covering had been used to reduce the brutality that had been inflicted.
‘Post-mortem,’ Keats said, following her gaze to the wound across the mouth.
Kim did a quick count of the slash marks in the fabric. ‘Ten?’
‘Eleven,’ Keats said. ‘There’s one more on the side seam of her jumper.’
So, eleven stab wounds and death hadn’t been enough? The killer had still needed to make his feelings clear or send some kind of message after the life had left the body.
Kim started walking around the body as the horror of the scene settled in her consciousness and her memory.
She guessed the woman to be late thirties, early forties. Straw-blonde hair rested on the shoulders. A few strands were stuck to her face by drops of dried blood. Red pools had gathered either side of her. Her palms were covered in blood, where she’d clearly tried to stop her own bleeding, but the attack had been vicious and brutal. Two fingernails on the right hand and one on the left had been broken. She hadn’t gone quietly.
Further down the body, red lines and droplets were visible on the light-coloured jeans and the trainers, indicating that the deeper stab wounds had come later and that part of the confrontation had taken place standing up.
Small areas of reddened earth showed there’d been some dodging and staggering. This had not been a quick death.
Kim walked around again, taking in the finer details as Keats gave the nod for the photographer to begin.
A satchel had been cut away from her body during the attack and now lay at her feet. The magnetic catches didn’t appear to have been tampered with, but something green peeped out the top.
Kim looked around. ‘Where’s the dog?’
Keats shook his head. ‘No dog.’ He looked around too. ‘No lead either.’
‘The lead will still be attached to its collar. She’d have dropped it and the dog would have run.’
Keats eyed her doubtfully.
‘Those are biodegradable poo bags. I have the same ones. Pretty sure she wouldn’t be carrying them around to fill up her handbag.’
She turned to a constable. ‘Call it in to the cordons and go find the dog.’
