The assistants had placed covers on the floor beneath and around the table to collect the fine charcoal dust that Margaret had warned would settle all around them and track across the room as they moved back and forth dissecting organs for later microscopic examination. Professor Xie, although nominally the lead pathologist, now that mianzi was restored had deferred to Margaret’s greater experience and asked her to perform the autopsy while he assisted.

Now, as she examined the feet of the corpse, she found and pulled back a piece of black and stiffened material from the top of the left foot. “The charred remains of what appears to be a leather shoe and part of a sock are present over the dorsum and the sole of the left foot and the sole of the right foot. There are no remaining identifying features, other than that the left shoe appears to have been of a laced variety. The skin of the dorsum of the left foot is dark red and blistered and there is an apparent needle track in the skin in the area of the saphenous vein and venous arch.”

Margaret reached up and switched off the microphone, turning towards Li. “Looks like our man might have been a junkie. The top of the foot is quite a common place to shoot up if you want to hide the needle tracks. We can confirm that by checking for narcotics residue in and around the capillaries of the lungs. Blood tests will tell us what he was shooting up. Probably heroin.”

“Will you get sufficient blood and material for testing? I mean, won’t everything be cooked?” Li’s distaste at his own question was palpable.

“Superficially, yes. Normally we would draw off fluid from the eyes and blood from the femoral veins at the top of the legs, but that will be cooked and solid. Inside, though, should be pretty much protected and preserved. Beyond the accelerant used to set him on fire, there wasn’t much else to sustain the blaze, so he wouldn’t have burned for that long.”

The assistants turned the body over and Margaret switched on the microphone. “The posterior trunk shows a symmetrical external contour. The spine is clearly mid-line. There is charring of the skin of the back and multiple small areas of skin splitting over the latissimus dorsi bilaterally. There is no obvious blunt or sharp force trauma of the back.”

Having placed the body on its back again, the autopsy assistants placed a rubber block around six inches thick beneath the body, in the mid-chest area, to help expose the chest cavity when Margaret made the first Y-shaped incision, starting at each shoulder, meeting at the bottom of the breastbone, and continuing down past the belly button to the pubic bone. She peeled back the skin and musculature of the chest to reveal the cavity.