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.”

Five

Five

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.”