Newbury & Hobbes 04 - The Executioner's Heart by George Mann Read Free Book Online

how much he could extrapolate from any given injury or mark, from an eviscerated belly to the pinprick of a needle in an upper arm. He could unravel what had happened to a victim simply by reading the direction of their wounds or the objects in their pockets.
    Not that it was difficult to see what had happened here. Just like the others—the elderly man and the middle-aged woman with whom he now made uneasy bedfellows—the younger man’s chest had been cracked open and his heart ripped viciously from within. Even now his rib cage yawned open, split into a ragged-edged wound. Around the gaping hole the flesh was puckered, waxy, and spattered with gore. His hands were fixed like rigid claws by his sides, as if he’d been raking at something in the moments before he died, either in self-defence, or more likely in abject pain. Perhaps both. His shirt and jacket—now little more than ragged, bloodied strips—still hung loosely from his shoulders. They had clearly been torn open in a hurry to provide access to the flesh and bone beneath. It seemed to Veronica that the makeshift surgery had been performed while the man was still alive.
    The smell, of course, was horrendous. The corpses had already begun to decompose, particularly those of the two men. The woman was a more recent addition, a victim from the prior evening, Veronica had been told, although her flesh had already lost its pinkish hue through so much blood loss, leaving the body looking pale and doll-like.
    She wondered what Bainbridge had found at the scene. She could only begin to imagine the amount of spilled blood. It must have been everywhere, pooling on the floor, sprayed up the walls, dripping off the furniture. She shuddered as she thought about these pale, violated corpses in situ in their homes. Here, as harrowing as they were to look upon, they seemed to belong. Here in the morgue, that was where corpses like these were supposed to reside. But in their own homes, butchered like swine and surrounded by the accoutrements of their lives, they would have been utterly incongruous, somehow even more awful to witness.
    She’d seen their like before, of course, more times than she cared to remember, and each and every occasion had left an indelible impression upon her.
    Sometimes she wondered if her life would always be steeped in death.
    She laughed at herself. Now she was just being maudlin. Although it was difficult not to be while surrounded by the remains of the recently deceased.
    She tore her eyes away from the body of the young man, looking for Bainbridge. She needed a distraction.
    He was standing beneath the tiled archway at the other end of the antechamber—really nothing more than a screened off section of passageway—deep in conversation with another man, a Professor Archibald Angelchrist.
    Veronica wasn’t quite sure what the man was doing there at the morgue, but she harboured a growing sense of suspicion. He had never been properly introduced to her, and ever since he’d arrived he’d been speaking with Bainbridge in hushed tones, evidently intent on excluding her from the conversation. She’d gathered he was a government advisor, although she was not yet entirely sure in what capacity. She’d also gleaned that he already knew Newbury, which had come as something of a surprise. Newbury had never mentioned him, not even in passing. Whatever the purpose of his attendance, it was obscure and left her feeling a little uncomfortable. Well, more uncomfortable.
    Clearly, though, he and Bainbridge were close. Veronica suspected the man had something to do with whatever secretive business Bainbridge had been getting up to with the Home Secretary these last few months. He was always heading off for meetings of an undisclosed nature, waving away her questions on the matter as if they weren’t important. This was despite the amount of time they had spent together over the summer while she’d assisted him on a number of unusual cases.
    Newbury had