The Blackhouse by Peter May Read Free Book Online Page B

there.” He dropped the ghost pill carefully into a plastic evidence bag and sealed it. “You see, we’re clever bastards these days.”
    â€œWhat about DNA?” Fin looked at the dried lumps of undigested food stuck to the fabric of the fleece, and could not begin to guess what they were. It seemed that no matter what you ate, it nearly always came back up looking like diced carrots in porridge. “Will you be able to get any out of that lot?”
    â€œOh, I imagine so. We’re sure to find mouth mucosa cells in the saliva. We’ll get DNA from the nuclei of any of the cells lining the mouth, or the oesophagus, or the stomach itself. They slough off all the time, and will certainly be part of the vomitus.”
    â€œWill it take long?” Gunn said.
    â€œIf we get the specimen to the DNA lab some time this afternoon. Extraction, amplification … we should have a result by late tomorrow morning.” The professor put a finger to his lips. “But don’t tell anyone, otherwise everyone’ll want their results that fast.”
    Fin said, “The CIO says he’s going to take anything up to two hundred DNA samples to run past whatever you extract from this lot.”
    â€œAh.” Professor Wilson smiled, and his beard bristled. “That’ll take a little longer. And besides, we have not yet established that this isn’t the victim’s own vomitus.”
    Two white-coated assistants wearing large yellow rubber gloves wheeled the body in from the six-shelved refrigerator across the hall and transferred it to the autopsy table. Angel Macritchie was a big man. Bigger than Fin remembered him, and probably fifty pounds heavier than when he had last seen him. He would not have disgraced the front row of a rugby scrum. The thick black hair he had inherited from his father was a good deal thinner now, more silver than black. His skin was a pale putty grey in death. The lips that taunted, and the fists that damaged, were slack and powerless now to inflict the emotional and physical pain that they had dispensed with such ease through all those childhood years.
    Fin looked at him, trying to remain dispassionate, but even Angel’s dead presence made him tense and knotted his stomach so that he felt physically sick. He let his eyes wander to the dreadful opening across his abdomen. Inflated loops of shiny small intestine, pink-tan in colour, had burst through the opening in the abdominal wall, held by a sheet of fat that Fin knew, from the Edinburgh post-mortem, was called the mesentery. There also seemed to be a balloon of large bowel pushing through. Dried blood and body fluid streaked Angel’s thighs. His tiny, flaccid penis looked like a dried fig. Fin turned to see DI Gunn standing toward the back of the room, almost pressed against the window. He was very pale.
    Professor Wilson drew blood from the femoral veins at the top of the legs and vitreous fluid from the eyes. Fin always found it hard to watch a needle entering an eyeball. There was something peculiarly vulnerable about the eyes.
    Muttering almost inaudibly into a handheld recorder, the professor examined first the feet and then the legs, noting reddish-purple bruising on the knees, before coming to the opening in the abdomen. “Hmmm. The wound starts higher up on the left side of the abdomen, with the terminus lower on the right, tapering away almost to a skin scratch at the very tip.”
    â€œIs that significant?” Fin said.
    The professor straightened up. “Well, it means that the blade used to inflict the wound was slashed across the abdomen right to left, from the killer’s perspective.”
    Fin suddenly saw his point. “It was left to right in Edinburgh. Does that mean one was right-handed, the other left?”
    â€œWe can’t tell handedness, Fin. You should bloody well know that by now! You can slash either way with the same hand. All it means is, they were