Peter Lovesey - Last Detective

IN THE BRISTOL CITY MORTUARY a body lay on a steel trolley. In profile the swell of the stomach suggested nothing less than a mountainous landscape. Or to an imaginative eye it might have been evocative of a dinosaur lurking in a primeval swamp, except that a brown trilby hat of the sort seen in 1940s films rested on the hump. The body was clothed in a double-breasted suit much creased at the points of stress, grey in colour, with a broad check design - well known in the Avon and Somerset Police as the working attire of Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond. His silver-fringed bald head was propped on a rubber sheet he had found folded on a shelf. He was breathing evenly.

Peter Diamond was entitled to put his feet up. Ever since the phone beside his bed at home in Bear Flat, near Bath, had buzzed shortly after 1 a.m., he had been continuously on duty. By the time he had got to the scene at Chew Valley Lake and viewed the body, the local CID lads had set the wheels in motion, but there had remained decisions only Diamond could make, strings that only the man in charge could pull. He'd pulled more strings than Segovia.

Clearly a naked body in a lake was a suspicious death, warranting the attendance of a Home Office pathologist. Resolved to get the top man rather than one of the local police surgeons who was simply empowered to certify that death had occurred, Diamond had personally called Dr Jack Merlin at his home seventy miles away in Reading and spelt out the facts. Fewer than thirty forensic pathologists were on the Home Office list for England and Wales, and several lived closer than Merlin to Chew Valley Lake. Diamond had set his sights on Jack Merlin. Experience had taught him to shop around for the best. In practice two or three pathologists bore the brunt of the work for the whole of southern England, sometimes motoring vast distances to attend the scenes of crimes. Dr Merlin was grossly overworked, even without the emergency calls, obliged by the system to perform many routine autopsies a year to provide funds for his forensic science unit. Reasonably enough, if he was called out to a corpse, he liked to be assured by the detective in charge that his attendance was indispensable.

Without altogether succumbing to Diamond's early morning charm, Merlin had responded at once. He had got to the scene by 3.30 a.m. Now, ten hours later, he was performing the autopsy in the room next door.

The sight of that unoccupied stretcher had been irresistible to Peter Diamond. Ostensibly he was there to witness the post mortem. The emphasis on scientific and technical know how in the modern police increasingly made it the custom for senior detectives investigating suspicious deaths to watch the pathologist at work. Diamond didn't embrace the opportunity as readily as some of his colleagues; he was content to rely on the pathologist's report. Not for the first time on the way to a post mortem had he taken the slow route and meticulously observed the speed limits. On arrival he'd spent some time cruising along Backfields looking for a parking space. Upon finally checking in at the mortuary to learn that the pathologist had started without him and Inspector Wigfull, his reliable assistant, had already gone in, he'd grinned and said, 'Botheration. Bully for John Wigfull. Time out for me.'

For the now-dormant Detective Superintendent, those first hours had been as stressful as they always were when you had to impose order on a situation as disorderly as sudden death. But the CID machine was humming now, the procedures set in motion with the coroner, the scenes-of-crime officers, the missing persons register, the forensic science laboratory and the press office. He could justifiably take his nap while waiting for the news from Jack Merlin.

The door of the dissecting room opened suddenly and woke him. There was a whiff of something unpleasant in the air: cheap floral perfume sprayed from an aerosol by a zealous technician. Diamond blinked, stretched, reached for his felt hat and raised it in a token greeting.

'You should have come in,' he heard Dr Merlin tell him.

'Too close to lunch.' Diamond hoisted himself ponderously on to an elbow. It was true that he wasn't used to missing lunch. He had stopped buying suits off the peg when he took up rugby and started thickening. The rugby had stopped eight years ago, when he was thirty-three. The thickening had not. It didn't trouble him. 'What's your snap verdict, then - subject to all the usual provisos?'

Merlin smiled tolerantly. Soft of speech, with a West Country accent redolent of blue skies and clotted cream, this slight, silver-haired man projected such optimism that it was a pity the people he attended were in no state to appreciate it. 'If I were you, Superintendent, I'd be rather excited.'

Diamond made a gesture in the direction of excitement by heaving himself into a sitting position, squirming around and dangling his legs over the side of the trolley.

Merlin went on to explain. 'It's the opportunity one of your sort dreams of - a real test of his sleuthing ability. An unidentified corpse. No clothes to identify her from a million other women. No marks of any significance. No murder weapon.'

'What do you mean - "one of your sort"?'

'You know very well what I mean, Peter. You're the end of an era. The last detective. A genuine gumshoe, not some lad out of police school with a degree in computer studies.'

Diamond was unamused. 'No murder weapon, you said. You're willing to confirm murder?'

'I didn't say that. I wouldn't, would I? I'm in the business of making incisions, not deductions.'

'I just want any help you can give me,' said Diamond, too weary to argue professional demarcations. 'Did she drown?'

Merlin vibrated his lips as if to buy time. 'Good question.'

'Well?'

'I'll say this. The body has the appearance you would expect after prolonged immersion.'

'Come on, Jack,' Diamond urged him. 'You must know if she drowned. Even I know the signs. Foam in the mouth and nostrils. Bulging of the lungs. Mud and silt in the internal organs.'

'Thanks,' said Merlin with irony.

'You tell me, then.'

'No foam. No over-distension. No silt. Is that what you needed to know, Superintendent?'

Diamond was accustomed to asking the questions, so he tended to ignore any addressed to him. He stared and said nothing.

Someone stepped out of the autopsy room carrying a white plastic bag. He spoke something in greeting and Diamond recognized him as one of the scenes-of-crime officers. The bag now on its way to the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory at Chepstow was known in the trade as the guts kit.

'Drowning is one of the most difficult diagnoses in forensic pathology,' Merlin resumed. 'In this case, decomposition makes it even more of a lottery. I can't exclude drowning simply because none of the classical signs are present. The foam and the ballooning of the lungs and so on may be present when a body is retrieved from water soon after a drowning occurs. They may not. And if they are not, we can't exclude drowning. The majority of cases of drowning I've seen over the years have lacked any of these so-called classical signs. And after a period of immersion ...' He shrugged. 'Disappointed?'

'What else could have killed her, then?'

'Impossible to say at this stage. They'll test for drugs and alcohol.'

'You found no other signs?'

'Other signs, as you put it, were conspicuously absent. Chepstow may give us a pointer. This is rather a challenge for me, too.' Merlin didn't go so far as to rub his hands, but his blue eyes certainly gleamed in anticipation. 'A real puzzle. It might be more productive to determine what didn't kill her. She was definitely not shot, stabbed, battered or strangled.'

'And she wasn't mauled by a tiger. Come on, Jack, what have I got to go on?'