Leave the Grave Green

“I’ll just leave the tidying up to my assistant,” Winstead said over his shoulder to Kincaid. “She likes to do the pretty work. Don’t you, Heather darling?” he added, smiling at her. “Gives her a sense of job satisfaction.” He peeled off his gloves, tossed them in a rubbish bin and scrubbed his hands at the sink.

Heather rolled her eyes indulgently. “He’s just jealous,” she said sotto voce to Kincaid, “because I’m neater than he is.” She slipped on a pair of gloves and continued. “This chap’s mum would be proud of him by the time I’m finished, isn’t that so, Winnie?”

At least Connor Swann’s adoring mum had been spared admiring Heather’s handiwork, thought Kincaid. He wondered if Julia would defy convention to the extent of avoiding the mortuary and the funeral.

As Winstead ushered Kincaid from the room he said, “She’s right, I’m afraid. I get the job done, but she’s a perfectionist, and her hand is much finer than mine.” He led Kincaid down several halls, stopping on the way to retrieve two coffees from a vending machine. “Black?” he asked, pushing buttons with familiarity.

Kincaid accepted the paper cup and sipped, finding the liquid just as dreadful as its counterpart at the Yard. He followed Winstead into his office and stopped, examining the human skull which adorned the doctor’s desk. Attached to the facial surface by pins were small cylinders of rubber, each of varying height with a black number inked on its tip. “Voodoo or art, Doctor?”

“A facial reconstruction technique, lent to me by an anthropologist chum. A guess as to sex and race is made by measuring certain characteristics of the skull, then the skin depth markers are placed according to information from statistical tables. Clay is added to a thickness that conforms to the markers, and Bob’s your uncle, you have a human face again. It’s quite effective, actually, even if this stage does look like something from Nightmare on Elm Street

. Heather is interested in forensic sculpture, and with her hands I don’t doubt she’d be good at it.”

Before Winstead wandered too far on the subject of the lovely Heather’s attributes, Kincaid thought he had better redirect him. “Tell me, Doctor,” he said as they settled into worn leather chairs, “did Connor Swann drown?”

Winstead knitted his brows, an exercise which made him look comical rather than fierce, and seemed to bring himself back to the body in question. “That’s a pretty problem, Superintendent, as I’m sure you very well know. Drowning is impossible to prove by autopsy. It is, in fact, a diagnosis of exclusion.”

“But surely you can tell if he had water in his lungs—”

“Do hold on, Superintendent, let me finish. Water in the lungs is not necessarily significant. And I didn’t say I couldn’t tell you anything, only that it couldn’t be proved.” Winstead paused and drank from his cup, then made a face. “I’m an eternal optimist, I suppose—I always expect this stuff to be better than it is. Anyway, where was I?” He smiled benignly and took another sip of his coffee.

Kincaid decided Winstead was teasing him deliberately, and that the less he fussed the faster he’d hear the results. “You were about to tell me what you couldn’t prove.”

“Gunshot wounds, stabbing, blunt trauma—all fairly straightforward, cause of death easily determined. A case like this, however, is a puzzle, and I like puzzles.” Winstead uttered this with such relish that Kincaid half-expected him to rub his hands together in anticipatory glee. “There are two things which contradict drowning,” he continued, holding up the requisite fingers. “No foreign material present in the lungs. No sand, no nice slimy river-bottom weeds. If one inhales great gulps of water in the act of drowning, one usually takes in a few undesirable objects as well.” He folded down one finger and waggled the remainder at Kincaid. “Secondly, rigor mortis was quite delayed. The temperature of the water would account for some degree of retardation, of course, but in an ordinary, garden-variety drowning the person struggles violently, depleting the ATP in their muscles, and this depletion speeds up the onset of rigor considerably.”

“But what if there was a struggle before he went in the water? His throat was bruised—he might have been unconscious. Or dead.”

“There are several indications that he died quite a few hours before his body was discovered,” Winstead admitted. “The stomach contents were only partially digested, so unless your Mr. Swann ate a very late supper indeed, I’d guess he was dead by midnight, or as close to it as makes no difference. When the analysis of the stomach contents comes back from the lab you may be able to pinpoint that last meal.”

“And the bruising—”