Tainted Ground Read Online Free PDF Page B

well.
    â€˜Anything you particularly want me to do first thing tomorrow?’ Patrick asked.
    â€˜How are you with post-mortems?’
    â€˜That wasn’t something I ever got involved with in the army.’
    â€˜Now’s the time to start, then. Rapton’s kicking off at eight thirty if you’d care to attend.’
    â€˜At the Royal United?’
    â€˜That’s right.’
    â€˜You’re an old hand at PMs,’ Patrick said to me encouragingly when we were outside. ‘You attended one not so long ago when you were researching your last novel.’
    â€˜Do you really want me to come along?’
    For an answer he gave me a big, brave, hopeful smile.
    â€˜But you’re not remotely squeamish,’ I protested. ‘You’ve seen all kinds of ghastly sights, people blown up with their innards all over the place and things like that.’
    â€˜It’s not quite the same as watching someone slice the top off a corpse’s head with a bandsaw.’
    I was not feeling particularly cheerful at the prospect either but gave him a big smile back and said, ‘At least these’ll be fresh. The last one had been dead for the best part of two years.’
    They were fresh
and
bloodless, of course. This, together with the starkly lit and antiseptic environment of the mortuary and Sir Hugh Rapton’s deft efficiency, helped to alleviate the grisliness of what was taking place. It was possible to become quite interested in a diseased liver, a heart showing signs of enlargement, the missing gall bladder and appendix.
    â€˜I would say this man had quite a few sessions in hospital,’ Rapton commented as he completed the work of removing internal organs for analysis, on this, his first post-mortem on the list. ‘Do we know their identities?’
    â€˜No,’ Patrick replied. ‘And I’ve never seen them before – my parents live in Hinton Littlemoor so I’m around the village quite a bit. For obvious reasons my father mostly knows the people who set foot in church.’
    â€˜In a nutshell then we have two white males and one white woman. They had been dead for less than twenty-four hours. One would assume that they’d been killed some time the previous night.’
    I was making notes.
    â€˜The first,’ Rapton resumed, ‘this man here, as you can see, was around fifty-five years of age, and slightly overweight, flabby really, five feet eight inches tall, weighing thirteen stone eleven pounds. And, as we’ve just observed, he wasn’t very healthy. Also, there are streaks of what looks like white emulsion paint in his hair and under his fingernails but obviously it’ll be sent for testing. I’d say from his physique he was normally a couch potato so perhaps he’d just moved to the area and forced to do some decorating. That’s just a guess, of course. I like to try to see beyond the obvious.
    â€˜The second male, whom we’ll take a look at in a minute, was younger. He’s twenty-five to thirty, six feet one inch tall and weighs twelve stone three. Fit-looking. There’s a scar on his chin and his top front teeth have been crowned so he might have been a bad boy and got into fights.’
    â€˜Any private thoughts about that one?’ Patrick prompted when the pathologist paused.
    â€˜He died with the kind of scowl on his face that suggested it was there for most of the time when he was alive.’
    â€˜He might have had a criminal record, then?’
    â€˜Just gut feelings,’ was all Rapton said. ‘If you’ll excuse the pun.’
    â€˜And the woman?’
    â€˜Well, she’s wearing a wedding ring but whether she’s the wife of this man here …’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll have to wait for the identification. Otherwise she’s about the same age, around fifty, thin, malnourished-looking. Five foot six, eight stone dead. Sorry about another pun. She was