3

       Late Thursday afternoon

      Sean and Donnelly walked along the corridors of Guy’s Hospital, heading for the mortuary. They were accompanied by Detective Constable Sam Muir who would be acting as exhibits officer – taking responsibility for any objects the pathologist found on or in the body during the post-mortem. Sean wondered if he would bump into his wife, Kate, one of the all too few doctors attending to the never-ending flow of patients through the Accident and Emergency department – the sick and injured from the surrounding areas of Southwark, Bermondsey and beyond. Some of London’s poorest and most forgotten, living in council flats where violence and crime were seldom far away, yet all of their degradation and suffering going unnoticed and unseen by the swarms of tourists wandering around Tower Bridge and Tooley Street. If only they knew how close they were to some of London’s most dangerous territory.

      His mind returned to the victim’s parents. He and Sally had called at the small terraced house in Putney. A desirable neighbourhood on the whole, but boisterous on weekend evenings. Sally had done most of the talking.

      Daniel had been their only child. The mother was devastated and didn’t care who saw her fall to the floor screaming. Her despair was a physical pain. When she could speak, all she could say was the name of her son.

      The father was stunned. He didn’t know whether to help his wife or collapse himself. He ended up doing neither. Sean took him into the living room. Sally stayed with the mother.

      They knew their son was gay. It had bothered the father at first, but he grew to accept it. What else could he do other than push the boy away? And he would never do that. He said his son worked as a nightclub manager. He wasn’t sure where, but Daniel had been doing well for himself and had no money problems, unlike other young people.

      He hadn’t met any of his son’s friends. Daniel hadn’t kept in touch with his old school friends. He came home quite often, almost every Sunday for lunch. If he had a boyfriend then neither he nor his wife knew about it. Their son had said he wasn’t interested in anything like that. They hadn’t pressed him.

      The father had asked what they were to do now. His wife would be finished. She lived for the boy, not him. He knew it and didn’t mind − but with the boy gone?

      He wanted to know who would do this to his boy – who would do this to them? Why? Sean had no answers.

      As the three detectives entered the mortuary they could see Dr Simon Canning preparing for the post-mortem. A body lay covered with a green sheet on what Sean knew would be a cold, metal operating table. Water continually ran under the body to an exit drain as the pathologist did his work, so that the whole thing resembled a large, shallow, stainless-steel bathtub.

      Some detectives could detach themselves from the ugly reality of post-mortems, bury themselves in the science and art of the procedure. Unfortunately, Sean was not one of those detectives. For days to come images of his own post-mortem would blend with the memories of his shattered childhood. Meanwhile Dr Simon Canning was busy arranging his tools – bright, shiny, metal instruments for torturing the dead.

      ‘Afternoon, detectives.’

      ‘Doctor. Good to see you again,’ Sean replied.

      ‘I doubt that,’ said the pathologist. Canning was pleasant enough, but businesslike and succinct. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Inspector. I’ve started without you. I was just having a bit of a clean up before continuing. Right then, shall we get on with it?’

      The doctor pulled back the sheet covering the body with one quick movement of his arm. Sean almost expected him to say, ‘Voila!’ like a waiter lifting the lid off a silver platter.

      The hair on the back and side of the head was matted with blood − it looked sticky. Sean could clearly see the gashes in the side of the head and the small stab marks all over the naked body.

      ‘Seventy-seven,’ Canning told him.

      Sean realized he was being spoken to. He glanced up at the doctor. ‘Sorry?’

      ‘Separate stab wounds. Seventy-seven in total. None in the back of the body. All in the front. Made by some form of stiletto knife, or an ice pick, but it’s the first blow to the head that killed him. Eventually.’

      Dr Canning pointed to the head wound. Sean forced himself to lean closer to the body. ‘One can see the ear is missing. Not cut off, but more a case of the victim being hit so hard that whatever he was hit with crushed the skull and still had enough energy to tear the ear away as the swing of the object carried through.’

      ‘Nice,’ was all Sean said.

      ‘And the victim was on his knees when the first blow was struck,’ the doctor continued. ‘We can see the cut to the scalp is angled downwards, not upwards. The killer swung low, not high.’

      ‘Or he was hit from behind?’ Sean offered.

      ‘No,’ Canning told him. ‘He fell backwards, not forwards. Look at the stains from the flow of blood. They run to the back of the head, not towards the face.’

      He looked at the detectives, making sure they were concentrating on what he was saying and not what they were seeing. He had their attention.

      ‘But