She pressed the buzzer and waited to enter.
‘Matilda, come on in.’ The door was opened by radiologist Claire Alexander who performed the digital autopsies. She was dressed in oversized scrubs. Her face was red, and her hair was stuck to her forehead from sweating. Despite the grim nature of her job, Claire always had a smile on her face and welcomed Matilda with open arms.
‘You’re going to love me when I tell you what I’ve found,’ Claire began, heading straight for the Digital Autopsy suite.
‘Oh,’ Matilda was slightly taken off guard. She was hoping for a cup of tea first, maybe five minutes to compose herself.
‘We’ve scanned all three victims this morning. I think Adele is ready to get started on the invasive post mortems. Are you on your own?’ Claire asked, stopping in the middle of the corridor and turning around.
‘For now. I’ve got Ranjeet coming down.’
‘Right. Come on through.’
Claire opened the door into the small ante-room next to the main suite. As usual, the heat was stifling due to the bank of computers and scanning equipment. The atmosphere was heavy, not purely because of the heat, but the knowledge of what went on in this room. It seemed to be embedded in the walls. The usually clear desk had birthday cards dotted about, a reminder than even though this was a place of death, life does go on.
‘Whose birthday is it?’
‘It was mine on Monday. I should probably take these down now.’
‘Many happy returns.’
‘Thank you. Don’t even think about asking how old I am; I’m trying to put it out of my mind.’
‘Did you do anything special?’
‘I had a meal out with a couple of friends and I’m off to London this weekend to see a play,’ she said, a beaming smile lighting up her face.
Matilda smiled back. It seemed strange to talk about the usual practices of everyday life in a mortuary. She often wondered how people like Claire and Adele were able to do their job without it encroaching on their private lives. Matilda often took her work home with her. She spent many sleepless nights going over conversations, interviews, and statements to see if she had missed anything. Watching Claire deftly hammer away on the keyboard, bringing up images of dead bodies on the large computer screens, she doubted Claire would still be awake at 2 a.m. torturing herself about a bullet entry wound.
‘I’m going to talk you through Serena Mercer’s killing first. Now, we believe this to be the last of the killings. I’ll come to the reason why in a moment. However, this is an image of Serena’s face and chest.’
A black-and-white X-ray filled the screen. Matilda had no idea what she was looking at. She didn’t know one artery from another. Fortunately, she didn’t have to.
‘As you know, the attack was frenzied. Now, it’s difficult to establish the trajectory of the stab wounds as there was a lot of haemorrhaging which is obscuring the soft tissue. However, air tracks through the soft tissue and we can follow the path of the air to the initial stab wound.’ She looked over at Matilda who had a blank expression on her face. ‘Do you follow?’
‘I think so.’
Claire turned to another computer screen where a more detailed image of Serena Mercer appeared. In glorious technicolour, Matilda could see every muscle and vein in the dead woman’s face, neck and chest.
‘From the outside, we can see that she was stabbed twenty-eight times. Eight in the face, six in the neck, five in the chest, and nine times in the stomach.’
‘Can you tell which one killed her?’
‘The ones to the neck did the most damage. They cut through the major nerves and arteries. Both the internal and external jugular veins were severed,’ she said, pointing to them on the screen.
‘I’d have thought you’d have said the ones that ripped out her intestines.’
‘She was most likely dead by then. Also, I think your killer was getting tired by that point too. You can see where the knife dragged along the stomach, almost tearing it open rather than stabbing. Either he was getting tired or his knife was getting blunt.’
‘So why do you think she was killed last?’
‘Ah, this is the clever part. Take a look here.’ She zoomed in close and pointed to the clavicle bone in the chest. ‘Do you see that white line?’
‘Yes,’ Matilda said, leaning in to look at the pure white, but incredibly small, line. ‘What is it?’
‘That is the tip of the knife.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ she replied with a smile. ‘The knife hit the clavicle, the shoulder blade, and snapped the tip right off. Obviously, I don’t know how many knives your killer had but all three victims have similar size stab wounds. I’m guessing two different sized knives, but he could have had more than one with the same sized blade.’
‘Oh.’
Claire closed down the images of Serena and brought up the ones of her twenty-eight-year-old son.
‘Judging from where Jeremy Mercer was found, on the stairs, we can surmise he was the first victim. He also has the least amount of stab wounds – three. A fairly deep one to the trunk of the body but managed to miss the stomach. Another stab to the neck and one to the chest.’
Claire zoomed in on Jeremy’s stomach. ‘See this line, this is from a much larger knife compared to these two,’ she said, pointing to the stab wounds on his chest and neck. ‘Now, the tip from the large knife is what is embedded in Serena Mercer’s clavicle. The tip from the smaller knife is here,’ she pointed to a bright sliver of light in Jeremy Mercer’s chest. ‘It’s broken as the blade hit the sternum manubrium and it’s stuck here in the pectoral muscle.’
‘So, if he killed him first, damaged his knife, why haven’t we found it? Surely he would have thrown it to one side or something as his spree continued.’
‘In an attack this frenzied, knowing your killer had at least two knives, you’d imagine him to have one in each hand and be stabbing remorselessly. When one knife breaks you’d throw it away and keeping stabbing with the one you had left,’ Claire surmised.
‘That’s what I was thinking, too. He’s hardly going to stop, put the knife away, then continue.’
‘Unless he did throw it away then went back to collect it once he’d finished.’
‘Hmm,’ Matilda thought. ‘If he’s killed in the way he has done, with such ferocity, then gone back around the house to check he hasn’t left anything behind, that shows a man of such cold-blooded calculation. To walk around a house, having tied up one of his victims and leaving her alive, he is basically one disturbed and sick individual.’
Claire shuddered. ‘I am so glad I’m in here and not doing your job.’
‘Right now, I think I’d rather be doing your job too. This is one killer’s head I do not want to attempt to get into.’
Claire blew out her cheeks and unbuttoned her top button. It was getting stifling in the small room. ‘Do you want me to show you Clive Mercer or would you like to take a break?’
‘Let’s carry on,’ Matilda said. Her voice lowered and her eyes were wide. She was genuinely frightened by this killer.
‘Clive Mercer’s injuries were all to the neck. Thirty-seven stab wounds in total. His head was just hanging on with two tendons.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Matilda uttered.
‘He cut through the lot; the carotid artery, the auricular nerve, the