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Sunday afternoon

Charlie was still angry when he arrived in Hector Powell’s autopsy suite after another Sunday driver-ridden journey. He always thought of it as belonging to Hector, though there were other pathologists, including, bizarrely, Powell’s wife Sasha, doing a placement from her university course. “We bonded over corpses,” she had told him airily. Today, he was even angry — jealous — of the easy way Sasha and Hector managed Unwin’s body between them, laying it out on the stainless steel table, ready for examination. He didn’t want to see Unwin naked and helpless, unmoving, his flesh mottled and cold, unable to stop the coming dissection. He had been talking to Unwin the day before, and here he was, a case. Somehow, it was worse that this invasion of Unwin’s body was to be carried out by two people whose love was still strong and obvious. That was how he and Tom had been, and it was how Unwin and Patsy had been. There was no way back from this for Patsy and it made Charlie want to scream.

“I don’t want to see this.” The words burst out from Charlie without conscious decision on his part, looking down at the tiled floor, concentrating on the marks left when it had been last mopped. From the corner of his eye, Charlie saw the sweep of something white, and then Hector was beside him, a gentle hand on his arm.

“You don’t have to,” Hector said. “There are things you will need to know, but you don’t have to watch if it’s too much. There’s a chair over by the wall, or you can wait in my office.”

Charlie looked up to see that Unwin’s body was now covered by a sheet. He breathed out. Unwin was still dead, but not being able to see bare skin, hair, feet, and fingers made it more bearable.

“Could you stay while I look at the head injuries?” Hector asked, and Charlie nodded.

Hector moved back to the body and uncovered only Unwin’s head and neck. Thick hair covered his head, making the damage hard to see, but Charlie remembered the pool of dried blood on the carpet of the upstairs room.

“Here … and here,” Hector was saying, parting the hair with probing fingers as Sasha took notes. Then, “Let’s turn him over.”

Charlie looked away as Hector and Sasha removed the sheet, turned the body and replaced the sheet. Hector returned to his probing and measuring, murmuring to Sasha, and occasionally asking her to help. After some minutes, Hector stood back, and Sasha replaced the sheet.

“I want to see inside the skull, to be one hundred percent certain,” Hector said, “but for now, I can confidently say that your colleague died from these wounds, probably from the very first blow. I’m also convinced that the hammer found with the body was the implement that delivered those wounds.”

There was some comfort in the thought that Unwin had died from the first blow. Not much, but some.

“The other thing I can be confident about is that the first blow was delivered by someone standing behind and to the right-hand side of the victim, and from the angle, I would say that the attacker was smaller than him. The other blows indicate that the victim was on the ground when they were struck.”

Charlie felt sick. An image of someone striking the fallen Unwin repeatedly came into his head and refused to leave.

“How much smaller?” he croaked.

“Hard to say,” Hector replied. “I’ll measure the angle more accurately later, but the blow was not from above, but rather from below and to the side.” He mimed blows to Sasha’s head by way of illustration.

“It could be someone not used to using a hammer as a weapon,” Sasha chimed in, and then said, “Sorry. I’ll shut up.”

“It’s a reasonable observation,” Hector said. “Though we usually leave that kind of speculation to the police.”

“OK, here’s another one,” Sasha said, apparently forgetting that she had promised to be quiet. “When I was at school, we had self-defence classes from this policewoman. She showed us how to do that thing where you poke your keys between your fingers, told us to go for the eyes and the balls and not to carry a knife. She said most people have no idea how to use a knife, but that almost everyone knows how to use a hammer.”

The words hung in the empty air around Charlie. He could hear the background hum of the refrigerated cabinets, the sound of birds outside the high windows, people shouting in the street and the squeak of Sasha’s trainers on the tiled floor. The stink of formaldehyde, or whatever other chemicals were in use, filled his nose and mouth. His throat seemed constricted again, so he cleared it.

“Can you get us any closer to the time of death?” he asked. At the scene, Hector hadn’t wanted to be drawn about when Unwin died, though he had taken the usual measurements of body and ambient temperature. “Sometime last night, or possibly earlier,” had been as far as he was prepared to go.

“That depends,” Hector said. “Do you know when he last ate? And what he ate?”

“I can find out, if I can get hold of the guy he was with in the afternoon,” Charlie said. He knew about the role of stomach contents in determining the time of death, but that was something else he didn’t want to think about.

“Why don’t you go and sit in my office and make your calls? The coffee machine is easy to use. Biscuits in the bottom drawer of the desk. I’ll come and get you if I find anything you need to see. Otherwise, we’ll be about an hour.”

Charlie’s legs had seized up, so that he struggled to bend his knees enough to walk, but he made it to Hector’s office, and onto Hector’s desk chair. He closed his eyes, feeling his skin tingle with the anticipation of a few moments’ sleep. Instead of succumbing, he stood up and pulled out his phone to ring Dylan.

“I said dinner,” Dylan replied, after Charlie had explained what information he needed. “But it was quite early, maybe sixish? And it was just a big salad with lots of cheese and some prawns. No booze. I wanted to work, and Unwin had his car.”

“So, Unwin left you, what, about seven?”

“Earlier. I heard the seven o’clock news on the radio, and he’d gone by then.”

That meant Unwin could have been in Llanfair long before Charlie, Eddy and Patsy took up their stations in the town centre.

“Have you found out what happened to him yet?”

Charlie said they hadn’t, and once again, promised to stay in touch. Then he ended the call and let the phone drop onto the desk in front of him. None of it proved anything. Plenty of people were shorter than Unwin. Hell, he was shorter than Unwin. Just because Unwin could have been in Llanfair while Patsy was out of the police station, didn’t mean he was. Just because Patsy’s time was unaccounted for now, didn’t mean it wouldn’t be accounted for later. But if anyone knew how to use a hammer, Patsy would. It would be yet another of her skills. It wasn’t her. Surely, it wasn’t her.

Charlie fell asleep.