Read Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation for Free Online Page A

she moved to the head and made a cut all the way around the back of the skull, following the hairline, and then with a grotesque crackling sound she pulled the scalp forward, exposing the bony,bloody plates of the skull and leaving the flesh resting on the face like an eyeless, mouthless mask of raw meat. Cutting through the skull, she eased the brain free of its bony confines, lifting it up so she could cut through the spinal cord. The brain went with the rest of the internal organs, and Jane stepped back, examining her handiwork.
    Jane glanced at her watch. ‘Fancy some lunch?’ she said to Emma. ‘It’s getting late. There’s a decent little bistro just across the road.‘’
    ‘Thanks,’ Emma said, dry-mouthed, ‘but I don’t really fancy anything at the moment. I’m happy to have a glass of water while you eat, though, if you promise not to have anything with beef or pork it in.’
    ‘Just pasta,’ said Jane, ‘I promise.’ She turned to where her assistant, Dan, was standing against the far wall, waiting. ‘Close this lady up,’ she said, ‘and then take samples from the organs and send them to Mr Burrows for analysis. And see if you can reconstruct what her face looked like before the cuts were made, based on the photographs and the remaining skin and subcutaneous fat. I’ll be back in an hour or so.’
    Emma and Jane left the mortuary and walked across to the Italian restaurant. Emma found herself having to slow down, just like she’d done in the car, to make sure that she stayed with the pathologist.
    Sitting down with a bottle of sparkling mineral water in front of them and Jane’s order being prepared, Emma voiced the question she’d been wanting to ask for hours.
    ‘What happened to her?’
    ‘Difficult to say at the moment,’ Jane replied judiciously. ‘There are traces of chafing on the wrists and the ankles, so I suspect that she was bound tightly for a period of time. The skin is bruised but not broken, suggesting that whatever wasused to restrain her was soft and flexible, not hard and unyielding. My initial findings are that there is some chafing over chafing, which leads me to believe that she was unbound and then bound again several times—’
    ‘—Suggesting that she was tied up for a while.’
    ‘Yes.’ Jane Catherall paused for a moment, thinking. ‘At the risk of being indelicate, the area around the anus and the perineum shows signs of staining and blistering.’
    ‘I don’t like where this is going,’ Emma sighed, feeling her stomach briefly clench.
    ‘She has been forced to sit in her own bodily waste for some time before being cleaned up, poor child. Part and parcel of the process of restraint, I would venture.’
    ‘All of this is sounding more and more like sexual perversion,’ Emma said grimly.
    Jane made a
tch
sound through her teeth. ‘Perhaps, but my initial examination of her labial area showed no obvious tears or bruises. The sexual assault tests will tell us more.’
    ‘And what about the obvious wounds on the body?’
    ‘At first sight, I thought the various cuts and slices were inflicted by some sharp-edged instrument such as a machete or a samurai sword, but if that were true then you would expect some directionality to the cuts.’ She took her knife off the table and leaned over towards Emma, tracing cuts across her face, shoulders and chest. ‘If the killer had been standing in front of her then cuts on one shoulder should have been pointing in a different direction to the cuts on the other shoulder, and I should have been able to trace all the cuts back to a point directly in front of her – ’ she tapped her right shoulder with her left hand – ‘like so.’ She heaved herself back to her seat, and started hacking at the white tablecloth instead. ‘Or if the perpetrator had been standing over the victim, if she was tiedto a table perhaps, being tortured, then the cuts should have been similarly traceable back to a different point, off to