The Blackhouse by Peter May

different.” He ran a latexed finger along the upper edge of the wound, where the skin had darkened as it dried. “The wound inflicted on the Edinburgh victim was deeper, too, more violent, severing the mesentery from the retroperitoneum. You’ll remember, there were about three feet of small intestine hanging between the legs in loops that had been partially severed and drained.” Fin recalled the smell of it at the scene, streaks of pale green and yellow marbling the blood on the pavement. And at the post-mortem the small bowel, emptied of its juices, had been a dull, dark gold in appearance, quite unlike Angel’s. “There’s just a wedge of omentum which has pushed out here, and a bulb of the transverse colon.” The professor worked his way around the wound and its protrusions. He measured it. “Twenty-five and a half centimetres. Shorter, I think, than in Edinburgh, but I’ll need to check that. And this man’s much heavier. He would have presented a bigger target area.”
    The external examination moved on to the hands and arms. The professor noted bruising around both elbows. There were old scars on hands ingrained with oil, and he scraped some of the black accumulation of it from beneath bitten fingernails. “Interesting. These certainly do not look like the hands of a man who put up a desperate struggle to ward off his attacker. There is no sign of trauma, no skin beneath the fingernails.”
    Careful scrutiny of the chest showed no trauma there either. But there was clear bruising on the neck, the same reddish-purple as the knees and the elbows. A row of four round bruises on the left side of the neck, two of them close to half an inch in diameter, one larger oval on the right side. “Consistent with having been caused by fingertips. And you can see the little crescent-shaped abrasions associated with them. Made by the killer’s fingernails. There are tiny flakes of skin heaped up at the concave side.” The professor glanced up at Fin. “It’s interesting, you know, how little pressure it takes to strangle someone. You don’t have to stop them breathing, just prevent the blood draining from the head. The jugular veins that carry blood away from the head only require about four and a half pounds of pressure to cut them off. Whereas the carotid arteries carrying blood to the head require about eleven pounds to put them out of action. You’d have to apply about sixty-six pounds of pressure to cut off the vertebral arteries, and thirty-three pounds to choke off the trachea. In this case you can see the florid petechial haemorrhaging around the face.” He peeled back the eyelids, beneath a large purple bruise on the right temple. “Yes, and also here around the conjunctivae. Which would suggest that death might have been caused by cutting off the venous drainage.”
    He moved back to the neck. “Interesting, though, that again there is no indication that our Angel put up any kind of a fight. Someone defending themselves might be likely to scratch their own neck as they tried to prise away their attacker’s hands. Which is another reason one would have expected to find skin beneath the fingernails. Interesting, too, that the trauma around the neck here, inflicted by the rope, the colour of the bruising, would indicate that he was almost certainly dead by the time he was strung up.” He moved toward the bench where he had laid out the photographs. “And if you look at the photography, the pooling of the blood on the ground, and compare it with the way the blood and fluid has streaked down the body, one could only be drawn to conclude that the disembowelling took place once our Angel had been suspended from the roof, and after he was dead. The blood was not under pressure when the wound was inflicted, otherwise there would have been telltale spatter patterns on the floor. It simply drained from the body through the