The Blackhouse by Peter May Page A

wound.”
    Gunn said, “So you’re saying that the order of things was that he was strangled to death, then hung from the rafters and disembowelled?”
    â€œNo, I’m not saying anything of the sort.” The professor was short on patience. “I’m thinking aloud. Jesus Christ, we’ve only just started the fucking examination.”
    The assistants carefully turned the body over, and loose flesh fell away from folds of fat around the midriff and settled on cold steel. Great flabby white buttocks were dimpled and streaked with wiry black hair. The same body hair that grew in tight curls around the neck and shoulders. There was no visible sign of trauma except, once more, at the neck.
    â€œAhhh …” The professor shook his head, disappointed. “I had half hoped to find the roots of wings beneath his shoulder blades.” He moved on up to the scalp and started working carefully through the hair, parting and reparting it as if he were looking for fleas.
    â€œThink you might find horns instead?” Fin said.
    â€œWould you be surprised if I did?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAhhh …” This time the professor had found something that did not disappoint him. He crossed to his toolkit, removed a scalpel, and then returned to the body to start paring away an area of hair high up on the back of the scalp, revealing a purple-red patch a little bigger than the size of a walnut, and an oval indentation that was soft beneath the fingers. The skin was broken, and there was evidence of dried blood. “A nasty little crack on the skull.”
    â€œSomeone took him out from behind,” Fin said.
    â€œIt would appear that way. Bruising his knees and arms and forehead as he went down, pretty heavily by the looks of it. The shape of the indentation in the skull would indicate that he was hit with a metal tube, a baseball bat, something round like that. We’ll get a better idea when we open up the skull.”
    With the body turned faceup, and the head supported on a shaped metal block, Professor Wilson began peeling back the layers of Angel’s hidden secrets. He made a “Y” incision, cutting in from each shoulder to a point at the breastbone, and then drawing the blade down through the centre of the chest, stomach, and abdomen to the pubes so that he could lay back the flesh on either side to reveal the ribcage. He used a pair of heavy shears to cut through the ribs before dislocating them at the clavicle, removing the breast bone and both halves of the shield that the human body has evolved to protect the delicate internal organs. One by one those organs were removed—heart, lungs, liver, kidneys—and taken to the workbench at the far end of the room to be weighed. Each measurement was chalked up on a blackboard, before the organs were sectioned into wedges, like slices of bread, for examination.
    Angel had been in average condition for a man of his age and weight, lungs darkened from years of smoking, arteries hardened, but not in imminent danger of shutting down completely. His liver showed the ravages of too much alcohol consumed over too many years, the pale grey-brown colour of mild cirrhosis, nodular and scarred. The professor had to dig through thick layers of retroperitoneal fat to retrieve the kidneys.
    The slimy, fluid-filled purse of the stomach was drained into a stainless steel bowl. Fin recoiled from the smell, but Professor Wilson seemed to savour it. He sniffed several times, like a dog, his eyes closed. “Curry,” he said. “Could be lamb bhuna.” His eyes twinkled as he caught Fin’s revulsion.
    DI Gunn said in a small voice, “He had a curry at the Balti House in Stornoway about eight o’clock on Saturday night.”
    â€œHmmm,” said the professor. “I wish I’d tried it last night.”
    Fin exhaled deeply with distaste. “Smells like alcohol, too.”
    â€œAccording to witnesses