The Blackhouse by Peter May Page B

he had a fair few pints at the Crobost Social after he got back from town,” Gunn told them.
    â€œWell,” the professor said, “I’d say the contents of his stomach are pretty much intact. Partially digested. No medication residue grossly identified. Ethanol odour is noted. Whatever cretinous cocktail of curry and alcohol he threw down there, he didn’t throw it up again. So I think we might begin to lean toward the thought that the vomitus found on his clothing was, indeed, that of his killer.”
    The pathologist began, then, to cut the guts free of their layers of fat, unlooping them and slicing them open along their length with a pair of scissors. The smell of excrement was almost unbearable. It was all Fin could do to stop himself from gagging. He heard Gunn gasping, and turned to see him with a hand placed firmly across his mouth and nose. But he clearly intended to stick it out.
    Finally, the discarded intestine was dropped into a lined bucket and removed. “Grossly unremarkable,” Professor Wilson said, apparently unaffected. He turned to the neck, pulling the flap of skin from the “Y”-shaped incision up over the face to reveal the damage caused to the bony and cartilaginous structures by the act of strangulation and the subsequent hanging, although he quickly established that the neck itself was not broken.
    An incision was made to the back of the head, running from one ear to the other, and the pathologist peeled the scalp down over the face to reveal the skull. He moved Fin back from the table as one of the assistants took an oscillating saw around the skull cap before removing it and allowing the brain to plop out into another stainless steel bowl. The professor examined the skull and nodded his satisfaction. “As I thought. There’s an area of subgaleal haemorrhage over the left parietal bone, two and a half to three and a half centimetres, roughly the same dimensions as the scalp contusion. And a small amount of deep subdural haemorrhage. The parietal bone shows a matching fracture, pretty much consistent with what I suspected. A metal tube, a baseball bat, something of that nature, used to club him down from behind. If he wasn’t completely unconscious, he’d have been in no condition to resist.”
    Fin wandered over to the bench where the pathologist had laid out the photographs taken at the crime scene. It looked as if the boatshed had been lit by an overzealous theatrical lighting director. The colours were lurid and startling, blood already dried to a rust brown. Angel’s dead weight seemed impossibly large, layered folds of blue-white flesh. The intestine looping from his grinning abdomen appeared unreal. It all had the cheap and nasty veneer of a bad sixties B-movie. But Fin was beginning to get a picture of Angel’s last hours.
    He had gone into Stornoway for a curry, returning afterward to Ness, where he had consumed several pints at the Crobost Social Club. He had either accompanied his killer to the boatshed at Port of Ness or met him there. For what reason, it was unclear. But in any event, he must have either known his killer, or been sufficiently unsuspecting to turn his back on him, allowing the opportunity to attack him from behind. Knocked unconscious by a blow to the back of the head, he had been turned over and strangled. The murderer must have been in a state of high nervous tension, excitable, adrenaline pumping. He had vomited all over his victim.
    Undaunted, apparently, he had proceeded to strip Angel of his clothes. That would have taken some time, and been a far from simple task, given the dead weight of a man of around two hundred and fifty pounds. Even more incredibly, he had proceeded to tie a rope around his neck, thread it through a beam in the roof and hoist him upright so that he was eventually hanging with his feet more than six inches clear of the ground. Which told them something about the murderer. This was a