drive myself. I’m fine.’
‘I’m sure you are,’ Catherine told her. ‘After witnessing something like this, people are sometimes so fine that they drive through a red at the first set of lights and head straight into the oncoming traffic. Go with Officer Thompson. Call someone who can come and get you.’
Mrs Chalmers rather feebly nodded her assent. The scenario Catherine had just painted must have struck her as all too plausible and she suddenly didn’t feel quite so sure of herself.
Beano gave Catherine an appreciative look.
‘When does this stuff stop freaking you out?’ he asked quietly, out of the witness’s earshot.
‘You’re doing fine, Beano,’ she assured him with a pat on the arm.
He didn’t point out that she hadn’t answered his question.
That was because she didn’t like what the answer said about her. She didn’t know when the sight of a murder victim had stopped bothering her, and hadn’t even been conscious at the time of passing through such a watershed, but she knew it had been a very long time ago. Of course, every so often one could get under her skin, but she couldn’t have said when that had last happened.
The sight of Stevie Fullerton buckled up and buckled over in his Bentley certainly wasn’t going to do it. Her great fear, of course, was that now nothing could.
She was always more vulnerable to these thoughts when Cal O’Shea was present. The pathologist liked to joke about how sanguine she was around murder scenes, which was generally interpreted as a humorous play on the gags and remarks he had to endure about spending his days cutting up dead bodies. He liked to make out that he found her intimidating and ‘spooky’. This could also be interpreted as deflection, but Catherine was never sure to what extent he was actually joking. Cal had this penetrating and inscrutable gaze, the kind that felt like he could see beneath the skin of the living as analytically as his scalpel let him reveal the secrets of the dead. It piqued a paranoia that he could see inside her, and she was afraid of what he might have found.
She thought Aileen was moving a little deliberately and wondered if she’d done her back, then she turned just enough for Catherine to notice the protuberance that was nudging her overalls. Of course: she remembered hearing that Aileen was pregnant, but it had been a couple of months since she’d seen her.
It briefly struck Catherine as quite jarring to see a bright young woman, blossoming with child, spending her day focused upon a murdered corpse. Maybe that meant she wasn’t totally numbed to the horrors after all.
It seemed incongruous but, on reflection, imminent new birth around recent death was pure cycle-of-life stuff. The wean was in the womb, for God’s sake. It wasn’t like Aileen had taken along a five-year-old on Bring Your Daughter To Work Day.
She spent a few minutes catching up, asking how Aileen was getting on, trading a few stories about the debilitating effects of having placenta-brain. Cal left them to it, heading off to get started.
When Catherine broke off from chatting, Cal seemed to have disappeared. She walked carefully around the forecourt, tracing an imaginary perimeter surrounding the victim, and found him crouched down at the open door of the Bentley.
‘Are you going to introduce us?’ he asked without glancing back. ‘He’s rather shy. Perhaps if you broke the ice…’
‘My apologies. Stevie Fullerton, this is Cal O’Shea. Cal O’Shea, this is Stevie Fullerton. You might want to wish him many happy returns.’
‘Oh, it’s his birthday?’
‘His forty-ninth and last.’
‘Some way to give a guy his bumps,’ Cal observed. He was leaning carefully into the car without touching anything, looking up at Fullerton’s bowed head.
‘Aye. Four bullets to the chest at close range.’
‘And, it would appear, one to the middle of the fore … Oh no, I’m mistaken. Goodness gracious.’
Cal had this idiom of
‘I’m sure you are,’ Catherine told her. ‘After witnessing something like this, people are sometimes so fine that they drive through a red at the first set of lights and head straight into the oncoming traffic. Go with Officer Thompson. Call someone who can come and get you.’
Mrs Chalmers rather feebly nodded her assent. The scenario Catherine had just painted must have struck her as all too plausible and she suddenly didn’t feel quite so sure of herself.
Beano gave Catherine an appreciative look.
‘When does this stuff stop freaking you out?’ he asked quietly, out of the witness’s earshot.
‘You’re doing fine, Beano,’ she assured him with a pat on the arm.
He didn’t point out that she hadn’t answered his question.
That was because she didn’t like what the answer said about her. She didn’t know when the sight of a murder victim had stopped bothering her, and hadn’t even been conscious at the time of passing through such a watershed, but she knew it had been a very long time ago. Of course, every so often one could get under her skin, but she couldn’t have said when that had last happened.
The sight of Stevie Fullerton buckled up and buckled over in his Bentley certainly wasn’t going to do it. Her great fear, of course, was that now nothing could.
She was always more vulnerable to these thoughts when Cal O’Shea was present. The pathologist liked to joke about how sanguine she was around murder scenes, which was generally interpreted as a humorous play on the gags and remarks he had to endure about spending his days cutting up dead bodies. He liked to make out that he found her intimidating and ‘spooky’. This could also be interpreted as deflection, but Catherine was never sure to what extent he was actually joking. Cal had this penetrating and inscrutable gaze, the kind that felt like he could see beneath the skin of the living as analytically as his scalpel let him reveal the secrets of the dead. It piqued a paranoia that he could see inside her, and she was afraid of what he might have found.
She thought Aileen was moving a little deliberately and wondered if she’d done her back, then she turned just enough for Catherine to notice the protuberance that was nudging her overalls. Of course: she remembered hearing that Aileen was pregnant, but it had been a couple of months since she’d seen her.
It briefly struck Catherine as quite jarring to see a bright young woman, blossoming with child, spending her day focused upon a murdered corpse. Maybe that meant she wasn’t totally numbed to the horrors after all.
It seemed incongruous but, on reflection, imminent new birth around recent death was pure cycle-of-life stuff. The wean was in the womb, for God’s sake. It wasn’t like Aileen had taken along a five-year-old on Bring Your Daughter To Work Day.
She spent a few minutes catching up, asking how Aileen was getting on, trading a few stories about the debilitating effects of having placenta-brain. Cal left them to it, heading off to get started.
When Catherine broke off from chatting, Cal seemed to have disappeared. She walked carefully around the forecourt, tracing an imaginary perimeter surrounding the victim, and found him crouched down at the open door of the Bentley.
‘Are you going to introduce us?’ he asked without glancing back. ‘He’s rather shy. Perhaps if you broke the ice…’
‘My apologies. Stevie Fullerton, this is Cal O’Shea. Cal O’Shea, this is Stevie Fullerton. You might want to wish him many happy returns.’
‘Oh, it’s his birthday?’
‘His forty-ninth and last.’
‘Some way to give a guy his bumps,’ Cal observed. He was leaning carefully into the car without touching anything, looking up at Fullerton’s bowed head.
‘Aye. Four bullets to the chest at close range.’
‘And, it would appear, one to the middle of the fore … Oh no, I’m mistaken. Goodness gracious.’
Cal had this idiom of
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