THEY EXCHANGED ONLY A brief few remarks in the car afterwards. Lynley asked Hannaford where she was taking him, and she replied that she was taking him with her to Truro, to Royal Cornwall Hospital, to be exact. He then said, “You’re going to check all the pubs on the route, aren’t you?” To which she archly replied, “All the pubs on the route to Truro? Not very likely, my good man.”
He said, “I’m not talking about the route to Truro, Inspector.”
She said, “I knew that. And do you really expect me to answer that question? You found the body. You know the game if you’re who you say you are.” She glanced his way. She’d put on sunglasses although there was no sun and, indeed, it was still raining. He wondered about this and she answered his wonder. “Corrective,” she told him. “For my driving. My others are at home. Or possibly in my son’s rucksack at school. Or one of the dogs could have eaten them, for all I know.”
“You have dogs?”
“Three black Labs. Dogs One, Two, and Three.”
“Interesting names.”
“I like to keep things simple at home. To balance all the ways things are never simple at work.”
That was the extent of what they said. The rest of the drive they made in silence broken by radio chatter and two calls Hannaford took on her mobile phone. One of them apparently asked for her approximate time of arrival in Truro, barring traffic problems, and the other was a brief message from someone to whom she responded with a terse, “I told them to get it to me. What the hell’s it doing with you in bloody Exeter?…And how’m I supposed to…That is not necessary and yes you’re right before you say it: I don’t want to owe you…Oh, grand. Do what you like, Ray.”
At the hospital in Truro, Hannaford guided Lynley to the mortuary, where the air smelled headily of disinfectant and an assistant was hosing off the trolley on which a body had been cut open for inspection. Nearby, the forensic pathologist?thin as an ageing spinster’s marital hopes?was downing a large tomato juice over a stainless sink. The man, Lynley thought, had to have a stomach of iron and the sensitivity of a stone.
“This is Gordie Lisle,” Hannaford said to Lynley. “Fastest Y incision on the planet and you don’t want to know how quick he can shear ribs.”
“You do me too much honour,” Lisle said.
“I know. This is Thomas Lynley,” she told him. “What’ve we got?”
Finishing his juice, Lisle went to a desk and scooped up a document to which he referred as he began his report. This he prefaced with the information that the injuries were consistent with a fall. He went about relating them. Pelvis broken, he said, and right medial malleolus shattered. He added, “That’s ankle to the layman.”
Hannaford nodded sagely.
Right tibia and right fibula fractured, Lisle continued. Compound fractures of the ulna and radius, also on the right, six ribs broken, left greater tubercle crushed, both lungs pierced, spleen ruptured.
“What the hell is a tubercle?” Hannaford asked.
“Shoulder,” he explained.
“Nasty business, but is all that enough to kill him? What sent him to the other side, then? Shock?”
“I was saving the best for last. Enormous fracture of the temporal bone. His skull broke like an eggshell. See here.” Lisle set his document on a work top and strolled over to a wall on which the human skeletal system was displayed on a large chart. “When he fell, I reckon he hit an outcrop on the way down the cliff. He flipped at least once, picked up speed with the rest of the descent, landed heavy on the right side and crushed his skull on the slate. When the bone fractured, it sliced into the middle meningeal artery. That produced an acute epidural haematoma. Pressure on the brain and no place for it to go that’s not lethal. He’d have died in about fifteen minutes although he would have been unconscious throughout. I take it there was no helmet nearby? No other headgear?”
“Kids,” Hannaford said. “They think they’re invincible.”
“This one wasn’t. Anyway, the extent of the injuries suggests he fell the moment he began the abseil.”
“Which itself suggests the sling broke the instant it took his full weight.”
“I’d agree with that.”