‘Which is?’
Joe waved Edmunds over to a workstation, where pieces of shattered glass, collected from the hotel sofa, waited under a microscope. A few drops of residual liquid sat pathetically at the bottom of a test tube. A metal rod, attached by wires to a piece of equipment, had been dipped into it. What remained of the protective belt had been laid out on a tray, pieces of Garland’s skin still clinging sickeningly to the rubber.
‘I take it you’re aware they were trying to simulate a gunshot to fake Garland’s death?’ asked Joe.
Edmunds nodded: ‘Simmons told us.’
‘Good plan. Brave,’ said Joe genuinely. ‘So, how does one murder someone with a fake gunshot? Modify the gun? Swap out the blank bullets? Replace the tame explosive behind the blood bag, right?’
‘I guess.’
‘Wrong! All these things would be checked and double-checked. So our killer decided to refashion the protective belt that would be strapped across Garland’s chest. It’s just a strip of rubber inside some material, no threat to anyone.’
Edmunds moved over to the remnants of the belt, covering his nose against the stench of scorched flesh. Several strands of charred metal protruded haphazardly out from the rubber.
‘Strips of magnesium coiled around the rubber lining,’ said Joe, apparently indifferent to the smell, ‘wrapped around his chest and burning through the poor bastard at a few thousand degrees Celsius.’
‘So, when they triggered the blood bag …’
‘They ignited the magnesium coil. I found some accelerant coating the sections at the front to ensure that it caught.’
‘Where does the glass fit into all of this?’ asked Edmunds.
‘Overkill, if you’ll excuse the term. The killer wanted to ensure that Garland wouldn’t survive. So, he strapped several vials of acid to the inside of the belt for good measure, which then exploded into his exposed flesh under the intense heat … Oh, and not forgetting the fatal spasms and oedema on inhalation of the toxic vapour.’
‘Jesus.’ Edmunds was scribbling frantically in his notebook. ‘What sort of acid?’
‘I’m not really doing it justice by calling it an acid. This stuff is worse, far worse. It’s what they call a superacid, probably triflic, approximately a thousand times stronger than your run-of-the-mill sulphuric acid.’
Edmunds took a step back from the innocent-looking test tube.
‘And Garland’s got this stuff eating away at his insides?’ said Edmunds.
‘You see my point? It’s hopeless.’
‘This stuff must be hard to get hold of?’
‘Yes and no,’ answered Joe unhelpfully. ‘It’s widely used industrially as a catalyst, and there’s a concerning demand for it on the black market for its weaponisable qualities.’
Edmunds sighed heavily.
‘Not to fear, you’ve got far more promising leads to look into,’ said Joe cheerfully. ‘I found something on the Ragdoll.’
Baxter stepped away from the table to take a call from the hospital. In her absence, Andrea unenthusiastically removed her work phone from her bag and switched it on. Eleven missed calls: nine from Elijah and two from Geoffrey, received before she remembered to tell him she was safe. There was one new voicemail. She braced herself and held the phone to her ear.
‘Where are you? Hospital? Been trying to get hold of you for hours,’ started Elijah, inconvenienced. ‘Spoke to one of the staff at the hotel. She said you were filming something when it happened. I need that footage here, now. I’ve sent techie Paul over to the hotel with a spare key to the van. He’ll upload it from there. Call me when you get this.’
Baxter returned to the table to find Andrea looking shaken.
‘What?’ she asked.
Andrea put her head in her hands: ‘Oh God.’
‘What?’
Andrea looked up at Baxter in resignation.
‘They’ve got the footage,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Everything she touched really did turn to shit.
They had been called back to the hospital and were forced to barge their way through the wall of television cameras and reporters that had besieged the main entrance. Andrea noticed that Elijah had sent Isobel and her cameraman to report on this latest horrifying incident that she now found herself at the centre of.
‘Taste of your own medicine,’ Baxter pointed out after a police officer allowed them through and they had reached the safety of the lifts.
A nurse showed them into a private room, and Baxter could tell instantly from her demeanour what she was about to say: despite their best efforts, the extent of the damage was too great and Garland’s heart had stopped on the operating table.
Even though she had been expecting this and had only known Garland for three days, she broke down into tears. It was impossible to imagine ever ridding herself of such an immense burden of guilt. She could almost physically feel it pulling in her chest. He had been her responsibility. Perhaps had he not felt that he had to plan it all behind her back … Perhaps if she …
The nurse told them that Garland’s sister had been informed and was alone in a room down the hall if they wanted to sit with her, but Baxter could not face it. She asked Andrea to wish Rory a speedy recovery and left the hospital as quickly as she could.
Joe removed the now infamous Ragdoll corpse from the freezer and wheeled it into the centre of the lab. Edmunds had hoped to never see the horrible thing again. As a final insult to the poor woman whose torso had already been so gruesomely connected to five separate body parts, a fresh set of stitches now ran along the centre of her chest, forking off between her small breasts and ending at either shoulder. Though they had established at the crime scene that the amputations and mutilations had taken place after death, he could not help but feel that this nameless pale-skinned woman had been punished the most.
‘You found something in the post-mortem?’ asked Edmunds, feeling unfairly angry at Joe for the one misaligned stitch he had spotted.
‘Huh? No, nothing.’
‘So?’
‘Take a moment and then tell me what’s not right about this body.’
Edmunds gave him a despairing look.
‘Apart from the obvious, of course,’ Joe added.
Edmunds looked over the grotesque cadaver, not that he really needed to. He doubted that he would ever be able to shake the image from his memory. He hated being in the same room as it. Although it was completely irrational, there was still something macabre about it. He looked back at Joe blankly.
‘No? Look at the legs. Taking into account that they’re different skin colours and sizes, they have been cut and attached almost symmetrically. But the arms are a different story altogether: one complete female arm on one side …’
‘Not that we needed the entire arm to identify the nail polish,’ Edmunds chimed in.
‘… and then just a hand and a ring on the other.’
‘So the arm belonging to the torso must be significant in some way,’ said Edmunds, catching up.
‘And it is.’