12. The 21 grams

DS Vega is sent to get the preliminaries from pathologist Dr Niles Rooker

12

‘Good morning,’ DI Rosen said softly into her phone, tucked into the very furthest corner of her office. All right, so not an office in the traditional sense but a corner of the Major Incident Suite which she had fenced off with blue felt noticeboards. It afforded her a little more privacy than the other team members and a semblance of seniority. 
    ‘Sorry, afternoon,’ she corrected herself as she clocked the time. Vega would be in soon. She needed to hurry this along. ‘I have an appointment at four o’clock…Daria Isobel Rosen? Yes, that’s right…No, I’m afraid I have to cancel.’ She caught sight of herself in the reflection of her laptop and patted futilely at her hair. It was beginning to frizz again.

     ‘No, I’ve not had a change of heart. I’d just like to rearrange, if possible…Yes, I understand it will be more invasive the longer I -- no, I get that, I do it’s just…’ she dropped into her swivel chair, tugging at the hair tie which her wiry curls were escaping from and letting them tumble about her shoulders. ‘Look, if I had time to spare then I wouldn’t be considering this in the first place. Just leave me a message if you have a cancellation and I’ll do my best to make it.’ 
     She hung up and searched her desk for a brush and some more hair grips. She could have sworn she bought a new pack just the other day. Maybe they were in the car…
     ‘Ma’am?’
     She looked up to see Carmichael peering around one of her strategic noticeboards. She quickly smoothed her hair down again before clasping her hands in front of her. ‘Yes, Tony?’
     ‘I wondered if it was all right to have that chat now.’ 
      ‘Of course. Take a seat.’ She gestured the chair set opposite her desk and Carmichael dropped into it. ‘So what’s the nature of this complaint?’
     ‘I bumped his head into a window. I imagine that’s what it is, right, Tony?’ 
     Rosen and Carmichael turned to see Vega filling the gap between the boards, a bacon sandwich in one hand and a coffee in the other. ‘I was trying to motivate him. With a little more effort I reckon he could be a mediocre detective.’

‘All right, Richard. Give it a rest,’ Rosen warned as colour crept into Carmichael’s cheeks again. The detective constable’s fists had tightened at his sides which was exactly the reaction she imagined Vega had been looking to elicit. Deflection, she had found, worked best in these situations.

‘Dr Rooker is concluding Deano’s post mortem this afternoon; DCS Bishop has requested that you attend, Vega, to get the preliminary findings before the full report is made available.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Vega continued to stand there, watching her. He rarely saw her with her hair loose. He found himself thinking of her between his sheets, her curls haloed around her head, tickling his nose as spooned behind her. The small of her back, the dimples above her rear and the spattering of freckles across her toned shoulders; the mole on her inner thigh and the taste and the warmth between her legs…His memories of her were vivid suddenly, intense and unbidden.

‘Was there something else you wanted?’ Rosen said, and he realised he’d been quiet too long. Carmichael was looking at him with suspicion.

‘No, nothing,’ Vega said, backing away with his hands up. ‘Consider me gone.’ He turned back into the din of the MIS and dropped his coffee and his sandwich onto Khan’s desk. The prospect of what was to come had killed his prodigious appetite. ‘Don’t say I never bring you breakfast, Zaid.’

‘Bacon? Really? I’m Muslim, you dumb f**k,’ Zaid grinned, but he took a swig of the coffee and gagged. How much sugar did he put in it? It was like diabetes in a cup.

 

The average weight of a male human heart was, apparently, 300 to 360 grams. A female’s was lighter, at 230 to 330. Vega knew this because he was stood opposite an average organ weight chart which had been pinned to the newly plastered, freshly painted wall in the PM room; part of the spanking-new Tunbridge Wells Hospital where the post mortems were now conducted.

The place was space-age compared to Rooker’s former chambers but the smell was the same. It wasn’t dissimilar to a swimming pool: bleach and chlorine and bare, clean skin. Vega ran his fingers around the steep edges of a circular stainless steel sink with a wide, gaping drain and what looked like a cistern above it, complete with flush. He didn’t want to dwell on what fluids must be washed down there or why such a heavy-duty set-up was required.

‘It’s all singing, all dancing, eh?’ he remarked, turning to face Rooker and regretting it when he saw the y-shaped incision on the skinny little chest of Deano Stowe. The surgical wound was sutured shut now, but it was still repellent. ‘Do you like your new digs?’

‘Oh yes. Very much,’ Dr Niles Rooker said, his feathery voice muffled by the mask tucked around his nose and mouth before he removed it and dropped it in a bin. He had tied his dirty blonde hair back into a high, stubby ponytail and Vega noticed for the first time the silver cuff looped through his upper ear. Maybe he was of this century after all: despite the pathologist’s youth Vega had always thought of him as some throwback to the Victorian age.

‘Much more convenient for the relatives, of course,’ Rooker continued. ‘I always thought it insensible to take my bodies all the way to Greenwich. There was a certain poetry to it, though; returning to the home of time, once one’s metaphorical clock had stopped.’

‘You need a hobby, Niles. One that doesn’t involve corpses.’

‘Oh? And what would you recommend?’

‘I don’t know. Trains? You look like a bit of an anorak.’

‘Should I take offence?’ Niles chuckled. Vega thought it unlikely that he would. He’d tried to insult the good-natured pathologist numerous times in the past without any recorded success.

‘No. No offence intended,’ he said. ‘So what did you and your team conclude, Niles? Any revelations for us lot on the shop floor?’

‘Perhaps a few,’ Rooker smiled. ‘You were right, by the way; it was a captive bolt pistol which was used, and it was this injury which proved fatal. It was dealt elsewhere, though.’

‘He wasn’t shot at the crime scene?’

‘No. He was taken there while dying. I imagine his killer thought him to be already deceased but our boy hung on.’ Niles lifted the sheet a little higher up Deano’s chest and tucked it in, his eyes soft and moist and magnified by his lenses. ‘I’ve often pitied you, Richard, for the role you play.’

Vega’s attention had been on Deano’s hand. It was lying at his side, out of the arsenic green paper sheet which covered him. His blue-grey fingers were gently curled as if inviting him to hold them; he could see where the teenager had bitten his nails down to the quick, and the raw-looking grazing which went up his right arm. Road-rash, he had assumed at first. It would be in the report.

‘What role’s that then?’

‘Well, a more intimate one than I have, certainly,’ Rooker said as he placed away his instruments.

‘You take their core temperature, Niles. I think that’s as intimate as it gets.’

‘Yes, I deal with the body,’ Rooker conceded, ‘but you the twenty-one grams.’

‘Twenty-one grams?’ Vega’s eyes darted to the list on the wall again, the average weights of organs:  pericardium, right lung, left lung, liver, pancreas, thyroid…

‘The weight of a soul,’ Rooker said, turning to look at him, somewhat surprised. ‘You haven’t heard of that? I thought with your history…’ Rooker shook his head.

‘It’s a theory, based on a phenomenon which occurs coincident with death; the instant life ceases we all lose a measure of weight " the air in our lungs, bodily fluids and the like " but there is an unexplained loss of weight in every individual, and consistently that weight is twenty-one grams, or three-fourths of an ounce, and that…that is said to be the weight of the soul.’ Rooker pointed a pair of oversized, serrated scissors at him. ‘That is what you deal in. His interests, his hopes, and his potential. I think that must be far worse.’

Vega swallowed thickly. What did he know about Deano? Not enough, not yet. Not even why he had been killed, let alone by whom. ‘Come on then, you hinted at revelations. What have you got?’

Rooker carefully rolled back the sheet covering Deano’s bare feet and lifted one gently in the palm of his hand. ‘You see here,’ he said, not looking at the child’s sole but always, intently, at Vega. Vega suddenly had the impression he was being tested and shifted his weight, folding his arms across his chest, ready for the challenge. ‘There is swelling of the local area. The skin has been emulsified and has blistered.’
     Vega peered closer. ‘I don’t see it.’ 
     ‘It is very slight,’ Rooker agreed. ‘It’s only really observable at a histological level.’ 
     ‘Histological?’ 
     ‘I mean at a microscopic level,’ the pathologist said, patiently. ‘In the electron microscope the nuclei appear deformed; they contain clumped chromatin, and the keratin is discoloured yellow and similarly clumped.’
     ‘Which means…?’
     ‘That there was damage at a cellular level; damage which was not observable to the naked eye. You should also know that when I swabbed there was evidence of salt-water.’
     ‘I don’t like where this is going.’ Vega peered closer at Deano’s small, pale foot, straining his eyes to see what the myopic Rooker had. ‘Tell me it isn’t what I think it is.’ 
     ‘How would I possibly know what you think it is?’ Rooker smiled and reached for his assembled notes to hand to the detective. ‘I would venture that sometime prior to death the victim had a considerable electrical current deliberately applied for a very short duration to the local area.’
     ‘And by local area, you mean the bottoms of his feet.’
     ‘Yes.’ 
     ‘When you say short duration, how short are we talking here?’ 
     ‘I would imagine a period of less than ten seconds,’ Rooker said. ‘Long enough to cause a great deal of pain, but short enough a time that there would have been negligible Joule heat, which would explain why there are no significant burns.’ 
     ‘Right. So we’re looking at torture. We’re looking at someone who tortures and tries to conceal the fact they’ve tortured. So someone practiced in it.’
     ‘I believe so.’
     ‘You believe so?’ Vega turned to face him fully. ‘I need more than belief, Niles. I need a statement of fact.’ 
     ‘The victim’s brain shows evidence of micro-haemorrhages in the region of the third and fourth cerebral ventricles. This is symptomatic of a large increase in blood pressure, which can be caused by electrothermal coagulation necrosis. That is consistent with the scenario I hypothesised, whereby the victim was exposed to significant current. Those are the facts. They are what I deal with.’ Rooker heaved his bony shoulders, his eyes compassionate but his expression stern. ‘I don’t speculate. That is your remit.’ 
     Vega looked up into a kaleidoscopic view of his own face; the autopsy room was filled with polished, reflective surfaces and he seemed to be staring down on himself from every angle. He still felt small and inadequate.

‘Twenty-one grams, eh?’ he sighed.

‘Your remit,’ Rooker repeated with a small, conciliatory smile as he covered Deano’s head. 

 

For some time after his parking ticket had expired Vega sat bowed over the steering wheel, massaging his temples and trying to coax out an idea, a little flash of genius.

Deano would have had to have been transported, whether he went willingly or not.  There would have been a vehicle involved at some point but there were too many tyre-tracks at the nearest lay-by for every one of them to be extracted and identified yet, overlapped and entangled as they were. 
     Who deliberately electrocuted a fifteen year old boy? Why the hell would you? Those questions were too abstract: he focused on the practical. Where would it have happened?

There was another crime scene out there, somewhere, where the atrocities committed against Deano had taken place. If it had been him responsible, then he would have sought to destroy that place as completely and as irrecoverably as possible. Vega pulled out of the hospital car park, just as an attendant looked to be bearing down on him. Back to Dowding house, he supposed, where he could run some searches.

  

 

Author's Note

All constructive criticism gratefully received.

Reviews

[NoelHC]

Here I am left with at least 3 cliffhangers, what is up with Rosen, and the canceled appointment, how will she deal with Carmichael, and what happened to Dean. Oh maybe, four cliffhangers, what went on before with Rosen and Vega.
Sarah, you taunt me with a chapter every week or so, you really must buckle down and write more often, and for longer periods. enough of this swilling Merlot, that is for celebrating the publishing of the book.
Well done ma'am, I see nothing I could fault.

[SLD Bailey]

Hahahaha!! The merlot is actually the only thing that gets me writing, so if anything I need to speed up my near inevitable descent into alcoholism! Glad you liked :)

[NoelHC]

Sommelier, a case of Merlot for the lady, she has work to do, people to kill off. Hurry!

[W.k.kortas]

I thought Vega's actions in Rosen's "office" were a little reckless--not so much to be entirely out of character, but it struck me (foreshadowing, perhaps?) The research into the weight of the heart and the y-shaped incision shows a nice touch of research, plus the weight of the heart plays off nicely against the notion of the weight of the soul. The dialogue, both internal and external, remains top-nothc.

[SLD Bailey]

Thanks ever so, Kortas :) I am beginning to rethink Vega's aggression. It was going to be part of a wider arc but now I'm wondering if there is a more subtle way to do it. All work-in-progress!