round her throat, swung her from side to side and smashed her head against a wall, probably hard enough to make her lose consciousness.’ He swung Miss Grey from side to side as illustration, but spared her the banging of the head. She looked disappointed as he released his grip, but carried on labelling jars of human offal.
Indicating blood-matted hair and a discoloured area on the scalp Drysdale invited them to inspect the damage.
‘If she struggled, doc,’ asked Frost, ‘wouldn’t she have marked him . . . scratched him . . . gouged out chunks of flesh?’
A tight smile. ‘If you’re hoping for pieces of tell-tale flesh under her fingernails, I must disappoint you, Inspector.’ He lifted the girl’s misshapen right hand and displayed the fingernails. They were bitten down to the quick.
‘Damn,’ said Frost.
Carefully Drysdale lowered the hand to its original position. ‘Clear evidence of sexual intercourse just before she died.’
Frost nodded glumly. He had expected this. ‘Rape?’
‘I think so,’ replied the pathologist blandly.
‘You think so?’ echoed Gilmore, incredulously. ‘You only think so.
‘There is evidence of bruising that could suggest intercourse took place against her will . . .’
‘Then she was raped,’ cried Gilmore.
‘If I might be allowed to continue,’ grated Drysdale. ‘The girl was a virgin. She could have submitted willingly, but have been tensed instead of relaxed. This might account for the bruising. Equally, she could have been raped. There is no magic way of knowing at this stage.’
‘If she submitted willingly, doc,’ said Frost, ‘there would have been no real need to have wrung her neck afterwards.’
‘That’, snapped Drysdale, ‘is in your province, Inspector Frost, not mine. I give the medical facts. It’s up to you to speculate.’
Frost nodded ruefully. ‘Then give me some facts on the way the bastard burnt her so I can speculate how to catch the sod.’
‘I was coming to that,’ said Drysdale testily. ‘As you can see, the genital area is badly charred. In my opinion this occurred very soon after death, within an hour, say.’
‘Dr Maltby thought it could have been done with a blow-lamp.’
Drysdale frowned. ‘For once, Dr Maltby might have been right. To do that sort of damage you’d need something like a blowtorch.’
‘But why would anyone do it, doc? Is it a new kind of sexual perversion?’
‘I’ve come across something like this once before. A murdered rape victim, a thirty-eight-year-old prostitute. She was found in some bushes near a railway embankment. The lower part of the body was badly burnt where her killer had doused paraffin over her and set it alight. It seems he had heard about genetic fingerprinting. You’ve probably read about it.’
‘No,’ said Frost. ‘I only read comics and dirty books.’
‘There’s a newly developed technique,’ lectured Drysdale, ‘that allows us to determine an individual’s genetic fingerprint from traces of body fluid – semen, say.’
Frost’s mouth dropped open. ‘You mean a dick print instead of a fingerprint?’
The pathologist winced. ‘I wouldn’t put it as crudely as that, Inspector, but yes, by DNA testing we can positively identify the donor of a semen sample.’
‘So if I produced a suspect . . .’ began Frost, hoping Burton had traced the plumber.
‘If you produced a suspect, we could either positively incriminate him, or positively eliminate him, but he would have to supply us with a blood sample for comparison.’
‘I’ll get a blood sample for you,’ said Frost. ‘And if he won’t give us one voluntarily, I’m sure we can arrange for him to fall down the station stairs.’
The pathologist’s smile wavered. Like many people, he never knew when Frost was being serious or when he was joking. ‘Unfortunately, Inspector, it wouldn’t work with this poor girl. Even without the burning, the advanced stage of decomposition of the body precludes any possibility of carrying out the test.’
‘This bastard’s having all the luck,’ moaned Frost. ‘Anything else, doc?’
Drysdale made a mental note to include in his complaint to the Divisional Commander his displeasure at the way Frost chose to address him. ‘Yes.’ He held out his hand and clicked his fingers. Miss Grey gave him a large sealed jar full of squishy, lumpy brown unpleasantness dotted with green. ‘The stomach contents. She hadn’t had time to digest her last meal before she died.’
Frost screwed his face and turned his head. ‘Tell me what it is, doc, so I can make a point of not ordering it.’
‘Something with chips and peas. You’ll get a detailed analysis some time tomorrow. My report will be on your desk by noon.’