glance and wished she hadn't: the empty ribcage was a sight from a butcher's window.
'Minor lesions on both forearms.' He looked at her over his mask. 'As if someone had dug their nails in, perhaps.'
'Violently?'
'Hard to say.' Finished with the stomach, he picked it up in both hands and placed it alongside the other major organs he had examined and cut into sections. 'You don't know if the police turned him over? Blood had pooled towards the front of his body but the photos they took at the locus show him on his back.'
'Unlikely. The DI said some kids stumbled across him - maybe it was them?'
'Kids? You think they'd touch a stranger's corpse?'
She considered the prospect. 'No, I don't.'
Andy picked up a scalpel and returned to the body. 'Well, someone did.' He began cutting around the hairline in preparation for peeling the scalp forwards over the face. It was Jenny's cue to leave.
She telephoned DI Wallace as she stepped out into the welcome fresh air, the smell of death clinging stubbornly to her clothes. Wallace listened to Andy's findings and said it sounded as if it would have to remain a police matter, at least until he'd ruled out the possibility of foul play. He informed Jenny that Mrs Jacobs had identified her husband's body from a photograph but had been too emotional to talk. In the meantime he'd been over to the Conway Unit in Clifton and met Alan Jacobs's line manager, a Mrs Deborah Bishop. Jacobs had been Senior Staff Nurse in the young persons' ward, dealing with twelve- to eighteen-year-olds. As far as Bishop had been aware he'd been in good spirits; she had appeared badly shaken at the news.
'Have you got Mrs Jacobs's address?' Jenny asked.
'39 Fielding Road, Coalpit Heath,' DI Wallace said after a brief hesitation, the tightness in his voice suggesting that he'd rather she stayed away from the bereaved until it was her turn.
Jenny's gut told her there was more to his reluctance than protecting his turf. She wondered if Bishop had told him something he hadn't let on. A death, however loosely related to vulnerable teenagers, would have set alarm bells ringing all the way to Whitehall. Senior civil servants in the Department of Health would already be asking questions of their own.
Jenny thanked him for the information and let him know he wouldn't be having it all on his own terms: 'I'll have my officer take Mrs Jacobs through the procedure. Oh, and by the way - did your people alter the position of the body before I arrived?'
'Not to my knowledge. Seen as found.'
'Let me know if you hear different. Dr Kerr thinks it had been rolled over.'
The detective gave a dismissive grunt and rang off.
Jenny waited until early evening before calling on the widow. Technically there was no need for the coroner to disturb the next of kin while the police were still investigating, but she liked to make contact while emotions were still raw and before questions had to be thought about before being answered. And there was something about Wallace that had troubled her. From the moment she arrived in the churchyard he had seemed distracted and defensive, a man wrestling with an unspoken problem.
Coalpit Heath was an outlying suburb in the north-east of the city. She had resolved not to wake the household if she found it in darkness, but as she drew up opposite number 39 she noticed a crack of light behind the drawn curtains in the downstairs front room.
A woman in her sixties answered the door on the security chain, her face set in a hostile frown. 'What is it now?' The sound of a child's cry carried from somewhere inside the house.
Jenny passed a business card through the crack. 'Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner. I'd like to speak to Mrs Jacobs?'
The woman held the card at arm's length, trying to make out the print. 'I'm her mother.'
'Would it be all right to have a brief word?'
Sighing, she unhooked the chain and opened the door. 'The police have been here all evening. I thought we'd have some peace.'
'I'll be as quick as I can.'
The woman led Jenny through a short hallway and into a living room that ran straight through into a modern kitchen. Her daughter, the widow, was lying on a tan leather sofa wearing pyjamas and a towelling dressing gown. A waste basket next to a coffee table was overflowing with used Kleenex.