on either the angle of the wound or the force needed to inflict it.' He glanced at the restive lawyers. 'The blade penetrated to a distance of six and a half inches and pierced the aorta. Blood pressure would have collapsed in seconds. The victim would have been unconscious in moments, dead in a minute or two at the most.' He brushed his face nervously with his hand. 'But to force a blade, even that of a slender carving knife, right through the chest wall, would take considerable force.'
'Can you quantify that for us?' Jenny asked.
'An average person's full strength.' He paused to take a gulp of water, wilting under the sceptical glares of lawyers sitting less than six feet away from him. 'And the blade went in almost exactly horizontally, whereas most aggressive knife wounds are either angled upwards or downwards —’
'Because?'
'I'll show you.' He took a pen from his jacket pocket and held it in a clenched fist. 'You're either stabbing down from the top of the chest, or up from beneath the ribcage. And it's hard to kill someone with a knife. That's why you read that victims have been stabbed twenty or more times. The attacker doesn't often get the penetration to deliver a fatal blow.'
Ed Prince leaned forward and whispered urgently in Sullivan's ear. Sullivan frowned and gave a dismissive shake of his head. He wasn't impressed so far.
Jenny said, 'Are you able to say precisely how this wound was inflicted?'
'Not precisely, but I can draw certain reasonable conclusions.'
'Such as?'
'It was either a lucky blow or the killer acted very deliberately, aiming the knife horizontally so as to pierce the ribs with a single deep strike.' He rubbed a finger around the inside of his shirt collar. 'What it doesn't look like is a frenzied, emotional attack such as you might see following a rape, for example; it feels too calculated for that.'
The lawyers frowned. The police solicitor tapped Fraser Knight urgently on the shoulder and handed him a note.
Jenny said, 'Why do you think Dr Thomas failed to raise these points?'
'Each pathologist tends to draw their own frame of reference. He obviously didn't see it as his job to speculate.' He shrugged. 'Times change. I was taught differently.'
Jenny watched two women in the front row of the jury look again at their shared photograph of Eva's body. They were starting to think, to imagine different possibilities.
Bracing herself, Jenny said, 'Was there anything else about the body which you noticed that Dr Thomas hadn't remarked on?'
'It's not of any forensic value,' Dr Kerr said, eager to get to the end of his ordeal, 'but I noticed that there were two tattoos on the body. The first was a butterfly design just above the base of the spine, and the second two words tattooed just above the pubic bone on the left side of the mid-line.'
'Can you say when she had these tattoos done?'
'The one on her back had been there for some time, years perhaps. The one on her front was very fresh, perhaps only a few weeks old.'
Jenny nodded to Alison, who handed out two photographs showing the front and back of Eva's body to the jury and to the lawyers. Inset on each was a close-up of the corresponding tattoo.
'Did you take these photographs, Dr Kerr?'
'I did. Early last week.'
Sullivan rose abruptly to his feet. 'Can I ask you, ma'am, why these photographs weren't disclosed to the interested parties before this hearing?'
Jenny glanced at Kenneth Donaldson, who was in whispered conversation with one of Ed Prince's assistants.
'There's no legal requirement for a coroner to disclose in advance, Mr Sullivan.'
'There's a right to see a post-mortem report in advance,' Sullivan snapped back.
'And copies were sent to your instructing solicitors.'
'It contained no mention of these tattoos.'
Praying that Andy Kerr would hold his nerve, Jenny said, 'Perhaps Dr Kerr didn't consider them relevant. And I fail to see what difference disclosure of this detail would have made.'
'Ma'am, I wish to raise a matter of law in the absence of the jury.'
'No, Mr Sullivan. There is no reason for this evidence to be withdrawn, and there is certainly no reason for its existence to be suppressed.'
Sullivan jabbed the air with his forefinger, 'Ma'am, there are extremely important issues of public interest that need to be addressed with a full consideration of the law.'
'You misunderstand the nature of a coroner's court, Mr Sullivan. I am not an arbiter between competing cases, I decide what evidence I consider relevant.