“Come in,” called Dr. Mogabe.
Annie went in. The office was small and functional, with a couple of bookcases full of medical texts, a filing cabinet whose top drawer wouldn’t shut, and the inevitable computer on the desk, a laptop. Various medical degrees and honors hung on the cream-painted walls, and a pewter-framed photograph stood on the desk facing the doctor. A family picture, Annie guessed. There was no skull beside it, though; nor was there a skeleton standing in the corner.
Dr. Mogabe was smaller than Annie had imagined, and his voice was higher in pitch. His skin was a shiny purple-black and his short curly hair gray. He also had small hands, but the fingers were long and tapered; a brain surgeon’s fingers, Annie thought, though she had nothing for comparison, and the thought of them poking their way through the gray matter made her stomach lurch. Pianist’s fingers, she decided. Much easier to live with. Or artist’s fingers, like her father’s.
He leaned forward and linked his hands on the desk. “I’m glad you’re here, Detective Inspector Cabbot,” he said, with a voice straight out of Oxford. “Indeed, if the police hadn’t seen fit to call, I would have felt obliged to bring them in myself. Mr. Payne was most brutally beaten.”
“Always willing to be of service,” said Annie. “What can you tell me about the patient? In layman’s terms, if you please.”
Dr. Mogabe inclined his head slightly. “Of course,” he said, as if he already knew the elite, technical mumbo jumbo of his profession would be wasted on an ignorant copper such as Annie. “Mr. Payne was admitted with serious head wounds, resulting in brain damage. He also had a broken ulna. So far, we have operated on him twice. Once to relieve a subdural hematoma. That’s-”
“I know what a hematoma is,” said Annie.
“Very well. The second to remove skull fragments from the brain. I could be more specific, if you wish?”
“Go ahead.”
Dr. Mogabe stood up and started walking back and forth behind his desk, hands clasped behind his back, as if he were delivering a lecture. When he came to name the various parts, he pointed to them on his own skull as he paced. “The human brain is essentially made up of the cerebrum, the cerebellum and the brain stem. The cerebrum is uppermost, divided into two hemispheres by a deep groove at the top, giving what you have probably heard called right brain and left brain. Do you follow?”
“I think so.”
“Prominent grooves also divide each hemisphere into lobes. The frontal lobe is the largest. There are also parietal, temporal and occipital lobes. The cerebellum is at the base of the skull, behind the brain stem.”
When Dr. Mogabe had finished, he sat down again, looking very pleased with himself.
“How many blows were there?” Annie asked.
“It’s difficult to be specific at this stage,” said Dr. Mogabe. “I was concerned merely with saving the man’s life, you understand, not with conducting an autopsy, but at an estimate I’d say two blows to the left temple, perhaps three. They caused the most damage to begin with, including the hematoma and skull fragments. There is also evidence of one or two blows to the top of the cranium, denting the skull.”
“The top of his head?”
“The cranium is that part of the head which isn’t the face, yes.”
“Hard blows? As if someone hit directly down on it?”
“Possibly. But I can’t be a judge of that. They would have been incapacitating, but not life-threatening. The top of the cranium is hard, and though the skull there was dented and fractured, as I said, the bone didn’t splinter.”
Annie made some notes.
“Those weren’t the most damaging injuries, though,” Dr. Mogabe added.
“Oh?”
“No, the most serious injury was caused by one or more blows to the back of the head, the brain-stem area. You see, that contains the medulla oblongata, which is the heart, blood vessel and breathing center of the brain. Any serious injury to it can be fatal.”
“Yet Mr. Payne is still alive.”
“Barely.”
“Is there a possibility of permanent brain damage?”
“There already is permanent brain damage. If Mr. Payne recovers, he may well spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair in need of twenty-four-hour-a-day care. The only good thing is that he probably won’t be aware of that fact.”
“This injury to the medulla? Could it have occurred as Mr. Payne fell back against the wall?”
Dr. Mogabe rubbed his chin. “Again, it’s not my place to do the police’s job, or the pathologist’s, Detective Inspector. Suffice it to say that in my opinion these wounds were caused by the same blunt instrument as the others. Make of that what you will.” He leaned forward. “In this simplest layman’s terms, this man received a most vicious beating about the head, Detective Inspector. Most vicious. I hope you believe, as I do, that the perpetrator should be brought to justice.”
Shit, thought Annie, putting her notebook away. “Of course, Doctor,” she said, heading for the door. “You will keep me informed, won’t you?”
“You can count on it.”
Annie looked at her watch. Time to head back to Eastvale and prepare her daily report for Detective Superintendent Chambers.
After his lunch with Tracy, Banks wandered around Leeds city center in a daze thinking of the news she had given him. The matter of Sandra’s pregnancy had hit him harder than he would have expected after so long apart, he realized as he stood and gazed in Curry’s window on Briggate, hardly taking in the display of computers, camcorders and stereo systems. He had last seen her in London the previous November, when he was down there searching for Chief Constable Riddle’s runaway daughter, Emily. Looking back, he felt foolish for the way he had approached that meeting, full of confidence that because he had applied for a job with the National Crime Squad that would take him back to live in London, Sandra would see the error of her ways, dump the temporary Sean and run back into Banks’s arms.
Wrong.
Instead she had told Banks that she wanted a divorce because she and Sean wanted to get married, and that cathartic event, he thought, had flushed Sandra out of his system forever, along with any thoughts of moving to the NCS.
Until Tracy told him about the pregnancy.
Banks hadn’t thought, hadn’t suspected for a moment, that they wanted to get married because they wanted to have a baby. What on earth did Sandra think she was playing at? The idea of a half brother or sister for Brian and Tracy, twenty years younger, seemed unreal to Banks. And the thought of Sean, whom he had never met, being the father seemed even more absurd. He tried to imagine their conversations leading up to the decision, the lovemaking, the maternal desire rekindled in Sandra after so many years, and even the shadowiest of imaginings made him feel sick. He didn’t know her, this woman in her early forties who wanted a baby with a boyfriend she had hardly been with for five minutes, and that also made Banks feel sad.
Banks was in Borders looking at the colorful display of bestsellers, and he didn’t even remember walking in the shop, when his mobile rang. He went outside and ducked into the Victoria Quarter before answering, leaning near the entrance across from the Harvey Nichols café. It was Stefan.
“Alan, thought you’d like to know ASAP, we’ve identified the three bodies in the cellar. Got lucky with the dentists. We’ll still run the DNA, though, cross-check with the parents.”
“That’s great,” said Banks, snapping back from his gloomy thoughts of Sandra and Sean. “And?”
“Melissa Horrocks, Samantha Foster and Kelly Matthews.”
“What?”
“I said-”
“I know. I heard what you said. I just…” People were walking by with their shopping and Banks didn’t want to be overheard. To be truthful, he also still felt like a bit of a dickhead talking on his mobile in public, though from what he saw around him, nobody else did. He had even once witnessed a father sitting in a Helmthorpe café phone his daughter in the playground across the road when it was time to go home, and curse because the kid had switched her mobile off so he had to walk across the road and shout to her instead. “I’m just surprised, that’s all.”