Julia Ford gave him a disgusted look. Lucy shook her head. Banks nodded toward the guards. “Take her down.”

He’d managed it by the skin of his teeth, and he didn’t even feel as good about it as he had thought he would, but he’d got Lucy Payne where he wanted her for twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours to find some real evidence against her.

Annie felt only indifference toward Terence Payne’s corpse laid out naked on the steel autopsy table. It was simply the shell, the deceptive outer human form of an aberration, a changeling, a demon. Come to think about it, though, she wasn’t even certain she believed that. Terence Payne’s evil was all too human. Over the centuries men had raped and mutilated women, whether as acts of plunder in wartime, for dark pleasures in the back alleys and cheap rooms of decaying cities, in the isolation of the countryside, or in the drawing rooms of the rich. It hardly needed a demon in human form to do what men themselves already did so well.

She turned her attention to events at hand: Dr. Mackenzie’s close examination of the exterior of Terence Payne’s skull. Identity and time of death had not been a problem in this case: Payne had been pronounced dead by Dr. Mogabe at Leeds General Infirmary at 8:13 P.M. the previous evening. Naturally, Dr. Mackenzie would do a thorough job – his assistant had already carried out the weighing and measuring, and photographs and X rays had been taken – indeed, Annie guessed Mackenzie to be the kind of doctor who would do a thorough postmortem on a man shot dead right in front of his very eyes. It didn’t do to make assumptions.

The body was clean and ready for cutting, as there’s no man cleaner than one who has just been through surgery. Luckily, the police surgeon had been dispatched to take fingernail scrapings, bloodstained clothing and blood samples when Payne had first arrived at the infirmary, so no evidence had been lost due to the scruples of hospital hygiene.

At the moment, Annie was interested only in the blows to Payne’s head, and Dr. Mackenzie was paying particular attention to the cranium before performing the full postmortem. They had already examined the fractured wrist and determined that it was broken by a blow from PC Janet Taylor’s baton – which lay on the lab bench by the white-tiled wall – and there were also several defense bruises on Payne’s arms, where he had tried to ward off PC Taylor’s blows.

Unless Payne had been murdered by a nurse or doctor while he was in hospital, PC Janet Taylor’s actions were most likely directly responsible for his death. What had yet to be determined was just how culpable she was. An emergency operation to relieve a subdural hematoma had complicated matters, Dr. Mackenzie had told Annie, but it should be easy enough to separate the surgical procedure from the unskilled bludgeoning.

Payne’s head had already been shaved before his surgery, which made the injuries easier to identify. After a close examination, Mackenzie turned to Annie and said, “I’m not going to be able to tell you the exact sequence of blows, but there are some interesting clusters.”

“Clusters?”

“Yes. Come here. Look.”

Dr. Mackenzie pointed toward Payne’s left temple, which looked to Annie, with its shaved hair and bloody rawness, rather like a dead rat in a trap. “There are at least three distinct wounds overlapping here,” Dr. Mackenzie went on, tracing the outlines as he went, “from the first one – this indentation here – followed by a later wound superimposed and a third, here, which overlaps parts of both.”

“Could they have been delivered in quick succession?” Annie asked, remembering what Janet Taylor had told her about the flurry of blows, and the way she had imagined it all herself when she visited the scene.

“It’s possible,” Dr. Mackenzie admitted, “but I’d say any one of these blows would have incapacitated him for a while, and perhaps changed his position in relation to his attacker.”

“Can you explain?”

Dr. Mackenzie brought his hand around gently to the side of Annie’s head and pushed. She went with the light pressure and stepped back, head turned. When he reached out again, his hand was closer to the back of her head. “Had that been a real blow,” he said, “you would have been turned even farther away from me, and the blow would have stunned you. It might have taken you a little time to get back to the same position.”

“I see what you mean,” Annie said. “So that would lead you to believe that perhaps other blows came between?”

“Mmm. There’s the angles to consider, too. If you look very closely at the indentations, you’ll see that the first blow came when the victim was standing.” He glanced toward the baton. “See. The wound is relatively smooth and even, allowing for the differences in height between PC Taylor and the victim. I’ve measured the baton, by the way, and matched it closely to each wound, and that, along with the X rays, gives me a better idea of the victim’s position at the time of each blow.” He pointed again. “At least one of those blows to the temple was delivered when the victim was on his knees. You can see the way the impression deepens. It’s even clearer on the X ray.”

Dr. Mackenzie led Annie over to the X ray viewer on the wall, slipped in a sheet of film and turned on the light. He was right. When he pointed to it, Annie could see how the wound was deeper toward the back, indicating that the baton had come down at an angle. They went back to the table.

“Could he have got up again after a blow like that?” Annie asked.

“It’s possible. There’s no telling with head wounds. People have been known to walk around for days with a bullet in their brains. The main problem would be the rate of blood loss. Head wounds bleed an awful lot. That’s why we usually leave the brain until last in a postmortem. Most of the blood has drained off by then. Less messy.”

“What are you going to do with Payne’s brain?” Annie asked. “Keep it for scientific study?”

Dr. Mackenzie snorted. “I’d as soon read his character by the bumps on his head,” he said. “And speaking of which…” He asked his assistants to turn the body over. Annie saw another raw, pulpy area at the back of Payne’s head. She thought she could see splinters of bone sticking out, but realized she must be imagining things. Payne had been treated in hospital and they wouldn’t leave bone splinters sticking out of the back of his head. There was also some evidence of surgical stitching, which probably gave the impression of splinters. She only shivered because it was cold in the room, she told herself.

“These wounds were almost certainly inflicted when the victim was at an inferior level, say on his hands and knees, and they were delivered from behind.”

“As if he were moving away from his attacker on all fours, looking for something?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Mackenzie. “But it’s possible.”

“It’s just that at one point she says she hit him on the wrist and he dropped his machete, which she kicked into a corner. Apparently he went scrabbling after it on his hands and knees and she hit him again.”

“That would concur with this kind of injury,” Dr. Mackenzie conceded, “though I count three blows to the same general area: the brain stem, by the way, by far the most dangerous and vulnerable to attack.”

“She hit him there three times?”

“Yes.”

“Would he have been able to get up after that?”

“Again, I can’t say. A weaker man might well have been dead by then. Mr. Payne survived for three days. Perhaps he found his machete and got up again.”

“So that is a possible scenario?”

“I can’t rule it out. But look at these.” Dr. Mackenzie directed Annie’s attention toward the deep depressions at the top of the skull. “These two wounds, I can say with some certainty, were administered when the victim was in an inferior position to the attacker, perhaps sitting or squatting, given the angle, and they were administered with tremendous power.”