Tales from the Triverse

Traffic: Part 2

Late shift
On duty: DC Nisha Chakraborty and DC Zoltan Kaminski

London.
1972. August.

The morgue was so clean it reminded Nisha of a restaurant kitchen. Whenever she went out for a meal, she imagined the chefs dissecting the animals, examining their innards for cause of death. Intended to be eaten by a human. She smiled to herself, for only a moment, then returned her attention to the coroner and the corpse on the table. The aen'fa girl from the river was now more ordinarily proportioned, the bloating having reduced, her skin thin and flaccid as a result of over-stretching. She would have been slim, probably attractive. Her skin was a light, pastel green, though much of it was now a slushy, decaying brown, like autumn leaves rotting on the pavement.

Nisha wrinkled her nose. At the back of her mind she knew that John Callihan would have been on one of these slabs not long ago.

"She'd been in the river a good while, at least a week," the doc was saying, "the only reason she's in as good condition as she is, is because the river's been colder than usual, and the slower aen'fa decomposition rate. Putrefaction brought the body back up where it got tangled in netting, which is how it ended up on the bank."

Zoltan snorted. "Any guesses on where she entered the water?"

Dr Steven Wong always seemed more excited by his job than was appropriate. Nisha liked her job, believed in what they did at the SDC, but Wong? He loved pulling apart bodies, especially if they were of Palinese origin. Cracking his knuckles, he pointed at a plastic container on floor at the end of the table. "Hard to say with any accuracy, but there was a lot of detritus tangled in her limbs and hair. Netting, rope, mostly, but also some broken glass, old tin cans. Might give you an indication."

Leaning over the container, Nisha grimaced. It was a sludgy concoction that looked like it had been dredged from the depths of the Thames. "Did she drown?"

"Unlikely. The lungs were fully collapsed, and were only wet through prolonged exposure. There is no evidence of inhalation of water, so I'd say she was dead before she was submerged." He pointed at the aen'fa's forehead, above the sharp, eyebrow-less brow, where a deep gash cut through to the bone. "There's also this. Definitely bludgeoned with something solid and heavy, fracturing the skull around this area. Looking at the impact marks and the size, I'd guess at the side of a table, or a mantelpiece sculpture, something like that. Can still find flecks of red paint in the wound, and whatever hit her left an uneven mark - which is why I'm angling towards some sort of object, with an uneven surface."

Zoltan moved round the table for a better look. "Did it hit her, or did she hit it?"

"Can't say. There's evidence of bruising around her ankles and shoulders, consistent with the body being moved, though."

"Right," Zoltan said. "Whacked, then dumped in the river. Charming."

"Make sure we get some of those paint flecks out and examined," Nisha said. "You never know."

"One other thing," Wong said, lifting the body on one side. "There's a mark at the base of the spine here."

"What is that? A tattoo?"

"That's what I thought, but nothing that civilised. It's a brand. Made through direct application of extreme heat."

The dark, raised mark, about the length of a finger, depicted two connected chain links. Nisha grimaced. "That's an ugly thing. Some sort of aen'fa mark? A tribal thing perhaps?"

"Not seen one before," Zoltan said, examining it closely.
"How many aen'fa have you seen this closely?"