Chapter 31

The two men carried their bags from Mao’s car up to the locked and bolted entrance. Tonight it took only one rattle and a slightly raised voice from Lee to rouse the man within. Kreeger steeled himself for the appearance of the misshapen little monster; but when his toothless face grinned through the chicken-wire and glass, he still jumped. The bolt rammed back, the door creaked open, and there he was, hunched beneath the naked, low-watt bulb: Mr Fuk, night-watchman of the city morgue.

The previous twenty four hours had not been kind to Fuk. His skin had greyed to the colour of one of the fresh cadavers in his charge. His hunch looked as if it had swelled, pushing him down into a more severe stoop—his eyes barely left the concrete floor. He grunted at Lee, ignored Kreeger.

‘More bodies today,’ Lee said, ‘Phant.’

Fuk, with his hoop of keys, led the way through the corridors of the foul-smelling building: ammonia and death in equal measure.

‘Did he say anything about the electricity?’

‘No,’ Lee said. He called up to Fuk, whose reply was curt and staccato, the angry syllables echoing away through the acrid hallways. He had not looked back. ‘He says the electricity always goes off and he’s not here in the daytime—he sleeps. ‘Docta Lin, he leave a message for you.’ Lee nodded away in front.

Minutes later their guide gave up on his forward shuffle, selected a key from his hoop, and thrust it into the keyhole. A vigorous twist of his wrist sent back the bolt and he resumed his limp on into the building. Tonight he didn’t open the door.

Lee pushed it back and flicked the switches on the wall. As the lights flickered on and the fan began to stir the putrid air, the two men hurried through and entered the lab. Once inside, Kreeger went for the switches while Lee sealed the door.

‘Power go off again today,’ Lee said, picking up a notebook and waving it under his nose.

Kreeger surveyed the bench to his left; somebody had taken away the clutter and left it looking like a reasonable workspace. A new-looking microscope sat next to a desk-lamp. Kreeger could not immediately identify the other pieces of equipment but he was impressed.

‘Docta Lin,’ Lee said, snatching up a scrap of paper. ‘He wish you well.’ He waved the paper in front of Kreeger.

‘What does he say about Blye’s clothes? And the electricity?’

Lee looked again at the paper. ‘Sorry, nothing.’

Kreeger was not surprised. He put his bags on the bench and started to unpack. First out was the jar of flies. ‘I will start here in the lab,’ he said, peering in through the glass. It was no longer abuzz: some of the specimens had died, others crawled around in a catatonic stupor. ‘I might take a look at the body later.’

The doctor approached his work solemnly, still feeling trapped in that corner by Lee’s awkward questions. This really would be his last duty, official or not, he understood that now. His final autopsy in Norfolk had not been so climactic. His responsibilities in the examining room had slowly tapered off as he had moved into a more academic role, lecturing, writing papers; passing on his knowledge to others. There had always been something to do, something ahead, up until this trip to the Far East. But after tonight . . . . The finality had not hit him until Lee had put it to him so bluntly. He had always imagined that in his retirement he could keep one foot in the department door, consulting on important cases, guest lecturing—keeping busy and feeling wanted. But out here, that security had evaporated. He looked back over this huge country with its vast population, over the wide ocean, to his little job in the Norfolk Medical Examiner’s Office, and it all seemed so insignificant. He had spent the last three months wishing himself home, but now he realised there would be little there for him when he finally made it back.

Kreeger tweezered out a dead fly and put it under the microscope. ‘Let’s see who you are,’ he said to the insect. Mind back on the job.

Lee had gone to the back of the lab and was looking through the jumble. He would not care about how Kreeger had become interested in forensic entymology, how this eminent pathologist had given himself an extra tool to use in uncovering of the mysteries of death.

*

Kreeger was not a trained entymologist, he was a medical doctor who had started his career saving life and ended it amongst the dead. A decade ago, the Norfolk Police Department had dug up a murder victim, buried in a park for months; the corpse offered no forensic evidence besides the bugs that had colonised it. No hair or skin samples, no fibres or fingerprints, no blood or semen. Nothing inside or outside for Kreeger to work on. Just bugs. They had flown in a specialist from New York—a forensic entymologist—to assist; and with his help, Kreeger had been able to establish both where the victim had been killed and when. The police soon had the murderer in custody.

Kreeger adjusted the microscope’s back-light and brought the fly into focus. It was certainly a blowfly, as he had expected, but he would need to look up the exact species. Each species has its own unique life cycle—from eggs to maggots to pupae to adult insect—and the time taken within each stage of that life cycle is known, varying only with the weather. So in order to calculate anything, Kreeger would first have to identify the species.

A crash from the back of the room distracted the doctor: Lee had dropped something big. Kreeger looked over and saw him pulling a long easy-chair from the pile of rubbish. Putting his eye back on top of the microscope, he played with the focus and turned down the back-light. It was a perfect specimen, looming up through the eyepiece. Grey bloated abdomen segmented into nine parts, serrated hooks beneath its mouth … He began to scratch notes onto a pad without taking his eye from the fly, and only when the page was full did he swivel around on his stool and reach into his bag for his copy of Jarvis and Skipper’s Flies of Asia. He turned to the chapter on Callids, members of the Calliphoria family of insects, a family that includes the genus Phormia—the blow flies. Kreeger found the correct genus and began to run his finger down a page of photographic plates: Phormia Burientas, Phormia Sclitoris, Phormia . . . . He turned to the next page and there it was, in full colour, pinned out on its death bed—Phormia Orientas.

He looked at Professor Jarvis’s entry on this blow fly. It’s life was not a mystery; science had dissected, measured, timed, and otherwise scrutinised this little bug for all to see. Jarvis could be poetic at times: the female, he says, ‘relishes fresh meat, bloody and warm’. That would make things easier, Kreeger thought; this fly would not go near decomposed or putrefied flesh. The only uncertainty in calculating the post-mortem interval is introduced by not knowing how soon after the death of the host the adult fly laid her eggs; this can happen at any time within a few days. If Phormia Orientas was responsible for colonising Blye’s body, the eggs would have been laid quickly, reducing the uncertainty.

When he had finished reading the Professor’s marvellous description he was impressed with the creature that he had pinned out under his microscope. He scribbled a few more words on a fresh page of his notebook.

A female could have sniffed out Blye’s corpse from miles away, flying in with her batch of fertilised eggs like a B52 carrying a primed cargo of bombs, only her guidance and delivery systems would have been far more accurate. In a daylight raid, she would have buzzed in and dropped her clutch of five hundred eggs with devastating effect—her little bombs would eventually decimate their target. And she would not have been the only one to attack the body.

Incubated by the warmth of the fresh meat, within two days, the sausage shaped eggs would have hatched out into maggots which then commenced with the destruction, eating their way through the young American, non-stop feasting for their brief five-day lives, shedding skins when full. At the end of it, bloated and distended, they would have crawled out of the flesh and looked for a dry place to rest, as if sickened by the rich food and their untamed indulgence. Each full maggot would have needed its last skin and would not have hastily thrown it off as it had done so with the others. The skin would have quickly hardened and contracted into his new home as he metamorphosed into a pupa, mummified inside his death shroud.

Nathan Blye’s meat had not gone to waste; encased inside each black tomb was not death but life—the transformation of the boy’s flesh and blood into a magnificent winged creature, ready to fly out and begin the cycle all over again.

Kreeger magnified some of the other flies in the pot; they were all Phormia Orientas; now he knew exactly what he was dealing with.

He had forgotten about Lee and now looked around for him. The detective had settled himself onto the foldable easy-chair, which he had extended to its full length. He lay back with a magazine propped on his chest. He used a free hand to shell peanuts that he fished out of a bag lying on the ground next to him.

‘Jon, I need to get something from the freezer.’

Lee threw a peanut into his mouth and peered over the magazine but his expression did not change. He spat a piece of shell onto the floor.

‘Alright, I’ll do it myself,’ Kreeger muttered.

He swung open the lab door and stepped through into the cooler body-room. He hadn’t changed his clothes yet, still unsure whether he would bother with a full autopsy or not. He wore no facemask but fortunately the air had cleared a little; it stank but at least he could get some air in through his nostrils. He looked over at the blue boxes; how many more now waited there he could not be sure, but it had certainly been a busy twenty four hours for the city morgue. Which box contained the body of Nathan Blye? The overhead fan sent a draft of cool air through his open collar and over his bare arms. He shivered—the first time he had done so in this city.

Kreeger stepped over the blood-stained floor to the box at the end of the row. He lifted the lid and from the head of the top body he pulled away the hood. Two oval eyes bulged out of their sunken sockets, shining up like distant beacons over a black ocean, their brilliant whiteness subdued only by the patina of capillaries shooting blood over each surface. Kreeger cursed, let go of the hood, and dropped the lid—the slamming metal blowing out the fresh stench of death. He gagged.

In the next box, Kreeger found the body he recognised, although by now the young American would be familiar only to a pathologist. The specimen pots were where he had left them: at the feet of the corpse—Blye had not kicked in his sleep. He read the labels, took the pots he needed, and returned the body to darkness.

Lee had moved little besides his hands and jaw during the doctor’s absence and barely looked up on his return, engrossed as he was in his reading material. Kreeger’s judgmental eye just made out the magazine’s glossy cover and its pink-fleshed girl in a high-heels. He sniffed at the man; and as laid the cold pots on his bench, he watched Lee pick at something stuck in his teeth.

The creamy yellow grub came into sharp focus as Kreeger adjusted the eyepiece, soft and voluptuous in its fully-grown form. Delicate spiracles separated its length into segments; beautifully developed mouth hooks protruded from its tapered end, ready to attach the coming pupa to a stable anchor for a safe hibernation. Kreeger noted the telltale signs in its body structure then checked more plates in Jarvis and Skipper to confirm his identification and tell him exactly how old it was. Phormia Orientas, without a doubt; third-stage larva. It had already lost two of its skins and was about to metamorphose into a puparium—three days old. The doctor could now estimate the post-mortem interval, the time elapsed since the death of Nathan Blye, or in this case the time elapsed between his death and his refrigeration, which occurred five days ago, on Wednesday night.

Three days for the larva, one or two for the eggs to hatch, and zero to two days for the eggs to be laid. Kreeger scribbled the numbers on his pad and came up with a minimum post-mortem interval of four days and a maximum of seven days. If the refrigeration had been constant Kreeger would have been able to say for sure that Blye had been dead for at least four days before being brought to the morgue. Unfortunately, the frequent rises in temperature of the body could have allowed the larvae to continue to develop during the warm spells if they had not been killed off during the cold spells.

An assistant would have halved the time for the analysis of the specimens. Kreeger thought of Delores from the labs back home then looked over at Jon Lee, nested amid a scattering of broken peanut shells; it would be quicker alone, he decided.

The label on the next pot he handled read ‘pupa from shorts’. It rattled inside the plastic before falling out onto his palm. A few minutes of analysis, shared between the microscope and Jarvis and Skipper, were all he needed. He scribbled two more numbers into the pad: minimum—six; maximum—eleven. The larva had put the two figures at four and seven, so there was an overlap of between six and seven days. It was looking as if Blye had been dead a lot longer than anyone was saying.

To be entirely sure, Kreeger would have to look at the pupae he had recovered from the ground beneath where the corpse had lain. He reached for the plastic pot with the appropriate label. These pupae had not been refrigerated and had so far undergone a normal life cycle. After having gorged themselves for several days on Blye’s flesh, the maggots had crawled from the corpse and found a suitable dry place in the earth beneath the body in which to metamorphose. He flipped off the lid, shook the contents, and peered in at the deep-purple pupae. Using tweezers, he picked out a well-developed specimen.

Identifying the species from Jarvis and Skipper was simple, but fixing its age was not so simple—it was older than the one from the shorts and as pupae mature they get harder to age. He reduced and increased the magnification of the microscope several times, each time adjusting the position of the pupa on the slide, looking carefully at its body structure. He cross checked the glossy pages of his reference book more than once. According to Professor Jarvis, the pupae of the Phormia Orientas live for six to seven days before hatching into adult blow flies, which meant that Kreeger would have to accurately age the specimen for it to be of any use. Magnification, slide, book—he did everything one more time before realising that he had missed the tapering of the final spiracle at the mouth end. As the pupa develops this spiracle slowly divides on the underside until hours before the pupa hatches it completely separates into two distinct lines. He carefully turned the pupa over and increased the magnification. There it was: the tapered final spiracle, not yet two distinct lines, but almost. Kreeger was sure that it would be hatching within the next twenty four hours; he would keep it in the lab and allow it to do so just to make sure.

Now that he knew what he was looking for and how to look, he quickly examined five or six others from the white pot: they were all mature, ripe for hatching. He jotted the numbers on a clean page—he had already done the simple calculation in his mind, he just wanted to see the result. Eleven. He wrote it out in letters for added effect then wrote ‘days’ after it. The minimum post-mortem interval was eleven days.

Kreeger turned back to the figures revealed by the larva from the corpse and the pupa from Blye’s shorts: six to seven. Today was the seventh and Blye had been bought here on the second—five days. The life-cycles of the bugs in the cold box had been halted for five days. Five plus six or seven made eleven or twelve. Everything matched. Blye died at least eleven days ago. Another quick calculation put the maximum post-mortem interval at sixteen days.

‘Well Mr. Lee,’ Kreeger boomed forth. Lee jerked forward and a handful of peanuts spilled out onto the floor. ‘It seems that our friend, young Nathan Blye, has been spending ghost money for a lot longer than you thought.’

Lee’s brow furrowed as he awkwardly rose from the easy chair, brushing away crumbs.

‘According to my deductions, based on forensic entymology, the post-mortem interval for the deceased is at least eleven days.’

‘Docta, you please speak English so I can understand.’

Kreeger grinned and said: ‘I am just trying to tell you that the boy did not die last Tuesday night, a mere six days ago; he has been dead for two weeks, give or take a day or two.’

Lee took a few steps towards Kreeger, bunching his thin eyebrows over his narrowed eyes. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘We found the body on Wednesday, the second, and he was in the monastery the day before, the first. You make a mistake, Docta.’

Kreeger cut into the detective with a fierce stare. ‘I have just analysed the insects from the body and from the crime scene. This species of fly cannot possibly grow to maturity in just six days. Look for yourself.’ He motioned to the microscope.

Lee waved a dismissive hand at the bench and his disbelief seemed to melt into unconcern. ‘Okay, okay, Docta Kreega, whatever you say.’ He kicked a stool into the bench and pulled himself up onto it; his elbows went onto the wooden surface and his shoulders dropped. ‘You want to check the body now,’ he said, looking hard at his watch.

Kreeger’s steady eyes had followed Lee’s movements and now fixed him with a stare; he breathed a little quicker and could feel the moisture gathering on his sticky skin. Palpitations. ‘Listen Jon.’ The words were stern and made Lee suddenly look up from his slouched position. ‘This case might not be important to you, but Nathan Blye was somebody. He has parents who want to know what happened to him, and it is my job to try to find the truth. You might try to be a little more co-operative.’

Lee dropped his eyes and cowered; he obviously hadn’t caught all the words but he ‘d got the main point. Kreeger picked up some of the specimen pots and said, ‘I am going to put these back in the refrigerator—just in case anyone is interested in the evidence.’ His arms were full so he kicked open the lab door and pushed through, leaving Lee at the bench.

*

He slammed into the vile air of the body room, its coolness and foul smell knocking the anger directly out of him. He stopped, wishing he had put on a facemask. By the time he reached the blue box, his heartbeat had slowed and the sweat on his forehead had cooled. He needed a free hand to lift the lid so he tried to hold all the pots in one arm; one fell, bouncing on the concrete; then another. He had to kneel and let them all slip to the ground, noticing as he did so the patchwork stains—years of careless work. Crouched there on the cold concrete floor, he yawned then checked his watch. Lee was right, it was pretty late. He slowly stood up and heaved up the lid, wishing he had not lost his temper with the local detective. The pots went in one by one. He took a final look at the plastic-wrapped body before closing the lid on tonight’s autopsy. Do it tomorrow, he said to himself, or . . .

Kreeger re-entered the lab having decided to finish for the night; he opened his mouth to tell Lee, but the smaller man suddenly began snapping words into his cell-phone, cutting of the syllables like a chef slicing through a carrot. At last he chopped off a goodbye and dropped the phone into his jacket.

‘Fat,’ Lee said, looking up at Kreeger, ‘Offica Fat he speak to the widow again today.’ He nodded through the door towards the bodies. ‘Fat says the . . .’

Kreeger had stopped listening to Lee, his eyes returned to the door. Hadn’t her late husband, old Ling, come in on the same day as Blye, and hadn’t he lain up there on the same hill a week before doing so?

‘Jon,’ Kreeger said cutting off the detective, ‘her husband, the old man; he came in here on the same night as Blye didn’t he? And didn’t you say that he had been left up on the hill for a week before anyone found him?

‘Eh . . . yes.’

Kreeger thought for a moment. ‘Come on, I need your help.’ He turned and thumped through the heavy door. ‘Bring your apron,’ he called back.’

*

By the time Lee entered the body-room, Kreeger had already wheeled over the examining table and had the lid of the box open. He swung down the front panel which cracked the concrete despite his attempts to stop it from doing so.

‘Docta Kreega, what . . .’

‘I have to check the old man’s body.’

‘What? I am not sure if I can let you do that. What do you want?

‘Don’t worry, I just want to look. I won’t touch anything?’

‘Well . . . eh you must hurry. Fat; he says that we have just given permission to the widow to come over and get the body. She has been going crazy over at the police station all day today. Tomorrow is a very important festival, and she wants to have her husband’s ash ready for it. She will be here soon.’

Without any display of surprise, Kreeger bent and peered in at the fourth tray down where a body lay wrapped in plastic. ‘Still in the same place?’ He could not recognise it through the plastic and was reluctant to pull off the hood.

‘Yes, of course; Docta Lin he never moves the position of the bodies once they are in. Very bad luck, you know?’

Kreeger tapped the tray. ‘Help me get him up onto the table, will you?’

Lee was trying to fasten his apron with one hand; the other he cupped over his nose. He nodded but didn’t open his mouth.

Blye had been packed at the top of the box and getting him out the night before had not been too difficult. Ling was at the bottom.

‘When will she be here?’ Kreeger asked.

Lee didn’t want to speak. He took out the same soiled rag as the one he’d used the night before and mumbled through it, ‘Not sure. She will have to find an undertaker to help her, and she will have to bribe someone at the, how you say, place to burn . . .’

‘Crematorium.’

‘Yes, yes. She will have to bribe someone over there to open up and build up a fire. And the monks. She will have to hire two or three monks from the temple. But these things very easy to do with money. Maybe she do them already. Maybe she will be here soon, Docta.’

Kreeger remembered that the rollers on this tray worked and he began to ease it forward; with Lee’s help it came right out, bringing the sheathed corpse with it. Kreeger took the head and shoulders, Lee the feet, and on the count of three they swung old Ling up. The wheels rattled and the iron creaked as he landed on the examining table. Kreeger wheeled the cadaver over to the light as Lee sealed up the box.

The scalpel slithered the length of the body, opening its protective cocoon; and as the decomposed corpse slowly revealed itself, Kreeger could only think of his clothes—he wished he had changed them and hoped that the apron that he had hastily hung over his neck would be sufficient. Still, he would not be going in too deeply.

Ling had supposedly died five days before Blye but his corpse was less decomposed. This did not mean that he had in fact died after Blye; it could be due to the different surroundings they had rested in after dying. Blye had been outside, mutilated, exposed in semi-nakedness to everything nature could throw at him. Ling had been clothed, wrapped up in bed, sealed in a room. The first flies to find Ling would have had only the soft membranes in his face to work on—nose, ears, eyes, and mouth. Blye’s guests from the insect world would have had much choicer pickings. Given these disadvantaged starting positions, the maggots’ infestation of Ling would have progressed much more slowly, and where Blye’s flesh had been ravaged by these little carnivores, much of Ling’s had been spared.

Kreeger worked around the head, admiring the work of the larvae. Of course it was possible that no female member of Phormia Orientas had flown in through the old man’s window or door and the doctor would not find what he was looking for. In fact the first two or three creamy maggots that he picked out of the oral cavity did not look at all like Phormia Orientas. Others, inside the nasal cavity, looked more promising; he dropped them into a pot.

As with Blye, Ling had been spared the indignity of facing the coroner with exposed genitals. Kreeger noticed the oversized boxer-shorts and hoped that they were the same ones that he had died in. He looked for a pocket, but there did not seem to be one. He didn’t really want to cut away the shorts, but there seemed to be no other way—he needed to check. A few careful snips revealed the genito-anal area which had, not surprisingly, been heavily infested: some flies, Phormia Orientas among them, prefer to lay their eggs in shaded areas; some even lay at night. Ling had lain inside a dim house, but even there they would have chosen the darkest place, such as the spot Kreeger was now looking at. Blye, he knew, had lain outside in direct sunlight but his killers had helped the oriental Phormid by throwing bamboo leaves and bark over parts of his body, keeping out the sun’s rays.

Kreeger cut more of the material and pulled away the shorts in several pieces. He searched, finding nothing in the folds or hems. But running his finger and thumb along the bunched up cotton of the waistband he found what he was looking for. He needed the scissors again to snip around it, but it came away easily—a shiny, deep-purple puparium, which he dropped into a plastic pot. He was finished.

Kreeger looked up for Lee but could not see him. If the widow was coming for her husband they had better get him back in the box as soon as possible. ‘Jon, I have finished.’ No reply. He picked up his pots and walked back to the lab. Lee was back in the easy chair with his shiny magazine and peanuts; he looked up with wide open eyes as the doctor entered the room.

‘Give me a minute to look at these then we can get the body back in the refrigerator.’ He dropped the pots next to the microscope. Lee mumbled a response.

The first two maggots that Kreeger lit up on the microscope slide definitely were not Phormia Orientas—he did not need Jarvis and Skipper to tell him that—too many spiracles and elongated mouth hooks. He could have gone through the plates to find out exactly which species they belonged to, but that would just waste time and was probably unnecessary anyway. The next one was different. He counted the segments, examined the filigree of the spiracles, and noted the structure of the mouth hooks. A quick look at the reference book. ‘Yes,’ he said out loud, with his finger under the appropriate plate. Lee looked up, but Kreeger was already back to the microscope, hovering over its eyepiece. He reconfirmed his identification: Phormia Orientas, third stage larva. This little grub had exactly the same birthday as the ones he had retrieved from Blye’s flesh an hour earlier. No doubt about it—they could almost have shared the same mother.

The pupa rolled off the slide and only a quick hand from the doctor caught it before it bounced away. The second time he secured it more carefully. As Kreeger slowly adjusted the back-light and focused the lens, a beautifully formed dark-purple chrysalis materialised before his eye. He knew what it was at once. He reached for the pot labelled ‘pupa from shorts’ and again put the specimen from Blye’s underwear beneath the microscope. Identical.

‘Jon,’ Kreeger called back in a voice far too loud for the small room, ‘Did you find out exactly when he died? The old man I mean, her husband.’

‘Yes,’ Lee said, stopping his chewing for a moment, ‘Fat; he just told me. Thursday, twenty seven.’ He began to chew once more.

‘Well, well,’ Kreeger boomed again, ‘Our boy died on Franklin’s birthday.’ He waited for Lee’s response but got nothing beyond a stony look over the tilted magazine. Lee neither asked for clarification nor challenged the doctor’s forensic entymological deductions. He simply looked up, as if he could not care less. A shrug would have said as much.

As Kreeger began to clear off his bench, he heard Lee behind him. ‘Are you going to do the boy now?’ By his tone Kreeger knew that he was checking his watch again, but he did not turn around to see. ‘No. That will not be necessary now. I just want to get back to the hotel.’

Kreeger reached behind him for the straps of the apron and as his fingers found the first tie, he heard the door of the body-room creak open and Fuk’s gruff voice ring out. He sounded angry.

Lee shot up, the fastest Kreeger had ever seen him move. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Did you put the old man back in his box?’