Vic Leyton is leaning over Nigel Baxter’s bloated body, her face close to the corpse’s mouth. She inhales deeply, like she’s sniffing a particularly delicious pot of stew bubbling on a stove. It’s not a sight you see every day.

‘Can you smell it?’

I don’t fancy taking a whiff of dead man’s breath but I move in closer.

Vic nods her encouragement.

‘Well…?’

I look down at Nigel Baxter’s bluish corpse and reluctantly lean over him. He’s been opened up already, the ugly black blanket stiches form a Y-shape from his arms down to his pelvis, making him look cartoonish, like something from a Tim Burton movie, ghoulish and unreal. I try not to think about how the same thing must have been done to my Rachel, that she’d been cut open and her organs inspected and dissected before being stuffed back inside of her and sewn together. It had been bad enough witnessing her head injuries when I’d gone to identify her body. My once-perfect Rach broken and battered on a slab, like a piece of meat. I hadn’t wanted the pathologist to touch her, to pull her guts out with scissors or slice her skull open with a scalpel to reveal her damaged brain. I didn’t want them to stick needles in her to determine if there was alcohol in her blood (there wasn’t, of course) or to check her urine and the bile from her gallbladder, and everything else they do as a matter of course. And I really didn’t want them to open up her pelvis and expose her uterus, which was cushioning a small embryo that would’ve been our child. But it was their job to, it was a necessary evil. Just as this is. I don’t suppose Janet Baxter is over the moon about it either.

It’s a funny old calling, cutting up dead bodies and looking inside them for a living. I imagine it must take a degree of emotional detachment. But it’s got to have some psychological impact, especially when it comes to opening up kids or horrific abuse victims, people who’ve been brutally raped and the like. To see the horror inflicted upon the human form day in, day out, that would take its toll on a person wouldn’t it? I know it would affect me. Maybe it’s why ‘paths’, as we call them in the business, have got a bit of a rep for being oddballs. Though Vic Leyton comes across pretty normal – comparatively at least. She’s methodical, meticulous, highly professional and even has a sense of humour. Hell, you’d need one in her game I should imagine. She’s not bad with a needle and thread either.

‘Almonds,’ I say, ‘marzipany.’

She looks like she’s about to give me a gold star.

‘Ten out of ten, Riley,’ she says. ‘It’s one of the first things I noticed.’

‘And?’

‘You tell me, Detective.’

I don’t know Vic particularly well, not on a personal level anyway, but well enough to know that she likes to ask you the questions before she presents you with the answer, a bit like a teacher. She loves her job, you can tell, and she wants you to be as enthusiastic about it as she is, to play a little forensic pathology game in a bid to educate you. I go along with the game because it’s to my benefit in the long run. Bombard her with too many straightforward questions too quickly and she turns into one of her subjects. She’s quid pro quo is Vic.

I pause and she sighs. I’m not a model student I realise, and she senses my urgency.

‘Mr Baxter here was in fact in rather good health, considering he was overweight,’ she informs me, ‘no visible signs of heart disease; lungs, liver, kidneys all functioning pretty well, no indication of decay. He wasn’t a smoker, or a drinker really.’

I nod, not wanting to interrupt her flow.

‘There were no other visible marks on his body, other than the incisions of course, no bruising, no contusions, no signs of struggle, defence marks or broken capillaries, no damage to the neck or head.’

I stare at Baxter’s face and imagine how his voice might have sounded. He is, of course, expressionless; his mouth just a grim, thin line, yet somehow I see him as having been a rather jovial sort of chap. Janet certainly described him as such. She told me, among other things, that he was the regular Father Christmas at the local children’s hospice each year for almost a decade and that the children adored him. And I can visualise him with a white beard and a red hat making all those sick kids happy with his jolly ‘ho ho hos.’ Depressing.

‘We found minimal alcohol in his body. 0.01ml trace in his blood, urine and tissues – he’d had a glass or two but he certainly wasn’t drunk when he died.’

Vic pulls back the paper blanket that’s covering Baxter’s body, exposing his right wrist. There’s no longer any blood visible, just a thick black line that widens in the middle, a tear.

‘This was the first incision made. Ventrical,’ Vic explains, ‘a little over 5cm in length and deep enough to completely sever the radial artery. It resulted in fatal exsanguination; the invagination process of the artery stumps is controlled by the elastic structure of the vessel walls and consequently the spontaneous arterial haemostasis is obstructed.’

I look at her, my eyebrows raised, and she smiles at me pitifully. Such a philistine, I know.

‘He bled out, basically,’ she says.

‘How fast?’

‘Not as fast as you might think, it might have taken up to an hour, though the depth of the cut suggests it may have been sooner, mercifully.’

I inwardly wince.

‘And the same on the left side?’

She places his arm back underneath the paper blanket, gently I note.

‘Identical, almost. Again, ventral cut, perhaps even deeper than the right, severing that all-important radial artery. The wounds are in keeping with the razor blade used.’

My own wrists begin to buzz a little.

‘What’s interesting however, is that our Mr Baxter here was right-handed.’

I know what she’s going to say, but I don’t say it for her. Like I said, Vic likes to show and tell.

‘Seems slightly curious to me that he would slit his right wrist first, don’t you think?’

I nod. She’s building up to something, I can sense it.

‘So, cause of death was blood loss then?’

I get a vague whiff of that scent again, almonds and perfume, a sweet mix, and suddenly I remember the smell of furniture polish in the penthouse, like someone had given it a spring clean even though the housekeeper had said no one had been in for twenty-four hours.

Vic Leyton stands back from the body and looks me in the eyes. She’s got nice eyes has Vic. Big and brown. Lord only knows the horrors they’ve seen.

‘Well, you would think that, but actually, no,’ she says, pausing for dramatic effect, ‘I don’t think the blood loss killed him.’

I stay silent for a second or two, let her have her crescendo moment. I can hear my heart beating inside my chest, fuelled by the influx of adrenaline that’s just dropped in my guts.

‘Oh?’

She nods conspiratorially.

‘There’s something else,’ she says slowly, accentuating the words. ‘That smell, that almondy, marzipany scent you detected?’

‘Yeah…’

‘… Arsenic.’

I literally take a step backwards away from the table. The adrenaline has risen up through my diaphragm now and is attacking my galloping heart. I feel a little lighter.

‘There was a little over 400mg in his urine, an exceedingly large amount, enough to shut his organs down pretty rapidly…’

‘But I thought you said his organs were in good shape?’

‘I did, and they were… but that was before he ingested a substantial amount of poison, Riley.’

My mind races.

‘From the chocolates?’

Vic looks like she’s about to give me a round of applause.

‘Uh-huh. Arsenic poisoning tends to be a slow affair. Like I say, a substantial amount was needed to kill him, not least for his sheer size.’

‘But I thought with arsenic… you’re sick, you vomit the stuff up, the body tries to get rid and you can’t breathe…?’ Hey, I’ve seen a few Agatha Christies in my time you know. ‘Indeed,’ she nods, seemingly pleased with my knowledge on such a matter, ‘which is why I wasn’t all that surprised to find traces of chloroform in his blood too, around 21mg…’

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ I realise I’ve said this aloud and hold my hand up in apology.

She dismisses my blasphemy with a faint smile.

‘So basically, to sum up, Nigel Baxter was given chloroform to render him incapacitated, he’d already ingested arsenic, which was shutting him down, and then his wrists were slit open?’

Vic sighs at my reductive statement. ‘I’d say, in my experience,’ she flashes me a look that translates as ‘which is extensive’, ‘the arsenic in his system caused his vital organs to shut down internally while he simultaneously bled out. One perhaps happened before the other, my guess is his organs. You’re right about the vomiting though; had he been conscious he would’ve been violently sick, short of breath, heavily perspiring, but he wasn’t… conscious, that is.’

I’m speechless for a moment as I stare at Baxter’s body, his poisoned, incapacitated, slit-open, murdered body, and I envisage Janet Baxter’s reaction as I inform her, duty-bound, of Vic’s findings.

So, the good news, Mrs Baxter, is that your husband didn’t take his own life after all! The bad news however, is that someone else did. Every cloud, eh?

I look at Vic and she shrugs.

‘I’m sorry’, she apologises in her clipped Home Counties accent, ‘looks like I’ve made quite a lot more work for you, Dan.’

Her use of my Christian name, a first in all the years I’ve worked with her, jolts me out of the thousand-yard stare I’m fixed in, breaking through the plethora of questions that have begun marching through my brain like a platoon of Marines as I stare at Baxter’s corpse.

‘Yeah,’ I flash her a sarcastic smile as I look up, ‘Thanks, I appreciate that… Vic.’

There’s a hint of a smile on her face as she begins the process of washing up, scrubbing the scent of death from her skin. I wonder, given her daily exposure to it, if she ever manages to get it off completely.

‘Well, whoever killed him,’ she says with her back to me at the sink, ‘they certainly wanted to make sure there was absolutely no room for error. They clearly made sure they finished the job.’

I turn to leave then, taking one last look at the greying face of Nigel Baxter, aka Father Christmas.

‘Didn’t they just,’ I say.