Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
Marc had turned up with Madds to issue formal apologies and try to smooth things over with Scarlett’s family.
Once Mr Peters had recovered, he had been taken home by their family liaison officer.
Declan had cleaned his nose, refusing to get it checked out at A hopefully, everyone would be too busy doing their thing to pay her any attention in the corner feeling sorry for herself.
Dawson was just a kid, a good-looking one too; his black hair was slicked back off his waxy face, and she wished for the hundredth time that he had never gone up on that fell.
He had his whole life ahead of him. His fingernails were painted black.
They were short and some of them were chipped, a lot like Morgan’s had been until two days ago when she’d treated herself to a manicure.
Now, hers were a blood-red cat-eye colour.
Dawson was a boy after her own heart; she’d have wanted to be friends with him.
Her eyes filled with tears so hot they were burning her eyelids.
Lowering her head, she blinked rapidly to try and clear them. She didn’t know how she was going to get through this. Ben didn’t look much better, he kept rubbing his jaw that was now sporting a large purplish bruise that seemed to be spreading all along the left side of his face.
He looked at Morgan and she whispered, ‘Are you okay?’
He nodded. ‘Are you?’ he whispered back, and she shrugged because she wasn’t okay.
‘It’s rude to whisper.’ Declan had one hand on his hip and in his other was a scalpel.
‘Sorry, it is,’ Morgan replied.
He winked at her. ‘Susie, give me a hand, let’s remove Dawson’s clothes. Have you guys got what you need?’ he asked Joe and Claire, who nodded.
They worked diligently and in silence, all of them lost in their own worlds of grief and sadness for Dawson. Morgan couldn’t watch when, after everything had been measured and photographed, Declan declared, ‘I’m going to make the Y-incision now, just to prewarn you all.’
Morgan looked across the room to the wall where the radio and Echo were instead, trying to think of things to take her mind off what was happening, because the last thing she needed was to faint. Declan was studying Dawson’s lungs to determine if he died before or after he went into the water.
‘The head injury is too severe to have been caused by him hitting his head on a rock in the water. Before I even examine that I can tell by the visible bone fragments that it is a blunt-force trauma injury sustained before he went into the water. What I’m looking for is to see if he was already dead before he was put into the lake, but I won’t know until I remove his lungs and check to see how much lake water is in them. ’
Morgan closed her eyes and thought about New York.
She and Ben had strolled Greenwich Village for hours, until they’d come across a tattoo shop called Tiny Zaps.
Intrigued, she’d gone inside and chosen a tiny tattoo design off an old space invaders machine; in less than thirty minutes she’d left the shop with an apple with NYC written across it.
Happy with her permanent souvenir of the city she’d fallen in love with, she found she could block out the noise of the pruners as they were chopping through Dawson’s rib cage.