Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

I nodded. “Ok, let’s turn to Lucy Moore.”

I picked up the second file.

The first shock was the baby.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked.

“Oh yes. She gave birth about a week before she died. It looks like she breastfed the infant for about two days and then stopped.”

“It died?” I asked.

“Or she gave it away?” Crabbie said.

Laura shrugged. That was beyond her area of expertise.

“We’ll get dogs and go back up to Woodburn Forest. Maybe the baby was buried nearby,” I said to Crabbie.

“And I’ll check the missions and the hospitals,” McCrabban added.

“This might be a better explanation of why she killed herself: you give birth, your baby dies …” I said.

“Why did you think she killed herself?” Laura asked.

“Well, her ex-husband just joined the hunger strike last week and we were thinking guilt or something. But this is more concrete,” I said.

“And it’s probably why she ran away! At Christmas she would have been — what, three months gone?” Crabbie asked.

“She’d know at three months but she might not be showing,” Laura said.

“Pregnant! At least this is one case we can start closing the book on, eh Sean?” Crabbie said.

He was dead right. Everybody in Ireland understood this particular trope. Girl gets pregnant out of wedlock, runs away, gives birth, kills herself. Happened all the time. Abortion was illegal on both sides of the Irish border. There were few places a girl could turn. Of course Lucy was a little different in that she was slightly older and she had already been married, but with her ex locked up in the H Blocks and already a Republican hero, there would be just as much pressure, perhaps more …

She was probably too guilty to even write a note explaining herself.

Sad. Sad. Sad.

“Gentlemen, I really should …” Laura said quietly.

“Yes, yes, of course, Dr Cathcart. Anything else suspicious here?” I asked.

“I’ve been told that she’s been missing since before Christmas,” Laura said.

“That’s right,” McCrabban agreed.

“There were no bruises on her wrists or ankles, no signs of malnutrition or torture or abuse. Her muscles had not atrophied, her vitamin D levels were high. Which means that she was eating just fine and that she was getting plenty of sunlight,” Laura said.

“So she wasn’t somebody’s prisoner,” Crabbie said.

“I think you can infer that,” Laura replied.

“Everyone thought she was down South because of the postcards and letters she sent home. Can you tell if she was living down there?” Crabbie asked.

Laura shook her head. “No. She’d eaten fried egg on toast which I imagine you can get on both sides of the border.”

“That’s a hell of a last meal,” I said.

“I like fried egg on toast!” Crabbie said. “I make it for the missus sometimes.”

“So, is that everything?” I asked before Crabbie could further depress me with his culinary exploits.

“It’s all in the autopsy,” Laura explained.

“Good,” I said.

“There is one thing,” Laura added hesitantly.

“Yes?” I said.

“Well, I don’t want either of you to make a big thing about this because it’s probably nothing …”

Crabbie and I exchanged a look.

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, she died by strangulation, of course: the rope choked off the oxygen supply to her brain and she asphyxiated.”

“We saw that,” Crabbie said. “She thought it would be quick and it wasn’t.”

Laura nodded. “And she got a finger between the rope and her neck but it didn’t do any good.”

“No, it didn’t,” I agreed.

“Well, it’s just that … I’m not entirely happy with the bruises on her neck,” Laura said.

Her eyes were narrowed. She was tapping a pencil off the desk. I leaned back in the chair and folded my hands across my lap. “We’re all ears.”

“The bruising of the rope was the primary cause of contusion on her neck. And there were bruises just in front of the thyroid cartilage from where she’d wedged her forefinger between the rope and her throat, but it seems to me that one of those bruises looked something like a thumb, a thumb that was much bigger than Lucy’s. A thumb that pressed directly on her larynx. I should stress that this is only a possibility and it would not stand up in court. I included this observation only in the appendix of the autopsy report and I put no particular stress upon it. The bruising of the rope was considerable and it’s possible that this thumb-shaped bruise was either caused by the rope or by Lucy herself. When the coroner asks me the cause of death at the inquest I will say it’s almost certainly a suicide.”

“Although if this bruise was the result of Lucy being choked, prior to the noose being placed around her neck …” I said.

“It would be murder.”

McCrabban and I weren’t happy. We had enough on our plate with a lunatic going around shooting homosexuals. We didn’t need someone murdering hunger strikers’ ex-wives as well.

“You’re going to tell the coroner that it was death by suicide?” I said frostily.

“That’s what I believe,” Laura said.

“That’s what we’ll put in our report then. That’s what we’ll tell the family,” I replied.

“Fine. Gentlemen, I really must go to my clinic,” she said. We all stood.

Crabbie and I walked back to the station in silence.

We were both thinking about Lucy. “You don’t like it, do you, Sean?” Crabbie asked.

“No. I don’t.”

“It would be the old faithful, wouldn’t it? The murder by hanging disguised to look like a suicide …”

“Aye.”

“Or, as the good lady doctor says, it could just be a common or garden suicide.”

I nodded.

“You can’t let it sidetrack you though, mate,” Crabbie insisted.

“I know.”

We went back inside the barracks, sat at our desks and carried on work on the serial killer case. I read up about Orpheus and Offenbach in the station’s 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica . Nothing leapt out at me. I called Special Branch to check that the men on the killer’s hit list were getting protection.

They were.

I called the forensic lab in Belfast to see about those fingerprints and was told that it was only a skeleton crew on the weekend and not to expect anything.

I went to see McCallister and he read the patho report on Lucy Moore and told me that it looked like a suicide to him. I told him about Dr Cathcart’s concern.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

“I’d keep an open mind but I’m thinking suicide. A note would have been the clincher.”

“Aye. Suicide.”

I went out for some air. Carrickfergus on a Sunday was a ghost town. Everything was closed. Even the paper shops and the petrol stations shut at noon.

There was no traffic on the lough and I walked along the shore to Carrickfergus Castle. I was going to actually go in and check it out but it too was closed.

I returned to the police station.

“You want to go back to Woodburn Forest?” I asked McCrabban.

He looked up from his paperwork and nodded.

We rustled up Constable Price who was our canine officer.

The dog was a sensible looking lab/border collie cross called Skolawn.

We drove to the forest in the Land Rover and found the tree where we’d cut down Lucy.

We did a sight line box scan and found nothing suspicious.

We let Skolawn go. After an hour he had failed to find any human remains but he had managed to kill an endangered red squirrel.

“It would be helpful if we could find out where she’d been living for the last five months,” I said.

“With all the other stuff we have to do, you want us to look into that?” Crabbie complained.