Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“I prefer ‘Dr Cathcart’ rather than ‘love’ if you don’t mind, sergeant.”

Now I felt even more like an eejit.

“Sorry, Dr Cathcart … look, we seem to have got off on the wrong foot, I mean, uhm, just because we’re police officers, it doesn’t mean that we’re total idiots.”

“That remains to be seen. This hand, for example,” she said, picking up the severed right hand.

“What about it?”

“It seems that none of you noticed that this hand does not belong to the victim. It’s from a completely different person.”

Shit.

That was what my subconscious had been trying to tell me all night.

“Nope, we missed that,” I admitted.

“Hmmm.”

“What else have you found out?” I asked.

She put the hand back on the autopsy table and gave me a plastic bag containing a bullet slug.

“You’ll want this,” she said. “Recovered from his chest.”

“Thank you.”

She read her notes. “The victim is a white male around twenty-eight years old. His hair has been dyed blond but it was originally brown. The lack of compression of the blood vessels in the arm or ligature marks on the wrists leads me to the conclusion that the victim’s right hand was cut off postmortem. After he was murdered.”

“We prefer the term ‘unlawful killing’ at this stage, Dr Cathcart. It’s the mens rea of the killer that determines if he or she is guilty of murder as opposed to some other kind of unlawful homicide,” I said to get a bit of my own back and annoy her — which I could see was mission accomplished.

Dr Cathcart sniffed. “Shall I continue?”

“Please.”

“Another man’s hand was placed at the scene. This man was considerably older than the victim. Perhaps sixty. For what it’s worth this hand shows evidence of callusing on the fingers in a pattern which suggests that he played the guitar. Perhaps professionally.”

“How long ago was this hand removed? Days ago? Weeks ago?”

“It is difficult to say. However there is no evidence of freezing and thawing in the blood or skin cells so I would assume that it was removed around the same time as the victim was killed.”

“When was the victim killed?”

She picked up her notes and read: “Between 8 and 11 pm on 12/5/81.”

“The cause of death was the gunshot wound?”

“The chest wound probably killed the victim but he was then shot in the head, execution style.”

“Anything else?”

“The victim had had sexual intercourse with a male before or after he was killed.”

“How can you tell that?”

“The victim’s exterior sphincter was stressed and I found semen in his rectum.”

“Was this consensual intercourse?”

“If the sexual encounter was also postmortem then I would hazard a non-consensual encounter.”

This was beginning to look a little less like your ordinary run-of-the-mill execution of an informer.

“Leaving aside the sexual episode, the chronology of the murder seems to have been this: the victim was shot in the chest, shot in the head, there was an interval of some time and then the assailant removed the right hand with a hack saw,” she continued. She stifled a yawned.

“Tired or already jaded by death?”

“Sorry. Helicopters woke me up last night. Couldn’t get back to sleep. We couldn’t possibly do the rest of this outside, could we?”

“Certainly. Over a cup of tea or something?” I asked.

“That would be nice,” she said and smiled.

“I’ll just need to fingerprint this character. Is that ok? We’ve got the prints from the other hand working their way through the system.”

“Yes, that’s fine. But I should show you this first.”

She went to one of the stainless steel bowls and I winced involuntarily as she reached inside and gave me something large and slippery. I opened my eyes and was relieved to see that it was merely a plastic bag with a curled-up piece of paper inside.

“What’s this?”

“I also recovered this from the victim’s anus and perhaps this was where the subcutaneous stressing came from.”

“Jesus Christ! That was up his arse?”

“Yes.”

“The bag and all?”

“Just the paper.”

“I see.”

“Why don’t you meet me in the hospital cafeteria in ten minutes while I wash up?” she said.

“Ok,” I replied. I took out my kit and fingerprinted John Doe’s left hand. I went back outside and along the gloomy corridor until I found Hattie Jacques again. “I need to make a phone call,” I said.

Her eyes bulged as if I had asked for her firstborn but then she directed me to an inner office. I called McCrabban and told him to get over here right away not sparing the horses. I went to the cafeteria, got a pot of tea and waited for both of them at the window seat next to the garden. I examined the bullet: 9mm slug shot at point-blank range. I looked at the bag Dr Cathcart had given me.

Keeping it within the plastic I unrolled the piece of paper she had recovered.

“What the fuck?” I said to myself.

The paper was soiled and faded but it was clearly the first twelve bars of a musical score:

I examined it for a minute. Some things were obvious. It was for solo tenor and piano but clearly transcribed from an opera score. I hummed it to myself. It was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. The words had been removed from the transcription, which wasn’t that uncommon. I hummed it again. It was something quite famous. Italian. Verdi or Puccini.

But which opera and what were the words? I needed an expert. While I was thinking Crabbie showed up.

“Jesus, how did you get here so fast?” I asked him.

“Out the back doors, over the railway lines. Is one of them teas for me?”

“No. Here,” I said handing him the bag. “Dr Cathcart found this shoved up the victim’s arse. Get Matty to open it with full forensic caution. When he’s done that, please get him to make me a photocopy of it and get one of those reserve constables to send the photocopy back over here ASAP. Make sure Matty does his best work on this. The killer might not have expected us to find it and he may have been a bit more careless.”

“This was in the victim’s, uh, behind?”

“Yeah. Here, take it.”

“Ok, boss,” Crabbie said taking the plastic bag with distaste.

“And take this,” I said handing him the fingerprints.

“What’s this?” Crabbie asked.

“That hand next to the body last night? It was from somebody else.”

“Seriously?”

“Me and Matty missed it. Right eejit I looked in front of the patho.”

“A different bloke’s hand next to the body? What kind of a case is this?”

“There’s more.”

“I’m listening.”

“He had semen in his arse too. It’s a possibility that he was raped postmortem. Raped, a piece of music shoved up his arse, his hand cut off. We’re into weird territory with this one, Crabbie.”

His eyes were wide. “If the press get a whiff of this …”

“But they won’t, Crabbie, will they? Not until we’re ready.”

“No way, Sean. No way.”

“Good. Now here’s the slug. Get that up to the ballistics lab. And have that photocopy back here as quick as you can.”

Crabbie went off looking thoroughly unhappy.

When he was gone I took out my notebook and wrote: “Shot in the chest. Rape? Musical score. Nineteenth-century opera. Hand removed and kept for trophy? Second victim? Tortured? Informer? Something else made to look like murder of informer?”

I looked through the cafeteria window at the darkening sky.