The Cold Cold Ground

“This is not one of her days.”

“It’s not? Oh? Where is she?”

“She’s doing an autopsy, if you must know.”

“That’s what I wanted to see her about,” I said pulling out my warrant card.

“You’re Sergeant Duffy? She’s been trying to reach you for the last hour.”

“I was busy.”

“We’re all busy.”

She showed me the way to the morgue along a dim black and white tiled corridor that seemed unchanged since the 1930s.

A leak was dripping from the ceiling into a large red bucket with the words “Air Raid Precautions” stamped on the side.

I stopped outside a door marked: “Autopsy. Strictly No Admittance Without Permission of Staff Nurse.”

I knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” a voice asked from within.

“Sergeant Duffy from Carrick police.”

“About time!”

I pushed the door and went inside.

An antiseptic, freezing little room. More black and white tiles on the floor, frosted windows, a buzzing strip light, charts from a long time ago on “hospital sanitation” and “the proper disposal of body parts”.

Dr Cathcart was wearing a mask and a white cotton surgical cap. A little Celtic cross was dangling from her neck and hanging over her surgical gown.

The star of the show was John Doe from last night who Dr Cathcart had opened up and spread about like a frog on a railway line. There were bits of him in various stainless steel bowls, on scales and even preserved in jars. The rest of him was lying naked on the table uncovered and unconcerned by these multiple violations.

“Hello,” I said.

“Put on gloves and a mask, please.”

“I don’t think he’s going to catch anything from us.”

“Perhaps we’ll catch something from him.”

“Ok.”

I put on latex gloves and a surgical mask.

Cathcart held up the severed right hand. “Were you responsible for fingerprinting this hand?” she asked. Her eyes were blue and I could see the hint of black hair under the cap.

“One of my officers did it, but I take full responsibility for him. Why, did we do something wrong?”

“Yes, you did. Your officer cleaned the fingers in white spirit before taking fingerprints from this hand. We therefore lost any evidence that may have been under the victim’s nails.”

“Oh dear, sorry about that.”

“Sorry doesn’t fix things, does it?” she said sternly in what I realized now was some kind of posh South Belfast accent.

I really didn’t like her tone at all. “Love, in a murder investigation getting the fingerprints is a priority so that we can establish who the victim was and hopefully trace their final movements and question witnesses when things are fresh in their minds.”

She pulled down her mask. Her cheeks were pink and her lips a dark red camellia. Her eyes were a vivid azure and her gaze icy and disturbing. She was imperious, attractive and she probably knew it.

“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?”