The Cold, Cold Ground

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 handcut 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.
    The wind had picked up and it begun to rain. A harsh sea rain from the north east. The flowers in the well-kept hospital garden were getting a battering. I flipped a page of my notebook and sketched them: syringa wolfii, syringa persica – here under the great shadow of the railway embankment May was the month that bred lilacs out of the dead land.
    Dr Cathcart sat down. She’d showered and changed into civvies. A tight, mustard-coloured jumper, black slacks and high heels. Her hair was a long cascading stream of black that fell ever so precisely over her right shoulder. She was the spit of the evil Samantha on Bewitched .
    “Shall I be mother?” she asked, pouring the tea.
    “If I can be the pervy uncle.”
    She made the tea like a surgeon. Milk, then tea, then more milk and your bog-standard two sugars. In the long caesura an army helicopter flew low overhead.
    “Do you have any more questions, Sergeant Duffy?”
    “The semen in the victim’s rectum, is there any way we can use that to help identify the killer?” I wondered.
    “It’s an interesting question. I have read a