The Cold, Cold Ground

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 mylap. “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.
    I nodded.
    “All right. I’ll ask around,” he said.
    “Do either of you want to drive up to forensic lab with me and get our fingerprint results on John Doe?” I asked.
    “Don’t go there, Sean. Not on a Sunday. There’s no point making waves,” Crabbie said.
    He was as impatient as I was but maybe he was right.
    We drove back to the station. I poured myself a Johnnie Walker which was the general libation used to liven up the office tea. Johnnie Walker in the tea, Jim Beam in the coffee.