periscopic peer around the corner promptly torpedoes all thoughts. She’s actively seeking me out; for what, my booze-fogged brain cannot even begin to fathom.
‘Donal,’ she hisses, as if secretly rousing me from deep slumber.
‘Edwina, how are you?’ I say, making to get to my feet but somehow failing.
‘Er, stay where you are,’ she laughs. ‘I trust that’s a double Scotch?’
‘Jameson, thanks.’
Edwina and I go back to the very first murder scene I’d attended as a PC, the brutal stabbing of a girl aged twenty-one. I’d tried hard not to get upset, but failed, much to the glee of my emotionally stunted older colleagues. Edwina’s regal upbraiding of them still makes me smile: ‘You may be surprised to learn, gentlemen, that to the fairer sex, male vulnerability is a very sexy quality indeed.’
Since then, she’s sought me out at murder scenes to check on my progress and educate me about her craft. I’ve even been teased about it by female colleagues, who rather cruelly dub her my ‘Crime Scene Cougar’.
She stands at the bar with her back to me, her right boot perched on a foot rail running six or so inches off the ground. This uneven stance lifts one side of her white blouse to reveal a denim-clad buttock. On closer inspection, it’s a textbook half-moon arse cheek that should belong to someone twenty years her junior. I’d never even considered Edwina as a sexual being before and blaze like a KKK cross.
Christ, Donal, I scold myself, I know you’re not getting any at home, but she’s old enough to be your mother …
Double Christ, Donal, is this some form of twisted Oedipal grief? Banish such thoughts at once!
‘You look a little flushed,’ she teases, and I notice her brandy snifter clasped classily between upturned fingers. I then notice perhaps one button too many undone on her cotton shirt, so shift my gaze swiftly up to her half-amused eyes.
‘That’ll be the old uisce beatha.’
‘Ah, the one Gaelic phrase I know. The water of life, or whiskey as we inelegant Anglo Saxons call it. To poor Julie.’
‘Julie,’ I say and we clink solemnly.
She sits and sips reverentially. ‘Watch this,’ she says, tilting the balloon-shaped brandy glass. ‘Don’t worry,’ she giggles, sensing my rising panic as she tips it all the way down onto its side. ‘See how it comes right up to the rim but doesn’t spill out? That’s how you measure the perfect single shot of cognac. And that’s the only thing I remember from my three-grand-a-term finishing school.’
‘Sounds like the kind of school I should’ve gone to.’
‘I heard about the kidnapper making off with the ransom money last night. The good news for you, Donal, is that Julie’s been dead for longer than twenty-four hours.’
I’d already guessed, but now it’s official, tension escapes me like air from a pricked balloon. ‘Thank God,’ I gasp. ‘And thank you for letting me know, Edwina.’
She puts her hand on mine and I convulse violently, like a flatliner receiving an electric shock. It’s all I can do not to bellow ‘CLEAR’. My God, is she coming onto me?
‘What else can I tell you?’ she husks, the minx, giving my stunned, immobile hand a squeeze, then slowly withdrawing. Reluctantly perhaps? Has she got some sort of weird crime scene horn? ‘The ground where she lay has no grass discoloration or flattened vegetation, so she hadn’t been there very long. She was completely naked inside the blanket.
‘There were two obvious fracture injuries to the back of her skull, both about a week-old and caused by a blunt instrument. I’ll be suggesting these were inflicted nine days ago when she was first abducted.
‘I found chain-like marks around her right ankle; she had been forced to wear some sort of restraint or leg iron. The redness of the injury shows it was caused before death. I found no chafing marks around her wrists though, which seems odd as this is universally the preferred method of restraint.
‘I found another ligature mark running along the back of her neck. Her tongue was protruding through clenched teeth which you normally find in people who’ve hanged themselves. She must have been throttled very violently at the end.
‘Her fingernails were undamaged and there were no marks on her forearms, the sort of defensive injuries that you’d expect if a victim had fought for her life. In other words, when the time came, she must have been restrained and strangled from behind, quickly and cleanly, which will provide some small comfort to her family.’
We both need a drink after that. But Edwina’s not finished.
‘Now here’s an odd thing. The changes to Julie’s flesh show she’s been dead for about two days. That makes it impossible for me to determine if she’d been raped or sexually assaulted. But the insects in her body suggest she’s been exposed to air for a lot less time, I’d say between twelve and twenty-four hours.
‘There was also something really striking and bizarre about her appearance.’
She squints at her drink, as if still trying to make sense of it herself.
‘She was completely bald.’
‘How?’
She shuffles in her seat, theory still percolating. ‘For several hours after she died, her body must have been stored in some sort of sealed container which kept the flies and insects out. If he wrapped her in a sheet or towels and this place got very hot, her hair must have stuck to the bloody sheets or towels. When he unwrapped her, it came away from her head.’
‘Or he shaved her?’
‘No. Its ripped out at the root.’
‘God, her poor family, having to see that …’
She smiles. ‘You’re a sensitive old soul, Donal. I’ve instructed the mortuary to prepare a hairpiece.’
She takes a bigger swig than me this time.
‘Other things of note, no food in her stomach, which suggests she hadn’t eaten for at least eight hours prior to her death. And the sheet she came wrapped in today bears a laundry mark – MA 143 – so if you chaps can find the origin of that laundry mark, you may find her killer.’
She takes a final gulp as I consider how to even word my only question.
‘We had a tip-off,’ I lie, because the truth might get me sectioned. After all, I’m basing this on last night’s bonkers visions of Julie. ‘Look, I won’t bore you with the details, Edwina, but there’s been a suggestion that an axe is involved in Julie’s murder, somehow.’
She frowns and I visualise my question grinding through her red-hot brain engines. She shakes her head finally. ‘I’ve only ever known Triad gangsters to use an axe. Or Irish travellers, I’m sorry to say. How exactly is an axe involved in this?’
‘Truthfully, I’ve no idea. I just thought I’d better mention it.’
She shakes her head
