Midnight Murders by Katherine John Page A

gentlemen.’ Goldman wandered off down the corridor, then turned back. ‘You will keep me up-to-date with your progress, Inspector?’
    â€˜If we make any you’ll be the first to know,’ Evans assured him.

CHAPTER FIVE
    â€˜Dirt’s clogging the sink again.’ Patrick O’Kelly shouted to his assistant as he peered through the magnifying glass he was moving slowly, centimetre by centimetre, along the thighs of the body laid out on the slab.
    â€˜I thought I’d got rid of it all,’ his assistant grumbled as he left the earth he was sifting, from one side of a body-bag to the other, through a fine mesh.
    Patrick inched the glass upwards on to the torso. ‘Superintendent,’ he acknowledged Bill who walked through the double doors.
    â€˜Anything for us yet?’ Bill surveyed the body stretched out on the slab and the body-bag opened out on the slab next to it.
    â€˜I haven’t finished examining the body,’ the pathologist retorted irritably.
    â€˜Sorry to press you, but at the moment we know absolutely nothing. A few basic facts might kick off our investigation.’
    â€˜Like?’ Patrick asked, although he already had an idea what Bill was looking for.
    â€˜Like who she was, and how and why she died?’
    â€˜The “who” I can’t help you with. The “how” I told you on site.’ Patrick straightened his back, discarded his magnifying glass, and walked to the head of the corpse. Pushing back the eyelids with his thumb and forefinger, he prodded at the burst blood vessels that had flooded the whites with scarlet. He indicated the evidence of several smaller haemorrhages on the forehead. And those are just the ones you can see. I found more in the internal organs. Asphyxiation.’
    â€˜She was buried alive?’
    â€˜Even without the haemorrhages the build-up of dirt in the nostrils and lungs confirms it.’ Patrick pushed aside the bone-cutter he’d used to open the ribcage, and removed the square of tissue he’d used to cover the slit in the skin, not out of any finer feelings for the corpse, but from the need to keep contamination of the other body parts to a minimum. ‘Judging from the amount of earth and debris in the bronchial tubes,’ he palpated a tube he’d slit open, and crumbs of black dirt fell into his hand, ‘she struggled for breath until the last.’
    â€˜How long would that have taken?’ Bill flinched at the thought of the young girl stretched out dead and naked before him, fighting for air, while being smothered by shovel-full after shovel-full of earth.
    â€˜Impossible to fix an accurate time. A lot depends on whether he worked quickly or slowly. And, then again, he might have dumped her at the bottom of the pit some time before he buried her.’
    â€˜How long would it have taken from the first breath that was more dirt than air, to the last?’ Bill pressed, refusing to allow Patrick to fob him off.
    â€˜Going by what I’ve dug out of her tubes and lungs, I’d say somewhere between five and ten minutes; but she wouldn’t have been fully conscious towards the end.’ Patrick retrieved his magnifying glass and resumed his minute study of her skin. ‘I was right about the lips. They had been super-glued together. She managed to tear them apart, but not that long before she died, judging by the bleeding. Bingo!’ he shouted gleefully. ‘Puncture marks, upper right arm. A whole beautiful series of them. Some bruised and old, some fresher, and one very fresh.’ He spoke into the voice-activated dictaphone that hung above the slab before marking the sites with blue ink. ‘I’ve taken blood samples, if it’s detectable, we’ll soon know about it.’
    â€˜How long has she been dead?’
    â€˜You know I hate that question.’
    â€˜And you know I have to ask it,’ Bill replied.
    â€˜Body temperature was