The Lamplighter by Anthony O'Neill

as Pringle and the others bent over to gingerly raise the corpse it became apparent that the head had fallen loose. Pringle stood at the edge of the pit and held the jawless skull up, Hamlet-like, looking into the face and frowning.
    Groves took the opportunity to chastise him. “This is no time for morbid gestures, laddie.”
    â€œThere’s something here, sir,” Pringle explained. “In the eye socket.”
    Groves frowned. “What is it?”
    Pringle pincered his fingers, inserted them into the cavity, and withdrew a crumpled ball of paper, which he handed across.
    Groves unfurled it distastefully. It was a page torn raggedly from a Bible, “ST. JOHN CHAP. VIII” printed across the top. He flipped it over. And saw that a particular phrase of Verse 44 had been crudely underlined in pencil.
    â€œâ€˜He was a murderer from the beginning,’” he recited blankly, then looked up from the page, gathering his senses. “Is that all there is?”
    Pringle took another look inside the skull. “That’s all, sir.”
    Groves turned to the superintendent, holding up the page. “Could this have been buried with the body?”
    The superintendent looked uneasy. “I don’t believe it common for the dead to have pages stuffed in their heads, sir.”
    â€œI ask not for your opinion. I merely asked if it was possible.”
    Pringle interjected: “If the page were inside the body for fourteen years, sir, it surely would be more brittle.”
    â€œFourteen years?”
    â€œThe length the Colonel has been buried, sir.”
    Groves nodded. “So it’s a message, then?”
    â€œSeems that way, sir.”
    A message. And, notwithstanding the bodies themselves, their first tangible lead. Somebody human, with or without the aid of beasts, had worked Colonel Munnoch’s body to the surface for perhaps the sole purpose of inserting this sinister libel in the dead man’s skull.
    He was a murderer from the beginning.
    Groves looked from the decapitated body to the head still poised in Pringle’s hands, wondering what secrets the illustrious Colonel could possibly harbor to warrant such a belated accusation. His eyes wandered to the spartan stone and the man’s epitaph—“A Christian and a Soldier”—and he had a brief, Godlike vision of his place in the scheme of this mystery, the simple whaler’s son flung into the cauldron of Scotland’s capital and, at the end of his worthy career, sent to do battle with unimaginable forces. He felt the palpable presence of evil, too, its very sanguine taste, like nothing he had previously experienced, and he looked again at the page of Gospel in his hand as though it might actually spell out what his heart already knew—he was on a divine errand.
    Then, lurching out of these thoughts, he became aware of the others staring at him expectantly, and he frowned at them crossly.
    â€œJust get that body put together and laid to rest,” he snapped. “We’ll need to prowl the area for more evidence.”
    Then he turned, as the others repeatedly tried to restore the Colonel’s head to his body, and, looking into the rolling fog, became aware of a peculiar tension in the air, the song of shuddering steel, and a monstrous panting sound, building in force and proximity. And he stiffened, momentarily wondering if the murderer might be returning expressly to rip him apart—the others had paused, too, with the corpse still in their hands, and the blackbirds had launched into the air—before, with great explosive puffs of steam and smoke, a red and black locomotive of the Edinburgh and Leith Railway surged out of the fog and thundered along the embankment in front of them, hauling behind it a string of first-class carriages, at the windows of which, staring through the mist at the grotesque tableau, sat a line of bonneted society ladies on their way to a Newhaven