The state pathologist, Jane Dore, greeted Lottie and Boyd. A pair of tiny spectacles were perched on her prim nose and her dark green eyes peered through the glass. A smart navy skirt suit clung to her tiny body and a blue blouse peeked out at her throat. She wore very high-heeled shoes. Lottie felt underdressed in her warm jacket, jeans and long-sleeved top with a thermal vest underneath. She’d spent the forty-kilometre drive to Tullamore in silence. Boyd sang, out of tune, to the music on the radio and she’d found it irritating but said nothing. Sometimes that was the best way to handle his moods.

‘Welcome to the Dead House,’ Jane Dore said, extending a petite hand to Lottie.

Lottie returned the handshake.

‘Call me Lottie. The Dead House?’ she enquired.

‘A throwback to olden times. Come.’ Jane led the way along a narrow corridor.

Lottie followed, hoping the intense disinfectant smell would help blank out the scent of death. She doubted it. Boyd slipped into step behind them.

The pathologist pushed open a swing door and entered a room with white tiles stretching from floor to ceiling. Three stainless steel tables stood in the centre. Two held bodies under stark white cotton sheeting. Susan Sullivan and James Brown, Lottie presumed. She could see reflections in the steel cabinets and recoiled from her own distorted image.

Jane Dore sat on to a high stool in the corner and booted up a computer.

‘This takes ages to come alive,’ she said.

‘Once that’s all that comes alive,’ Lottie said, attempting to lighten the atmosphere. Boyd raised an eyebrow, folded his arms, said nothing.

The pathologist drummed a red varnished fingernail on the bench. Lottie pulled over another stool and sat in the silence, waiting for the computer to zip into cyber world.

‘Did anything unexpected crop up?’ she asked as Jane keyed in her password. No Post-its stuck under the keyboard for this woman.

‘Death in both cases was asphyxiation due to strangulation,’ she replied. ‘There is little evidence of defensive wounds on Sullivan’s body. There’s grazing on Brown’s fingers and bruising on his neck around the ligature, as if he’d tried to dislodge the rope. I also found some blue nylon fibre under his fingernails. I’ve sent all fibre and hair to the forensics lab and they have the rope too. There is a slight contusion at the base of his skull. I don’t know what caused it and until I have the forensic results I cannot conclusively determine that his death was self-inflicted.’

Lottie congratulated her gut instinct. She might still be proven wrong but she was almost sure Brown hadn’t committed suicide. A bump on the back of the head told her someone else was around last night.

‘Sullivan was in a bad way . . .’ The pathologist paused mid-sentence, pushing her spectacles back up her nose.

‘And she may have given birth. I’m not one hundred per cent sure until I run more tests on the tissue I’ve extracted.’

‘Why can’t you be sure?’ Lottie asked.

‘Her reproductive system is a mess. She was in the advanced stages of ovarian cancer. Both ovaries have tumours as large as mandarins and there’s another in her uterus.’

‘It had crossed my mind she might’ve had cancer,’ Lottie said, recalling the Oxycontin in the victim’s medicine cabinet.

‘It’s possible she confused the symptoms with menopause,’ Jane said.

‘She knew,’ Lottie said with conviction.

‘Ovarian cancer is silent. It’s usually at an advanced stage when symptoms appear. Sullivan only had weeks to live, but someone got to her first.’

Lottie thought back to the day Adam received his diagnosis. Had Susan gone through the same earth-shattering scenario with her doctor? How did she react? Did she take the news in a calm, dignified manner, like Adam, or had she screamed at the doctor as she, Lottie, had?

‘Are you all right?’ Jane Dore raised her eyebrows, concern knitted between them.

‘I’m fine. Just thinking of something else.’ Lottie quickly composed herself, professionalism overriding her personal emotion. She felt like pounding her finger on the computer, it was taking so long. But her nails were bitten and uneven. Better not, she thought.

‘At last,’ the pathologist said, as a program pinged into life and a green hue lit up the screen.

She keyed in Susan Sullivan’s name. Numerous lines of text and several icons appeared. She clicked and an image of Sullivan’s body filled the screen.

‘Here, you can see the ligature mark, a deep groove on the tissue. It’s from a very thin plastic-type wire. This is consistent with the iPod headphones found around the victim’s neck. The lab is currently running analysis to confirm it as the murder weapon. A quick jerk, tighten for fifteen to twenty seconds and the victim is dead.’

‘Would the killer have to be a man?’

‘Not necessarily. Using the right amount of force in the correct area, it could be either sex. There’s limited bruising on the neck, so she didn’t put up much of a fight.’

Lottie watched as the pathologist moved the cursor further down the image and hovered over the victim’s upper thigh.

‘What’s that?’ Lottie asked, squinting at the screen.

‘I believe it’s a homemade tattoo. Indian ink pounded on to the skin and jabbed repeatedly with a needle. It looks like lines in a circle. Not very clear. It’s badly drawn and deep too. Incised with a knife perhaps, then daubed with ink. I’ll show you,’ she said. ‘Put these on.’

She extracted latex gloves from a drawer at her knee and handed them to Lottie and Boyd. Jumping down off her high perch, she walked with small elegant steps to the nearest table and pulled back the sheet exposing the naked body of Susan Sullivan. A rough Y incision marked the woman’s chest, crudely stitched with thick thread.

Lottie shuddered. Is this what they had done to her Adam? Dying at home had necessitated the undertaker placing his body in a steel box and bringing Adam to the hospital for a post-mortem. She’d been too distraught at the time to object. Now, she didn’t want to go there, so she forced her concentration to what the pathologist was indicating.

Jane Dore moved one of the victim’s legs and fingered the dead woman’s inside thigh. ‘See?’ She pointed to the mark on the victim’s inner thigh.

Lottie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, trying to shed her unease. She bent over to look. The dead woman’s pubis was almost in her face.

‘Yes, I see it,’ she murmured. Boyd remained in her shadow.

‘Now look at this.’

At the second table, Jane whipped the sheet from the body. James Brown lay there, whiter than he had ever been in life, stitches traversing his chest also. The pathologist pulled his legs apart.

Lottie stared at a mark comparable to the tattoo on Sullivan’s inner thigh. Both were in similar locations. But this one was more oval-shaped, as if the hand of whoever had drawn it had slipped.

‘I’ve sent samples of the ink to the lab for analysis. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a result.’

‘I’m sure it isn’t a county council initiation rite,’ Boyd said.

‘Nothing would surprise me nowadays,’ Lottie said.

‘In my opinion these marks were made thirty or forty years ago. The growth of the epidermis and the fading ink would testify to that.’

Lottie opened her mouth to say something, but decided against it. It was an important link between Susan Sullivan and James Brown, besides their work.

Jane Dore printed off the tattoo images.

‘Happy hunting,’ she said, handing them to Boyd.

Blowing air through her nostrils, Lottie expelled the scent of decaying flesh. She peeled off the gloves, dropping them in a sterile bin beneath a bench. The pathologist scrolled down the computer screen and printed off her preliminary reports.

Once she’d finished, she gave them to Lottie and returned to the bodies to tag and bag and do whatever it was a pathologist had to do to finish autopsies. Lottie didn’t want to know about that. She leafed through the pages as she strolled behind Boyd and couldn’t help wondering if Susan Sullivan had a child out there somewhere.

‘Find out the name of Sullivan’s doctor,’ she told Boyd.

Hearing the click of high heels, she turned round to find Jane Dore standing behind her. Too close. Lottie’s spine tingled. She was more uncomfortable with the living than the dead. Get a grip, Parker.

‘I’m going to get a bite to eat. Would you like to join me?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lottie, ‘DS Boyd and I have to get back to Ragmullin. Next time?’

‘I hope we don’t have a next time. If you follow me.’

Lottie smiled. It was the other woman’s only attempt at any kind of humour.