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  ‘I think so,’ Pinsky said. ‘She wasn’t sexy.’

  ‘No,’ Winchester agreed rather sadly. ‘Shame, really. We get kind of fusty and musty in here . . . could have used a bit of femininity about the place. Even our secretaries are . . . sensible. Just as well, of course, just as well. But . . .’ He smiled wryly. ‘Bits and bones, that’s physical anthropology,’ he said. ‘Dead bones, dead civilizations, all rather . . . dead.’

  ‘Like Professor Mayhew,’ Muller said abruptly, behind them.

  Pinsky and Neilson turned to look at him and he blushed. ‘Well,’ he said defensively. ‘She is.’

  And they all thought about that for a while.

  There were actually a few men on the force who enjoyed attending autopsies. Neither Jack nor Tos was among them. Tos, especially, had a delicate stomach and the merest whiff of the chemicals in the morgue would make him go pale. Nevertheless, rules were rules and there they were. Tos focused his attention on Bannerman, the Medical Examiner.

  ‘She was basically a healthy woman,’ Bannerman was saying. ‘But I’d say she’d been neglecting herself lately. Not eating right, that sort of thing. Her skin was loose, her flesh dehydrated. Her nails are chewed right down, toenails, too.’

  ‘You mean she chewed her toenails?’ asked Muller in amazement. He had joined them, leaving Pinsky and Neilson to continue their questioning of the other teachers in Mayhew’s department.

  ‘No, I mean she picked at them,’ Bannerman said. ‘She had a couple of scabs that she picked at, too, and some heavy scratches on her scalp. The woman was nervous is all I’m saying. Sort of nibbling herself away.’

  ‘Are you saying it was suicide?’ Jack asked.

  Bannerman came around the long table on which lay the sheeted figure of the late Elise Mayhew. As was always his unconscious habit, he squeezed her toe affectionately as he passed. It always amused Stryker.

  ‘No. Angle of the wound is rather awkward for that. Could have been, but she would have to have been a bit of a contortionist.’

  ‘Well, if she chewed her toenails . . .’ Muller began in a nervous attempt at humour.

  Bannerman just glanced at him impatiently. Bannerman was a serious man and felt himself to be an advocate on behalf of the victims he analysed. They didn’t complain or cry out like live patients, but he felt sympathy for them, whoever they had been. Even hardened criminals got kindly treatment from Bannerman. But he was thorough. Very, very thorough. ‘I understand there were no prints on the gun.’

  ‘None. Wiped clean.’

  ‘Well, funnily enough, there were some faint traces of powder on her hands,’ Bannerman said.

  They all looked at one another. ‘Then she was holding the gun?’

  ‘Maybe. At first I thought she might have been holding it with some sort of barrier between her hands and the actual weapon. I looked to see if there were powder burns on the hem of her sweatshirt, for instance . . . she could have held the gun using the bottom of her sweatshirt.’ He demonstrated by gathering up a handful of his scrubs, showing how he might hold something in that way.

  ‘Why?’ Tos asked.

  ‘Well, exactly. It’s a rare suicide who tries to make it look like murder. Too caught up in their own escape to think of what comes afterwards. Cruel, really – they never think about who is going to find them and it is usually a loved one. Anyway, there weren’t any powder burns on her clothes. Did they find any towels or handkerchiefs or scarves near the body?’

  Stryker picked up the Scene of Crime report and went through it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that.’

  Bannerman shrugged. ‘Well, she might have put up her hands when the assailant pointed the gun at her . . . there was no real pattern in the powder deposits. It was just something I noticed.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Stryker asked.

  Bannerman shook his head. ‘No bruises on the body, no signs of a violent struggle. Nothing under her fingernails but household dirt, her own skin cells and so on. Have you gone over the house yet?’

  ‘About to do that,’ Tos informed him.

  ‘State of mind,’ Muller said. ‘Right?’

  Bannerman nodded. ‘We don’t know much about her yet. But she was worried about something, that’s clear.’

  ‘She was writing a book,’ Tos said. ‘Some serious kind of book. Neighbour woman said she was wrought up about it.’

  ‘She also said – this neighbour woman – that she had “let herself go” and that maybe the marriage was going bad,’ Stryker put in.

  ‘I cannot totally rule out suicide,’ Bannerman said. ‘It’s far-fetched, but it is possible.’

  ‘The gun was found under the bed,’ Muller said, eager to participate.

  ‘Could have skidded away when she fell.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Bannerman agreed. ‘The argument that was overheard . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Something was going on in her life, something was going wrong . . . she was going downhill.’

  ‘You care too much, Bannerman,’ Jack stated.

  Bannerman looked at the sheeted figure on the table. ‘Somebody has to,’ he said.

  SIX

  Pinsky and Neilson had acquired a list of Professor Mayhew’s students from the previous term, and a list of her current students although, as Dr Winchester said, they had hardly begun the autumn term and most of them wouldn’t know her very well, or vice versa.

  They also picked up a faculty list, giving names and departmental numbers and extensions. These lists, they discovered, were like gold dust and it was only Winchester allowing them to photocopy his that secured them the information.

  ‘What did you think of Winchester?’ Pinsky asked Neilson, when they stopped for coffee after tiring of wandering around the campus trying to track down people teaching classes.

  ‘Not sexy,’ said Neilson in a vague imitation.

  Pinsky laughed. ‘I thought the shirt was an interesting style statement.’ He tore off a corner of a sugar packet and tipped the contents into his mug. ‘It said “I’m a regular guy”.’

  ‘But he isn’t, is he?’ Neilson asked. ‘He obviously admired Mayhew’s mind.’ This was clearly odd to him.

  ‘He noticed that she didn’t dress up,’ Pinsky pointed out.

  ‘But he seemed to approve of that, I thought,’ Neilson said. ‘What kind of a person studies bones and rituals anyway? Never mind the shirt . . . a lot of them down there were dressed pretty casually, I noticed. Sort of a departmental look.’

  ‘Anthropology,’ Pinsky mused.

  Neilson frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘I studied a bit of anthropology at college,’ Pinsky said. ‘They were all like that. Casual as hell, sort of lured you into thinking they were casual markers, too. They weren’t.’

  ‘I didn’t know you went to college,’ Neilson said.

  ‘Two years, that’s all. Flunked out. Not my style, really. Although I did like anthropology. Find it useful in dealing with perps. Primitive patterns, all that. Native impulses. Social responses. It’s real interesting. Also, Denise is studying it as part of her degree, so it’s kind of come up lately.’

  ‘I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,’ Neilson complained. ‘I went straight to the Academy from high school myself.’

  ‘Not a bad thing,’ Pinsky told him reflectively. ‘A good thing. Sometimes I get distracted, see. By thinking of those things. If you start looking all the time at the Big Picture, which is what anthropology does, then you tend to trip over the little picture, like who shot who and why, you know? Better to be all cop, maybe. Jack, now. Jack has a legal mind and that gives him problems too. He gets caught up in what’s permissible evidence, in legal ramifications, even in questions of good and evil . . . winds him up tight sometimes. He’s another one who’s mostly mind, like the late Professor Mayhew. Although he
’s a lot better since he met Kate, I will say that. She’s loosened him right up. Are you going to finish that other doughnut?’

  ‘No – have it.’ Neilson pushed the plate across the table.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pinsky said around a mouthful of sugar, cinnamon and calories. ‘Maybe “all cop” isn’t the best thing either. “All cop” narrows your vision a little too much, maybe.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Neilson agreed. ‘Like, I was thinking maybe I should do some night school stuff. Broaden my outlook.’

  ‘That would be good. Trouble is making the classes. We don’t exactly have predictable schedules, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Neilson said glumly. He was depressed at learning Pinsky had two years of college, even if he had flunked out, which Neilson doubted. Got fed up, possibly, but not flunked. Not Pinsky. Ned was smart. He was learning a lot from Ned. But he did wish he’d gone to college too. He wished he’d done a lot of things, but there you go. Man has to work, man has to eat. You got on with what you did best. And he had made detective, hadn’t he?

  When they got back to headquarters Stryker and Tos were discussing the Mayhew case.

  ‘Anything at the university?’ Stryker asked them.

  ‘Not much. She was a lovely woman, loved by all and everything was lovely. They are “very upset”,’ Neilson reported with appropriate gestures. He even bowed at the end.

  ‘Hmm. Doesn’t sound like any university department I’ve ever heard of,’ Stryker said. ‘There’s always a lot of backbiting and infighting going on in these places.’

  ‘Maybe anthropologists are different,’ Neilson suggested.

  ‘Maybe,’ Stryker agreed. ‘But it does seem weird. We’d better go at them again. You talked to the head honcho, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Pinsky said.

  ‘Hmm. I think some more conversation with the lesser mortals of the department might be revealing.’

  ‘I’ll put it on the list,’ Neilson said.

  ‘We’re going back to the house,’ Stryker stated. ‘I’ve been going over the photographs of the scene.’

  ‘Here we go,’ said Neilson. He was referring to Stryker’s habit of asking the photographers who took pictures of the scene of crime to also print out the negatives back to front, so he would have two sets of each one. He maintained, and it had proved true on several occasions, that the eye often doesn’t see what it is looking at. And a second look at the scene itself didn’t hurt either. They all chuckled, but Muller looked confused.

  Stryker explained his theory. ‘Here.’ He held out a pair of photos. ‘Take a look yourself.’

  Muller took the photographs. ‘I don’t see anything different,’ he said, puzzled.

  ‘You will,’ Stryker told him. ‘Come on, we’ll go back to the Mayhew house and see what we can find.’

  He called again.

  Kate felt quite sick when she heard the thin, insinuating voice: ‘Hello, Katie.’

  She hung up, knowing it would do no good. Knowing he would call back.

  And he did. ‘I can go on with this as long as you can,’ he said.

  Kate gripped the handset so tightly her knuckles ached. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded. ‘What is the point of all this?’

  ‘In good time, Katie, in good time. I just want you to know that someone is watching you. Someone who knows all about you. Someone who will tell all about you. Eventually.’

  ‘What does eventually mean?’

  ‘It means . . . punishment, of course,’ said the voice. ‘Punishment for bad behaviour.’

  ‘I’m going to tell the Dean myself.’

  There was a chuckle. ‘Oh, I don’t think you mean that, Katie. I really don’t. So embarrassing. And you’ll never get tenure.’

  ‘Still, it is better coming from me than from you. I can give my side. I can explain.’

  ‘And will you be believed? That is the question, isn’t it? Will you be believed? Or will they believe the boy? After all, I have the evidence of the cancelled cheque.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing wrong, dammit!’

  ‘Oh, but you have. Poaching students is not very nice, Katie. Taking students from what they should be doing to what you teach – silly books and poems. So much easier. So very much easier.’

  She frowned. ‘Easier than what?’

  Again, the chuckle. ‘Naughty, naughty,’ said the voice and then there was just the dial tone.

  Stryker and Tos could almost feel the curious eyes behind every neighbourhood window as they approached the house and ducked under the crime scene tape that was still around the Mayhew home. Muller felt odd, following them. What the hell were they looking for anyway? Hadn’t the Scene of Crime guys checked it all out already? Taking out the keys that had been found in the house during the initial assessment, Stryker opened the front door and they went in.

  There was a light blinking on the answerphone and Stryker pressed the button.

  ‘Hi, honey,’ came a man’s voice. ‘Don’t know where you might be at this time of night, but I just called to say I love you and will be home on Saturday. You have my itinerary and the numbers if you need to call. Goodnight, sleep well.’

  Tos and Stryker looked at one another.

  ‘The husband, presumably,’ Tos said.

  ‘And where would the itinerary be?’ Stryker enquired and they both turned to the room that was set up as an office.

  ‘He obviously doesn’t know anything about what happened,’ Muller said, as they searched the heaps of scattered papers on the surface and went through the drawers.

  ‘Or he called as a bluff,’ Stryker said. ‘It would be a good cover, don’t you think?’

  ‘Kind of sick.’

  ‘More calculated than sick,’ Stryker observed. ‘You or I might think of it.’

  ‘We’re devious,’ Tos said with a wink.

  ‘He might be, too.’ Stryker straightened up, holding a pad of Post-it notes. At the bottom was a company name. ‘Dirkson Medical & Office Supplies’ with an address and a website. ‘“Aha! said Holmes”,’ he said. ‘This is where he works. They’ll have an itinerary, they’ll know where he is.’ He put in a phone call to the office to get someone started on the trackdown. ‘This will speed things up.’

  They continued to search through the late Professor Mayhew’s papers. There were a number of essays, heavily marked, obviously waiting to be returned to the students. Endless notes on everything from envelopes to the backs of supermarket receipts to the insides of toilet-roll wrappers.

  ‘She obviously thought a lot while she was on the john,’ Tos remarked. ‘Me, too. Only place I can get any peace.’

  Stryker shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t understand any of this stuff,’ he complained. ‘We should really get one of her colleagues to go through it. I don’t know what refers to what – her life or the lives of the people she was writing about. Look here – she says “misery is felt in the bones”. Does that mean herself or . . .’

  “‘Aha, said Watson!”,’ said Tos, holding up two matching books, ‘diary and address book.’ But it was only a calendar diary, detailing meetings, assignments and other day-to-day notations. ‘Thought I had it there for a minute,’ Tos muttered.

  ‘Well, that’s an idea,’ Stryker said. ‘She might have kept a diary . . .’

  ‘Too easy,’ said Tos. ‘Way too easy.’

  ‘Well, you can always hope.’ Stryker headed towards the bedroom, where the outline of the body on the rug made a ghostlike presence in the room, as did the darkened stain at the head. They stood quietly for a moment, looking around.

  ‘What did the SOC investigators say?’ Tos asked.

  ‘Not much. The bed was sat on but not slept in. The bedside drawer was open . . . presumably where she kept the gun.’

  ‘So she sat down, took the gun out, stood up and blew her brains out.
’

  ‘Through the eye? I never heard of any suicide who did that,’ Stryker protested. ‘Especially a woman . . . they sometimes go through a whole ritual of making themselves look their best before doing the deed. In the mouth, maybe . . . but to stare straight into the gun? No way, I can’t believe that. And—’ He pointed to the bed. ‘Not so apparent now, but in the photographs you can see that two people sat side by side on the bed.’

  ‘Really?’ Tos was startled. ‘I never noticed that.’ He turned to stare at the bed, which was wrinkled on one side. ‘So she sat there with her killer, all cosy like?’

  ‘I don’t know how cosy it was, considering she got a gun out at one point,’ Stryker said. He walked around the room. No cigarette butts in the ashtray on the far bedside table, but it was there, so one of them presumably smoked. ‘Which side of the bed do you sleep on?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘I sleep in the middle,’ Tos answered virtuously. Stryker just glared at him, knowing Tos was aware he meant when Tos slept with Liz. ‘On the right side,’ he added grudgingly.

  ‘Me, too.’ Stryker nodded. ‘But there were cigarette butts in the ashtray in the office, so presumably she smokes. In which case she slept on the right side.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Maybe it means she was the dominant partner.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Tos scoffed. ‘You can’t know that. I thought you didn’t go in for all that psychological crap.’

  Stryker nodded. ‘True – just a thought. The gun was in the left-hand bedside table.’

  ‘His side? But the gun was registered to her.’

  ‘I know. Interesting, isn’t it – other people’s marital arrangements.’ Stryker wandered over to look at the other bedside table, hoping to find a personal diary. But the drawer and shelves only held aspirin, antihistamine tablets and tissues. In the other one there had only been a nasal spray and a crime novel. ‘If we really wanted to know they could do a DNA from skin flakes,’ he mused.

  ‘For crying out loud, do we really want to know?’

  ‘It helps to know the victim,’ Stryker said quietly. ‘If she was dominant, was she a nagger? Did she patronize him because she was the intellectual? Did she make him feel small? Did he come to resent her? Did he cheat on her to get his own back? . . . All that.’