‘Both, maybe. He was a biochemist – he’d naturally think in terms of chemical processes.’ Brodie stood up, pacing the incident room. ‘But I think he made a connection that scared him. Scared him enough to contact McRae, to ask for an official meeting.’
He picked up his desk phone and dialled the pathology department at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. After navigating through several departmental transfers, he was connected to a woman who identified herself as the records administrator.
‘I’m investigating a death from four years ago,’ Brodie explained. ‘Dr Mark Finlay, biochemist at Ninewells. I need to confirm whether you still have the post-mortem results on file.’
‘Let me check our archives,’ the woman replied. Brodie heard the click of a keyboard. ‘Yes, we have the file. Death by cardiac arrest, natural causes.’
‘Who performed the post-mortem examination?’
More keyboard clicking. ‘Let me see… the pathologist was Dr Holmes.’
‘Thank you,’ Brodie managed. ‘Could you send a copy of that post-mortem report to Glenrothes station? DCI Liam Brodie.’
‘I’ll have it sent over this afternoon.’
After hanging up, Brodie looked at Lucy. ‘Sherlock performed the post-mortem on Mark Finlay. The records are being sent over this afternoon. We can ask Sherlock more about the PM, see if he thinks anything nefarious was going on. He worked up in Dundee at the time.’
‘Terrific,’ Lucy said. ‘If anybody will know if there’s something dodgy going on, it’s him. I’ll call him and let him know you’ll be down later.’
‘Good job,’ Brodie said.
19
APRIL 2022
The afternoon light filtered through the lace curtains of the Victorian terrace on Cromwell Road, casting latticed shadows across the cluttered study. Professor Fred Hart sat hunched over his mahogany desk, a magnifying glass trembling slightly in his age-spotted hand. Retirement had not diminished his meticulous nature at sixty-nine, though arthritis had made the fine work increasingly difficult.
The house was silent save for the occasional creak of settling floorboards. His wife, Margaret, had been dead five years now, and their children – scattered across England and Australia – called dutifully on Sundays but rarely visited. The emptiness had driven Hart back to his life’s work, to the cases that had defined his four decades as Dundee’s most respected forensic pathologist.
He’d spent the morning sorting through boxes from the university’s storage facility. He was organising his professional archive to donate to the medical school. Unofficially, he couldn’t let go. Each photograph, each case file represented a puzzle he’d once solved, a voice he’d given to the dead.
The file spread before him now was one he knew intimately: the Kirkland murder, 2007. Rebecca Kirkland, twenty-four, had been found strangled in her Broughty Ferry flat. He’d performed the autopsy himself, his findings instrumental in securing the conviction of her boyfriend, Thomas McGregor. An open-and-shut case, or so everyone had believed.
Hart lifted a contact sheet of autopsy photographs, holding it beneath the antique lamp that had once belonged to his father. The warm light illuminated the black-and-white images in stark detail. He’d reviewed these photos hundreds of times during the trial, in lectures to medical students, in the nightmares that occasionally plagued him still.
But something nagged at him now, a whisper of wrongness he couldn’t quite articulate.
He reached for the manila folder containing his original autopsy report and typed on the old IBM Selectric. His eyes scanned the familiar words, the technical language that translated violent death into clinical observation:
Ligature furrow present, measuring 1.2 cm in width, located 3 cm below the thyroid cartilage, ascending posteriorly from left to right…
Hart set down the report and returned to the photographs. Using the magnifying glass, he examined the images of Rebecca Kirkland’s neck. The ligature mark was clearly visible, precisely as he’d described. But there was something else in the shadowing around the bruising that seemed… inconsistent.
He stood with effort, his knees protesting, and shuffled to the filing cabinet where he kept his reference materials. His fingers, gnarled but still capable, flipped through files until he foundwhat he wanted: a collection of ligature strangulation cases from various sources, accumulated over his career.
Back at the desk, he began comparing. Case after case, photograph after photograph. The angle of Rebecca Kirkland’s ligature mark was consistent with manual strangulation using a ligature – a scarf, the prosecution had argued, though no scarf was ever found. McGregor had claimed innocence, maintained it throughout, but the forensic evidence had been damning.
Hart’s evidence had been damning.
He pulled another photograph closer, a detailed close-up of the throat region. There. His breath caught. Faint linear marks were at the edges of the primary ligature mark, barely visible in the granular quality of the original photograph. Secondary marks that ran at a different angle.
How had he missed this?
His mind raced backwards through the years. The case had come in during a hectic period – he’d had three autopsies that week, was teaching a full course load, and Margaret had just been diagnosed with the breast cancer that would eventually take her years later. He’d been thorough; he was sure of it. But had he been careful enough? He should have relied more on his assistant, but he, Hart, had been full of himself back then.
Hart reached for his leather-bound notebook, which he’d kept throughout his career for personal observations that didn’t make it into official reports. He found the entry for Rebecca Kirkland, dated 15 March 2007:
Straightforward manual ligature strangulation. Petechial haemorrhaging consistent with asphyxiation. Time of death estimated 10-14 hours before discovery. Boyfriend has scratches on his hands – defensive wounds from the victim likely. Strong case for prosecution.
