The miniskirted waitress walked past them. Nice ass. Osborne ordered another espresso. The halyards flapped in the breeze, and the pills seemed to be lifting him off the ground.
“Who’s handling the postmortem?” he asked.
“Chief Medical Examiner Moore.”
Osborne stubbed out his cigarette. A bloodstain had appeared under his Band-Aid. He stared for a few seconds at his empty cup, lost in thought, then stood up, leaving a note on the table.
“Where are you going?” Culhane asked.
Sitting on his hind legs, Toby was looking at him as if he was a stone.
“Back to bed,” Osborne replied.
* * *
Amelia Prescott would be one of the best researchers in the field of forensic medicine: that was what she was working toward. Of course, at the age of twenty-five no one took her seriously yet—medicine was as sexist a world as any other—but she would prove to all those scientific bigwigs that she wouldn’t stay a lab assistant for long. She hadn’t crossed the ocean to limit herself to the chores Moore assigned her. They would recognize what a fast worker she was, how detached she remained when faced with a dissected body, not to mention her human qualities . . .
So far, apart from Tom Culhane, nobody seemed to give a damn about her. Amelia was pretty, well turned-out, happy to engage in witty banter, but her relationships with men had always ended in failure, sometimes bitter failure. Whose fault was it? Among other things, she’d become infatuated with her professor of applied biology during her studies in London. Omar, a Syrian, had had problems with his immigration status, especially after 9/11. The simplest thing would have been to get married, but, well, she was young, and it hadn’t worked out. With her degree in her pocket, she had left England on a whim—an ad in the Times for a job in Christchurch—because of the racism in particular. The stupid part of it was that she’d found the same thing here.
Except that here there was this guy, Paul Osborne. Amelia found him handsome, passionate, moody, sensual, dangerous. Quite the opposite of her. And there was a Pandora’s box inside him that she was dying to open. It was obvious to anyone with eyes to see: she had fallen in love. For three days now, she had been tossing and turning in bed, for three days she had been trying to calm her nerves and kill her sleepless nights by reading scientific reviews that had lost their meaning for her, for three days she had been calling herself a fool, a complete fool.
She was just rushing out of the lab when Osborne charged into the corridor.
“Paul!” she cried, narrowly missing his arms. “What are you doing here?
Small as she was—only five feet two—Amelia seemed as much at home in the basement of the Medico-Legal Institute as he was in the gutter. She immediately cast a professional eye on the Band-Aid over his nose.
“What have you done to your nose?”
“I didn’t like it.”
As if unconvinced, she looked at it from more than one angle. “That was no reason to mess it up. Now what can I do for you?”
“The woman whose body was found on the beach at Karekare,” he said. “Do you have anything new on her?”
“Yes, the body’s been identified. Come into my office, it’ll be easier to talk in there.”
His head feeling heavy, he followed her into a small, untidy square room that smelled of antiseptic and formaldehyde. Part of Osborne almost fainted, the rest of him held out.
“Sure you don’t need a tablet?” she asked.
“Thanks, I’ve had my dose.”
Amelia searched in the mess on her desk and extracted a sheet of paper. “All the same, I preferred you without a Band-Aid.”
“Well?” he said, pointing at the paper.
“Joanne Griffith,” she sighed. “Yes, a relative of hers dropped by yesterday.”
“Did you examine the body?”
“Just briefly. You know I’m only an assistant here.”
There was a touch of irony in her voice. Scatterbrained she might be, but she had a lot of self-confidence.
“Did you find any wounds?” Osborne asked.
“Contusions, scratches, bites, a few pieces of torn skin. Nothing that could have been the cause of death, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“And the skull?”
“After a week spent in the water, there were some lumps, caused by resorption. That’s all.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
But he was sure they were both thinking the same thing. Silence lay heavy in the room.
“In your opinion,” he asked, “what did she die of?”
Amelia shrugged. “As far as I can see, she drowned. Or perhaps had a heart attack. Moore will be able to tell you more after the postmortem.”
Osborne seemed annoyed. “What about the blood?” he insisted.
