‘So I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I shouldn’t have accused you of colluding with him.’

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t have been there at all. I should have mound my own business.’

It’s something we used to say as kids—mound rather than minded, sprunt instead of sprinted. She laughs, and my heart thaws a little.

•

‘Agent Thistle,’ Dr Norman says. ‘You always bring me the best cases.’

Norman is tall and pale, with a dry sense of humour and an unsettling way of looking at people, particularly me. I always feel like she can read my mind. She doesn’t like me much, but that’s okay. No one does.

Today her strawberry-blonde hair is mostly tucked into a blue shower cap. As usual, she shows no sign that she can feel how cold it is down here in the morgue.

The air smells bad. This meat is all too old to eat, and a lot of it has been pumped full of chemicals to preserve it.

‘What can you tell us, doc?’ Thistle asks.

Norman takes a steel tray out of a big fridge and places it on a workbench. It’s covered with Saran wrap, like a plate of leftover sandwiches after a party. She removes the plastic wrap, unveiling the hand. The wedding ring is gone.

‘Left hand of an adult male,’ she says. ‘Mid-forties, judging by the elasticity of the skin. No tattoos, no burns and no calluses on the fingertips, which would suggest a white-collar job. Removed with a serrated blade. Possibly a hacksaw.’

It was a bread knife, but whatever.

Thistle glances at me. ‘At least we have Biggs’s prints now.’

Looks like my plan worked, sort of. ‘How do you know it’s the right hand?’ I ask.

‘It’s the left,’ Norman says.

Hilarious.

‘How do you know it belongs to Biggs? Plenty of men in their forties work white-collar jobs.’

‘Get this,’ Thistle says. ‘A security guard at the university hears screaming from somewhere outside at four-thirty this morning. She has a look around. Finds nothing. Then, about two hours later, a jogger sees a pool of blood on the cycle path.’

‘I didn’t see a cycle path when we visited the school,’ I say.

‘It’s outside the fence,’ Thistle says. ‘But not far from the math department.’

‘So, no cameras?’ I say. ‘That’s a shame.’

Norman gives me a strange look. I fight the urge to touch my hair, checking it for crusted blood.

‘The jogger slows down,’ Thistle says, ‘and sees a severed hand half buried in the grass a few feet away. She calls the cops. When they show up, they can’t find the rest of the body. But they do take a wedding ring off the hand. The engraving on the inside says, Love, Gabbi. And it has the date of Biggs’s wedding engraved next to that.’

‘That does sound fairly conclusive,’ I say.