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’

I thought she’d just make a desultory pass through the frankly soul-deadening bulk of Nicky’s transcripts and then put them down again. But half an hour later she was still reading, while the kid with the headphones communed with his inner ears and the fat man woke, looked around in surprise and suspicion, dozed off again. I let her read, covertly admiring the furrow of her brow, her lower lip unselfconsciously thrust out in deep concentration. I like intelligent women. It’s a pity they’re mostly too smart to get involved with me.

After a while she looked up at me, turning the sheaf of documents so that the top sheet faced me.

‘Incised wounds,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Is that what this is about? Incised wounds?’

I was momentarily at a loss. ‘There are a lot of woundings in there, Nurse Ryall,’ I acknowledged. ‘But as you can see, there’s no pattern. We’ve got every weapon under the sun, including some that came as news to me, and every variation on murder, suicide, self-harm and lethal ambush. It’s hard to think of a kind of wound that isn’t in there.

’

She stared at me wide-eyed. ‘Are you serious?’ she demanded at last.

‘I thought I was.’

‘Then you really needed to ask an expert.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘The ones that aren’t in there? Blunt-instrument trauma. Crush and impact trauma. Abraded wounds. Gunshot wounds. Not to mention, if you widen the field a bit, burns, fractures, dislocations, concussions and sprains, strangulation, suffocation—’

I held up my hands, partly in surrender and partly to rein her in a little.

‘Okay, fine. What does that leave?’

‘I told you,’ Nurse Ryall said, with slightly exaggerated patience. ‘Incised and puncture wounds - and you’ve got one of each of them up in that ward. Almost all these cases fall into one of those two basic types: the damage was done either with a point or with an edge - or sometimes both. Stabbing and hacking, basically. Hurting people with things that are sharp.’

‘You must be a lot of fun at playtime,’ I said sardonically.

It was either that or break into full applause, and I didn’t want her to get too cocky at this early stage in our relatioƒ inat nship.

‘Nursing diploma - BSc equivalent. I’m studying four nights a week.’ She said, stiffly on her dignity. ‘So I don’t get much playtime, Felix Castor. But I do get to know everything there is to know about wounds. Or did you think that was just prurient curiosity?’

‘Fix,’ I said.

She bridled. ‘What is?’

‘My name. It’s Fix.