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night, but I didn’t think the details were going to start stacking up the same.’
    Now that Markham mentioned it, Adam remembered the case. The corpse was referred to in police circles as “the mermaid.” It explained Markham’s earlier unease. Adam was aware that, according to the Queensland Bureau of Crime Statistics, there were just three long-term unidentified bodies at the State morgue, all either homicides or suspected homicides. “The mermaid” was one of them.
    ‘The Chief Coroner’s Office in Brisbane is handling that one,’ Markham continued. ‘The one big difference with “the mermaid” is that she’d been in the water a great deal longer. Fourteen to sixteen days, so deterioration created difficulty in establishing her appearance. Special procedures for the fingerprinting didn’t help.’
    ‘Something more about this bothered you,’ Adam guessed.
    ‘I’m coming to that. I remembered something about the hands, so I accessed the report.’
    ‘Fists?’
    ‘Yes. But the deterioration meant there was no further detail available.’
    ‘So we don’t know about bruising or the state of the veins.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Or whether there’d been medical trauma to have caused abnormal posturing.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘What’s the current status?’
    ‘Facial reconstruction. The coroner brought in a university anatomist who specialises in recreating heads from skeletal remains. They’ll transmit the image internationally. Intuition tells me there’s too many similarities here, Adam.’
    ‘Can’t disagree.’
    ‘And Kirby’s back from vacation today, isn’t he?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Senior Sergeant Arthur Kirby was the Northern Rocks station chief.
    ‘And he and the mayor are buddies. Don’t be surprised if you and Kirby get a call from our illustrious political leader before the day’s out. Bingham won’t be happy to have a drowning linked to a long term missing persons case, not with both his re-election and the town’s fiftieth birthday hot on his heels.’
     
    Markham turned back to the body on the slab. With rigor mortis having passed it wasn’t a problem for him to unfurl the fingers out from the clenched fist position. ‘You can give a hand with the fingerprinting.’
    ‘Give me too much to do and I’ll need my own desk and phone in here.’
    ‘Not in the budget, I’m afraid. You can don some scrubs and bring over one of the pads, while I prep the fingers.’ As Adam moved to the storage units along the far wall, Markham used a hypodermic syringe to inject glycerine into the balls of the fingers. That would smooth out the unnatural wrinkles caused by immersion in the ocean.
    Adam held the pad in place as Markham took each of the fingers and rolled them across the ink. Markham said: ‘Now, about the teeth. It’ll take a while to get an accurate cast of the dentition but in the meantime you can take the fingerprint forms and get things happening on that front.’
    ‘Good.’ Adam still hoped for an early ID and a ruling of accidental drowning. But his hopes for that were fading by the minute.
    Markham paused a moment, resting his gaze on Adam. ‘I didn’t realise before how bleary eyed you’re looking.’
    ‘Yeah, well…not here for a photo shoot.’
    ‘In these days of the Britney brigade, bleary eyes are a “must” for celeb shots, aren’t they?’
    ‘Except I’m not a celebrity.’
    ‘You are to those boys on the basketball teams,’ Markham offered. ‘We’re all a celebrity to someone.’
    ‘Who’s your someone?’
    ‘My wife…well, here’s hoping.’
    Adam stifled a grin. ‘Point taken.’
    ‘You didn’t get much sleep?’
    ‘Not a lot.’
    ‘If this girl’s death has brought back painful memories for me, Adam, and it has, then I can only imagine how much more difficult it must be for you.’
    ‘I’m okay, Brian.’ Seventeen years before, when Adam’s sister drowned, Brian Markham hadn’t been the police medical examiner for the region. He’d been the