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general looked like Laura’s, though it was fuller, less hollowed out.
    ‘That’s the peninsula that sticks out between the Mersey and the Dee ,’ Plunkett continued. ‘Meols is on the North Wales side, not the Liverpool side. Apparently, it’s quite a well-off place. She ran away from home 20 months ago. Her parents thought she might have headed to London . She’d run away a couple of times previously and on both occasions she went there. I’ve spoken to a local officer familiar with her file and he told me that the family had been investigated by Social Services. It seems that the father might have been abusing her. She’d confided in a friend, who’d gone to a teacher, who’d gone to the authorities.’
    ‘She escapes the abuse to be killed here.’ McEvoy shook his head at the injustice. ‘What a world.’
    ‘Nothing was proven, apparently,’ Plunkett said, obviously not believing the father’s innocence. ‘Though it seems her personality changed quite a bit when she was about 13. She became quieter, more withdrawn, stopped hanging around with her friends, and her grades started to drop. Before that she was a straight A student. She went to the local grammar school and was planning to go to university to study engineering. I’d say it was odds on he was sexually abusing her.’
    ‘And it’s definitely her?’ McEvoy asked.
    ‘She has matching birthmarks on the back of her left leg. One is halfway down her thigh, the other half way down the calf. I spoke to Hannah while you were on your way down here. Professor Jones has checked it out and she has the marks.’
    ‘Right, okay.’ McEvoy placed the papers back down on the table. ‘We need to arrange for someone to go over and talk with the family, act as liaison and to find out if there was any reason why she might have been killed.’ He glanced down at the photo again. ‘Her name is Schmidt,’ he stated. His faced creased in thought. ‘I thought you said Smith. That German, you think?’
    ‘I guess so,’ Plunkett shrugged.
    ‘And the business cards were left in the German cemetery. A coincidence?’ He shrugged.
    ‘You mean she might not have been a random victim?’
    ‘It has to be a possibility,’ McEvoy conceded. ‘Maybe he’s trying to play games with us?’
    ‘You want me to go back up to that graveyard and see if there are any Schmidts buried there?’ Plunkett offered.
    ‘I guess we’d better at least check it out.’
     
     
    Elaine Jones was standing with Colm McEvoy and Hannah Fallon outside Laura’s room giving them her assessment before she headed off to Loughlinstown Hospital to conduct the autopsy.
    ‘All I can go on here is the lividity, the stage of rigor mortis, and the body temperature readings taken by the local doctor this morning and myself this afternoon. On that evidence I’d say she was killed somewhere between ten and one last night.’
    ‘Nearer to ten than one?’ McEvoy asked.
    ‘I can’t really say. Probably before midnight is as far as I want to go right now.’
    ‘What about the killing? I assume she was killed by the sword?’
    ‘There’s nothing to indicate otherwise, unless she was drugged in some way. We’d need to do some tests to rule that out. I’d say though, if she was drugged, the sword followed quickly – her blood pumped over the sheet and body. Once we get to the hospital I’ll do a full autopsy. There doesn’t appear to be any other signs of physical attack. And it doesn’t look as if she fought back either. We’ll do the usual checks under the fingernails, just in case.’
    ‘She just swallowed the sword,’ Hannah said.
    ‘It looks that way,’ Professor Jones agreed. ‘Dead in an instant.’
    ‘How about sexual assault?’ McEvoy asked.
    ‘I don’t think so.’ The pathologist shook her head. ‘It’s difficult to say ahead of the autopsy or moving the body, although she was almost certainly naked when she was killed; the killer wasn’t as thorough a cleaner as he