‘Me too, just as soon I come up for air. But please, Angus,’ she put her hand on his arm, ‘don’t tell Monty what caused it. He’s doing so well, a shock like this could set him back.’

‘He’ll need to know it was a deliberate attack.’

‘I’ll tell him when he’s fully recovered or when this case is wrapped, but not ’til then. Have you had any luck with tracing the man who gave the mag to Izzy?’

Angus frowned. ‘No one outside the school seems to remember seeing the man at all, can’t tell us anything...’

‘Thanks for meeting me here,’ Hurst broke in, addressing the team gathered around the table. ‘The Notting autopsy is the only one I’ve had the chance to complete so far, and I’ve still got a queue of trolleys in the basement waiting for me.’

‘Wish I was that popular,’ Wayne said.

Unsmiling, Hurst reached into her briefcase and handed out colour photos of the deceased, some taken at the scene and some from Notting’s autopsy itself.

Stevie examined the pictures, interior shots of the bus showing portions of dark-haired girls squeezed between crumpled seats and twisted metal, another girl thrown free and clearly dead. She focused mainly on a shot of Notting lying on his back outside the bus. In his case, the sadness she usually felt at viewing such scenes was absent. He reminded her of a wolf, his lupine grin eerily mimicked by the deep red slash in his throat, exposing slashed blood vessels and a gaping trachea. Flies spotted the pool of congealing blood in which he lay; the vivid stains of his shirt looked alive and creeping under her gaze. A limp male hand, presumably belonging to Jimmy Jack Robinson, was visible at the very edge of the frame, the knife on the ground between them.

Col put down the pile of photos he’d been leafing through. ‘The cause of death looks pretty obvious to me; what else have you got for us, Melissa?’

‘His blood contained a cocktail of chemicals—high doses of amphetamines, sedatives and marijuana, which could explain the randomness of the accident. The guy was as high as a kite and would have been totally out of control. And if he was the driver, well ... he was an accident waiting to happen.’

‘That makes sense,’ Angus said. ‘Pruitt’s report states there were no signs of brake marks on the bitumen. It was as if he deliberately drove straight over the ravine.’

‘But how do we know he was the driver?’ Stevie asked.

‘MCI are still busy working out body projectiles, but they think from the position he was lying in, he most probably fell out of the driver’s side door,’ Angus told her.

‘But they can’t be certain, surely,’ Wayne queried the pathologist. ‘If he was alive, might he not have moved or crawled away from where he landed when he first hit the dirt?’

‘Unlikely, Sergeant, given that his spinal cord was severed in the T3 and T4 region,’ Hurst said.

‘So he was paralysed?’

‘If he’d lived he’d have been a paraplegic from the lesion down. At the time of the accident, due to shock and swelling, he probably wouldn’t have been able to move a muscle.’

Everyone around the table paused to consider this.

‘Is it possible that someone cut his throat while he was still driving the bus?’ Stevie queried.

‘Only if someone had a death wish,’ Wayne scoffed.

‘These girls might not feel they had much to live for,’ Stevie said, exchanging a glance with Hurst, who agreed with a barely perceptible nod of her head.

‘Okay then, could Jimmy Jack have threatened him by putting the knife against his throat? It’s a sharp knife—his hand might have slipped if the bus hit a bump,’ Angus suggested.

Hurst allowed a slight smile; she enjoyed listening to the detectives trying to work it out for themselves. Stevie knew that she probably had the correct card up her sleeve, but wouldn’t produce it until she was sure every possibility had been covered, and then her word would be final. As well as Chief of Forensics, she lectured in pathology at UWA. She loved to teach, and could never let an opportunity pass her by. They had all learned a lot from Professor Melissa Hurst.

‘What about the angle of the wound?’ Angus asked.

‘Left to right slash,’ Hurst replied.

‘Left to right,’ he mused. ‘Meaning our offender was right handed.’

Stevie pushed away from the table and stood behind Wayne. ‘I need to get something clear here.’ Reaching for a butter knife from the table, she told him to hold still. With her left hand pulling back upon his forehead, she held the knife above his throat and made a left to right slashing motion.

Angus smacked his hands together. ‘I’ve been wanting to do that for years.’

Stevie pulled a disconcerted Wayne to his feet. ‘Okay, now, lie on the ground,’ she commanded. Wayne looked around the empty common room to reassure himself no one else was watching and positioned himself on the hard carpet squares as if rigor mortis had already set in.

Stevie positioned herself behind his head and went through the same motions as when he was sitting. When she’d finished Wayne heaved himself from the floor returned to his seat and flexed his shoulders. ‘Well, I hope that was worth my pain and humiliation.’

‘It was, Wayne,’ Hurst said, ‘well done. Stevie was demonstrating how similar the throat cutting technique is, irrespective if the victim is lying or sitting when the attack is made from behind. The knife wounds would be almost identical too, which means we can’t rely on them.’

‘If Notting was driving, let us assume Robinson was in the passenger seat—he did go through the front window—so if he did the throat slashing surely the cut would have been more like a jab to the left side of the neck,’ Angus said.

‘But still possible for the passenger to angle himself and slash from behind with negligible difference to the slash mark provided it was performed in one swift motion, left to right.’ Hurst switched her gaze from Angus to a woman bearing down on them with a tray of coffee. The hospital worker’s gaze slipped to photos strewn across the table. Hurst hastily bundled them underneath the file. The woman’s complexion took on the green hue of her hospital uniform. Stevie wondered how long she had been eavesdropping and waited for her to leave before she continued.

‘So the angle of the blade in these two scenarios can’t tell us whether he was killed in or out of the bus. What about blood spatter?’

‘We’re getting there,’ the pathologist said. ‘There was some of Notting’s blood on the bus, but also some of Robinson’s. The lab concluded it was from the impact of their heads on the windscreen. The spatter patterns are just trickles and drops and not indicative of a powerful spray.’ She removed the photo of Notting once more, this time tapping it with a neatly trimmed fingernail. ‘The neck was pulled back, making the muscle and the trachea more prominent, protecting the carotid artery but exposing the jugular. He would have died of suffocation from the severed trachea before he bled out; still, there would have been a massive gush of blood. It flowed away from the wound when he was lying down, as dictated by gravity. If you look at this photo you can see the pattern flow down either side of the neck and across the ground. The clothing along the victim’s back was also saturated, but as you can see, there is only a little on his shirt front. If he was sitting on the bus when he was killed most of the blood would be on the front of his shirt and in his lap.’

‘Would it have got on the murderer?’ Fowler asked.

‘If the carotid artery had been damaged, yes, most probably; but since only the jugular was affected here, the spray wouldn’t have been as powerful. The murderer might have been able to avoid it if he or she was careful.’

‘She,’ Angus mused. ‘The girl, Mai, was the only one conscious when the paramedics arrived. She was lying alongside her friend Lin on what was left of the floor of the bus with a badly broken leg.’