As they turned, Mary came thrashing out of the bushes with her mouth open and her hat snagged on a bush behind her. She tripped and fell over a waist-high red-leafed bush. Her forearms beat into the ground to save her fall. She scrambled to get up, sliding in the clay again. Mary Brosnahan was quite unconcerned about being late for Miss Black, moving to Portmarnock or fretting about Dublin's lost civic pride. Her chief concern was to get away from that clump of bushes and shrubs, where her pattern of day-to-day life had been wrecked completely for some time to come by finding the corpse with its head bashed in.

That Friday afternoon saw Inspector James Kilmartin, offices in Dublin Castle, in the company of Garda Tom Connors, of Kevin Street Garda Station but seconded for training to the Murder Squad, sitting in a navy blue unmarked Garda car.

Kilmartin and Connors had just stepped out of the side gate of Trinity College. Kilmartin had listened to Mulholland and then Lacey from Garda Forensic while Connors stood with his hands pocketed, his hair tossing almost in rhythm with the flapping ends of the plastic cordon pegged around the site. The two detectives from Forensic took turns pointing to spots in the bushes. Three other men crouched in the bushes as they talked. Kilmartin watched the three as they inched their ways from spot to spot on their hunkers. He considered that they would make reasonable gardeners but that they'd need something better than tweezers and plastic bags.

"No, sir. No sign of whatever gave him the clout," Lacey had said.

"Nothing like a little hatchet or that class of thing?" Kilmartin murmured.

"Divil a bit, sir. He was brought over here all the same. We might do better now when we find out where he was done in."

"Dragged, is it?" Kilmartin asked.

"Carried would probably be it, sir. He's a hefty lad so…"