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9.00 A.M., THURSDAY 29th DECEMBER 1864

ALBERT STREET, DAYLESFORD

THE COCKATOO ON THE roof let up its screeching, and the gurgles and squelches from Maggie Stuart’s body claimed the room. They were sounds to unsettle Constable Irwin, as if the commotion outside had cast a veil over the examination in plain view before him. Doctor Doolittle went on with his specimen collecting as the policeman looked to the dead woman’s slashed throat. He leant over the deep rents either side of the windpipe, and noted the blood — congealed on the sheets and sprayed on the wall, and darkening as it aged.

Doolittle smeared a second glass slide and fitted a cover, and, along with hair samples already taken, made a parcel and addressed it. He wiped his fingers with a damp cloth.

Irwin stood back from the bed now to regard a corpse that could not have been more immodestly positioned: chemise lifted high, legs wide and hanging to the floor from the knees. It looked to him a deliberate arrangement, a taunt to the husband who would, and did, make the grim discovery on his return from his shift a little after midnight.

Doolittle tapped a bruised thigh with a spatula.

‘My belief is that forcible connection took place.’

‘Bastard,’ Irwin breathed, and shook his head, despairing that such depravity should be found in his prosperous little gold-mining town.

Doolittle was detached, unmoved. Not two years had lapsed since he was a young Union surgeon in the thick of it at Chancellorsville; here was just one more mutilated body. He held out the parcel.

‘Be careful with this, Constable, and prompt. Undue delay to Melbourne will compromise the microscopic analysis.’

‘Rely on me, Doctor. God help us all, the monster who did this will hang!’

With resonant steps across rough-hewn boards, Irwin exited to the only other room of the Stuart cottage, one sparely furnished with a meat safe, table, chair, small bed, and two-seater bench. A chimney of mullock and coarse mortar stood within a wall, framed by a mantelpiece. Detective Walker was there, examining in lamplight the surface of the fireplace, all whitewashed for the summer, when cooking was for outside.

Early blowflies droned by in search of the corpse.