RAFFERTY WAS PLEASED Sam Dally had decided to exert himself on this one. Unusually, he combined two roles, and Rafferty surmised that his Police Surgeon half must have given his Pathologist half a talking-to for not only did the post mortem start on time but for once, Dally didn't indulge his usual macabre line in jokes and it finished earlier than Rafferty had expected.
Sam confirmed that Barbara Longman had been suffocated. Or – as Sam had it – her death was "consistent with suffocation", and, although he refused to commit himself as to the means, he thought it probable the killer had pressed something soft, like a cushion, over her face.
She hadn't been raped. Although an attempt had been made to make it look as though she was the latest victim of a s*x killer, it was an amateurish ef
