Stone Cold by Andrew Lane

soulful eyes. Then he looked
at the door through which Lukather had vanished, and sighed. It was sad, he thought, how a man could choose a career that cut him off from ever having a happy home life.
    He pulled himself together. He had work to do, and quickly. He stood up and reached out for the bunch of keys, which Lukather had left on the table next to his own cup. He picked them up. They
were surprisingly heavy. He quickly flicked through them until he found the largest one – the key to the door of the mortuary. He held it up to his eyes, wishing momentarily that he had
something that would allow him to see the detail of the key clearer – a magnifying glass, or something like that. He was looking for traces of material caught in one or two of the metal
corners between the tines of the key – little flecks of something like clay, or putty. That might indicate that someone had taken the key from Lukather’s key ring while he wasn’t
paying attention – while he was asleep perhaps – and pressed it into a block of clay, leaving an impression. Once they had taken the impression, they could have returned the original
key immediately. They could have then used the impression to mould a new key out of some metal with a low melting point. They might even have carved a copy out of some hard wood. All it would have
taken was time, and a little skill. The copy – whether it was metal or wood – wouldn’t have to last for very long: just enough for them to get in and out of the mortuary late at
night several times.
    The problem was, there were no traces of anything. The key was pristine. That didn’t mean that it hadn’t been copied, of course – just that if it had then the evidence had been
removed.
    He put the key back on the table just as Lukather returned.
    ‘Did the thefts of the body parts occur on a regular basis?’ he asked. ‘I mean, every week, or every month?’
    Lukather thought for a moment. His brow creased in a frown. ‘I don’t recall the exact dates,’ he said eventually. ‘Let me check my diary.’ He reached across to a
table and retrieved a leather-bound volume. He pulled up his half-moon spectacles, which were hanging from a chain around his neck, and perched them on his nose. He flicked through the diary,
sometimes going backwards or forwards a few pages to check something and then returning to where he had been. ‘I have the dates here,’ he said eventually. ‘I made sure I recorded
them all. The problem is that there is no obvious correlation between them. They never happened on the same day of the week, or the same day of the month.’ He shook his head in irritation.
‘There’s no obvious pattern. If there was, I would have spotted it. I even wondered whether the thefts might have occurred every full moon, perhaps, but that was not the
case.’
    ‘Because the full moon would have provided the most amount of light for the thief?’ Sherlock guessed.
    ‘Partly that, but partly also because there is a known correlation between insanity and the night of the full moon.’ Lukather took his glasses off and polished them with a small
cloth from his pocket. ‘Nobody is quite sure why,’ he went on, ‘but lunatics do appear to be influenced by moonlight. The fact has been known for years. Indeed the very word
“lunatic” derives from “
luna
”, the Latin word for “moon”.’
    ‘Could I have a look at the diary?’ Sherlock asked. ‘I realize it’s your own private information, but I think there might be some pattern there, if only I can spot
it.’
    ‘It’s not as if I have an active social life,’ Lukather said heavily. ‘There is nothing there I would be ashamed for my mother to see, if she were still alive, and if she
had ever cared about what I do for a living.’
    ‘And there’s no confidential police information in there – reports of the autopsies themselves, or something like that?’
    He shook his head. ‘That’s all put into special reports