Based on Lewis Allegory of Love. It's been awhile since I've done one of these, and I thought it probably would be wise to mention right from the start that these particular stories are really nothing more than retellings of my favourite scenes with whatever other material I thought needed included to make them into a narrative. If you really want to understand the case, you need to watch the episode…I do my best to not stray from what they show on the screen (or can be logically intuited from what they show) while trying to make sense of what our heroes were thinking or experiencing. I intended when I started writing these to stick with just what the sergeant would have seen, heard, etc…I think I manage that fairly well when the sergeant in question is Lewis; with Hathaway though—I find it impossible to not occasionally throw in something from Lewis' viewpoint because…well, he is the reason I'm here.

Purely for fan purposes, no copyright infringement intended.

Shattered

Murder was never pretty, never easy to look at. But this one was even worse than most: a young woman viciously attacked on the river bank, volumes of blood and thousands of shards of shattered glass…and the far-too early morning call-out hadn't helped.

Neither did the gallows humour of their often less than friendly pathologist. The bad ones got even to her. Quite often, he'd noted, they caused her to spit out her words in terse and angry bursts as though it were the detectives at fault for the body lying at her feet. That was a reaction Hathaway could empathize with and understand…it was not dissimilar to his own.

But others, like this one...she was chatty enough. And to do his job the sergeant needed to hear most of what she had to say, but—parts of it he could have done without. It was a hazard of the medical field, the wickedly grotesque, macabre humour of those who day after day faced the dehumanizing world of the ill and dying and when it became too much for them, took refuge behind a façade of very poor jokes.

"A fountain of blood?" he repeated her words like an auditory echo of the vivid splotches of red liberally covering the scene.

"A fountain—a spurt," she elaborated and went on, "She'd have been dead within two minutes. The jugular vein and carotid arteries were sliced right through." For emphasis, she pointed out the various severed vessels with her fountain pen as she spoke. Completely unnecessarily.

"By a piece of the mirror?" he asked.

She glanced his way out of the corner of her eye and said, "On reflection, yes."

He shook his head and tried to dissuade her from continuing on in that vein. "It's too early for jokes."

"And too early for Inspector Lewis, it would appear," she countered.

Not quite hiding his irritation, he said, "He's on his way." And then, because as the doctor had pointed out his inspector had not yet arrived and he had no one else to address at the moment, he added, "What's that?" 'That' was a paper scrap stabbed into the ground with a pointed bit of stick and defaced with letters clearly written in blood.

"I do bodies, Sergeant," Hobson, still in not-so-fine form, answered, "but I am assuming it is her blood." He steadfastly refused to roll his eyes though the fact it was blood, and undoubtedly the dead girl's, had been what was clear. It was the scrawled letters that weren't.

"Uq...is that an 'A' on the end?"

"Uqbara?" Hobson voiced tentatively. Somehow she'd managed to hit on the very pronunciation for the unfamiliar word as Hathaway would have given it. Because…there was something…

"I've heard that word somewhere," he mused. Hobson apparently hadn't. She launched into a more detailed description of her findings before he could quite place where. And then there was the scene processing to oversee waiting for Lewis' arrival…

It was all water under the bridge before his boss finally showed.

Hathaway made the mistake of stepping out of the tent set up over the crime scene just as Lewis approached giving Hobson the opportunity she must have been waiting for.

"Loitering within tent," she told the inspector with a nod towards Hathaway.

Hathaway scowled and Lewis winced before asking the sergeant, "Where does she get them?"

"Beano? Dandy?" Hathaway guessed. Hobson gave him a disparaging look; she didn't appreciate his stabs at humour any more than he did hers.

Lewis shot his guess down with, "You don't read comics."

"I used to look over the rough boys' shoulders, Sir," he said, but Lewis moved past him to enter the tent and it was time to get to work.

Lewis listened to his report while surveying the bits and pieces SOCO had collected, tagged, and bagged. It was the absence of a phone that drew his attention.

"She'd have had a phone," he stated. A young woman, in this day and age, hard to imagine she wouldn't have, Hathaway had to concede though it occurred to him that when Lewis had been her age, or even Hathaway's own, the absence of a phone would have been a given.

And then there was the perfume, with its expensive name and expensive scent which carried with it memories of the inspector's dead wife.

"Our Lyn bought some for Val that Christmas before we…lost her," Lewis said in explanation and turned away to stare out over the river. They'd come that far since that first day Hathaway had stood shuffling awkwardly while Lewis squatted at the side of his wife's grave. Lewis could now speak her name and the horrible truth that she was gone…just about. Those last words had been spoken so quietly that it was possible Hathaway had only intuited them. Still, Lewis had choked them out, and that was progress of a sort.

Hathaway stepped back to thumb through paperwork he'd already reviewed and give Lewis the time he needed to swallow down his tears and his grief, but there was a splash behind him, and he turned to see one of the divers making his way to shore with the ornate mirror frame held triumphantly over his head much as the man who had recovered the Wolvercote Tongue from the Thames years before must have done.*

The sight of the frame made Hobson pause and sigh before explaining how she saw the murder being accomplished, "So, smash it down over her head and pull back unrelenting and side to side—the jagged glass saws through her neck. She resists and cuts her hand trying to save herself." It was a sad summary of a horrific end. There was nothing more for the pathologist to add but, "Postmortem result as soon as I can." Then she was off leaving the detectives to get on with their part of the investigation.

"Hold back on the detail of how she died for the time being," the inspector, his emotions firmly back in check, ordered Hathaway though it was unlikely the details of a case like this would stay under the radar long. It was far too gruesome for that. "And that… 'Uqbara' word or whatever it is."

At that, finally, the tidbit of information that had been teasing Hathaway's consciousness since Hobson had read out the bloody word on that scrap of paper fell satisfyingly into place. "I've remembered," he announced.

"What?"

"Uqbara…though usually it's transliterated with 'K' not a 'Q'," he began.

Lewis rolled his eyes and said, "You could talk the head off a penny, you, eh?"

The sergeant got the hint and went on more succinctly, "It's a place in Iraq."

"Case solved then," Lewis quipped. "Thanks very much… Iraq." Iraq sounded much more like a complication than a help. And, of course, it was because Uqbara had less than nothing to do with the case at all. Unfortunately, they'd waste precious time and endanger more lives before the bloody scrawled letters would spell out their correct message and bring the case to a close.

"Mirror as a murder weapon...what's that all about?" Lewis asked as they walked on, and the answer to that, when it finally fell into place, would be almost too horrific to contemplate.

*I missed the connection watching this until I began to write it up, but then the reenacted scene was unmistakable and deserving of a nod. Inspector Morse: The Wolvercote Tongue