by S J Bolton
‘Yes, I know that,’ said Harry, as they reached the edge of the Fletchers’ property and turned to leave the garden. ‘Gareth Fletcher has mentioned it to me a couple of times. He wanted to get a surveyor in, he was concerned about the stability of the wall.’
‘He was right to be.’ The two men were at the side of the house. Another massive awning had been stretched across from the house to the church wall, creating a dry space for the forensic team to store equipment. Unable to reach them, the weather seemed determined not to be ignored. Raindrops thundered down on the plastic roof while the wind kept it in constant, noisy motion.
‘I’m told there’s an underground stream that runs beneath the church,’ Rushton continued, removing his overalls and indicating that Harry should do the same. ‘Ordinarily that’s not a problem, but when there’s been heavy rainfall, like over the past few days, the church cellar gets flooded. The land around here gets boggy. Did you know?’
‘Yes.’ Harry was balanced on one foot, struggling to take off a boot that was too tight and looking round for his own shoes. ‘Gareth and I had a walk around the boundary a couple of weeks ago. I agreed it didn’t look too stable, but there’s a process I have to go through when any work needs to be done on church property. I’d already set the wheels in motion but these things typically take weeks, sometimes months.’
‘Well, Brian, is it my granddaughter’s grave?’
Harry and Rushton both turned to see that Sinclair Renshaw had entered the tent from the Fletchers’ driveway. The fingers of his right hand clutched a cigarette. Harry had never seen him smoke before.
‘It looks that way,’ said Rushton. ‘I’m very sorry.’ Sinclair nodded his head, just once.
‘Do Jenny and Mike know?’ asked Harry. ‘Do you want me to-’
‘I’ve asked they not be told until the morning,’ Sinclair interrupted him. ‘Christiana has made coffee in the vestry. You should come up. It’s warmer in there.’
Harry pulled his own jacket back on. ‘What happens now?’ he asked Rushton.
‘Well, strangely enough, there is a protocol in cases like these,’ replied the detective, indicating that they should leave the tent. ‘When remains are uncovered on church property, they have to be removed from site and examined by a police-approved pathologist. If he determines the remains are ancient bones, a lot of them apply the hundred-year rule: they’re simply returned to the minister in charge – in this case, you – and it becomes your responsibility to re-inter them.’
‘Yes, I think I knew that,’ agreed Harry, ‘although it’s not a situation I’ve ever come across before.’
‘It’s certainly never happened here,’ said Sinclair.
‘On the other hand, if the remains are, shall we say, fresher, we have to confirm their identity,’ added Rushton. ‘Make sure the body really is the person whose name is on the headstone. Do you follow me, Reverend?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Harry.
‘Once identity is confirmed, we hand the remains back jointly to you and the family and let you arrange for re-interment.’
‘Another funeral,’ said Sinclair, running his hand over his face. ‘It will be too much for Jenny. How can any mother be expected to bury her child twice?’
51
‘WE SHOULDN’T RULE OUT A BREAK-IN,’ SAID HARRY. ‘Tom could be telling the truth.’
Gareth was holding a coffee mug between his palms. Both hands looked unnaturally white, the fingers blue-tinged. Harry felt himself shivering in sympathy. He could hear the creak of the central-heating system, but the events of the night seemed to have brought a chill indoors.
‘No sign of one,’ Gareth answered him, shaking his head. ‘Front door was locked, no windows open or broken. The back door was open, but we keep the key in it and the bolt’s at the bottom. Tom could have opened it by himself.’
‘Where did he get the bag from?’
‘By the front door. I had it ready to take with me in the morning.’
Harry thought for a moment and then turned to walk back along the corridor to the door. Under the window he could see trainers, shorts, socks – Gareth’s gym kit had been emptied out and left behind. Footsteps behind told him Gareth had followed. Through the coloured glass of the front door Harry could see two white figures, ghostly in the orange streetlight. They walked across the road carrying what looked like a stretcher between them. As Harry turned back to Gareth he caught sight of grey dust around the front door handle.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘The police have already dusted for fingerprints,’ replied Gareth. ‘They’ve done all the ground floor and Millie’s room. I think they were just covering themselves. They didn’t find anything.’
‘What about Joe?’ asked Harry. ‘What does he say happened?’
‘Joe heard Tom yelling and got up,’ said Gareth. ‘He heard banging around downstairs, put his waterproofs on – showing great presence of mind for a six-year-old – and went out. He saw Tom lying in the mud and helped him carry the bag, with Millie in it, back to the house. I’d got up for a pee, realized the back door was open and come down. Got the fright of my life. All three of them, soaked to the skin and covered in mud. Tom started yelling about this little girl of his, Alice was all for rushing them to A &E, I took a look outside and realized I’d better get the police on the blower. Just what have they found out there?’
‘Not clear yet,’ lied Harry. He’d been asked not to mention the full extent of what had been discovered in the garden. ‘I’m sorry about the wall. If I’d had any idea…’
Gareth was staring at the row of three hooks that hung by the front door. ‘That’s funny,’ he said.
‘What is?’ asked Alice, who was halfway down the stairs. Harry turned to smile at her and couldn’t bring himself to do it. That wasn’t a face someone could smile at.
‘My keys. They were missing earlier, remember?’ said Gareth. ‘Did you find them?’
Alice shook her head. ‘They were probably there all along,’ she replied.
‘They weren’t. I checked after the kids had gone to bed. I had to dig out my spare set to use in the morning. How could they have got back here?’
Alice looked from Harry to her husband. ‘Tom could have…’ she began.
‘Why would Tom hide his dad’s keys?’ asked Harry, trying to curb his impatience – they didn’t know everything he did. ‘If he’d wanted to open the front door in the night there were other sets he could have used, weren’t there?’
Alice nodded. ‘Mine were there,’ she said, glancing up at the hooks. ‘They still are. And he didn’t open the front door. It was locked when we came down.’
‘He thought someone had come into the house earlier this evening,’ said Harry. ‘He was upstairs with Evi and came rushing down in a panic. Remember? He made us check the ground floor.’
‘Exactly,’ said Gareth. ‘We checked. No one was in the house.’
‘No, they weren’t,’ said Harry. ‘Question is, were the keys?’
52
‘THREE HUMAN SKELETONS,’ THE PATHOLOGIST SAID, ‘almost certainly the remains of very young children, but I’ll get to that presently.’
Harry was hot. The room was smaller than he’d expected. Having been invited by Rushton to be present at the pathologist’s examination – the remains were all still technically his responsibility – he’d hoped to be able to position himself in the furthest corner. It wasn’t going to be. No one was getting too far away from the action today – there just wasn’t the space. A stainless-steel counter, almost a metre wide, ran around the perimeter of the room. The floor was tiled and appeared to slope downwards, allowing for easier sluicing towards the central drain. Above the counters, glass-fronted cupboards lined the walls. Three gurneys were positioned in the centre of the room. They left little room for the pathologist, his two technicians, the team of three police officers and himself. Twice already, Harry had had to side-step, finding himself in the way. He looked at
his watch. They’d been in the lab less than five minutes.
‘The one we have here,’ continued the pathologist, stepping up to the first gurney – Harry had been introduced to him fifteen minutes ago but couldn’t recall his name – ‘St Barnabas number one, we’ll call it for the time being, has been in the ground the longest. We can see almost complete skeletonization, with just the remains of muscle and ligament holding together the bones of the thorax and the abdomen.’ He began walking round the gurney, heading for the skull. ‘The right arm appears to have broken away at the shoulder when the grave was disturbed,’ he said, ‘and part of the ulna from the left arm hasn’t been recovered yet. A couple of the metacarpals from the left hand are also missing. The brain and the internal organs will be long since gone, of course. We found some traces of fabric around the upper body and two tiny white buttons that had fallen into the ribcage.’
‘Lucy Pickup was buried ten years ago,’ said Rushton. ‘Is that consistent with…?’
The pathologist held up one hand. ‘The rate of skeletonization is highly variable,’ he said. ‘It depends on the soil, the success of the embalming process if any has taken place, depth of burial and so on. The soil in the area where the bodies were found is alkaline, which would normally slow the rate of decomposition; on the other hand, this is a very young child. Very little body mass. On balance, I’d say a burial timescale of between five and fifteen years.’
‘We’re going to need a bit more than that, Raymond,’ said Rushton, who’d positioned himself at the foot of the gurney, directly opposite the pathologist. Raymond, that was his name. Raymond Clarke, one of the approved pathologists on the police list.
‘How old would you say she is?’ continued Rushton.
‘I’m only just getting started,’ replied Clarke. ‘And we don’t know whether number one is a she yet. As to age, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Based on the skeleton we have an estimated height measurement of 87 cm, which would put our little friend here in the fifteen-to-thirty-six-month bracket. Then we look at the rate of ossification.’
‘Fusion of the bones?’ asked Rushton.
Clarke gave a single nod of his head. ‘Ossification occurs in eight hundred points of the body and can offer some very useful clues as to age,’ he said. ‘An infant is born without carpal bones in the hand, for example. Then we have the cranium. There are five major bones in a newborn’s skull, which gradually fuse along specialized joints called sutures. The newborn also has a number of fontanelles or spots of soft membrane on the skull. On our friend here they’ve closed over, suggesting a child of at least twenty-four months.’
‘Between two and three, then?’ asked Rushton. ‘Could be Lucy.’
‘Very possibly,’ said Clarke. ‘So now we look at the injuries sustained to the corpse.’
Harry wondered if anyone else was as hot as he. Why would a pathology room be warm? You’d expect the opposite, surely, to keep the bodies in good condition. The two detectives Rushton had introduced him to – he was blowed if he could remember names – were standing like a couple of statues a few inches to his left. One of them, tall and very thin, looked to be in his late thirties. His hair was as thin as the rest of him and he appeared to have no eyelashes. The other detective was a year or so younger and powerfully built. Neither looked as uncomfortable as Harry felt. Maybe they’d just had more practice hiding it.
‘I’ve received the coroner’s report into the death of Lucy Pickup,’ Raymond Clarke continued, turning away from the corpse to a laptop computer. He peeled the surgical glove off his right hand and hit a key to activate the screen. ‘It’s all here if anyone wants to look. It refers to severe blunt-force trauma to the right posterior part of the skull, specifically the parietal and occipital bones, following a fall from around fifteen feet on to solid flint flagstones. Displaced fractures of the skull caused considerable internal bleeding and the force of the impact would have sent severe destructive shock waves through the brain. Death would have been almost instantaneous.’
Rushton and the taller of the two detectives closed in around Clarke. All three men peered at the computer screen. Harry stayed where he was. He already knew how Lucy had died. She’d fallen, tumbled to her death in his church, and her little skull…
He was looking at that skull now. The pathologist could take as much time as he liked, he knew it was Lucy. ‘In addition,’ Clarke was saying, ‘the spinal cord was broken in two places, between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae and slightly higher, between the fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae. There was also a femoral shaft fracture on the right leg.’ He turned away from the computer, caught Harry’s eye for a second and then stepped back to the gurney. ‘If we look at the head of little miss,’ he said, ‘and yes, gentlemen, I’m coming round to the idea that she was a little miss, we can see the extent of the trauma to the skull.’ Pulling his glove back on, Clarke slid his hand under the skull and turned it so his audience could see where the skull bones had collapsed. ‘These injuries are pretty much consistent with a fall from a considerable height,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had chance to properly examine the spine yet, but if we look at her right leg, the break across the femur is quite visible. Can you see?’
‘Could that have occurred last night?’ asked the stockier of the detectives. He was a sergeant, Harry thought. A sergeant called Russell. Luke Russell.
‘Not impossible,’ said Clarke. ‘But if you look at the X-rays taken for the coroner’s post-mortem, the lines of breakage are very similar. Later on today, we’ll take more X-rays. We can compare the two, just to be on the safe side.’
‘If her body was subjected to a post-mortem examination,’ asked the tall, thin detective, whom Harry thought was the more senior of the two, ‘wouldn’t it be obvious? Don’t you have to cut the chest open, remove the organs?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Clarke. ‘A full internal post-mortem involves cutting through the ribcage and removing the breastplate. The internal organs are taken out, examined, put inside a biohazard bag and replaced inside the chest cavity. The top of the skull is sawn open so the brain can be examined. All very difficult signs to miss.’
‘So…’
‘Unfortunately, not much help to us here because a full internal post-mortem wasn’t done on Lucy Pickup, just an external examination. It’s always a bit of a judgement call, whether or not to go the whole way and open the body up. The circumstances surrounding the death are taken into account, quite often the wishes of the family are considered. My guess is that the examiner at the time didn’t feel the full Monty was merited. What we do have, though, are signs of the embalming work done.’
Clarke turned to one of his assistants, ‘Pass me that bag, please, Angela,’ he said. The older of the two lab assistants took a clear plastic bag from the counter behind her and handed it to him. He held it up to the light, beckoning the officers closer. To Harry, at the back, the bag looked empty.
‘What we have in this bag,’ said Clarke, ‘is an eye cap. Can you see? Looks a bit like a very large contact lens. Embalmers use them to keep the eyelids closed, make the deceased look like they’re sleeping peacefully.’ He reached a gloved hand inside the bag and removed the translucent plastic disc. ‘We found this lodged inside number one’s skull,’ he said. ‘It would have been placed on the eye with adhesive to keep the eyelid in place.’ He returned it to the bag and handed it back to his assistant.
‘We also found traces of wire in the jaw,’ he said. ‘Consistent with the type used by embalmers to keep the lips together. And if you look at the skull, gentlemen-’ He moved back to the body on the gurney. The others followed and gathered at the head end. Harry moved just close enough to show willing. Clarke was pointing out where the fractured pieces of the skull lay separate from the head. ‘If you look carefully,’ he said, ‘you can see where the skull appears to have been glued together in places. Repairing an injury in that way is classic embalming procedure. It’s all about preserving the body and making it
as presentable as possible for the relatives in the days leading up to the funeral. Interestingly, this is the only one of the three showing any signs of embalming. We’ll send tissue off for analysis, of course. Formaldehyde is pretty nasty stuff, tends to hang around for a while.’
Clarke stepped away from the body, peeled off his gloves and dropped them in a biohazard disposal bin. Reaching up, he took a new pair from a dispenser. ‘We can also do a DNA analysis to be absolutely sure,’ he said, pulling on the gloves. ‘I understand the parents are coming in this morning, but if you ask me, I’m 95 per cent certain this is the little lady whose grave was disturbed last night. This is Lucy Pickup.’
No one spoke. Above their heads the fans of the air-conditioning unit suggested a coolness in the room that Harry just did not feel.
‘Right,’ said Clarke, and Harry almost expected to see him rolling up his sleeves. ‘That’s the easy bit over with. Now let’s have a look at her two friends, shall we?’
DS Russell glanced over at Harry, as if wondering how he’d respond to any suggestion of disrespect. Harry dropped his eyes. When he looked up again, the pathologist had turned to the second gurney. The others gathered round.
‘This child is a very similar size,’ said the detective inspector. ‘How sure can you be that this isn’t Lucy Pickup?’
‘These remains haven’t been in the ground for ten years,’ replied Clarke, without even pausing to think. ‘I’d be surprised if they’ve been in soil for more than a couple of months. Completely different state of preservation.’
Harry stepped closer and DS Russell moved aside to allow him to approach the gurney.
‘Number three is the same,’ said Clarke, indicating the third trolley. ‘Can you see?’
‘Not skeletonized at all,’ said Rushton. ‘They still have skin. They look…’
‘Dry?’ suggested Clarke, nodding his head. ‘They should. They’re mummified.’
