Читать книгу St Oda's Bones - Marcus Attwater - Страница 13

'Did Old Biddy tell you about next Sunday?' Sally asked, swinging the car into the infirmary parking lot.

'The dinner party? Yes, she did.'

'I realise I'm asking this in the wrong company, but what the hell do I wear? You've got it easy, you can just wear a suit.'

'I don't think they're terribly formal. And if you get it completely wrong they'll have a good excuse not to ask us back, won't they?'

'Thanks very much.'

DC Robbins looked puzzled. They were on their way to the post mortem on the body found in the church, and as far as their new colleague was aware, that was their only current case.

'Some things you have to make sergeant before you're allowed to know about them, Robbins,' Collins said.

Sally looked at him sideways. 'Never mind rank, somethings you have to be grown up,' she teased.

Collins could see that Robbins didn't like that, but the constable was very young. It seemed to bring out the world-weary copper act in Sally as well.

'Anyway, I don't think you would think you'd been missing much Joshua, if you knew,' DS Holmes concluded, refusing to be drawn on their other assignment. 'Here we are. Dr Nakamura's expecting us.'

Dr Nakamura was a small, round woman of about 60, who delighted in upsetting the expectations of simple plods who thought a police pathologist should be a cadaverous white male.

'I see for once the fuzz have turned out in force,' she said sardonically, when her assistant showed them in.

'DC Robbins has never attended an autopsy before,' Collins told her. He knew she hadn't meant the constable's presence, though. He always tried to stay away from a post mortem if he could. Although he had attended pretty gruesome murder scenes without breaking his stride, Dr Nakamura's methodical incisions always made his stomach turn. Trying to take his mind of what she was doing, he had once asked her how she came to choose this job.

'Believe it or not, Inspector, but when I was young, parents didn't always approve of medicine as a career for a girl. When I put my foot down, they tried to corral me in paediatrics. This,' she had gestured round her clinically clean workspace, 'Is as far away as I could get.'

Collins admired both her attitude and her professional skill, but he still wished his work didn't bring him into her orbit quite so often. He guessed he was safe with a skeleton, though.

The skeleton in question had been unwrapped from its plastic bags and laid out on the slab.

'It's assemble your own, these days, apparently,' Dr Nakamura said, 'But never mind, good practice for Adrian here.' She gestured at a lanky young man who, despite her best efforts, was threatening to live up to the cliché.

'First things first. It's complete. Well, I'm missing a metacarpal here, and a toe, but rats could easily have made off with those.'

Sally shuddered. Dr Nakamura ignored her. 'So the body was whole when buried. No severed limbs, and he had no congenital skeletal defects.'

'You are sure it was 'he'?'

'Not always easy to tell in sub-adults, but going by the narrowness of the pelvis, almost certainly male. We'll know for sure when the DNA sample has been tested. Age around fourteen years I'd say, but rates of development vary greatly in humans, so to be on the safe side, anything from twelve to seventeen. Healthy, good teeth, no fractures prior to the one sustained in the lower left arm.'

'Davidson said that there were no signs of healing on that, he supposed it was broken in the altercation that killed him. But could it have broken after death?'

'Your archaeologist was right, the ulna fractured shortly before death. Which means he had a fall or a fight, impossible to tell which.' She cradled the skull in her hand, touching a finger lightly to the cracked line. 'The fracture here is consistent with a blow from or against something unyielding, but he wasn't bludgeoned. A single blow like this would not necessarily have been fatal, but it may have caused internal bleeding which was. I will, of course, do the usual tests to check for alien substances, but as there are no other signs of distress on the remains, the blow to the skull is the most likely cause of death.'

'Can you tell us how old the remains are?' DS Holmes asked.

'I can't be precise. But more than twelve years, and certainly less than 40. I'm sorry I can't tell you more, I wouldn't relish going through all missing persons over twenty-odd years.'

'Oh, I don't think we'll have to do that,' Collins assured her, 'We know who he is, you see. You say you took a DNA sample? Make sure our technicians get the result, so we can compare with a living relative.'

'What do you mean, 'we know who he is'?' Sally said, as they gratefully took in lungfuls of fresh air outside the mortuary building, 'You can't have had time to go through missing persons yet, even using the removal of the shrine as a time window. You can't have narrowed it down that much.'

'I had help,' Collins admitted, '30 years ago, a boy went missing from Abbey Hill. There was no trace of him, living or dead. His name was Kester Johnson.'

Back at the station, the desk sergeant had the file on Johnson waiting for them. Collins carried the bulky folder into the CID room and leafed through it quickly. Apparently, the conclusion of the inspector in charge had been that Kester Johnson had run away from home.

'Pardoe, were you around 30 years ago? Do you remember this disappearance?'

'The Johnson boy? I wasn't on the case, but I heard about it.'

'But you can tell me about Inspector Clarke?'

Pardoe's usually impassive face creased in rare frown. 'Andy Clarke? Very sure of himself, was Andy. I made the mistake of disagreeing with him once. Can't say I regret it - I was right - but it didn't do my career any good. Andy Clarke's word was law in these parts.'

'So once he made up his mind that Kester had run away, he wasn't likely to change it?'

'No. And he probably made up his mind at once, he was that kind of man.'

Meanwhile, Robbins was doing some searching.

'Kester's mother Christine moved away from Abbey Hill about a year later,' he reported, 'And she is now Christine Shaw. Lives in Swindon.'

'Was she ever in the frame? Child disappears, you look at the parents first,' Sally said, trying to take the file from him.

'Maybe, but he was sixteen, not really a child anymore. There is nothing to suggest in here that Mrs Johnson was involved,' he said, hastily perusing Clarke's notes, 'She came home late that evening, assumed her son was sound asleep in bed, and the next morning she found he wasn't.'

'Wouldn't an anxious mother look in before she went to bed herself?' Sally said doubtfully.

'Inspector Clarke asked her that, actually. Apparently Kester was a light sleeper, and she did not like to disturb him,' Collins read out.

'But she doesn't have an alibi, as such.'

'Depends on when we think Kester was killed. Remember we don't know that. She came home at half past ten. Last sighting of Kester was at nine fifteen.'

'She could be lying.'

'Someone definitely is. But my money is not on Mrs Shaw. Anyway, I hope you don't have anything planned on Monday, Sally, because we'll have to see her first.'

He spent the next half hour on the phone, making appointments for Monday and Tuesday. He usually preferred to drop in on witnesses unannounced, so they wouldn't have had time to rehearse a story. But in this case he figured that anyone who didn't have their story ready after having had three decades to think about it wasn't going to make up anything plausible over the weekend. And it saved him the trouble of going over only to find they were out.

After Sally and Robbins went home he drove to Abbey Hill. Laura Fox joined him in the church after only a few minutes.

'I was so excited to have a real find, I mean, no matter how often they tell you pots are important, finding human remains is something else.'

'Was there anything to indicate the age of the remains other than that they were buried in medieval rubble?'

She shook her head. 'Not that I could see. Maybe a forensic archaeologist would have spotted something, but you don't expect to need someone like that on a site like this, do you?' She covered her mouth with her hand. 'Oh God, that poor boy. You get used to thinking of them as things, when you dig them up, but this…' She wiped her eyes. 'Sorry. What else do you want to know?'

'Anything, really. Things that seemed out of place, at the time or with hindsight.'

'There was one thing which didn't seem out of place. He - well, at the time I thought it was she, of course - had been laid out carefully. Full length, with the hands crossed on the chest. If it had been lying any old how, we'd have been suspicious earlier, but the body was arranged exactly the way you would expect a saint to be laid to rest.'

They were silent for a moment, thinking about the implications of this. There was something very cold about the thought that had gone into this. Collins could easily imagine someone in a panic deciding to throw the body in the hole, hoping that it would never be discovered. But to consider what would happen if it was found, to remove the clothes, lay out the body so that when the flesh was gone it would look as much as possible like the grave of the saint, there was a horrible coolness to that. And another reason to think that the killer hadn't acted alone. People who were violently angry didn't calculate, they tended to leave a mess. Unless they had help from someone looking at it from the outside, someone who, in this case, looked decades ahead.

'Thank you, Ms Fox, that was very helpful. Don't hesitate to get in touch if there is anything else you recall.'

'I will. And I hope you find who did this,' she said fervently.

He sat in a pew for while after she had gone, wondering why no one apart from Ms Dunstable had come forward with information of their own accord. It couldn't be that the people who lived here now simply thought it had nothing to do with them. It was a small place still, many people who had been here three decades ago still were, saw each other daily, went to the same church, the same shops. They must be gossiping among each other, must be wondering, watching. But if they were, they didn't share their thoughts with him.

He tried to work out whether activity in the apse would have been visible to anyone passing the church outside. Probably not, he concluded, unless they had used strong lights. It was the part of the church farthest from the street. Someone trusted, he thought, someone no one would question, had taken Kester to the church. He thought again about those fragile bones, and about how much, in other cases, you relied on getting information from the body and the scene of the crime. All they would have to go on here was what people chose to tell them.