In A Dry Season

THREE

Banks watched from the edge of the woods the next morning as the SOCOs slowly lifted the skeleton from its muddy grave under the expert direction of John Webb.

First, they had to take down the wall next to which the bones were buried, then they made a trench around the area and dug down until the bones were exposed, about three feet below the surface. Next, they slipped a thin sheet of metal into the earth under the bones, and finally they got it in place, ready to lift out.

The bones came up on the metal sheet, still packed in earth, and four SOCO pallbearers carried it up the slope, where they laid it out on the grass at Banks’s feet like a burnt offering. It was just eleven, and DS Cabbot still hadn’t shown up. Banks had already talked to Adam Kelly, who hadn’t been able to add anything to his previous statement.

Adam was still shaken, but Banks sensed a resilience in him that he had also possessed as an early adolescent. Banks, too, had loved playing in derelict houses, of which there had been plenty in post-war Peterborough. The worst he had ever come away with was a scraped knee, but a pupil from the girls’ school had been killed by a falling rafter, so he knew how dangerous they could be. The council was always boarding them up. Anyway, Adam’s little adventure had done no lasting harm, and it would give him stories to tell well into the school term. He would enjoy celebrity status of a kind among his pals for a while.

Banks stared at the filthy, twisted shape at his feet. It hardly looked human. The bones had taken on the muddy brown color of the earth they had lain in for so long; they were also crusted with dark, grungy muck. It stuck to the ribs the way a hearty stew was supposed to do, and it clung to various joints, clogging the cavities and crevices. The skull looked full of it – mud in the mouth, the nose, the eye sockets – and some of the long bones looked like old rusted metal pipes that had been underground for years.

The sight of it made Banks feel vaguely sick. He had seen much worse without throwing up, of course – at least there were no gaping red holes, no spilled intestines, no legs cut off at the thighs, skin riding up over the raw edges like a tight skirt – but he hadn’t seen much uglier.

The SOCOs had already photographed the skeleton during every stage of its excavation, and once they had finished carrying it up the hill they went back down and started their detailed search of the area, digging deeper and farther afield, leaving John Webb to give it a poke here and a scrape there. Webb also searched through the dirt for any objects that had been buried at the same time – buttons, jewelry, that sort of thing.

Banks leaned back against a tree trunk, as if on sentry duty, kept his nausea under control and watched Webb work. He was tired; he had not slept well after his late-night musings. Most of the night he had tossed and turned, waking up often from fragments of nightmares that scuttled off into dark corners when he woke, like cockroaches when you turn on the light. The morning heat made him drowsy. Giving in to the feeling for a moment, he closed his eyes and rested his head on the tree. He could feel the rough bark against his crown, and the sunlight made kaleidoscopic patterns behind his eyelids. He was at the edge of sleep when he heard a rustling behind him, then a voice.

“Morning, sir. Rough night?”

“Something like that,” said Banks, moving away from the tree trunk.

DS Cabbot stared down at the bones. “So this is what we all come to in the end, is it?” She didn’t sound particularly concerned about it; no more troubled than she seemed about turning up so late.

“Any luck?” Banks asked.

“That’s what took me so long. The university year hasn’t started yet and a lot of profs are still away on holiday, or busy running research projects overseas. Anyway, I’ve tracked down a Dr. Ioan Williams, University of Leeds. He’s a physical anthropologist with a fair bit of experience in forensic work. He sounded pretty excited by what we’ve found. Must be having a dull summer.”

“How quickly can he get to it?”

“He said if we could get the remains to the university lab as soon as possible, he’d have his assistants clean them up, then he’d manage a quick look by early evening. Only a preliminary look, mind you.”

“Good,” said Banks. “The sooner we know what we’re dealing with here, the better.”

If the skeleton had been lying there for a hundred years or more, the investigation wouldn’t really be worth pursuing with any great vigor, as they would be hardly likely to catch a living criminal. On the other hand, if it turned out to be a murder victim, and if it had been buried there during or since the war, there was a chance that somebody still living might remember something. And there was also a chance that the killer was still alive.

“Want me to supervise the move?” Webb asked.

Banks nodded. “If you would, John. Need an ambulance?”

Webb held his hand over his eyes to shield the sun as he looked up. A few of the silver hairs in his beard caught the light. “My old Range Rover will do just fine. I’ll get one of the lads to drive while I stay in the back and make sure our friend here doesn’t fall to pieces.” He looked at his watch. “With any luck, we can have it in the lab by one o’clock.”

DS Cabbot leaned back against a tree, arms folded, one leg crossed over the other. Today she was wearing a red T-shirt and white Nikes with her jeans, her sunglasses pushed up over her hairline. Pretty loose dress codes at Harkside, it seemed to Banks, but then he was one to talk. He had always hated suits and ties, right from his early days as a business student at London Polytechnic. He had spent three years there on a sandwich course – six months college and six months work – and the student life fast made encroachments on his dedication to the business world. Everyone at the Poly was joining up with the sixties thing back then, even though it was the early seventies; it was all caftans, bell-bottoms and Afghans, bright embroidered Indian cheese-cloth shirts, bandannas, beads, the whole caboodle. Banks had never committed himself fully to the spirit of the times, neither in philosophy nor in dress, but he had let his hair grow over his collar, and he was once sent home from work for wearing sandals and a flowered tie.

“I need to know a lot more about the village,” he said to DS Cabbot. “Some names would be a great help. Try the Voters Register and the Land Registry.” He pointed toward the ruins of the cottage near the bridge. “The outbuilding clearly belonged to that cottage, so I’d like to know who lived there and who the neighbors were. It seems to me that we’ve got three possibilities. Either we’re dealing with someone who used the empty village as a dumping spot to bury a body during the time it was in disuse-”

“Between May 1946 and August 1953. I checked this morning.”

“Right. Either then, or the body was buried while the village was still occupied, before May 1946, and the victim wasn’t buried too far from home. Or it was put there this summer, as you suggested earlier. It’s too early for speculation, but we do need to know who lived in that cottage before the village emptied out, and if anyone from the village was reported missing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What happened to the church? I’m assuming there was one.”

“A church and a chapel. Saint Bartholomew’s was deconsecrated, then demolished.”

“Where are the parish records now?”

“I don’t know. Never had cause to seek them out. I imagine they were moved to Saint Jude’s in Harkside, along with all the coffins from the graveyard.”

“They might be worth a look if you draw a blank elsewhere. You never know what you can find out from old church records and parish magazines. There’s the local newspaper, too. What’s it called?”

“The Harkside Chronicle.”

“Right. Might be worth looking there too if our expert can narrow the range a bit this evening. And, DS Cabbot?”

“Sir?”

“Look, I can’t keep calling you DS Cabbot. What’s your first name?”

She smiled. “Annie, sir. Annie Cabbot.”

“Right, Annie Cabbot, do you happen to know how many doctors or dentists there were in Hobb’s End?”

“I shouldn’t imagine there were many. Most people probably went to Harkside. Maybe there were a few more around when everyone was working in the flax mill. Very altruistic, very concerned about their workers’ welfare, some of these old mill owners.”

“Very concerned they were fit to work a sixteen-hour shift without dropping dead, more like,” said Banks.

Annie laughed. “Bolshevik.”

“I’ve been called worse. Try to find out, anyway. It’s a long shot, but if we can find any dental records matching the remains, we’ll be in luck.”

“I’ll look into it, sir. Anything else?”

“Utilities, tax records. They might all have to be checked.”

“And what should I do next year?”

Banks smiled. “I’m sure you can conscript one of your PCs to help. If we don’t get a break soon, I’ll see what I can do about manpower, though somehow I doubt this is a high-priority case.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“For now, let’s concentrate on the identity of the victim. That’s crucial.”

“Okay.”

“Just a thought, but do you happen to know if there’s anyone who lived in Hobb’s End still alive, maybe living in Harkside now? It doesn’t seem an unreasonable assumption.”

“I’ll ask Inspector Harmond. He grew up around these parts.”

“Good. I’ll leave you to it and see these bones off to Leeds with John.”

“Do you want me to go down there this evening?”

“If you like. Meet me at the lab at six o’clock. Where is it?”

Annie told him.

“In the meantime,” he said, “here’s my mobile number. Give me a ring if you come up with anything.”

“Right you are, sir.” Annie just seemed to touch her sunglasses and they slid down perfectly into place on her nose. With that, she turned and strode off into the woods.

Banks was an odd fish, Annie thought as she drove back to Harkside. Of course, before she’d met him she’d heard a few rumors. She knew, for example, that Chief Constable Riddle hated him, that Banks was under a cloud, almost lost in the clouds, though she didn’t know why. Someone had even hinted at fisticuffs between the two. Whatever the reason, his career was on hold and he was not a good horse to hitch one’s wagon to.

Annie had no particular liking for Jimmy Riddle, either. On the one or two occasions she had met him, she had found him arrogant and condescending. Annie was one of Millie’s projects – ACC Millicent Cummings, new Director of Human Resources, dedicated to bringing more women into the ranks and seeing that they were well-treated – and the antagonism between Millie and Riddle, who had opposed her appointment from the start, was well-known. Not that Riddle was especially for the ill-treatment of women, but he preferred to avoid the problem altogether by keeping their presence among the ranks to an absolute minimum.

Annie had also heard that Banks’s wife had left him for someone else not too long ago. Not only that, but there were stories going around that he had a woman in Leeds, had had for some time, even before his wife left. She had heard him described as a loner, a skiver and a Bolshie bastard. He was a brilliant detective gone to seed, they said, over the hill since his wife left, past it, burned out, a shadow of his former self.

On first impressions, Annie didn’t really know what to make of him. She thought she liked him. She certainly found him attractive, and he didn’t look much older than his mid-thirties, despite the scattering of gray at the temples of his closely cropped black hair. As far as being burned out was concerned, he seemed tired and he seemed to carry a burden of sadness in him, but she could sense that the fire still smoldered somewhere behind his sharp blue eyes. A little diminished in power, perhaps, but still there.

On the other hand, perhaps he really had lost it, and he was simply going through the motions, content to shuffle papers until retirement. Perhaps the fire she sensed in him was simply embers, not fully extinguished yet, just about to cave in on themselves. Well, if Annie had learned one thing over the past couple of years, it was not to jump to conclusions about anyone: the brave man often appears weak; the wise man often seems foolish. After all, enough people thought she was weird, too, and it wouldn’t be hard to argue that she had been merely going through the motions lately, either. She wondered if there were any rumors about her going around the region. If there were, she had a good guess what they would be: dyke bitch.

Annie parked on the strip of Tarmac beside the ugly brick section station and walked inside. Only four of them worked directly out of the station: Inspector Harmond, Annie and PCs Cameron and Gould. Apart from Samantha, their civilian clerk, Annie was the only woman. That was okay with her; they seemed a pretty decent bunch of men, as men go. She certainly felt no threat from any of them. PC Cameron was married with two kids, to whom he was clearly devoted. Gould seemed to be one of those rare types who have no sexual dimension whatsoever, content to live at home with his mum, play with his model trains and add stamps to his album. She knew that in books such types often turn out to be the most dangerous of all, the serial killers and sexual deviants, but Gould was harmless. Even if he liked to wear women’s underwear in private, Annie didn’t care. Inspector Harmond was, well, avuncular. He liked to think of himself as a bit like Sergeant Blaketon out of Heartbeat, but he didn’t even come close, in Annie’s opinion.

Harkside police station might be ugly on the outside but at least inside it was a sparsely populated open-plan office area – apart from Inspector Harmond’s office, partitioned off at the far end – and there was plenty of room to spread oneself around. Annie liked that. Her L-shaped desk was the messiest of all, but she knew where everything was and could put her hands on anything anyone asked her for so quickly that even Inspector Harmond had given up teasing her about it.

Annie’s desk also took up a corner, part of which included a side window. It wasn’t much of a view, only the cobbled alley, a gate and the back wall of the Three Feathers, but at least she was close to a source of light and air, and it was good to be able to see something of the outside world. Even if there was hardly any breeze these days, she loved each gentle waft of warm air through the window; it lifted her spirits. These little things mattered so much, Annie had discovered. She had had her shot at the big time, the fast track, with all its excitement, but it had ended badly for her. Now she was slowly rediscovering what mattered in life.

Harkside was generally a law-abiding sort of community, so there wasn’t a lot for a detective sergeant to do. There was plenty of paperwork to keep her occupied, make her feel she’d earned her pay, but it was hardly a high overtime posting, and there were slack periods. That also suited her fine. Sometimes it was good to do nothing. And why should she complain if enough people weren’t getting robbed, killed or beaten up?

At the moment she had two domestic-violence cases and a spate of after-dark vandalism on her plate. And now the skeleton. Well, the others could wait. Inspector Harmond had increased patrols in the area most often hit by the vandals, who would probably be caught red-handed before long, and just now the wife-beaters were contrite and arranging to seek help.

Annie headed first to the coffee machine and filled her mug, the one with “She Who Must Be Obeyed” written on it, then she walked over and knocked on Inspector Harmond’s door. He asked her to come in.

“Sir?”

Harmond looked up from his desk. “Annie. What is it, lass?”

“Got a minute?”

“Aye. Sit down.”

Annie sat. Harmond’s was a plain office, with only his merit awards on the wall for decoration, and framed photos of his wife and children on the desk. In his early fifties, he seemed perfectly content to be a rural inspector for the rest of his working life. His head was too large for his gangly frame, and Annie always worried it might fall off if he tilted it too far to one side. It never had; not yet. He had a pleasant round, open face. The features were a bit coarse, and a few black hairs grew out of the end of his misshapen potato nose, but it was the kind of face you could trust. If eyes really were the windows of the soul, then Inspector Harmond had a decent soul.

“It’s this skeleton thing,” she said, crossing her legs and cradling her coffee mug on her lap.

“What about it?”

“Well, that’s just it, sir. We don’t know anything about it just yet. DCI Banks wanted to know how many doctors and dentists lived in Hobb’s End, and if anyone who used to live there lives here now.”

Harmond scratched his temple. “I can answer your last question easily enough,” he said. “You remember Mrs. Kettering, the one whose budgie escaped that time she was having a new three-piece suite delivered?”

“How could I forget?” It had been one of Annie’s first cases in Harkside.

Inspector Harmond smiled. “She lived in Hobb’s End. I don’t know exactly when or for how long, but I know she lived there. She must be pushing ninety if she’s a day.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not that I can think of. Not offhand, at any rate. Leave it with me, I’ll ask around. Remember where she lives?”

“Up on The Edge, isn’t it? The corner house with the big garden?”

The Edge was what the locals called the fifty-foot embankment that ran along the south side of Harksmere Reservoir, the road that used to lead over the packhorse bridge to Hobb’s End. Its real name was Harksmere View, and it didn’t lead anywhere now. Only one row of cottages overlooked the water, separated from the rest of Harkside village by about half a mile of open countryside.

“What about doctors and dentists?” Annie asked.

“That’s a bit trickier,” Harmond said. “There must have been a few over the years, but Lord knows what’s happened to them. Seeing as the village cleared out after the war, they’re probably all dead now. Remember, lass, I’m not that old. I was still a lad myself when the place emptied out. As far as I remember, there wasn’t any village bobby, either. Too small. Hobb’s End was part of the Harkside beat.”

“How many schools were there?”

Inspector Harmond scratched his head. “Just infants and junior, I think. Grammar school and secondary modern were here in Harkside.”

“Any idea where the old records would be?”

“Local education authority, most likely. Unless they were destroyed somehow. A lot of records got destroyed back then, after the war and all. Is there anything else?”

Annie sipped some coffee and stood up. “Not right now, sir.”

“You’ll keep me informed?”

“I will.”

“And, Annie?”

“Yes, sir?”

Harmond scratched the side of his nose. “This DCI Banks. I’ve never met him myself, but I’ve heard a bit about him. What’s he like?”

Annie paused at the door and frowned as she thought. “Do you know, sir,” she said finally, “I haven’t got a clue.”

“Bit of an enigma, then, eh?”

“Yes,” Annie said, “a bit of an enigma. I suppose you could say that.”

“Better watch yourself, then, lass,” she heard him say as she turned to leave.

Before I tell you what happened next, let me tell you a little about myself and my village. My name, as you already know, is Gwen Shackleton, which is short for Gwynneth, not for Gwendolyn. I know this sounds Welsh, but my family has lived in Hobb’s End, Yorkshire, for at least two generations. My father, God bless his soul, died of cancer three years before the war began, and by 1940 my mother was an invalid, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. Sometimes she was able to help out in the shop, but not often, so the brunt of the work fell to me.

Matthew helped me as much as he could, but university kept him busy most of the week and the Home Guard took up his weekends. He was twenty-one, but despite the call-up, the Ministry was encouraging him to finish the third year of his engineering degree at the University of Leeds. They believed, I suppose, that his training would come in useful in the forces.

Our little shop was a newsagent’s-cum-general store about halfway along the High Street, near the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s, and we lived above it. We didn’t sell perishable goods, just things like newspapers, sweets, cigarettes, stationery, jam and other odds and ends, tea and tinned goods – depending, of course, on what was available at the time. I was especially proud of the little lending library I had built up. Because paper was getting scarce and books were in short supply, I rented them out for tuppence a week. I kept a good selection of World’s Classic editions: Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in particular. I also stocked a number of the more sensational novels, Agatha Christie and the Mills and Boon romances, for those who liked such things – unfortunately, the majority of my customers!

Though most of the able-bodied men in the village had joined up and put on one uniform or another, the place had never seemed busier. The old flax mill was operating at full strength again and most of the married women worked there. Before the war, it had practically come to a standstill, but now the military wanted flax to make webbing for parachute harnesses and other things where a tough fiber was needed, like gun tarpaulins and fire hoses.

There was also a big RAF base about a mile or so away through Rowan Woods, and the High Street was often busy with Jeeps and lorries honking their horns and trying to pass one another in the narrow space. The airmen sometimes came to the village pubs – the Shoulder of Mutton just down the High Street, and the Duke of Wellington over the river – except when they went to Harkside, where there was much more to do. We didn’t even have one cinema in Hobb’s End, for example, but there were three in Harkside.

These things aside, though, it remains difficult to say exactly how much the war affected us in Hobb’s End. I think that at first it impinged upon us very little. For those of us left behind, daily life went on much as normal. The first wave of evacuees came in September 1939, but when nothing happened for ages, they all started drifting home again, and we didn’t get any more until the bombing started the following August.

Even with rationing, our diets didn’t change as much as those of the city folks, for we had always been used to eating plenty of vegetables, and in the country there were always eggs, butter and milk. Our neighbor, Mr. Halliwell, the butcher, was probably the most popular man in town, so we were occasionally able to swap any tea and sugar we might put aside for an extra piece of mutton or pork.

Apart from the feeling of waiting, the sense that normal life was suspended until all this was over, perhaps the hardest thing to get used to was the blackout. But even in that we were more fortunate than many, as Hobb’s End had no streetlights to begin with, and the countryside is dark enough at the best of times. Still, that pinprick of light on the distant hillside was often the only thing to guide you home.

In the blackout, we had to tape up our windows to prevent damage from broken glass, and we also had to hang up the heavy blackout curtains. Every night, Mother used to send me outside to check that not a sliver of light showed because our local ARP man was a real stickler. I remember the whole village laughing the day we heard Mrs. Darnley got a visit from him for blacking out only the front of her house, but not the back windows. “Don’t be so daft,” she told him. “If the Germans come to bomb Hobb’s End, young lad, they’ll come from the east, won’t they, not by Grassington way. Stands to reason.”

On moonlit nights, especially if there was a full moon, the effect could be spectacular: the hills were dusted with silver powder, the stars glittered like cut diamonds on black velvet, and the whole landscape looked like one of those black-and-white engravings or woodcuts you see in old books. But on cloudy or moonless nights, which seemed far more frequent, people bumped into trees and even cycled into the river with alarming regularity. You could use a torch if you wrapped the light with several layers of tissue paper, but batteries were scarce. All car and bicycle lights had to be hooded and masked with a variety of gadgets that let the light through only in muddied, useless slits. Needless to say, there were a lot of car accidents, too, until petrol became too scarce and nobody drove anymore except on business.

Several events made the war more personal for us, such as the Spinner’s Inn fire, or the Jowett boy getting killed at Dunkirk, but the day before Gloria Stringer arrived, something hit even closer to home: Matthew got his call-up papers. He was due to report for his medical in Leeds in two weeks.

Jimmy Riddle had once accused Banks of skiving off to Leeds to go shagging his mistress and shopping at the Classical Record Shop. He had been wrong that time, but if he had seen Banks nipping out of the Merrion Centre late that afternoon, a new recording of Herbert Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi clutched in his sweaty palm, Riddle would have felt vindicated at least on one count. Not that Banks gave a toss. He didn’t even bother to look furtive as he walked out past Morrisons onto Woodhouse Lane.

It was gone half past five. Shops were closing and office workers were heading home. Banks had driven to Leeds behind John Webb’s Range Rover and stayed with him until they got the skeleton set up and secured in Dr. Williams’s lab, which turned out to be the first floor of a large red brick house off the main campus. While there, he had called the forensic odontologist Geoff Turner again and persuaded him – at the cost of at least one pint – to drop by the following morning to examine the skeleton’s teeth.

After that, Banks had watched the lab assistants start cleaning the bones, then he had gone out for a quick sandwich at a café on Woodhouse Lane, making a slight detour to the Classical Record Shop. He had been gone for about an hour and a half.

DS Cabbot was just parking her Astra when Banks arrived back at the lab. She didn’t spot him. He watched her get out and look up at the building, checking with the sheet of paper in her hand and frowning.

He stepped up behind her. “It’s the right place.”

She turned. “Ah, sir. I was expecting something a bit more… well… I don’t know really. But not like this.”

“More labby?”

She smiled. “Yes. I suppose so. Whatever that means. More hi-tech. This place looks like my old student digs.”

Banks nodded toward the building. “The university bought up a lot of these old houses when the families and their servants couldn’t afford to live there anymore. You’d be surprised how many odd and eccentric departments are hidden away in them. Let’s go inside.”

Banks followed her up the steps. This evening she was wearing black tights and shoes, a mid-length black skirt and matching jacket over a white blouse. She was also carrying a black leather briefcase. Much more businesslike. Banks caught a brief whiff of jasmine as he walked behind her. It reminded him of the jasmine tea that Jem, his friend and neighbor in the Notting Hill bed-sit, used to pour so fastidiously, as if he were performing the Japanese tea ceremony.

Banks pressed the intercom and got them buzzed in. The lab was on the first floor, up one flight of creaky, uncarpeted stairs. Their footsteps echoed from the high ceiling.

Dr. Ioan Williams waited for them on the landing. He was a tall, rangy fellow with long, greasy blond hair. Wire-rimmed glasses magnified his gray eyes, and his Adam’s apple looked like a gobstopper stuck halfway down his throat. Much younger than Banks had expected, Dr. Williams wasn’t wearing a white lab coat but was dressed casually in torn jeans and a black T-shirt advertising Guinness. His handshake was firm, and judging by the way he lingered over DS Cabbot, his mind was not one hundred percent focused on science. Or maybe it was. Biology.

“Come in,” he said, leading the way down the corridor and opening the lab door. “I’m afraid it isn’t much to write home about.” Despite his name, Williams had no trace of a Welsh accent. He sounded pure Home Counties to Banks, or Oxbridge. Posh, at any rate, as Banks’s mother would say.

The lab consisted of two rooms knocked into one. Apart from the long table at the center, where the skeleton lay, there was nothing much to distinguish it. Bookcases lined one wall, a long lab bench another. On it lay various measuring instruments and pieces of bone with tags on them like shop-window goods.

Still, Banks thought, what more did Williams need? All he looked at were bones. No mess. No blood and guts to clean up, no need for dissecting knives, scalpels or brain knives. All he really needed were saws, chisels and a skull key. And, thank God, they didn’t have to worry about the smell, though the air was certainly redolent of loam and stagnant mud.

There were a couple of posters on the walls, one of Pamela Anderson Lee in her “Baywatch” swimsuit and another of a human skeleton. Perhaps, Banks speculated, the juxtaposition meant something to Dr. Williams. A reflection on mortality? Or maybe he just liked tits and bones.

The bones on the table certainly looked different now that Williams’s assistants had been to work on them. Much of the crusting remained, especially in the hard-to-get-at crevices, but the skull, ribs and long bones were easier to examine. They were still far from the sparkling white of the typical laboratory skeleton, more of a dirty yellow-brown in color, like a bad nicotine stain, but at least the whole resembled something more like a human being. There was even a little matted red hair on the back of the skull. Banks had come across this sort of thing before, so he knew it didn’t mean the victim had been a redhead; hair turns red when the original pigment fades, and even many of the “bog men,” Iron Age corpses preserved in peat bogs, had red hair.

“There are a number of odds and ends my lads found while they were cleaning up,” Williams said. “They’re over there on the bench.”

Banks looked at the collection of filthy objects. It was hard to make out what they were: pieces of corroded metal, perhaps? A ring? Shreds of old clothing?

“Can you get them cleaned up and sent over to me?” he asked.

“No problem. Now let’s get down to work.”

Annie took out her notebook and crossed her legs.

“First of all,” Williams began, “let me confirm, just for the record, that we are dealing with human remains, most likely Caucasian. I’ll check a few things under the microscope tomorrow, do some more work on the skull dimensions, for the sake of scientific accuracy, but you can take my word on it at the moment.”

“What about DNA analysis?” Banks asked.

Williams grunted. “People seem to think DNA analysis is some sort of miracle answer. It’s not. Right now, I can tell you a hell of a lot more about what you want to know than any DNA could. Believe me, I’ve had plenty of experience in this field. May I continue?”

“Please do. But get a DNA analysis done, anyway. It might be useful for determining identity, or identifying any living descendants.”

Williams nodded. “Very well.”

“And what about radiocarbon dating?”

“Really, Chief Inspector, shouldn’t you leave the science to the scientists? There’s too big a margin for error in radiocarbon dating. It’s mostly useful for archaeological finds, and I think you’ll find our friend here is a little more recent than that. Now, if there’s nothing else…?” He turned back to the skeleton. “The height of the subject was easy enough to determine in this case by simple measurement once we got the bones arranged in their original positions. A meter and a half – between a hundred and fifty-four and a hundred and fifty-five centimeters.”

“What’s that in feet and inches?” Banks asked.

“Five foot two.” Dr. Williams looked over and smiled at DS Cabbot. “But I can’t be sure about the eyes of blue.”

Annie gave him a chilly smile. Banks noticed her roll her eyes and tug her skirt lower over her knees when Williams had turned away.

“Also,” Williams went on, “you are dealing with the remains of a young woman.” He paused for dramatic effect.

Annie shot him a quick glance, then looked down at her notebook again.

“Go on,” Banks said. “We’re listening.”

“In general,” Williams explained, “a male skeleton is larger, the bone surfaces rougher, but the main differences are in the skull and the pelvic area. The male skull is thicker.”

“Well, what do you know?” Annie muttered without looking up.

Williams laughed. “Anyway, in this case, the pelvis is intact, and that’s the easiest way for the trained eye to tell.” Williams reached over and put his hand between the skeleton’s legs. “The female pelvis is wider and lower than the male’s, to facilitate child-bearing.” Banks watched as Williams ran his hand over the bone. “This pubic curve is definitely female, and here, the sciatic notch.” He touched it with his forefinger. “Also unmistakably female. Much wider than a male’s.” He hooked his finger in the sciatic notch, then looked at DS Cabbot again as he caressed the skeleton’s pelvic area. Annie kept her head down.

Williams turned back to Banks. “The symphyseal area here, as you can see, is rectangular. In males it’s triangular. I could go on, but I think you get the point.”

“Definitely female,” Banks said.

“Yes. And there’s one more thing.” He picked up a small magnifying glass from the lab bench and handed it to Banks. “Look at this.” Williams pointed to where the two pelvic bones joined at the front of the body. Banks leaned over, holding the glass. On the bone surface he could just about make out a small groove, or pit, maybe about half an inch long.

“That’s the dorsal margin of the pubis’ articular surface,” Williams said, “and what you’re looking at is a parturition scar. It’s caused by the stresses that attached ligaments put on the bone.”

“So she’d given birth to at least one child?”

Williams smiled. “Ah, you’re familiar with the technical terms?”

“Some of them. Go on.”

Annie raised her eyebrows at Banks, then got back to her notes before Williams could nail her with his leering gaze.

“Well,” Williams went on, “there’s only a single pit on either side of the pubis, which would strongly suggest that she only gave birth once in her life. Usually, the more times a woman has given birth, the more apparent the parturition scars are.”

“How old was she when she died?”

“I’d have to do more comprehensive tests to be certain of that. With X rays of the ossification centers – the centers that basically produce the calcium and other minerals that make up bone – we can make a reasonably accurate determination. We can also do a spectrographic analysis of bone particles. But all that takes time, not to mention money. I imagine you’d like a rough estimate as quickly as possible?”

“Yes,” said Banks. “What do you have to go on at the moment?”

“Well, there’s epiphyseal union, for a start. Let me explain.” He looked over toward Annie like a professor beginning his lecture. She ignored him. He seemed unperturbed. Maybe this sort of ogling was just a habit with him, Banks guessed, and he didn’t even notice he was doing it. “Here,” Dr. Williams went on, “at the very ends of the long bones in both the arms and the legs, the epiphyses have all firmly united with the shafts, which doesn’t usually happen until the age of twenty or twenty-one. But look here.” He pointed toward the collarbone. “The epiphysis at the sternal end of the clavicle, which doesn’t unite until the late twenties, has not united yet.”

“So what age are we looking at? Roughly?”

Williams scratched his chin. “I’d say about twenty-two to twenty-eight. If you take in the skull sutures, too, you can see here that the sagittal suture shows some signs of endocranial closure, but the occipital and the lambdoid sutures are still wide open. That would also suggest somewhere in the twenties.”

“How accurate is this?”

“It wouldn’t be very far off. I mean, this is definitely not the skeleton of a forty-year-old or a fourteen-year-old. You can also take into account that she was in pretty good general physical shape. There is no indication of any old healed fractures, nor of any skeletal anomalies or deformities.”

Banks looked at the bones, trying to imagine the young woman who had once inhabited them, the living flesh surrounding them. He failed. “Any idea how long she’s been down there?”

“Oh dear. I was wondering when you’d get around to asking that,” Williams folded his arms and placed his forefinger over his lips. “It’s very difficult. Very difficult indeed to be at all accurate about something like that. To the untrained eye, a skeleton that has been buried for ten years might look indistinguishable from one that has been buried, say, a thousand years.”

“But you don’t think this one has been buried a thousand years?”

“Oh, no. I said to the untrained eye. No, there are certain indications that we’re dealing with recent remains here, as opposed to archaeological.”

“These being?”

“What do you notice most about the bones?”

“The color,” said Banks.

“Right. And what does that tell you?”

Banks wasn’t too sure about the usefulness of the Socratic method at a time like this, but he had found from experience that it is usually a good idea to humor scientists. “That they’re stained or decayed.”

“Good. Good. Actually, the discoloration is an indication that they have taken on some of the color of the surrounding earth. Then there’s this. Have you noticed?” He pointed to several places on the bone surfaces where the exterior seemed to be flaking off like old paint.

“I thought that was just the crusting,” Banks said.

“No. Actually, the bone surface is crumbling, or flaking. Now if you take all this into account, along with the complete absence of any soft or ligamentous tissue, then I’d estimate it’s been down there for a few decades. Certainly more than ten years, and as we already know, it’s unlikely she was buried after 1953. I’d go back about ten years from there.”

“1943?”

“Hold on. This is a very rough guess. The rate of skeletal decay is wildly unpredictable. Obviously, your odontologist will be able to tell you a bit more, narrow things down, perhaps.”

“Is there anything else you can do to get a little closer to the year of death?”

“I’ll do my best, of course, but it could take some time. There are a number of tests I can carry out on the bones, tests we use in cases of relatively recent remains as opposed to archaeological finds. There’s carbonate testing, I can do an ultraviolet fluorescence test, histologic determination and Uhlenhut reaction. But even they’re not totally accurate. Not within the kind of time frame you’re asking for. They might tell you, at a pinch, that the bones are either under or over fifty years old, but you seem to want year, month, date and time. The best you can realistically hope for is between thirty and fifty or fifty and a hundred. I don’t want to appear to be telling you your job, but probably your best chance of finding out who she was and when she was killed is by checking old missing-persons files.”

“I appreciate that,” said Banks.

“Anyway, I’ll need more information about soil, mineral content, bacterial content, temperature fluctuations and various other factors. Buried under an outbuilding floor, then flooded under a reservoir, you say?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll visit the site first thing in the morning and take some samples, then I’ll get working on the tests.” He looked at Annie. “Perhaps DS Cabbot here would be willing to escort me there?”

“Sorry,” said Annie. “Far too busy.”

His eyes lingered on her. “Pity.”

“Visiting the site’s no problem,” Banks said. “I’ll arrange for a car and make sure the SOCOs are expecting you. Look, we’re already a bit suspicious from the way and the place the body was buried. I know you don’t have a lot to go on, but can you tell us anything at all about cause of death?”

“I think I can help you a little with that, though it’s not really my area of expertise, and you should definitely get your Home Office pathologist to confirm this.”

“Of course. We’ll ask Dr. Glendenning to have a look as soon as he can. I doubt that it’ll be top of his list, though. What have you found to be going on with?”

“See those markings on the bones there?” Dr. Williams pointed to several of the ribs and the pelvic area. As Banks looked more closely, he noticed a number of triangular notches. They weren’t easy to spot because of the flaking and crusting, but once he saw them he knew he’d seen them before on bones.

“Stab wounds,” he muttered.

“Exactly.”

“Cause of death?” Banks leaned over and peered.

“I’d say so. See those little curls of bone there, like wood shavings?”

“Yes.”

“They’re still attached to the bone, and that only happens with living bone. Also, there’s no sign of healing, is there? If she’d remained alive after these injuries, the bones would have healed to some extent, starting about ten days after the injury. So, technically, she could have been stabbed anywhere from one to ten days before she died of something else. But, as I said, it’s unlikely. Especially since the position of some of these wounds indicates the blade would most certainly have pierced vital organs. In fact, I’d conclude that she was stabbed quite viciously, more than once, almost certainly causing death. But please don’t quote me on that.”

Banks looked at Annie Cabbot. “Murder, then,” she said.

“Well, I’d hardly imagine the poor woman did it herself,” Williams agreed. “Yes, unless I’m very much mistaken, it looks like you’ve definitely got yourselves a murder victim here.”