The Doll's House

78

Jim Grieves never said very much, but today he was unusually taciturn. The reason for this was obvious – two partially decomposed women lay on neighbouring slabs in his mortuary. This meant a sudden spike in workload for Jim – which he never appreciated – but more than that it meant a depressing few hours spent in the company of two young people who should have had their whole lives ahead of them. Fifty-something Jim was truculent and sarcastic, navigating his job with gallows humour, but he had grown-up girls of his own and Helen could tell that he was affected by the latest arrivals to the mortuary.

‘Roisin Murphy and Isobel Lansley,’ Jim began, ‘Missing Persons had their dental records on file. I’ve sent off DNA samples to double-check, but it’s them.’

Helen nodded.

‘How long?’

‘Roisin about two years. Isobel less – a year to eighteen months.’

Two more girls kept alive from beyond the grave through tweets and texts. It gave Helen no satisfaction to see that she had been right about the killer’s need for fresh victims.

‘I’m going to need a bit longer to give you cause of death. But both are likely to have suffered some kind of organ failure. They’ve been starved and kept in darkness. Like Pippa, their eyes have deteriorated, they have a complete absence of vitamin D in their systems, their skin is leathery. At some point their bodies just shut down – I’ll pin it down further as we go on.’

Helen knew this was coming but it still upset her.

‘We do have something here that we didn’t have with Pippa. All three bodies were washed clean – either by the killer or by Mother Nature – but I found something odd on Isobel. Two of the hairs in her fringe were stuck together. Nothing unusual in that – wet sand is sticky – but this was stuck together with some kind of solvent.’

‘Any idea what it is?’

‘Not a clue,’ he replied cheerily. ‘Not my department. But I’ve sent it off for tests. I’ve told them we need it back within hours. You can imagine what they said to that.’

For the first time today, Helen smiled. Jim enjoyed nothing more than winding up the lab crew, whom he unfairly dismissed as automatons.

‘What about the tattoo?’ she said, pressing on.

‘Similar pigments as used on Pippa. Hard to say if he used the same needle – if there’s bacteria on the needle that may help us decide either way – but one thing’s clear, he’s getting better at it. Isobel’s tattoo was much more skilled than Pippa’s.’

Helen took this in.

‘Truth be told,’ Jim continued. ‘You can buy these inks and needles online or in scores of stores in Hampshire. They are all pretty generic and I’m not sure that’s going to take you anywhere. If I were you I’d concentrate on the design. Find out why the bluebird is important to him.’

Helen left shortly after, having thanked Jim for his endeavours. He was right of course, though it didn’t take them any further forward. They had done the necessary checks on the tattoo – nobody sporting a bluebird tattoo had been arrested in recent history, nor was there any record of bodies turning up which were decorated in this way. Computerized records only went back ten to fifteen years, so it might be that the evidence was out there somewhere, predating computerization, but she couldn’t allot valuable manpower to sifting the archive, when the result of this line of investigation was so doubtful.

There was, however, one card left she could play, though it wasn’t a card she was particularly looking forward to using. She was still pondering how to approach this, when her phone rang.

On the other end was a very excitable DC Sanderson.