The Restless Dead

15

The mortuary was an unobtrusive building situated not far from the hospital. I signed in and was told which examination room to go to before being pointed to the changing room. Putting my own clothes into a locker, I pulled on a set of clean scrubs, replacing the old wellingtons of Trask’s that Rachel had lent me with a new pair of white surgical ones.

I still didn’t know what I was doing there. Lundy hadn’t told me very much at all, only that Clarke would meet me here. ‘She’ll explain then,’ he’d said. ‘Best you go in with an open mind.’

I always tried to anyway, but I could see I wasn’t going to get anything more from him. The DI hadn’t come with me to the mortuary, saying he wanted to stay while the rest of the barbed wire was recovered from the creek. He arranged for me to be given a lift by a talkative young PC, since my car was still waiting to have its spark plugs fitted at Trask’s house. I didn’t know now when that would happen.

Clarke was waiting for me in the examination room. With her pale colouring, the DCI’s thin face looked bleached out under the harsh lights. Frears was with her and already scrubbed up, although the policewoman had made do with a lab coat. They broke off talking when I went in. The chilled air conditioning wrapped around me like a cold blanket as the door eased shut.

‘Ah, Hunter. Glad you could make it,’ Frears greeted me cheerfully. The cherubic face looked incongruous under the surgical cap. ‘Safely negotiated the water hazards this time?’

‘I wasn’t driving,’ I told him.

He gave a barking laugh. ‘If it’s any consolation, same thing happened to me once. Made a complete mess of the old Jag I used to have.’

I gave an obligatory smile as I took in the room. It was well equipped and modern. There were two stainless-steel examination tables, spaced well apart from each other. A body lay on one, partly obscured behind the pathologist and DCI.

Sitting in a stainless-steel tray on the other was a decomposed foot.

Clarke’s mood didn’t seem to have improved since I’d seen her on the quay of the oyster factory, but perhaps that was her normal manner. ‘Thanks for coming, Dr Hunter.’

‘That’s OK. Although I still don’t know why I’m here.’

But I was starting to have a good idea. Clarke turned to Frears, leaving the explanation to him. He went to where the foot stood on the examination table.

‘Recognize this?’

‘It was in a boot the last time I saw it, but I’m guessing it’s the one from the creek.’

‘Care to tell me what you make of it?’

Puzzled, I pulled a pair of nitrile gloves from a dispenser, easing them over the plasters on my hands as I went across. Despite the cool of the air conditioning, there was a sour smell underlying the more stringent scent of antiseptic. The foot was large, pale and swollen, and wrinkled with the distinctive ‘washerwoman’s skin’ characteristic of immersion. The dirty-white adipocere had been given a faint, almost violet hue where it had absorbed the dye from the garish purple sock. The toes were like puffy albino radishes in which the yellow nails were embedded. They had bent under themselves, in a painful condition known as ‘hammertoe’. The exposed surface of the ankle joint was a gnarled mess of cartilaginous tissue and bone. This was the only part that had been exposed to the elements and scavengers, and what should have been the smooth surface of the talus — the uppermost bone of the ankle that connected to the tibia and fibula of the lower leg — was pitted and scratched.

‘Well?’ Frears prompted.

‘I can’t really tell you anything you won’t already know. Right foot, size ten or eleven by the look of it. Probably an adult male’s, although I can’t rule out a female with large feet. You don’t normally see hammertoes like that on younger people, which suggests it belongs to someone older.’ I paused, trying to think what else there was to say. I shrugged. ‘That’s about it, except that the build-up of adipocere and the fact it’s detached suggest it’s been in the water a considerable time.’

‘How long?’ Clarke asked.

‘Impossible to say just by looking at it.’ The shoe would have protected it, and perhaps accelerated adipocere formation. ‘If I had to guess I’d say a minimum of, oh, four weeks. But it could be much longer.’

‘Go on.’

‘There’s no sign of trauma, and only superficial pitting of the talus that’s consistent with weathering and scavengers. I can’t see any of the cut marks or damage I’d expect if it had been chopped or sawn off. So it looks as though it detached naturally. Can I take a look at the X-rays?’

Frears nodded. ‘Before that, would you mind measuring the ankle joint?’

I turned to him, puzzled. This was all basic stuff. ‘Why? Haven’t you done that already?’

‘Just humour me, will you?’

The pathologist wasn’t smiling now. Neither was Clarke. They both watched as I picked up a pair of sliding calipers from a second steel tray. ‘It’d be better to strip off the soft tissue first. I could—’

‘Just measure the joint as it is, please. There’s enough bone exposed.’

This was beginning to seem bizarre. I opened the calipers wide enough to fit over the talus, then carefully slid them shut until they were just touching the bone at either side.

‘I make the width 4.96 centimetres,’ I said, reading from the instrument’s ruled shaft. Removing the calipers, I opened them wider to measure the bone’s length.

‘You don’t need to bother with that,’ Frears said. He went to stand by the body on the other examination table. ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to measure the joint of the tibia and fibula. Right leg, obviously.’

Even if I hadn’t already guessed, the shotgun injury to the lower face would have confirmed this as the man’s body from the estuary. The clothing had been removed, and the remains lay naked on the table. Like the foot I’d just examined, they were badly swollen and well into the bloating stage of decomposition, the limbs with a stubby, unfinished appearance without any hands or feet. Exposed to the elements and scavengers, the skull was a bleached mess, and the damage caused by the shotgun blast was all the more evident now the estuary mud had been cleaned off. The chest and torso bore the Y-shaped incision from the post-mortem, although I thought the internal organs would have been too decomposed to offer much information. In deeper, colder water, they could sometimes be preserved by adipocere, but I doubted that would have been the case here. The genitals were still more or less intact, protected from insects and scavengers by the clothing, which at least simplified determination of biological sex. But with the remains in the condition they were, I doubted that the post-mortem would have established very much else.

‘Any time you’re ready,’ Frears said with a thin smile.

Leaving the first set of calipers on the first table, I exchanged my gloves for a fresh pair so as not to transfer any genetic material from the foot to the body. It was unlikely, since I’d only touched the calipers rather than the foot itself, but it was better not to risk cross-contamination.

Especially if this was shaping up the way I thought.

The heads of the tibia and fibula had been cleaned of any remaining shreds of tissue, exposing the ends of both bones. The heavier tibia, or shin bone, would have rested on the upper surface of the talus, with the slimmer fibula extending down the outside. Selecting another pair of calipers from the instrument tray, these designed for internal surfaces, I carefully measured the joint of the tibia and fibula as I had with the talus. Then, just to be sure, I measured them again.

I turned to Frears. ‘4.97 centimetres.’

He turned to Clarke. ‘As I told you. And it’ll stay the same no matter how many times we measure it.’

‘They’re not exactly the same size. The ankle’s slightly smaller,’ the DCI said doggedly.

Frears clamped his mouth shut, folding his arms as though they’d already been through this. He raised his eyebrows at me, all but saying you try.

‘There’s always going to be a slight variation,’ I told her. ‘It’s the same between left and right sides, they’re never going to be identical. If the difference was more than a few millimetres then yes, it’d probably mean it was from a different body. But one millimetre is a very close match.’

‘So in your opinion the foot definitely belongs to this body?’

‘I can’t say “definitely” without more tests. Going by what I’ve seen so far, though, it seems likely.’ Even though the possibility of two different people having ankle joints the same width couldn’t be entirely ruled out, the odds of them both being found dead in the same stretch of water were remote, to say the least. I looked down at the foot. ‘I’m guessing there’s a reason you think this isn’t Leo Villiers’ foot?’

‘We don’t have his actual measurements, but he took a size eight shoe. This one’s nearly twenty-eight centimetres long, which makes it a size ten.’ She made it sound like a personal insult.

‘Shoe sizes vary,’ I said, playing devil’s advocate. There was obviously more going on here than a discrepancy in shoe size.

Clarke didn’t seem inclined to answer, so Frears spoke instead. ‘True, but Leo Villiers broke his right foot playing rugby when he was nineteen. We’ve been allowed to see the original X-rays, which show the second and third metatarsals were badly damaged. They healed crookedly, but on the X-rays we took of this foot they’re perfectly intact. No old breaks, no calluses. Nothing.’

‘All right, Julian, I’m sure Dr Hunter doesn’t need it spelling out,’ Clarke told him irritably.

I didn’t. And now I understood the reason for her bad mood. The difference in shoe size might not be definitive, but bones didn’t lie. A break forms a callus where the two surfaces fuse together. That could remain for years, and if the bone healed in the wrong position the old break would be clearly visible on X-rays. So if this foot was from the remains recovered from the Barrows it could mean only one thing.

This wasn’t Leo Villiers’ body.

‘Did the post-mortem turn up anything?’ I asked, forgetting for the moment my embarrassment over missing it.

‘No smoking gun, if that’s what you mean. Except for the one that blew off the back of his skull, obviously.’ Frears seemed to have recovered his sense of humour. ‘No evidence of foam in the airways or lungs to suggest drowning, but I think we can safely assume he was dead when he hit the water anyway. The entry wound was contact or near as damn it. There’s searing from powder burns on what’s left of the jaw, and the wounds show the pellets were very tightly bunched. None of them remained in the body, and at that range there’d be no difference in spread, so I can’t say if it was birdshot or buckshot.’

‘But the barrel wasn’t actually inside the mouth?’ I asked.

The pathologist’s smile was cool. ‘No, it wasn’t. There’d be less of the skull left intact if it were, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

I was: if the shotgun had been behind the teeth when it was fired, the explosive expansion of hot gases would have virtually blown the cranium apart.

‘Is that relevant?’ Clarke asked.

‘That depends,’ Frears said. ‘I believe Dr Hunter is entertaining doubts about the wound being self-inflicted. A question of reach, isn’t that right, Dr Hunter?’

‘He’d have to reverse the gun and still reach the trigger,’ I explained to Clarke. ‘If the barrel was pressed against the outside of his mouth it would’ve meant he’d have to stretch further than if it was inside.’

‘We’re waiting to get the barrel length from the gunsmith,’ she said impatiently. ‘The missing shotgun’s a bespoke Mowbry, so they’ll have his arm measurements as well.’

‘What about the trajectory?’ I asked. It was even more apparent now how flat that was. The exit wound was in the lower part of the cranium rather than the crown, which suggested the shotgun had been held horizontally in front of the face. Not with its stock propped on the floor and its barrel pointing upward.

‘All that shows is that the gun was extended out in front of him,’ Frears countered. ‘It suggests he was standing rather than kneeling or sitting when the gun was fired.’

‘Or else someone else shot him,’ I said.

Suicide was only a workable theory as long as we thought the body was Leo Villiers, a disgraced and depressed suspect in a murder investigation. If this wasn’t him then we were looking at something else entirely.

‘I said the wound could be self-inflicted, not that it was,’ Frears said, his annoyance showing. ‘It’s inconclusive, as I made clear in my post-mortem report. Which you’d know if you’d been here.’

‘All right, let’s move on,’ Clarke said impatiently. ‘What else have we got?’

‘What about the piece of metal lodged at the back of the mouth?’ I asked Frears. ‘You said there were no pellets left in the body, so what was that?’

‘Ah, yes.’ He glanced at Clarke, who gave a nod. Going to the bench, he picked up an evidence bag and brought it over. ‘Know what it is?’

I’d not been convinced at the time that it was a piece of shot, and now I could see it wasn’t. Inside the bag was a small steel ball, about five millimetres in diameter and slightly deformed on one side. No, not deformed, I saw, holding it up to the light. Something had been broken off it.

‘It’s a stainless-steel tongue stud,’ I said, handing it back. I’d done some work with body piercings before, analysing how steel rings, bars and studs moved in buried bodies as the soft tissue decomposed.

Frears looked disappointed. ‘Technically, a “tongue barbell”. Part of one, at least,’ he added. ‘The rest of it must have been blown out with the pellets. Not the sort of thing one would normally imagine an aspiring politician like Leo Villiers to sport, is it?’

‘For all we know he could have decided to turn punk before he shot himself,’ Clarke said, exasperated. ‘We don’t even know for sure the stud was in the tongue. It could have got wedged in the mouth along with other debris while the body was in the water.’

‘That’s highly unlikely,’ Frears began, but Clarke was having none of it.

‘I don’t care whether it’s unlikely or not, I need to know for certain. And I mean absolutely certain. I’ve got Sir Stephen Villiers already convinced that this is his son and pushing for official confirmation. If I’m going to tell him otherwise I better be bloody right this time.’

‘Is there anything else in his medical records?’ I asked. Lundy had told me they still hadn’t been allowed access the day before, but they’d obviously seen the X-ray of the broken foot. If Sir Stephen Villiers had finally released his son’s records they might contain something else to help with identification.

Clarke blew out an irritated breath. ‘We don’t know. Sir Stephen only agreed to let us look at the X-ray and even that was like getting blood from a stone. We’ll need a court order for the full records, and if this isn’t his son’s body I’m not sure we’d have grounds for one anyway.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘What’s going to be in them that’s more important than helping identify his son?’

‘I’ve no idea, but whatever it is, it isn’t going to help us now. Sir Stephen’s made it clear he’s going to fight tooth and nail to stop them being released.’

‘Then you’ll have to wait for the DNA results.’ Frears shrugged. ‘Sorry, but there’s not much more I can do.’

That was met by silence. I turned back to consider the foot, thinking something through. Clarke must have noticed.

‘Dr Hunter?’

I thought for a moment longer. ‘I’m assuming you’ve taken DNA samples from the foot as well as the body?’

She turned to Frears. The pathologist looked irritated. ‘Of course, but we won’t get any test results back for another few days. I rather think DCI Clarke would like something sooner than that.’

There were new DNA testing systems being developed that claimed to produce a profile from samples in a matter of hours. That would revolutionize the job of identification, but until they became more widely available we’d have to rely on the old, slower method of analysis.

Or something even less high-tech.

‘There’s always the Cinderella test,’ I said.

Clarke just stared at me. Frears frowned. ‘I don’t follow.’

I looked down at the blunt protuberances of the tibia and fibula.

‘Do you have any cling film?’

It took a while for the cling film to materialize. It wasn’t the sort of thing there was normally much use for in a mortuary, even one as modern and well equipped as this. In the end Frears dispatched a young APT — an anatomical pathology technologist whose job was to assist at post-mortems — to find a roll from somewhere.

‘I don’t care if you have steal it from the hospital canteen, just find one and get it back here, will you?’ Frears instructed.

We’d gone into the briefing room while we waited. Soon afterwards Frears had excused himself to attend to some unconnected query, but by then Lundy had arrived. He’d finished overseeing the removal of the barbed wire from the creek, and cups of tea from a vending machine steamed on the table in front of us as he briefed his SIO.

‘The end of it was stuck in a lump of concrete. An old fence-post, by the look of it,’ he told her.

‘Could it have been just dumped there?’ Clarke asked.

‘It could, although it begs the question of who’d take it all that way. There aren’t any fences nearby, and there’re a lot more convenient places for fly-tipping.’

‘So you think someone used it to deliberately weigh down the body?’

I’d been wondering about that myself, ever since Lundy’s comment about the remains being surprisingly well trussed to say they’d supposedly drifted onto the wire. The DI absently stroked his moustache with a thumb and forefinger.

‘I don’t think we should rule it out,’ he said at last. ‘Look at where it was. The creek’s partially dammed by a sandbank there, so it never fully drains. And it’s not far from the road. Someone could have taken the body there in a car and carried it from the bridge. Tangle it up in the barbed wire to weigh it down, so even if it was found it’d look like it got caught up by accident. And a place like that, you could reasonably hope it’d stay hidden for years. Pure fluke we found it when we did.’

Fluke and bad luck for Trask’s young daughter. Clarke pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. I could almost see her headache. ‘Dr Hunter, you said it’d probably been in the water for several months?’

‘Going on its condition and what I could see, yes.’

‘So it can’t be Leo Villiers?’

‘I don’t see how it can be,’ I said. Villiers had been missing for six weeks at most, and the advanced state of decay of the remains from the barbed wire told me they’d been in the water much longer than that.

A knock on the door announced the APT’s return. Frears re-joined us as we filed back to the examination room.

‘I take it this isn’t routine procedure?’ Lundy commented, pulling on a pair of surgical gloves. They made his thick fingers look like blue sausages.

‘Not really. It wouldn’t hold up in court, but it should give us a pretty good indication of whether the foot’s from this body or not.’

Lundy stared down at the naked remains. ‘If it’s a match that’s really going to put the cat among the pigeons.’

He was right, but there was nothing I could do about that. The APT, a young Asian woman called Lan, handed me the cling film.

‘I could only get a twelve-metre roll. Will that be enough?’

‘That’ll be plenty,’ I told her.

Forensic science was becoming increasingly sophisticated, with technology steadily overtaking the more hands-on approach I’d been trained in. The old plaster of Paris used to make casts had been replaced by silicon-based alternatives, more efficient and less likely to damage the bone. And scanners were now being developed that would eventually make even that obsolete, allowing a perfect replica of any bone to be created on a 3D printer.

But we didn’t have a scanner or 3D printer, and even if we had, both that and casts required the bones to be properly cleaned. That would take time, and Clarke wanted a quick answer. So I’d make do with less sophisticated resources.

In this case, a roll of cheap cling film and a steady hand.

The APT hovered behind Clarke, Frears and Lundy, clearly curious as to what I was going to do. The group of them watched in silence as I tore off a length of the transparent plastic, carefully smoothing it over the exposed surface of the ankle bone.

‘Somewhat unconventional, I have to say. Hope you didn’t try anything like this on the Jerome Monk inquiry last year.’ Frears looked amused at my surprise. ‘Knew I’d heard your name before. Turned into quite the debacle, as I recall. Hardly your fault, of course, but not the sort of career move you’d want to repeat.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ I said without looking up. What had happened on Dartmoor was a matter of public record, and I didn’t need reminding. I glanced at Clarke, but the DCI wasn’t paying any attention. She’d have known all about my history before hiring me, and was clearly more concerned with what I was doing now.

‘Are you sure about this?’ she asked sceptically. ‘There won’t be any cross-contamination?’

‘There shouldn’t be,’ I told her, spreading the cling film over the rest of the foot and making sure there were no wrinkles. The transparent plastic would minimize any risk, and DNA samples had already been taken from both the foot and the body. If any more were needed, they could be extracted from deep inside bones well away from the exposed surfaces.

But I didn’t think cross-contamination was going to be an issue anyway. The wrapped foot resembled an off-cut of meat from a butcher’s counter as I set it aside and turned to the body. Stripping off my dirty gloves and replacing them with a fresh pair, I tore another section of cling film off the roll and smoothed it over the ends of the right leg’s tibia and fibula, making sure it fitted smoothly on to the surfaces of the exposed bones.

I stood back and considered my handiwork for a moment, then picked up the cling-film-wrapped foot again.

‘OK, let’s see what we’ve got.’

Without a cushioning layer of cartilage, the ankle joint was never going to fit together as snugly as it had in life. Yet even though the cling film was a poor substitute, the foot and lower leg came together like old friends. I gently rotated the foot, exploring the full range of movement, but there wasn’t really any doubt. Not even twins would have identical joint surfaces. Subtle differences would develop over time, variations caused by wear and tear. Yet there were no ill-fitting bumps of bone here to disrupt the smooth motion. The fit was near perfect.

I set the foot back down. There was silence before Clarke spoke.

‘Shit.’

Everyone there understood the seriousness of what had just happened. If this wasn’t Leo Villiers’ foot, then it couldn’t be his body either. Which potentially meant there were now two unknown male bodies to identify, neither of them his. And Emma Derby’s remains were still out there somewhere, waiting to be found.

‘Well, I think it’s safe to say this undermines the suicide theory somewhat,’ Frears said. The pathologist’s blue eyes twinkled. ‘Still, looking on the bright side, we don’t have far to look for a suspect.’