Simon Beckett - The Restless Dead

‘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.