Simon Beckett - The Restless Dead

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.