Peter James - You Are Dead

He tapped it all into his computer, seeming to take a particular delight, unless she was mistaken, in her venereal disease history. He then directed her behind the screen to remove her clothes.

While Freya Northrop was undressing, he tapped notes into his computer. Then he stared across the room at the green screen. He twisted the barrel of his pen so that the rollerball tip appeared, then retracted again.

That body in the Lagoon was really playing on his mind.

‘I’m ready,’ Freya said.

He continued to stare at the tip of his pen.

‘Freya Northrop,’ he said, almost silently, to himself. He liked her name. Nice lady! He liked her. ‘Bye for now!’ he said a little while later, as she left. He liked everyone to leave him with a smile.

Friday 12 December

The forensic archaeologist, Lucy Sibun, was a professional-looking woman in her early forties, with neat brown hair and square, modern glasses; she was accompanied by two juniors, here to learn from this rare scene. At this moment she was on her knees, studying the remains intently. Most of her face was hidden behind a gauze mask secured by tapes, and the rest of her slim figure was parcelled, unflatteringly, in a baggy white crime scene oversuit and clumsy-looking overshoes. It was just past 10 a.m. Under the watchful eyes of the similarly suited-up forensic pathologist Nadiuska De Sancha, the Coroner’s Officer Philip Keay, and crime scene photographer James Gartrell, the whole skeleton had now been exposed.

It lay, facing up at the bright, jury-rigged overhead lights from its jagged-edged shallow grave. There were fragments of fabric, and mouldy dark stiletto-heeled shoes lying by the foot bones, which would appear to confirm the assertion by the doctor, who had appeared out of the blue last night walking his dog, that it was female.

The most immediate question Roy Grace had for Lucy Sibun was the age of the remains. A key factor in a discovery like this would always be how long the remains had been here. Was this sufficiently recent that the offender or immediate relatives might still be alive, or were these the bones of someone who had died so long ago that anyone connected would now be long dead? In which case a homicide enquiry would be much more challenging.

He turned for guidance to the archaeologist. She was shaking her head, looking angry. ‘Why didn’t the workmen stop last night the moment they saw the bones, Roy? By carrying on, they could have destroyed crucial evidence for us.’

‘So you think this might be relatively recent?’

‘No. The path was laid around twenty years ago. I’m speculating that whoever killed this woman was aware the path was going to be laid, and buried her a short while before, knowing she would be covered. The remains must pre-date the laying of this path. Just like the Mafia reputedly bury bodies beneath motorways under construction. Maybe it was even one of the workmen who laid the path. One thing I am pretty sure about, this is the deposition site, but I don’t think it was the murder scene. The body has been dug up and reburied.’

‘Why do you think that?’

The archaeologist pointed at several barely visible marks on the bones. ‘I think these were made by a tool like a spade. She was buried somewhere else, in a temporary grave. Then she was dug up, clumsily, probably by someone nervous and in a hurry, who nicked her bones in several places during the process.’

Grace had a lot of respect for this woman’s expertise, which had been proven to him on several previous occasions. ‘Anything else that makes you think that, Lucy?’

‘Yes. Although this path was laid twenty years ago, I think she’s been dead for closer to thirty years. For starters, the shoes are a good indicator. I had a pair like these in my teens. But let’s ignore them for the moment and focus on the human remains.’ She pointed at a small bone fragment suspended from a tiny strip of desiccated skin. ‘See that U-shaped bone — it’s the one that keeps the tongue in place. It’s often an indicator of the cause of death — the hyoid often gets broken during strangulation. But it’s intact here. There are a number of indicators that this was a woman aged about twenty. There is little wear on the teeth, but wisdom teeth present. The pelvis shows auricular surface phase one, and pubic symphysis phase one.’

Grace tried to follow where she was pointing. ‘See the wide sciatic notch? Triangular-shaped obturator foramen? The long pubic bone and the wide subpubic angle? The subpubic concavity?’

He nodded, although he did not fully understand.

Then she pointed at the skull, which was partially on its side. ‘Less prominent supraorbital ridges. Sharp superior orbit. More upright frontal bone. Small mastoid process. Small rounded nuchal crest. It’s definitely female. There’s a lot of water under here. If she had been buried ten years before the surface was laid, I think she would have risen towards the surface and it would have been noticed by the original workmen.’

‘I’ve already tasked an officer with finding out who laid the path — and to see if any of the council workmen are still around. It’s quite possible they are. Do you have anything that might tell us who she is — was?’ Glenn Branson asked.

Lucy Sibun pointed at the jaw. ‘There’s a deciduous tooth and several fillings that could give us dental identification — if she was local,’ she said. ‘DNA’s a possibility.’ She looked up at Nadiuska De Sancha. ‘There might be more you could get from a full post-mortem.’

As the strong wind shook the tenting above them, the pathologist nodded, and turned to Roy Grace, then to the Coroner’s Officer. ‘Yes, I think that would be best. Can we recover the remains to the mortuary, please.’

‘I have to go,’ Grace said. ‘I’ll leave DI Branson here.’

He went back to the CSI tent and pulled off his protective clothing, then hurried towards his car. Before driving off, he sat and made more notes. Dental records were a possible method of identification, with a big but. There were thousands of dentists throughout the UK, but unlike fingerprints or DNA there was not, as yet, a central dental records database. You needed to have an idea who someone might be — and know who that person’s dentist was. And if she was from overseas, there was no chance at all.

DNA wasn’t a great prospect either. Going back twenty or so years, it was highly unlikely, even if she had been arrested for an offence, that her DNA would have been taken and logged. If it was thirty years ago that she had died, there was no chance of DNA. Their best hope, he decided, would be the lengthy process of a trawl through all the female missing persons within the time frame that Lucy Sibun estimated. To be on the safe side that would entail checking all female mispers, aged fifteen to thirty, from fifteen to thirty-five years ago.

There were many thousands of people on the current missing persons register of people who had been gone for over thirty days. It would be a massive task and the only way would be to start local.

Assuming the remains were of a local person.

He started the car and headed off towards Kemp Town, to the apartment building underground car park from where Logan Somerville had disappeared.

Friday 12 December

‘How long? How long are you going to keep me here? How long, whoever the hell you are? Let me go!’ Logan shouted out into the green-tinged darkness. ‘I need sugar, I need water! Please.’

The sheer terror of her situation had made her forget about her toe, until now. It was throbbing painfully. The restraints across her stomach, wrists, thighs and legs felt as if they were cutting into her flesh. Her right leg was cramping and she desperately needed to stretch it, but she could not move. She tried again to lift her head, but immediately something cut into her neck, choking her.