Simon Beckett - Written in Bone

I pointed at one of the long thigh bones. It had survived the fire better than most of the smaller ones, but its surface was still blackened and covered with the fine lines of heat fractures.

‘You can use the length of the femur to get a rough idea of height,’ I said. ‘As for race, a lot of the teeth have cracked or fallen out, but there are enough left to see they were more or less upright, rather than jutting forward. So she was white, not black. I can’t completely rule out yet that she wasn’t Asian, but…’

‘But there’s not many Asians in the Hebrides,’ Duncan finished for me, looking pleased with himself.

‘That’s right. So we’re probably looking at a white woman in her twenties, about five-seven and big-boned. And I found metal buttons, along with what was left of a zip and bra hook, in the ash. So she wasn’t naked.’

Duncan nodded, bright enough to understand what that meant. The fact she’d been dressed wasn’t conclusive, but if she’d been naked then the likelihood was that we’d have been looking at sexual assault. And therefore murder.

‘Looks like it was definitely an accident, then, eh? She just got too close to the fire, something like that?’ He sounded faintly disappointed.

‘That’s how it looks.’

‘Could she have done it to herself? Deliberately, I mean?’

‘You mean suicide? I doubt it. She’d have used an accelerant, and as I’ve said, an accelerant wouldn’t have caused this. And there’d be a container somewhere nearby, which there isn’t.’

Duncan rubbed the back of his neck. ‘What about the, er, you know, the hand and feet?’ he asked, almost sheepishly.

I’d been waiting for that. But the light coming through the dirty windowpane was already beginning to dim, and I still had a lot to do.

‘I’ll give you a clue.’ I pointed at the greasy brown residue that clung to the smoke-blackened ceiling. ‘Remember what I said about that?’

Duncan looked up at it. ‘That it was fat from when the body burned?’

‘That’s right. That’s the key. See if you can work it out.’ I drained my mug and handed it back to him. ‘Right, I need to get on.’

But once he’d gone I didn’t start work right away. Now I’d cleared away most of the covering layer of ash I could start to remove the surviving bones, bagging them for proper examination later. Even though I’d been deliberately thorough, I’d found nothing that pointed to a suspicious death. No visible knife marks on the bone, no other sign of skeletal trauma or injury. I’d even found the hyoid, the delicate horseshoe-shaped bone that so often breaks during strangulation, buried in the ashes. It had been reduced almost to the fragility of powder, so delicate that the slightest nudge might break it, but it was still whole.

So why did I still feel I was missing something?

A wayward gust of wind from the holes in the roof chilled me as I stood looking down at the remains. I went to where the skull lay canted on the floor, crazed with heat fractures. The cranium is made up of separate plates that butt against each other like geological fault lines. The blow-out had left a hole nearly the size of a fist in one of them, on the occipital bone at the back of the crown. Small fragments of bone lay on the floor around it, blown there when the hot gases had made their explosive exit. That was another indication that the damage happened in the fire-if the hole had been caused by an impact the fragments would have been driven inwards, into the skull cavity.

Yet something about the skull bothered me, a sort of nagging neural itch. Almost involuntarily, I found myself starting to examine it again.

As though with malicious timing, the daylight had begun to fade with increasing speed. Last night I’d avoided working at night because I didn’t want to make mistakes. Now I felt I would be making an even bigger one if I didn’t. I moved the floodlight, but it still wasn’t bright enough for what I wanted. Taking out my torch, I set it on the floor so it shone on to the gaping skull cavity.

Light spilled eerily from the empty eye sockets as I turned my attention to the shards of bone that lay on the floor. Most were tiny, no bigger than my thumbnail. I’d already recorded their positions on the graph paper but now, like a ghoulish jigsaw puzzle, I began trying to piece them back together.

It was something I’d normally only attempt in a laboratory, where I had the right clamps, tweezers and magnifying lenses to help me. Here I didn’t even have a table, and my progress was made even slower by my cold-numbed fingers. Gradually, though, I fitted the fragments together until I had a sizeable section.

And then I saw it.

A blow forceful enough to break the cranium will cause lightning-like fractures to radiate from the point of contact. Normally they’re hard to miss, and I’d seen no evidence of them here. But I’d been looking in the wrong place. The fragments had joined together to reveal a ragged spider’s web of cracks. Distinctive, zigzag lines that could only have been caused by a heavy impact, strong enough to fracture the bone without actually breaking it.

The skull had burst in the fire, all right, but in an area where it had been already weakened.

I carefully laid the bone fragments back on the ground. Brody had been right all along. This was no accident.

The woman had been murdered.

I BARELY NOTICED the wind and rain as I went back to the camper van. It was pitch dark outside, and the light from its window shone out like a beacon. There was a sour taste in my mouth. Someone had killed a young woman and then set fire to her body. Whether Wallace liked it or not, he hadn’t any choice now but to escalate this to a full-scale murder inquiry.

I was angry with the superintendent, but far more so with myself. It was no consolation that fire deaths are notoriously difficult; I should have taken notice of my instincts. And there was also something else to consider. It would be a mistake to assume that, just because the dead woman wasn’t local, her killer wasn’t either. We didn’t know what the victim had been doing on Runa, but according to Brody few outsiders came here at this time of year. So the likelihood was that she’d come over either with, or to see, someone who lived here.

Which would mean her killer was still on the island.

That thought stayed with me as I hurried to the camper van. It was almost stiflingly warm after the icy cottage, the air heavy with the fumes from the paraffin heater.

‘How’s it going?’ Duncan asked, getting to his feet.

‘I need to talk to Wallace. Can I use your radio?’

‘Uh, sure,’ he said, surprised. He handed it across. ‘I’ll er, I’ll be outside, then.’

The police radio was one of the new digital sets, which allowed calls to either landlines or mobiles. But Wallace didn’t answer any of his numbers. Great. I left messages telling him to call me and started struggling out of my overalls.

‘Everything all right?’ Duncan asked, coming back in.

‘Fine.’ He would find out soon enough, but I wanted to speak to Wallace before I told anyone else. ‘I’m going back to the village.’

There was no point my staying at the cottage any longer. I wasn’t touching anything else till SOC got here, and I needed to calm down and think through the implications of what I’d found. But as I started to go out I hesitated.

‘Look, keep an eye out, OK? Anything suspicious, anyone comes out here, call Fraser straight away.’

He looked puzzled and a little offended. ‘Aye, of course.’

I went out to the car. It was raining heavily now, and the windows on Ellen’s old VW fogged as soon as I got in. Turning the heater on to clear them, I struggled with the unwieldy gear lever and bumped down the track to the road. The wipers screeched as they smeared rain across the windscreen. I sat forward in my seat, peering through the steamed glass. Hardly any cars seemed to use the road, but I’d no desire to hit a sheep that had strayed on to the tarmac.