Simon Beckett - The Chemistry of Death

But dogs remained the best search tool for discovering where a body was buried. Their sensitive noses could detect the taint of the gases released during decomposition through several feet of soil, and good cadaver dogs had even been known to locate bodies buried over a century before.

The forensics team were scraping the soil from partially exposed remains using small trowels and brushes, working with an almost archaeological precision. The same techniques needed to be used whether the grave was a few weeks or a few hundred years old. The aim in both cases was to uncover the body with a minimum of disturbance, the better to decipher whatever evidence might have been unknowingly entombed with it.

In this case, the most telling piece of information was already apparent. I wasn't taking part in the recovery process, but I was standing close enough to see what mattered.

Mackenzie glanced at me. 'Any comment?'

'Only what I expect you know already.'

'Tell me anyway.'

'It's not Lyn Metcalf,' I said.

He gave a non-committal grunt. 'Go on.'

'This isn't a new grave. Whoever it is, they've been here since long before she went missing. There's no soft tissue left at all, no smell. The dog did well to find it.'

'I'll pass on your congratulations,' he said, dryly. 'So how long would you say it's been here?'

I looked at the shallow excavation. The skeleton was now almost fully exposed, its bones the same colour as the earth. It was an adult's, lying on its side with what looked like a T-shirt and jeans still clinging to its form.

'I can only narrow it down so far without doing more tests. Buried this deep, the decomposition would take much longer than it would on the surface. So for it to get to this stage, say a minimum of a year, fifteen months? But my guess is this has been here a good bit longer than that. Probably nearer to five years.'

'How do you know?'

'The jeans and T-shirt. They're cotton, which takes four to five years to rot. They've not gone completely yet, but they're getting there.'

'Anything else?'

'Can I take a closer look?'

'Help yourself.'

It was a different scene-of-crime team from the one I'd met before, at the site where Sally Palmer had been found. They glanced at me as I crouched down at the edge of the dig, but continued with what they were doing without comment. It was already late and they had a long night ahead.

'Any signs of trauma?' I asked one of them.

'Some pretty severe cranial damage, but we've only just started to expose it.' He indicated the upper right side, which was still partly covered by soil. But cracks were already visible, radiating from a section where the bone had caved in.

'Looks blunt rather than sharp or ballistic,' I said, examining it. 'What would you say?'

He nodded. Unlike his colleague I'd met at the previous grave site, he didn't seem to resent any interference. 'Looks like it. But I'm not going to commit myself until we make sure there isn't a bullet rattling around inside the skull.'

An injury to the skull caused by either gunshot or something sharp like a knife produced a different type of trauma from one made with a blunt object. It wasn't usually difficult to recognize them, and the signs so far were that this one, with the bone crushed inwards like an egg, was the latter. But I approved of his caution all the same.

'You think the head injury was the cause of death?' Mackenzie asked.

'Could be,' I said. 'By the looks of it, it would have been fatal, assuming it wasn't made post-mortem. But it's too soon to say one way or the other.'

'What else can you tell me, then?' he said, disgruntled.

'Well, it's a male. Probably white, in his late teens or early twenties.'

He peered into the grave. 'Seriously?'

'Look at the skull. The jaw shape is different for men and women. A man's flares out more. And see where the ear was, how that bit of bone is projecting? That's the zygomatic arch, and it's always bigger in men than women. As for race, the nasal bones suggest European descent rather than African. Could be Asian, I suppose, but the cranial shape is too lozenge-shaped, so I'd say not. Age…' I shrugged. 'Again, only a guess at this stage. But from what I can see of them, the vertebrae don't look too worn. And see the ribs here?' I pointed to where the blunt ends of bone protruded from underneath the T-shirt. 'The ends get more irregular and knobbly the older you get. The edges on these are still pretty sharp, so it's obviously a young adult.'

Mackenzie closed his eyes and kneaded the bridge of his nose. 'Perfect. Just what we needed, an unrelated murder.' He looked up suddenly. 'There's no sign of the throat being cut, is there?'

'Not that I can see.' I'd already checked the cervical vertebrae for any knife marks. 'After being buried for this long any damage is going to be harder to make out without a proper examination. But there's nothing obvious.'

'Thank God for small mercies,' Mackenzie muttered.

I could sympathize. It was difficult to say which would complicate things more: having to launch a second murder inquiry, or finding evidence that the same killer had been active for years.

But that didn't concern me, for which I was grateful. I stood up, brushing the dirt from my hands. 'If there's nothing else you need me for, I might as well get back.'

'Can you be at the lab tomorrow? I mean, later today,' Mackenzie added, catching himself.

'Why?'

He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. 'To take a better look at this. We should have finished here by mid-morning. We can have the body with you for lunchtime.'

'You seem to take it for granted I'm going to get involved.'

'Aren't you?'

It was my turn to be surprised. Not so much by his question, as the fact that he seemed to know me better than I did. 'I suppose so,' I said, accepting the inevitability of it. 'I'll be there for twelve.'

I woke up in the kitchen, cold and confused. In front of me, the door to the back garden stood open, revealing the first hint of a lightening sky. The memory of the dream was still fresh in my mind, the voices and presence of Kara and Alice as vivid as if I had just spoken to them. It had been even more disturbing than usual. In it I'd felt that Kara had wanted to warn me of something, but I'd not wanted to know. I'd been too afraid of what I might hear.

I shivered. I'd no recollection of coming downstairs, or what unconscious motive had led me to unlock the door. I went to close it, but then stopped. Rising like a cliff from the pale sea of mist covering the field was the impenetrable dark of the wood. A sense of foreboding gripped me as I stared at it.

Can't see the wood for the trees. The phrase came into my head from nowhere. For a moment it seemed to have some deeper significance, but it faded even as I tried to grasp it. I was still trying when something touched the back of my neck.

I started and turned around. The empty kitchen confronted me. A breeze, I told myself, even though the morning was still and silent, undisturbed by any whisper of air. I closed the door, trying to dismiss the unease that still persisted. But the sensation of fingertips gently brushing my skin lingered as I went back to bed and waited for the dawn.

I'd got most of the morning to kill before I was due at the lab. With nothing better to do, I strolled up to Henry's for breakfast, as I often did on Saturdays. He was already up and seemed in good form, cheerfully asking me how it had gone the night before as he briskly fried eggs and grilled bacon. It took me a moment to realize he meant the barbecue at Jenny's rather than the discovery in the wood. News of that hadn't broken yet, and what the reaction would be when it did I couldn't imagine. Manham was already struggling to deal with events as it was. And I still felt too unsettled by the dream to want to dwell on such things myself.