Simon Beckett - The Chemistry of Death

Unzipping the folder, he made a show of leafing through the papers in it. 'Took your medical certificate then switched to a PhD in anthropological science. Quite a high-flier, according to this. Followed that with a stint in the States at the University of Tennessee before coming back to the UK as a specialist in forensic anthropology.'

He cocked his head. 'You know, I wasn't even sure what forensic anthropology was, and I've been a policeman for nearly twenty years. I could manage the "forensic" bit, of course. But anthropology? I always thought that was studying old bones. Bit like archaeology. Shows how things can slip by you.'

'I don't like to rush you, but I've got patients waiting.'

'Oh, I won't take any longer than I have to. But while I was on the internet I also found some papers you'd written. Interesting titles.' He picked up a sheet of paper. ' "The Role of Entomology in Time-Since-Death Analysis". "The Chemistry of Human Decomposition".'

He lowered the paper. 'Pretty specialist stuff. So I phoned a friend of mine in London. He's an inspector with the Met. Turned out he'd heard of you. Surprise, surprise, it looks like you've worked as a consultant for various police forces on quite a few murder investigations. England, Scotland, even Northern Ireland. My contact said you were one of the few registered forensic anthropologists in the country. Worked on mass graves in Iraq, Bosnia, the Congo. You name it. According to him you were pretty much the expert when it came to human remains. Not just identifying them, but how long they'd been dead, what they'd died of. He said you picked up where pathologists left off.'

'Is there a point to this?'

'The point is I can't help but wonder why you didn't mention any of this yesterday. When you knew we'd found a body, when you found evidence it could be a local woman, when you knew we would want to identify who it was as soon as bloody possible.' He kept his voice level, though his face had grown redder than ever. 'My friend at the Met thought it was highly amusing. Here am I, the senior investigating officer of a murder inquiry, with one of the country's leading forensic experts in front of me pretending to be a GP'

I didn't let the fact he'd finally called it a murder distract me. 'I am a GP.'

'But that's not all you are, is it? So why the big secret?'

'Because what I used to do doesn't matter. I'm a doctor now.'

Mackenzie was studying me as if trying to decide if I was joking or not. 'I made some other phone calls after that one. I know that you've only been practising as a GP for three years. Packed in forensic anthropology and came out here after your wife and daughter died in a car crash. Drink-driver in the other car survived unhurt.'

I sat very still. Mackenzie had the grace to look uncomfortable. 'I don't want to open old wounds. Perhaps if you'd been straight with me yesterday I wouldn't have had to. But the bottom line is we need your help.'

I knew he wanted me to ask how, but I didn't. He went on anyway.

'The condition of the body's making it difficult to identify. We know it's female, but that's all. And until we've got an ID we're pretty much hamstrung. We can't start a proper murder investigation unless we know for certain who the victim is.'

I found myself speaking. 'You said "for certain". You're already pretty sure, aren't you?'

'We still haven't been able to trace Sally Palmer.'

It was only what I'd been expecting, but it still shook me to hear it confirmed.

'Several people remember seeing her at the pub barbecue, but so far we haven't found anyone who can recall seeing her since,' Mackenzie continued. 'That's nearly a fortnight ago. We've taken DNA samples from the body and the house, but it'll be a week before we get any results.'

'What about fingerprints?'

'Not a chance. We can't say yet if that's down to decomposition or if they've been deliberately removed.'

'Dental records, then.'

He shook his head. 'There aren't enough teeth left to get a match.'

'Someone broke them?'

'You could say that. Could have been done deliberately to prevent us identifying the body, or just a by-product of the injuries. We don't know yet.'

I rubbed my eyes. 'So it's definitely murder?'

'Oh, she was murdered, right enough,' he said, grimly. 'The body's too badly decomposed to know if she was sexually abused as well, but the assumption is that she probably was. And then somebody killed her.'

'How?'

Without answering, he took a large envelope from the folder and dropped it on the desk. The shiny edges of photographs peeped out. My hand was reaching for them before I realized what I was doing.

I pushed the envelope away. 'No thanks.'

'I thought you might want to see for yourself.'

'I've already told you I can't help.'

'Can't or won't?'

I shook my head. 'I'm sorry.'

He regarded me for a moment longer, then abruptly stood up. 'Thank you for your time, Dr Hunter.' His voice was cold.

'You've forgotten this.' I held out the envelope.

'Keep it. You might want to look at them later.'

He went out. I still had the envelope in my hand. All I had to do was slide out the photographs. Instead I opened a drawer and dropped it inside. I closed the drawer and told Janice to send in the next patient.

But the envelope's presence stayed with me for the rest of the morning. I could feel its tug throughout every conversation, each examination. After the last patient had closed the door I tried to distract myself by writing up his notes. Those finished, I went and stared out of the French doors. Two home visits, and then I had the afternoon to myself. If there had been a breath of wind I could have taken the dinghy out on the lake. But as it was I'd only be as becalmed on the water as I felt now, on dry land.

I'd felt curiously numb as Mackenzie had dredged up my past. He might have been talking about someone else. And in a way he was. It was a different David Hunter who had immersed himself in the arcane chemistry of death, seen the end product of countless incidents of violence, accident and nature combined. I'd looked on the skull beneath the skin as a matter of course, priding myself on knowledge that few other people were even aware existed. What happened to the human body when life had left it held little mystery for me. I was intimate with decay in all its forms, could chart its progress depending on the weather, the soil, the time of year. Grim, yes, but necessary. And I took a magician's satisfaction in identifying when, how, who. That these were individuals I was dealing with I never forgot. But only in an abstract sense; I knew these strangers only in death, not in life.

And then the two people I cherished more than anything else in this world had been snatched from me. My wife and daughter, snuffed out in an instant by a drunk who had walked away from the crash unscathed. Kara and Alice, both transformed in a moment from living, vital individuals to dead organic matter. And I knew – I knew – exactly what physical metamorphosis they would be undergoing, almost to the hour. But that failed to answer the single question that had come to obsess me, and to which all my knowledge couldn't even begin to find an answer. Where were they? What had happened to the life that had been within them? How could all that animation, that spirit, simply cease to exist?

I didn't know. And that not knowing was more than I could bear. My colleagues and friends were understanding, but I hardly noticed. I would have gladly plunged myself into my work, except that was a constant reminder of what I'd lost, and the questions I couldn't answer.

And so I ran. Turned my back on everything I'd known, relearned my old medical training and hid away out here, miles from anywhere. Given myself, if not a life, exactly, then a new career. One that dealt with the living rather than the dead, where I could at least try to delay that final transformation, even if I was no closer to understanding it. And it had worked.