Ken McClure - Tangled Web

There was no evidence of any furniture-stripping activity in the cellar although Gordon could see that there were some tools hanging up above the bench. Had he misjudged Dawes after all, he wondered? After all, many professional men did find relaxation in carpentry. He re-directed the light from one of the Anglepoise lamps upwards to the rack but his blood ran cold as he saw that they were not woodworkers’ tools at all but pathology instruments comprising several knives and a bone saw. He noted with added horror that the saw bore evidence of tissue trapped in its teeth.

His mind rebelled against the images this invoked but it looked to him as if this was the place where the attempt had been made to dissolve Anne-Marie Palmer’s body in acid. Ranulph Dawes had been the guilty party. ‘Oh Christ,’ he muttered, as the horror of such a scene fired his imagination. He pressed the tissues to his mouth, this time more in an effort to head off the urge to vomit than shut out the fumes, as he continued to take in everything around him. Next to the acid bath a heavy apron hung on the wall, the one Dawes must have worn while he was doing the job, thought Gordon. ‘Bastard!’

He backed away from the area and sat down on the cellar steps for a moment, glancing upwards for the reassurance of daylight at the head of the stairs where he’d left the door open — maybe a subconscious admission of unease. There was a conflict going on inside his head. On the one hand, he was recoiling in horror at the images this place conjured up, on the other, his brain was telling him that there was something wrong with what he concluding.

He tried to home in on what it was until finally, he thought he could see it. Dawes was a professional scientist, not some bumbling criminal playing around with acids without knowing anything about their properties. If Dawes had really wanted to destroy Anne-Marie’s body by dissolving it in acid, he could have and would have done just that: he would not have failed and had to resort to something else. If it came to that, he would not have used hydrochloric acid in the first place; there were many more efficient acids available for the purpose... and what were the surgical instruments all about? No attempt had been made to cut Anne-Marie’s body into pieces.

There were just too many unanswered questions floating about for Gordon’s liking. The pieces seemed to fit but the final picture was flawed. Something was terribly wrong with his reading of the situation. He went back over to the bench and stood there, looking first at the instruments and then at the acid bath. Once again, he held the paper tissues over his nose and mouth as he slid back the lid, feeling apprehensive as he looked down into the gently fuming liquid. He blinked quickly to keep his eyes moist, knowing that he should be wearing goggles or a face visor but not having access to either.

He was relieved to see that the acid seemed clear enough and wondered if it had been changed after or during the ‘failed’ attempt. He was about to replace the lid when something lying in the foot of the bath caught his eye; it looked like a short white stick but instinctively, he knew it must be a bone. At first he thought that it must have been missed but then he had to wonder what bone it could possibly be. Anne-Marie’s body had suffered tissue damage from the acid but no skeletal destruction.

Gordon looked to both sides of the bath and underneath and finally found what he was looking for, lying on the frame cross members, a pair of long- handled tongs. His proximity to the uncovered bath was exposing him to too much in the way of fumes from the acid. He backed off for a few moments to take in a few deep breaths before returning to his task.

Holding the tissues to his face with one hand while fishing with the tongs held in the other proved successful, but only after half a dozen frustrating attempts with watering eyes and lungs bursting through holding his breath as long as possible. He finally extracted the bone to bring it over to a conventional sink, mounted on the wall to his right, to rinse away the acid and take it in his hand. He decided that he would examine it upstairs in daylight, maybe even outside in the garden: he felt the desperate need for fresh air and for more than one reason.

As he stood outside the kitchen door, running his fingers lightly along the smooth white bone he found no difficulty at all in identifying it at all but this in itself, posed a new problem and one that utterly confused him. What he was holding in his hands was a leg bone — the tibia of a small child. The trouble was it was a bone that Anne-Marie Palmer did not have ; it could not possibly have come from her.

Gordon started to walk round the garden, his head bowed as he tried to think this latest twist through. He had the distinct feeling that he was playing three-dimensional chess with God but yet... he felt excited not dejected. He knew he was getting closer to the truth. He had the right pieces: they were just being played in the wrong order. If the child in the acid bath had had leg bones, then the child was not Anne-Marie Palmer... Oh, sweet Jesus Christ! It was Megan Griffiths!

It suddenly became clear to him what had happened. It had been Megan in the bath, not Anne-Marie. Megan’s dead body had been altered to make it look as if she was Anne-Marie Palmer! Her legs had been removed with the saw on the wall and then tissue damage inflicted, particularly on her lower extremities with acid in order to disguise the recent surgery. The whole exercise had been undertaken to create a corpse that would be accepted as that of Anne-Marie Palmer.

The why? was now obvious too. ‘Finding’ Anne-Marie’s body would stop people looking for her! He’d already considered the difficulties involved in stealing a cloned child from doting ‘parents’. Kidnapping had appeared to be a major stumbling block and one that he had not managed to see a way around. Dawes, or whoever he’d been in league with, had. Anne-Marie Palmer had been abducted but in order to stop a police hunt for the kidnapped child, the body of an already dead child had been made to look like her and then buried in the Palmers’ garden. The police, seeing no conceivable motive for the kidnap of a handicapped child, had followed their instincts, as the kidnappers must have reckoned they would, and this had led them to suspect the parents, unable to cope with their badly deformed child, had murdered her. They had found what they expected to find when they dug up the Palmers’ garden — a small legless corpse. Case closed. The child’s father even confessed to the crime. What a bonus that must have been, thought Gordon. But either way, it meant no more police hunt for Anne-Marie. The cloners had got clean away with their child.

In the same way that pain can be described as ‘exquisite’ Gordon found an almost mesmerising beauty about the whole horrific scheme. Whoever had dreamed up the scam was both brilliant and evil in equal measure. As everything started to fit, he wondered if thought had even been given to the type of acid used on the child’s body. Had they deliberately chosen hydrochloric over a more appropriate one because they knew that John Palmer would have had access to hydrochloric in his school science lab and the police would latch on to that fact?

Gordon returned to the cellar and took a last look around. The tissue from the teeth of the saw would be subjected to forensic study and there was no doubt in his mind as to what the outcome would be. The tissue would match that of the body found in the Palmers’ garden but neither would match the DNA profile of the Palmers — not because she wasn’t their biological child, but because she wasn’t even Anne-Marie!

Carwyn Thomas must have worked this out for himself when Fairbrother had given him his DNA fingerprinting results. The fact that he’d blurted out Megan Griffiths’ name at the time suggested that he’d made the connection and realised the motive for the theft of the cot death baby’s body.