M.R. Hall - The Disappeared

'And you. I've had just about all I can take of dealing with locums.'

'Then you'll be glad to know I type my own post-mortem reports and like to get them out of the way before I go home each night.'

'I see you've been got at already.'

'No comment,' he said, smiling.

Jenny realized the trace of accent she'd detected in his voice was Ulster. For some reason she found it reassuring: solid, reliable.

Dr Kerr said, 'I noticed that your Jane Doe had been sitting around for a while, so I had a look at her this morning.' He handed her a three-page report. 'I wasn't sure whether it was you or the police I should speak to first, but I saw on the file that you've opened an inquest.'

'Opened and adjourned while I try to find out who she is.'

'Aren't the police interested?'

'They will be if anything incriminating turns up. Till then they're more than happy to farm out the legwork.'

He nodded, though his expression was one of surprise. Jenny hoped his pathology was better than his grasp of professional politics.

'From an initial examination it's impossible to say what killed her. Most of the internal organs were missing - seagulls, I read.'

'Apparently so.'

'There was some lung tissue left, enough to give a suggestion that the bronchi were distended . . .'

'Meaning?'

'Drowning is a possibility, but I couldn't prove it. One thing that does interest me, though, is two nicks in the stomach side of the lumbar vertebrae. They could have been caused by the gulls, but equally I couldn't rule out stab wounds.'

'Is there no way of telling?'

'Afraid not.' He continued a little less confidently. 'Two other things. Firstly, her teeth: no decay, no fillings, so dental records probably won't help. And, secondly, I dissected her neck looking for evidence of strangulation. I didn't find that, but she has an early-stage tumour on her thyroid gland. It was large enough that she may have begun to feel it. She might have gone to the doctor complaining of pressure on her windpipe.'

'Thyroid cancer? What would have caused that?'

'What causes any kind of cancer? Unless she had a dose of radiation or something it's impossible to say.'

'Radiation?' She remembered the Crosby family and their daughter who worked at the decommissioned power station. 'There's a young woman missing who works at the Maybury nuclear plant, out on the Severn.'

'Right. I was going to say that it's the kind of tumour that's most common in Eastern Europe, in the Chernobyl footprint. Her cheekbones have a touch of that Slavic look.'

'The family's arranging a DNA test. If that doesn't turn up anything we could try something more sophisticated - geographical mineral analysis or whatever.'

'Not on my budget, we can't.'

'We'll see,' Jenny said, with a half-smile. 'We might persuade the police to pay for it.'

'I guess I could rustle up a radiometer from somewhere - there's some pretty accurate radiological data I could match her with. If she is from Eastern Europe, I might be able to get a rough location.'

'Anything would be helpful.' Jenny got up from her chair. 'The sooner we ID her, the sooner you free up your fridge space.'

'About that: couldn't the body be moved to an undertaker's or—'

Jenny cut in. 'You're on a permanent contract, right?'

'Yes . . .'

'Then you can afford to flex your muscles. If you don't start making demands first they'll bleed you dry - you'll be stealing cutlery from the canteen to conduct your postmortems.'

'It feels a bit early to start rocking the boat.'

She felt an almost maternal concern for him - not yet thirty and in charge of the repository of the hospital's darkest secrets. 'Listen, Andrew - can I call you that?'

'Sure.'

'They'll give you a week, then the consultants will be on the phone trying to lean on you to cover up their mistakes and the management will be suggesting you do anything but record hospital infection as cause of death. Get corrupted once and you're stuck with it for all time. Ask your predecessor.'

'Right,' he said uncertainly. 'I'll bear it in mind.'

The rain had passed and given way to a hard frost, which glinted on the tarmac as Jenny drove back towards home across the vast span of the Severn Bridge. The lights of the factories of Avonmouth to the left and Maybury to the right reflected off the flat water on a windless night. Reaching the far side and entering Wales, she waited for the tensions of the day to leave her as she slipped past Chepstow and plunged into the forest. The knots loosened a little, but somehow the sense of release wasn't as profound tonight. Meeting Mrs Jamal and the ordeal of dealing with the Jane Doe had roused a stubborn anxiety that refused to let her enjoy the glimpses of a crescent moon through the skeletal trees.

She tried to analyse her feelings. Random, unjust and terrifying were the inadequate words which came to mind. Why, for the last three years of her life, she had been haunted and occasionally overwhelmed by such deep and unsettling forces she was scarcely closer to knowing than when they had first made themselves felt. She had made some modest progress. Only six months before, she was limping through the days only with the help of handfuls of tranquillizers and bottles of wine. Dr Allen had helped her break both habits. She was medicated, but holding herself together: she functioned. And she had proved that the mask she hid behind was not as flimsy as she feared. In six months it hadn't slipped. No one who didn't know her history would ever guess.

Her pocket-sized stone cottage, Melin Bach, had lights at every window, meaning Ross was in. He'd taken to getting a lift home most evenings from a recently qualified English lecturer at his sixth-form college who lived further up the valley. From what she could tell, they passed their journey smoking cigarettes and listening to indie tracks they'd download and swap with each other. The teacher was as much of a kid as Ross.

'Do we have to have every light on?' she called up the stairs. Music pounded from his room: raw guitars and vocals that sounded like a weak mimic of the Stones. 'What about the planet?'

'It's already screwed,' Ross shouted back from behind the door.

Great. She hung up her coat. 'Don't suppose you thought about dinner?'

'Nope'. The music got louder. Jenny retreated into the living room, slamming the door behind her.

She scooped up the plates covered with toast crumbs, dirty cups and glasses, and kicked aside the discarded trainers in the middle of the flagstone floor as she carried them into the tiny unmodernized kitchen at the back of the house. Her ex-husband had laughed when he'd seen it - his had cost £80,000 and been installed by a team of German craftsmen who had arrived in a Winnebago - which was precisely why she clung to her ancient Welsh dresser and the erratic coke- fired range which dated back, neighbours told her, to the early 1940s.

As usual, there wasn't a scrap of food in the house. Ross had eaten everything except a jar of dried lentils and a packet of sugarless muesli some self-improving and misplaced instinct had urged her to buy the previous summer. She rooted around in the back of the cupboard and found only a can of evaporated milk and a mouldering jar of curry paste.

Ross thumped through the door wearing a combat jacket. He stood over six feet tall; her eyes were on a level with the underside of his chin.

'You should shop online, get a home delivery. You must be the only person who doesn't,' Ross said and dropped an empty Pepsi can in the bin.

'Hey - recycling.'

'Yeah, right. Like that's going to save us all.' He headed back for the door. 'I'm going out.'

'Where?'

'Karen's. Her mum actually feeds her in the evenings.'

'There's nothing to stop you—'