“No, no, it’s nothing like that,” Tennison said promptly, shaking her head. “I’m making some inquiries, that’s all.”
“Oh, my Lord, you gave me such a fright,” Esme Allen breathed, clutching the sweater above her heart. She patted her chest, regaining her composure. “Is it about that poor Cameron girl?”
“In a way.” Tennison glanced round. The cafe was quite small, with just two tables for those customers who wanted to eat their food on the premises. “Is there somewhere more private we could talk?”
The silvery-haired woman, a friend, it seemed, as well as a customer, put her shopping bag down and made a shooing motion. “You take the lady through to the back. I’ll look after the shop.”
Esme Allen raised the counter flap and Tennison followed her into a narrow, cramped room with a single window, part office, part storeroom, shelves to the ceiling stacked with provisions. The air was pungent with the mingled odors of herbs and spices. Esme indicated a canvas-backed folding chair and invited Tennison to sit down. She herself took the chair next to the desk, pushing aside a bundle of invoices to rest her elbow. She smiled attentively, lacing together her long, slender fingers.
“Mrs. Allen, I understand in the 1980s you and your husband owned Number fifteen, Honeyford Road.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“While you lived at Number seventeen with your family.”
“Yes.”
Without a pause, Tennison said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you that a body has been found buried in the back garden of Number fifteen.”
Esme Allen sat back, her strong white teeth biting her lower lip. “My God… you think he killed poor Simone?” she asked in a small, shocked voice.
“We just want to eliminate him from our inquiries,” Tennison replied, giving the standard line. If Esme Allen had been friendly with the occupant of Number 15, then it was possible that she might wish to protect him, or throw the police off the scent. “What was his name, Esme?”
“David Harvey.” No hesitation. Straight out with it.
Tennison nodded. “Right.” She unscrewed the cap off her gold pen and wrote down the name on her notepad. She glanced up. “Do you know where he is now?”
“No.” Esme shook her head, blinking as she tried to think. “My husband Vernon might know, but… well, we tried not to have anything to do with the man. I would never let my daughter Sarah go near that house. We all knew what he was like. Particularly with young girls.”
Tennison leaned forward slightly but said nothing.
“He wasn’t always like that, but after his wife died… I thought they were a lovely couple, but after she’d gone…” Esme lowered her voice. “Drinking and cursing and, you know, carrying on…”
Tennison put her fountain pen away and slipped the notepad into her pocket. “I’d like to speak to your husband if it’s possible-in fact to the whole family.” She got up to leave. “As soon as possible, please.”
“This evening,” Esme said, ushering Tennison through to the shop. “We’ll all be there this evening.”
“Fine. Thank you.”
Tennison went directly to a phone booth and got through to Muddyman in the Incident Room.
“It’s Harvey, not Harley or Hardy-Harvey. H-A-R-V-E-Y. So we’ve got to start again. I’m off to see Oscar Bream. ’Bye.”
“It makes a pleasant change, not being up to the armpits in someone’s viscera,” Bream said, opening the door to the Path Lab. He went in first, his considerable bulk swathed in a green plastic apron, rubber gloves up to the elbows. Two of his assistants were at work, assembling and measuring the skeleton on a table in the center of the lab. His senior assistant, Paul, was busy at another bench, reconstructing the smashed skull, piece by piece. It was largely complete, except for a jagged hole towards the back on the right-hand side, and he was fiddling with several fragments, puzzling how they might fit into the bone jigsaw.
Bream gestured towards the skeleton. “Though I must admit this girlie is sorely taxing my memory of my student anatomy classes,” he admitted to Tennison. “You know there are two hundred and six named bones of the body? Twenty-six to each foot alone. Luckily, most of those were still inside her shoes.”
“Fascinating, Oscar. But is it Simone Cameron?”
Bream had planted himself in front of the skeleton, arms folded across the green plastic apron. “Absolutely not.”
Tennison, coming around to join him, stopped dead in her tracks, mouth dropping open. “What?”
“As I said before, like Simone, in her teens-sixteen to seventeen. But taller-Simone was five seven, this girl is five eight, five nine.” He bent his head, peering at Tennison over the top of his glasses. “At the moment it looks as if she was all there, no mutilation. Good head of hair…”
And there it was, in a shallow tray, like a discarded wig, plaited and beaded. Bream moved over to the skull, which was raised up on a plinth, the beams of a spotlight shining eerily through the empty eye sockets. “Luckily, Paul here likes jigsaws.” He examined a fragment and handed it to his assistant, muttering, “Could be a bit of the zygomatic arch.”
Tennison was still grappling with this new revelation. It was always unwise to jump to conclusions without any sort of proof, but it was easily done; and Simone’s disappearance and the discovery of the body had seemed a neat fit. Too neat, as it now turned out. But she had to be absolutely certain that Bream himself was certain.
“You’re sure it’s not Simone?”
“Yeah.” He wandered over to the lightbox and stuck up x-rays of two skulls, side by side. One was Simone Cameron’s, taken from her medical records, the other Nadine’s. Bream turned to her. “Do you want me to point out the differences?”
“Not particularly, no.”
“Well, what else?” Bream mused, scratching his chin with his gloved finger. He looked across at the skeleton. “Fractured her wrist when she was younger… playing ball? Perhaps she fell off her bike? That’s for you to discover.”
Tennison sighed. “Don’t rub it in. Can you tell me if she was black or white?”
“No.”
“Shit. I’ve been going up a dead-end street.”
Bream was trying to be helpful. He had a good deal of respect for Jane Tennison, considered her a fine police officer with a keen intellect and an intuitive grasp of the many complex strands that went to make up a homicide inquiry. And to top it all, he rather liked her. Not an opinion he would have extended to quite a few chief inspectors of his acquaintance. He said, “Well, we’ve got a man here who does all kinds of jiggery-pokery with the skull to ascertain ethnic origins. Better still, a medical artist who could make you a clay head, at a price.”
“Is he good?”
“He’s our very own Auguste Rodin,” Bream said, a glimmer of a smile lurking behind his usual deadpan facade.
“Yeah, but is he good?”
“Naturellement.”
“That’s expensive, right?”
Bream nodded, looking down on her over his glasses. “Do you want a word with Mike Kernan?”
Tennison nibbled her lip. Then she decided. “No, screw it. Let’s just do it.”
“Okay.”
“So how long before I can pick it up?”
“Three weeks.”
“Fine,” Tennison said, moving back to watch Paul engaged in his painstaking assembly of the skull. “I’ll pick it up in three days.”
“I’ll have a word with him.” Bream stood at her shoulder. “Perhaps if you were prepared to model in the nude…?”
“That’s sexual harassment.”
Bream slowly blinked, his expression sanguine. “What isn’t these days?”
Tennison folded her arms, stroking her chin as she gazed at the skull in the bright cone of light. “How did she die, Oscar?”
“I’ve no idea,” Bream confessed. “Her skull could’ve been smashed after death. For all I know she could’ve been buried alive.”