It was as good a theory as any. But the idea of the pregnant woman being chased reminded me of something the SOCO had mentioned earlier.
‘The pale stains on the insulation,’ I said, looking at the matted glass fibre. ‘You said there were splashes of something similar on the steps outside. Could it be amniotic fluid?’
The female SOCO sat back on her heels, considering. ‘Yeah, I suppose it could. But I think the stains will be too old to say one way or the other.’
‘You’re thinking her waters broke?’ Whelan asked me.
‘It’s possible. But if they did, from what I saw of the foetus it would have been premature.’
‘So she could have died from that.’
I nodded, sobered by the thought. Without medical attention, if the membranes around the amniotic sac ruptured early it could be life-threatening in far better conditions than this. Trapped in a loft without even food or water, the woman and her child would have had no chance of survival. Only a slow death in the dark.
No one spoke, then Whelan turned back to the doorway.
‘Come on,’ he said heavily.
As we tramped down the wooden stairs I stopped by the dried splashes the female SOCO had spoken about. They were only faint, more like watermarks than blood. There were several of them, some little more than drops that led in an uneven trail up the stairs to the loft.
They might still be something entirely innocent, I reminded myself, some liquid spilled by a workman or some trespasser. It was easy to read too much into things, especially in an emotive case like this.
But as I followed Whelan back into the empty hospital corridor, the image of a young woman fleeing along it from some faceless pursuer — or pursuers — was hard to shake. She’d sought sanctuary in the loft, then found herself trapped there. I thought again about the scratches on the wooden doorframe, each gouge one of fear and desperation. Exhausted, her waters prematurely broken, she’d fought for her life and her child’s in the only way left open to her.
And when that had failed, she’d lain down in the filthy loft and died.
Chapter 6
In the end, the recovery of the woman’s remains went without a hitch. The dust had settled, literally, when I climbed through the ceiling hatch and crossed the stepping plates to where the desiccated body waited. Everything in the loft was as we’d left it, except now the hole that Conrad had fallen through had been covered over with plastic sheeting and cordoned off with blue-and-white police tape.
I’d been told the forensic pathologist was out of danger, although a bad concussion, broken hip, ribs and shoulder meant he wouldn’t be carrying out post-mortems any time soon. There had been talk about waiting for a replacement before resuming the recovery, but Ward hadn’t wanted to wait any longer. Even though the structural engineers had decided there was no imminent risk of any more of the loft collapsing, no one wanted to put it to the test. The priority now was to get the body out of the loft as quickly as possible. Anything else could wait until it was in the mortuary.
Ordinarily, recovering the woman’s body would have been relatively simple. Even fragile mummified remains wouldn’t cause too many problems, though care would have to be taken when it came to lowering them through the narrow hatch. The complication here was that the victim wasn’t only mummified, she’d been pregnant. And without the womb’s cushioning fluid to protect it, any attempt to move her body with the foetus still inside would cause the tiny bones to shift around, like seeds in a dry gourd. We couldn’t afford to damage them more than they had been already, which left me with no option.
Before we recovered the mother’s remains from the loft, I’d first have to remove her baby.
It wasn’t something I’d been looking forward to. There seemed something deeply wrong — sacrilegious, almost — in separating the two of them in that way. I waited while a SOCO carefully fastened plastic bags around the woman’s claw-like hands with their shredded finger ends and broken nails. Then, as another SOCO videoed the operation, I closed my mind to the macabre nature of what I was about to do and set to work.
I hadn’t done anything quite like this before. In effect, I was looking at two individual sets of remains, because the conditions for them both would have been markedly different. Whereas the mother’s body had been exposed to air, flies and scavengers virtually straight away, inside her uterus the foetus would have been more protected. That also applied to the process of mummification. The mother’s body would have desiccated from the outside, with internal organs gradually shrinking as they dried out at a slower rate. Ordinarily, the child she carried would have been similarly protected. Cocooned in the womb’s amniotic fluid, the foetal remains might not have mummified at all.
There was nothing ordinary about this, though. The entire abdominopelvic cavity was open and hollowed out, exposing the tiny bones nestled inside. Had that been caused by a wound, there would have been extensive bloodstains on her denim skirt and T-shirt. Since there weren’t any, it meant this was down to something else. Rats were one possibility. They were known to inhabit lofts, and the woman’s body would undoubtedly have been visited by them before it mummified.
But, contrary to popular belief, rodents aren’t major scavengers of human remains. Foxes, dogs and even domestic cats are all more voracious, although nothing of that size was to blame for this. Even if one had managed to gain access to the loft, larger scavengers generally devour a body in a recognizable sequence, starting with the soft tissues of the head and neck and ending by the disarticulation of the cranium and long bones. Sometimes that can allow a rough time-since-death to be estimated, based on how long each of these various stages are known to take.
Nothing I saw suggested that had happened here. The gnawing and teeth marks were mainly limited to the more vulnerable extremities. As well as damage from the woman’s futile attempt to escape from the loft, the finger ends had been badly chewed, which would rule out any hope of making an identification from fingerprints. The ears, nose and eyes had been similarly targeted, resulting in a grisly death’s mask of a face. That suggested nothing larger than a rat had been at work. Although the edges of the open cavity had been gnawed — and the much, much smaller foetal bones had received even more attention — that was more likely to have come later. The remains of empty pupae casings inside the cavity told me that Calliphoridae larvae had been busy, and I was inclined to think they were the main culprits rather than rats.
Yet flies would have laid eggs on the abdomen only if there was some kind of open wound. It didn’t have to be big: even a minor cut or graze would have provided all the invitation the questing insects required. But there was no sign of anything to indicate a pre-existing injury, such as a dressing or plaster either on the body or in the folds of the tarpaulin enclosing it. And nothing had been found at the other site where the body had been originally.
That was a mystery that could wait till the mortuary, though. Angling one of the floodlights closer, I turned my attention to the cluster of pathetically small bones.
As I worked, loud hammering from the floor below announced that the false wall was being dismantled. I didn’t let it distract me. Handling the delicate foetal skeleton was fine work. Not all of it was present, since some of it had been carried off by whatever scavengers had discovered it in the loft. The remaining bones had become disconnected from each other and lay in an untidy scatter, probably disturbed when the mother’s mummified body had been moved, as well as by the attentions of scavengers. One by one, I began to carefully lift them out and place them into small storage bags, wherever possible separating the left and right bones. The minuscule size meant it was an agonizingly slow business, baking hot under the glare of the floodlights.