He hesitated, flushing when he saw me. Then his chin came up and he let the door swing shut behind him.
‘Morning,’ I said.
That was met with a stiff nod. ‘Have you seen Dr Parekh?’ he asked, looking past me, as though expecting her to materialize.
‘Not so far. She’s doing the post-mortems this morning, isn’t she?’
‘That’s right.’ He paused. ‘Should be interesting.’
It was a transparent attempt to make me ask why. I was tempted not to bite, but then I’d have spent the rest of the day wondering. ‘Why, what have you found?’
I’d only seen the interred victims briefly. Mears would have had a chance to study the bodies much more closely before they were removed and brought to the mortuary.
But I immediately regretted asking. He made a poor attempt not to look smug. ‘Oh, this and that. You probably saw for yourself that they’d been tortured?’
Tortured? Except for the deep chafing of the restraining straps, the torch beams I’d played over the victims hadn’t shown any obvious signs of physical trauma. Being walled up alive would qualify as torture by any criteria, but I knew that wasn’t what Mears meant.
‘I didn’t get a good look,’ I said, aware it sounded like an excuse.
‘Well, it was easy to miss,’ he said, with false magnanimity. ‘The skin slippage and discolouration made it hard to see, but there was localized scorching to parts of the epidermis.’
‘They were burned?’
‘Isn’t that what I said?’
His look of confusion was badly feigned. I hadn’t seen the two victims close-up, and the condition of their bodies would have camouflaged any burns to some extent. That didn’t make hearing about it now rankle any less.
‘The injuries were relatively small and too contained to have been caused by a naked flame,’ Mears continued, enjoying himself. ‘Some sort of heated implement, probably, rather than a blowtorch. Of course, I’ll have a better idea once I can examine them properly.’
‘Whereabouts were they burned?’ I asked.
‘All over. I found scorching on the head, limbs, torso. It looks random from what I’ve seen.’ He couldn’t keep the condescending smile from his face. ‘If it’s any consolation, I had to point them out to Parekh, as well.’
‘That’s because these old eyes don’t see so well in the dark,’ Parekh’s voice came from behind us. ‘Although in my defence I was concentrating on the injuries from the straps at the time.’
I hadn’t noticed the pathologist approaching. Evidently neither had Mears. His face flushed scarlet as the diminutive figure stopped.
‘Dr Parekh, I, uh, I was just…’
‘Yes, I heard. Hello, David.’ She gave me a smile, but there was a dangerous glint in her eye. ‘How are you getting on with the loft victim? Almost done, I imagine.’
‘Getting there.’
‘You never were one to waste time. Well, I’ll look forward to reading your report. I’m sure it’ll be as thorough as ever.’ She turned to Mears, whose flush had deepened. ‘If you’re ready, Dr Mears, I’d like to make a start on the first post-mortem. I’ll try not to miss anything but feel free to point it out if I do.’
Without waiting, she headed off down the corridor. Small as she was, she set a surprisingly fast pace, forcing Mears to hurry after her.
I was smiling as I turned away. But it died as I thought about what the taphonomist had said. The two victims who’d been walled in had faced a horrendous death however you looked at it. If they’d been tortured — burned — as well, it took their ordeal to another level of cruelty.
It was an horrific thought. Pushing aside the selfish regret that I couldn’t take a look at their remains myself, I went back into the examination room where the bones of the young mother were waiting.
Chapter 13
I almost missed Ward’s lunchtime press statement. The young woman’s cleaned bones didn’t yield any surprises as I rinsed them off and put them to dry, but I couldn’t let go of what Mears had said. When the last of them were in the fume cupboard, I pulled up the photographs taken at the crime scene and during the post-mortem. Even though I knew I would have seen any burns already, I checked the photographs again for any evidence of charring on the young woman’s body I might have missed. Pale skin darkens during decomposition, while dark skin lightens, making it impossible to use skin colour as an indicator of ancestry. Even allowing for that and the drying effect of mummification, severe burns such as Mears had described finding on the interred victims would still be visible. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that she’d been burned on parts of her body destroyed by maggot activity — a suppurating burn on her abdomen would have been a target for flies to lay their eggs and wouldn’t have left bloodstains on the clothing, which might explain the gaping abdominopelvic cavity.
But I’d found no physical evidence to support that. Except for the close proximity of their bodies, there was nothing to suggest the deaths of the victims walled up in the hidden chamber and that of the pregnant woman in the loft were connected. I didn’t like coincidences, but it was beginning to look as though that’s all this was. Perhaps Commander Ainsley had been right to want Ward to treat the two crime scenes separately, I grudgingly admitted. Hidden away from prying eyes and all but forgotten, the derelict old hospital could hide all manner of secrets.
After poring over the photographs I finally accepted that I hadn’t overlooked anything. There had been no visible burns on the pregnant woman’s remains.
Leaving her bones drying in the fume cupboard, when I checked my watch I saw it would soon be time for Ward to give her statement. Hurriedly changing from my scrubs, I left the mortuary and drove to St Jude’s. Summer already seemed a long time ago; the year had swiftly embraced autumn. The light was subtly different now, the shadows longer and harder edged, while an underlying chill in the air bit like a harbinger of winter.
When I reached the hospital a small crowd was gathered around the hospital’s main gate. Cameras, TV vans and boom microphones clogged the road outside, and one lane had been cordoned off with metal barriers. I parked a couple of streets away and hurried back. I found a spot by the barrier on the edge of the scrum, where I’d have a good view from the sidelines. A microphone faced the waiting media just inside the gates, but no one stood at it as yet. Looking round, I saw Ainsley standing by himself at the back of the press. No one paid any attention to the commander, but in plainclothes there was nothing to identify him as a police officer.
I wondered if it was significant that he was standing on this side of the microphone rather than behind it with Ward.
There was no one else there I recognized. Including Oduya. The activist was nowhere to be seen, which was surprising. I’d thought he’d have jumped at the chance to present his case again in front of TV cameras. As I was wondering about that, a dark car drove down the hospital’s access road and pulled up inside the gates. Ward climbed out, together with Whelan and a smart young woman I took to be a police press officer.
The hubbub of conversation fell quiet as Ward stepped up to the microphone. Her face was deadpan, but the way she cleared her throat before she spoke betrayed her nerves. She’d made an effort to look the part, tethering the wayward hair into some sort of style and wearing a belted black mackintosh that concealed her pregnancy. I wondered if that was deliberate. It would be another unwelcome distraction if the press found out the SIO was pregnant as well as one of the victims.