As I worked I did my best not to dwell on what had happened at St Jude’s, but it was never far from my mind. I was acutely aware that the mummified remains — now reduced to smooth, pale bone — had once been a young woman with parents and friends. A life. It might have ended in a dirty loft, yet there was more to a person than the manner of their death. And while I didn’t need reminding how important it was to remain detached, knowing who this individual might be brought a subtle change of perspective. I could tell myself that it wasn’t confirmed, that it might have been a different young woman’s grieving family at the hospital that afternoon. But even the possibility of a name had a personalizing effect, removing a layer of distance between me and the victim.
Now when I handled the slender bones they seemed to have more weight.
I’d almost finished when my phone vibrated in my scrubs pocket. I’d been half expecting a call and felt no surprise when I saw it was Ward again. She didn’t waste any time.
‘Are you still at the mortuary?’
‘Just finishing up.’
‘Stay there. I’m sending a set of dental records I want you to check against the loft victim. How soon can you let me know if they match?’
‘It depends if you want a detailed examination or just a basic comparison.’ The latter was no problem: any forensic anthropologist had enough knowledge to compare ante-mortem dental records with the teeth of a dead individual. But anything more complicated was better done by a specialist.
‘Basic is fine. We’ll get a forensic dentist to do a formal identification later, and we’ll be running a DNA test as well. They’ll both take time, though, and I need something to go on now. Can you do that?’
I could. ‘Are the dental records Christine Gorski’s?’
‘Heard about that, did you?’ Ward didn’t sound surprised, but by then it would have been all over the news and social media.
‘I was at St Jude’s earlier when Oduya turned up with her family.’
‘Then you’ll understand why I don’t want to wait days to find out if the body’s hers or not.’ Her exasperation was clear from her voice. ‘The annoying thing is Christine Gorski’s name was already on our radar even before Adam bloody Oduya pulled that stunt this afternoon. She’s not the only pregnant woman who’s gone missing but her description matches what we know about the body from the loft. Right sort of age, six months pregnant and been missing for fifteen, which fits your estimated time since death. We don’t know what clothes she was wearing on the day she disappeared, but it was during summer so a T-shirt and short skirt’s not out of the question. Her family seems decent enough. Father’s Polish, as you probably guessed, works for a sports retail company. The mother’s a secretary, brother’s a final-year arts student. Not exactly well off but they could afford white fillings for Christine when she was fifteen.’
I thought about the condition of the dead woman’s teeth. ‘Did she use drugs?’
‘She’d been in and out of rehab for heroin addiction since she was seventeen. The family lost touch with her for nearly two years, until she turned up out of the blue one day and announced she was pregnant. She was broke and said she wanted their help to get cleaned up for the baby’s sake.’
‘What about the father?’
‘Her parents don’t know, and it doesn’t sound as though Christine did either. My guess is she probably wound up working on the streets, because she was in no state to hold down a regular job. Her parents didn’t ask too many questions, they were just glad to have her back. They insist the change of heart was genuine, although they still didn’t trust her enough to give her any money. It was all set up for her to go into rehab again, but she disappeared the day before it started. That was when they reported her missing, and they haven’t seen or heard from her since.’
Sad as it was, I could understand why Christine Gorski’s disappearance hadn’t been prioritized by the police. Her disappearance would have been seen in the context of her addiction, just another drug addict deciding to avoid rehab, rather than anything more sinister. That must have made it all the more agonizing for her family. The months of being in limbo, of not knowing what had become of their daughter, must have been sheer torture for them.
If I’d been in their shoes, I would have gone to Oduya as well.
I told Ward I’d be in touch and went back into the examination room. The circumstantial evidence that the reassembled skeleton on the table was the physical remains of Christine Gorski was stacking up, but I couldn’t let myself be swayed by that. Nor did I want to look at the dental records that Ward was sending through. Not yet.
There are several stages involved in establishing a positive dental identification. To start with I made sure all the teeth were present — which they were, with the exception of a missing back molar — and recorded the location and nature of crowns and amalgam fillings. That done, I checked for any untreated conditions, noting a cracked tooth next to the missing molar as well as several small patches of caries.
I entered all these details on to a dental chart. It perhaps wasn’t as exhaustive as a forensic dentist’s would be, because I didn’t have the same breadth of experience. But I was confident it would be enough for Ward’s purposes.
Once I’d finished my inventory, I compared the chart I’d drawn up with the dental records Ward had emailed as a password-protected file. She’d included a photograph of Christine Gorski with them. It looked to have been cropped and enlarged from a group photo, taken when she was in her late teens. The brown hair was tied up in a semi-formal style, exposing a roundish face that was both attractive and ordinary. She’d been caught looking off to one side as though not entirely engaged in what was going on, and although she was smiling it looked artificial, a self-conscious pose summoned up for a camera rather than anything spontaneous. I studied it for signs of an overbite, but it was hard to tell.
Occasionally, a single unique feature can be enough for a positive ID. I’d once had a case where I’d been able to make an informal identification from a distinctively crooked front tooth. That had been an unusual situation, though. Ideally, there should be an absolute match between the dental records taken when a person was alive and the post-mortem dental exam. That wasn’t the case here. Neither the caries, missing molar, nor cracked tooth were present in Christine Gorski’s records.
But she hadn’t visited a dentist for five years before she’d disappeared, which was more than enough time to account for the changes. And the cracked molar that sat next to the empty socket hinted that the missing tooth could have been dislodged by force. Knocked out rather than extracted.
More compelling than these inconsistencies were the similarities between the two. According to her records, Christine Gorski had an identical overbite to the one I’d noted on these remains, and the dental work of the woman from the loft matched hers to the last detail. Even down to the white fillings in two back molars. I went through it all again just to be sure, but there wasn’t any doubt.
We’d found Christine Gorski.
Chapter 14
One of the holy grails of forensic scientists has been to devise an artificial way of detecting the gases produced as a body decomposes. That would not only help locate buried or hidden human remains but also serve as a means of determining how long an individual has been dead. So far, though, science hasn’t come up with anything that can compete with nature.
The Labrador could barely contain its excitement. It was only young, its sleek coat pitch black except for a splotch of white on its head. Fairly quivering, it shifted from paw to paw, casting hopeful glances up at its female handler as it gave a tremulous whine.