The more I heard, the worse I felt. ‘How is he?’
‘Not good. The hospital have got him on fluids, antibiotics and God knows what while they run tests, but he’s in a bad way. Whether he’s guilty or not, we did him a favour getting him out of that place. If that’s how she cares for her own son, I wouldn’t like his mother looking after me, nurse or not.’
‘Has she said anything?’
‘Swear words, mainly. She’s got a foul mouth on her, that one. Turned the air blue when she talked about you.’ Whelan found that amusing, at least. ‘I don’t think you’re on her Christmas-card list any more.’
He veered off along another passageway. Its low ceiling dripped with water and the walls were beaded with condensation. The boiler house lay at the end of it, hidden behind heavy metal doors. Inside was a complicated assembly of tanks, pipes and valves that disappeared into shadow. In its prime it must have been like a furnace down here, hissing with fire and steam like the engine room of an old ship. Now the huge machinery was cold and dead. Beneath the smell of corrosion was the taint of old oil, so faint it was barely there. But the further in we went, the more another odour asserted itself. Soot and cold ashes. Something had been burned in here. Not recently, but not so very long ago either.
The search team were waiting by the boiler. Rusted and ringed with protruding rivets, the huge metal cylinder was eight or nine feet in diameter, like a giant tin can laid on its side. In one end was an open circular hatch, set low down by the floor. Floodlights had been positioned around it, backlighting the ghostly white figures so it looked as if they were huddled around a campfire.
‘Show me,’ Whelan said.
One of the figures, barely identifiable as a woman in the coveralls and mask, stepped forward. ‘This was buried in the ash inside the boiler. Pretty sure it’s bone, but I can’t say if it’s human or not.’
She handed Whelan a plastic evidence bag containing something small and dark. Whelan examined it under the light before passing it to me.
‘What do you reckon?’
The object resembled a burnt peanut shell. It was tubular in shape, no more than a centimetre or two in length with slightly flared ends. The surface was blackened, with a few charred tags of soft tissue still clinging to it.
‘It’s an intermediate phalange,’ I said. ‘A finger bone.’
‘So it’s human?’
‘Unless you get many chimpanzees or brown bears in North London, yes, it’s human.’
Whelan gave me a sour look, but I wasn’t being flippant. The phalanges of brown bears and some primates were superficially similar to ours, and I’d worked on cases before where animal bones had been mistaken for human. Even so, I wasn’t in any real doubt about what we’d found here.
‘They burn body parts in hospitals, don’t they?’ one of the search officers asked. ‘Could it be from an amputation?’
‘They’d have proper incinerators for that,’ Whelan told her, looking up at the metal cylinder. ‘This is an old coal boiler. It’d be for heating and hot water, not burning surgical waste.’
‘This didn’t happen when the boiler was running,’ I said. ‘Coal burns at a high temperature. It’d have been as hot as a crematorium in there, so any bone would have been calcified. It’d be white, not black like this. That’s a sign it burned at a lower temperature.’
Bone follows a predictable path when it’s exposed to fire. First it darkens, changing from the dirty cream of its normal colour through brown to black. Then, if the fire is hot enough, the bone turns to grey and then chalk white. Eventually, it will become light as pumice as the natural oils are burned away and only the calcium crystals are left.
Whelan looked towards the hatch. ‘Anything else in there?’
‘Don’t know yet,’ the officer said. ‘We backed off as soon as we found the bone. No obvious body parts, but it’s full of ash and cinders. There’s no way of saying what else is buried under it.’
Whelan was examining the floor in front of the boiler, where pale smears of grey marked the filthy concrete. ‘There’s ash spilled here. That from you?’
‘No, it was there already.’ The woman sounded offended.
‘Was the hatch open or closed?’
‘Closed.’
Whelan considered it for a moment longer, then bent to peer inside the hatch.
‘Can’t see much.’ His voice boomed inside the boiler. ‘Pass me a torch.’
Someone stepped forward and handed him a flashlight. Whelan leaned further inside, upper body disappearing into the round hatch.
‘Hard to tell what was burned in here. There’s a lot of ash but that could just be from before it was decommissioned.’
Extricating himself awkwardly, he straightened. He was holding a small, blackened cinder on his palm.
‘That isn’t bone,’ I told him.
‘No, but it’s not coal either. Looks like charcoal. There’s a load of it in there. Someone’s been burning wood.’
‘Can I take a look?’
Whelan handed me the torch and moved aside. A sooty, metallic smell of combustion filtered through my mask when I crouched down and leaned into the boiler’s mouth. My head and shoulders cast a shadow that blocked the floodlight, but the torch beam revealed a mess of cold ash and cinders, black islands in a grey sea. Whelan was right: there was a lot of what looked like burnt wood in there, carbonized to charcoal. It was possible that there could be more bone among it, but there was nothing immediately recognizable as human. I started to back out, then stopped as my torch beam passed over the back of the boiler.
‘There’s something else.’
Barely visible, an object was partially buried in the ash. Only its uppermost tip was showing, flattened and roughly triangular in shape. To a casual glance it could have been another piece of charred wood.
‘I think it’s a shoulder blade,’ I said.
I made way for a SOCO to take photographs, then bent through the hatch again. The curved rim dug against me as I leaned inside, reaching for the buried object. It shed ashes as I pulled it free, its triangular shape emerging from the cinders like a shark fin. Giving it a gentle shake to dislodge the clinging ash, I levered myself back out of the boiler and turned to show Whelan.
‘It’s a scapula. Human,’ I added, before he could ask.
The surface of the shoulder blade was blackened, but like the phalange there was still a weight and heft to it. The fire had been hot enough to burn away most of the soft tissues, but not enough to calcify the bone.
Whelan examined it. ‘We can rule out surgical waste anyway. I could see the odd finger finding its way inside, but not something this big. Question is, where’s the rest of the body? Unless it was dismembered and they only burned some of it in the boiler.’
That was one possibility. This wouldn’t be the first murder where the victim had been cut up and the various parts disposed of in separate locations. But I didn’t think so.
I took the blackened scapula back from Whelan. ‘Cutting up a shoulder’s a different proposition to an arm or a leg, or even a head. It’d mean sawing up the torso, which is a big, messy job, and I can’t see any cuts on this. The body can’t have all burned away either. A wood fire wouldn’t be hot enough, even if an accelerant was used as well.’
‘What about the wick effect?’ the SOCO who’d taken photographs suggested. ‘You know, when the body fat catches fire and burns like a candle till there’s next to nothing left. I’ve heard of that happening.’
So had I: I’d even come across the grisly phenomenon once myself. Under certain conditions, when the body burns, its layer of subcutaneous fat can melt and soak into clothing. The fabric then literally acts like the wick on a candle, causing the body to slowly burn away until little more than ashes are left.