‘It wasn’t mint?’
She smiled. ‘Whatever it was, it was very nice.’
‘What’s going to happen to Lola?’ I asked, as we went into the hallway, where Ward retrieved her shoes.
‘Too early to say. She could be facing charges of criminal neglect if it turns out she prevented her son from receiving medical treatment. But a lot depends on what happens with the fingerprints.’
‘Do you have enough to charge Gary Lennox without them?’
‘No, but there might be a way round it,’ she said cryptically. ‘Alternatively, I was hoping to appeal to your friend Oduya to persuade Lola it was in their best interests to grant consent. Prove their innocence, that sort of thing. That’s not going to happen now, though.’
‘He’s not my friend,’ I sighed, then picked up on what else she’d said. ‘Why isn’t it?’
‘Because he isn’t Lola’s friend any more either,’ Ward told me, as I unlocked the apartment’s front door. ‘She fired him this afternoon.’
Chapter 23
After its brief resurgence, the sun had given up the fight again by the following morning. The rain-dreary roads were lit with headlights long after it should have been light as I drove to the mortuary. I’d set off earlier than I needed to. I was due to meet Parekh later for the post-mortem on the bones recovered from the boiler, but before I did that there was something else I had to attend to.
The tiny bones of Christine Gorski’s foetus had been soaking for several days. Each morning I’d called into the mortuary to check on them and change the water for fresh. They hadn’t had much soft tissue left clinging to them to begin with: now even that had fallen away. There was nothing to keep me from examining them, but I knew Ward would want a report on the burnt remains from the boiler first. The foetal skeleton would have to wait.
The delicacy of the miniature bones seemed sadly poignant as I carefully removed them from the water. Some were so small that I could only pick them up with tweezers. The hairline fractures the X-rays had revealed in both tiny forearms were almost too small to see with the naked eye. I tried anyway. They would probably have been caused by scavengers or — more likely, given their subtle nature — when its mother’s mummified body had been moved further into the loft.
But they were too small to make out, no more than the faintest of lines against the bone-white slivers. Putting the bones back into clean water, I left them to their slow immersion and went out.
The post-mortem briefing for the burnt bones from the boiler didn’t take long. With only a left tibia, right patella and assorted phalanges from hands and feet to work on, there’d be precious little for the forensic pathologist to do, a fact Parekh seemed aware of when she breezed into the briefing room with an airy, ‘Morning, morning, let’s move this along, shall we?’
The briefing itself was a perfunctory affair, and as we filed out Parekh walked alongside me.
‘Have you seen your colleague recently?’ she asked.
I couldn’t think who she meant. ‘Who?’
‘Well, I’m not talking about the cadaver dog. Our esteemed forensic taphonomist, Daniel Mears.’
The last time I’d seen him was when he’d called asking for my help. I imagined he’d be finishing up by now, although since Ward had threatened to bring him in to examine the burnt bones instead of me, he was obviously still around.
‘Not for a few days. Why?’
‘Oh, no reason.’ The shrewd eyes held mine for a moment. ‘While you were here, I thought you might stop by and ask how he’s doing.’
She pushed through the door, leaving me to wonder what that meant as I followed. Ward had been similarly cryptic the night before when she’d mentioned that Mears was having problems. I’d assumed it was something to do with confirming the woman found interred with Crossly was Maria de Souza, perhaps using dental or medical records.
But he shouldn’t need my help with that. And even if he did, I’d had my fingers burned after bailing him out once. Parekh wouldn’t be aware of that, but I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. Whatever trouble Mears was having, this time he was on his own.
The post-mortem was as routine as expected. X-rays revealed no healed fractures that could potentially help with identification, and the rest merely confirmed what I’d already seen as I’d removed the bones at the scene. The considerable size of specimens such as the spade-like scapula pointed to a large stature, suggesting this individual was probably — though not definitely — male. Using the tibia’s measurements, I’d refined my preliminary estimate of height and calculated it to be around one hundred and eighty-five centimetres. An inch or so over six foot. But that wasn’t definitive: although the shin bone was a useful indicator of height, ideally any sort of estimate would be based around the length of other long bones as well.
It was the best I could do, though. And neither Parekh nor I could even hazard a guess at the probable cause of death. Although the two broken rib sections we’d recovered had obviously been caused by some sort of blunt trauma, there was no way of saying if they were a contributing factor or not. The ribs had both broken on the diagonal, in what were known as simple fractures. Common in falls, the bone had been snapped clean in two, creating a jagged, knife-like edge. An injury like that could easily have been fatal if the sharp bone had pierced the heart or severed an artery, or even punctured a lung, although that would have had less immediate consequences.
The problem was, I couldn’t say for sure that’s what had happened. The injuries could also have happened post mortem, after the victim was dead. The only thing I could say for certain was that the ribs were already fractured when the body was burned. Their broken surfaces were as blackened and charred as the rest, a sure sign they’d been exposed to the fire. If they’d been damaged afterwards — when the brittle remains had been taken from the boiler, say — then the exposed interior would show the pale ivory of unburnt bone.
Still, some interesting facts did emerge. Gently brushed clean of soot, I could see that the head of the right tibia and the inner surface of the patella showed some wear, though not very much. The phalanges told a similar story: this was an adult who’d lived long enough to show early degenerative changes in the joints, but not enough to suggest they’d reached an advanced age.
‘Based on that, I’d estimate mid-thirties to forties,’ I told Whelan. Ward had left immediately after the post-mortem, summoned to another briefing with Ainsley. Her deputy had the shadow-eyed look of someone who’d had another late night himself.
‘How sure are you about the height?’
‘I’d feel happier if it was based on more than one bone, but the tibia length is usually fairly reliable. Why, do you think you know who this is?’
‘Maybe.’ He seemed to debate how much he should say, then shrugged. ‘We’re still looking into associates of Darren Crossly, particularly anyone who used to work at St Jude’s. As well as Maria de Souza, we’ve turned up someone else whose description more or less matches what you’ve said about the remains from the boiler. His name’s Wayne Booth, worked as a porter with Crossly. Forty-five years old, single, a shade under six foot and heavily built.’
It wasn’t far out from my estimates for age and stature, but not as close as I’d like. ‘Forty-five’s at the upper end of the range, but still possible. I’d have expected someone taller, though. When did he go missing?’
‘Eleven months ago.’
That was seven months after Lola had said her son had his stroke, and considerably less than the fifteen months since Darren Crossly, Maria de Souza and Christine Gorski had last been seen alive. But Whelan anticipated my objection.