The unsolved case had been a blight on the local force for more than a quarter of a century. It still rankled with many of the older officers and even the very youngest and newest had inherited its burden and were familiar with every sorry detail. The fact that two children were presumed to have been murdered made the case a highly emotive one, all the more so because their own father was the prime suspect.
Bill Talbot, the Senior Investigating Officer, had always blamed himself, Karen knew that. He had no real reason to, that Karen could see, but like almost everybody who worked on the case he had been driven half-mad with frustration because he believed passionately that Richard Marshall was guilty of a dreadful crime.
Karen drummed her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. The traffic lights in front of her had changed three times while she had remained virtually stationary. Leaning out over the door and peering around the edge of the windscreen so that she could get a view of the road ahead past the line of vehicles in front of her, she could see that the traffic on the far side of the lights was jammed solid. No wonder nothing was moving. She took another pull of her cigarette and cursed the holiday season. It was August bank holiday week, and half the world seemed to have descended on Torquay. The entire economy of the West of England might rely on the tourist industry, but all it ever seemed to mean to a police officer was more trouble.
Eventually she arrived at the hospital. She was told that the examination of the remains was just beginning. Hastily she donned the regulation white-paper suit. The fact that this particular body was barely even that made no difference to procedure. It was just as important as ever for there to be no opportunity for a flash lawyer to imply that any kind of contamination had taken place. Nonetheless Karen regarded getting booted and suited as an even greater nuisance than usual. Not so very long ago police observers had been allowed to wear their own clothes without any protective overalls as long as they stood well away from the operating table. Not anymore. She broke into a sweat as she struggled to pull the plastic galoshes on over her chunky trainers. For what seemed like forever she couldn’t get them past the thickly cushioned heels.
“Amazing bloody performance for a fucking skeleton,” she muttered to herself, succeeding at last with one frantic pull.
Phil Cooper, Karen’s favourite detective sergeant, was already there, standing alongside the county pathologist Audley Richards, a taciturn character as precise in his work as his small neat moustache. Karen respected Doctor Richards, but had never managed to attain with him the easy bantering relationship which she had enjoyed with his predecessor. And Karen, of course, was impatient. It went with her territory.
“Is it a man or a woman?” she asked at once, gesturing to the bones on the mortuary table. That was, after all, the so-far unasked question which had been foremost in her mind since Phil had called that morning.
Audley Richards peered at her over his half-moon spectacles. With his thinning grey hair and aquiline nose, he looked more the part than any other doctor she had ever encountered.
“Patience, Detective Superintendent, patience,” he murmured. “I will be giving you my full report in due course.”
Karen clasped her hands behind her back, forcing herself not to rise to the bait. Sometimes she thought the pathologist deliberately set out to irritate her.
“C’mon, Audley,” she said. “You can tell me that straight away. That skeleton is in pretty darned good nick, considering. I reckon you knew its sex after one glance.”
Richards smiled without humour. “The shape of the hips indicates that these are the remains of a woman, and although the extra rib is not intact you can still see the start of it quite clearly.”
Karen felt a dryness in her mouth. This was the most important news of all. Had the skeleton been a man, or had it not been possible from its condition to immediately ascertain its sex, then the assumption she had already jumped to might have had to be dismissed after all. Or at least put on hold. As it was, the medical confirmation that these were the remains of a woman led instantly to her next question.
“So how long has the skeleton been in the sea?” she asked.
Audley Richards sighed dramatically. He glowered at her over his glasses.
“I’m a pathologist, not a psychic. I do not have a crystal ball,” he instructed. “Months or even years rather than days — but that’s as far as I’m going to be able to go. For anything more accurate than that you’ll need to establish the isotopes of these bones, and that’s a job for the experts in forensics.”
Karen had known that would probably be the answer. She was also aware that this was a new technique, as far as she knew conducted by only one forensic laboratory in London, and a technique which was still regarded as experimental and was certainly not at all precise. It would also take several weeks after the skeleton was delivered for any results at all to be achieved.
Audley Richards had turned his back on her in a rather determined way and seemed engrossed in his examination. She gave in then, standing in silence for another fifteen minutes or so, until he had finished. It seemed like much longer than that before he turned to her.
“Right,” he said. “We have here the skeleton of a youngish woman. Height, five foot four or five. No signs of any deterioration through age. From her bone formation I would estimate that she could be anything between twenty years old and forty. But these remains do not tell us a great deal more than that.”
Karen felt her heart thumping very loudly inside her chest. Audley Richards was not in the habit of giving anything away until he was absolutely sure of his facts, and on this occasion it seemed he did not have much to give. But the skeleton lying on the mortician’s table before them could be Clara Marshall, it really could.
“Any idea how she may have died?”
Knowing Audley Richards as well as she did, Karen didn’t really expect a meaningful reply to that either. Not yet, anyway. And she was right.
The pathologist shook his head. “There are no signs of any damage to the remaining bones. No new fractures. No old fractures, either, come to that. In view of the circumstances in which she was found it is almost certain that she was murdered, but exactly how I have no idea, and from the condition of this skeleton alone I do not see that changing.”
He pointed to the upper part of the skeleton. “As you can see the head is missing. It looks as if the tarpaulin disintegrated quite early on around that area of the body for some reason. Most of the neck bones are missing too. I couldn’t even tell if she had been strangled. To be honest, Karen, I don’t think we are going to learn a lot more from these remains.”
“So there are no immediate means of identification at all?”
“No. We don’t have a head, so we don’t have teeth to check with dental records. No old fractures, so checking with medical records won’t help either. It will almost certainly be possible to extract DNA from the bones, of course, but you’ll also need DNA from a close relative to compare it with. Catch-22 in a situation like this when you have a mystery corpse which might date back a bit.”
It was Karen’s turn to smile grimly then.
“I think I might know exactly where to find that relative, actually,” she said.
“You have a crystal ball now, Superintendent, do you?” enquired Richards loftily.
“For once, I don’t think I’m going to need one,” Karen replied.
“Well, don’t forget that the DNA you get from bones is not the stuff you take as samples for police records. It’s mitochondrial DNA. And mtDNA only passes directly down the female line. So you would have to have DNA samples available from this victim’s mother or grandmother, or from any children she might have.”