Since this wasn’t a crime scene-as Wallace had been at pains to point out-there was no real reason for me to grid out the remains. That was usually done to record the position of any evidence that was found. But I did it anyway. The stone floor prevented me from hammering pegs into the ground, but I carried drilled wooden blocks for that purpose.
Arranging them in a square around the body, I placed a peg in each one. By the time I’d finished stringing a grid of nylon cord between them my hands were numb and frozen in the thin latex gloves. Rubbing them to get some feeling back, I used a trowel and fine brush to begin clearing away the covering layer of talc-like ash.
Gradually, what was left of the carbonised skeleton was laid bare.
Our lives, and sometimes deaths, are stories written in bone. It provides a telltale record of injuries, neglect or abuse. But in order to find what was written here, first I had to be able to see it. It was a slow, painstaking business. Working on one square of the grid at a time, I carefully removed and sifted the ash, plotting the location of bone fragments and anything else I found on to graph paper before sealing everything in evidence bags. Time passed without my noticing. Thoughts of the cold, of Jenny, of everything, all vanished. The world narrowed down to the pile of ash and desiccated bones, so that I was startled when I heard someone clearing his throat behind me.
I looked up to see Duncan standing in the doorway. He held up a mug of steaming tea.
‘Thought you could use this.’
I checked my watch and saw it was nearly three o’clock. I’d worked right through lunchtime without realizing. I straightened, wincing as my back muscles protested.
‘Thanks,’ I said, stripping off my gloves as I went over.
‘Sergeant Fraser’s just called in, wanting to know how you were getting on.’
Fraser had put in a brief appearance earlier, but hadn’t stayed long, claiming he needed to carry on interviewing the locals. After he’d gone, Brody wondered aloud how many of his conversations would take place in the hotel bar. I thought it might be quite a few, though I didn’t say as much.
‘Slowly,’ I told Duncan, gratefully letting the hot mug warm my frozen hands.
He lingered in the doorway, looking at the remains. ‘How much longer do you reckon it’ll take?’
‘Hard to say. There’s a lot of ash to sift through. But I’ll probably be done by tomorrow morning at the latest.’
‘So have you, you know…found anything so far?’
He seemed genuinely interested. By right I should report to Wallace first, but I didn’t see any harm in telling Duncan some of what I’d learned.
‘Well, I can confirm it’s definitely a woman, under thirty, white and about five feet six or seven.’
He stared at the charred bones. ‘Seriously?’
I indicated the hips, now cleaned of the covering of ash. ‘If the body’s female you can often tell the age from the pelvis. In a teenager or adolescent the pubic bone is almost corrugated. As a woman gets older it starts to flatten out and then erode. This one is pretty smooth, so she was no teenager, but not old enough for any real wear and tear. Which puts her in her late twenties, thirty at the most.’
I pointed at one of the long thigh bones. It had survived the fire better than most of the smaller ones, but its surface was still blackened and covered with the fine lines of heat fractures.
‘You can use the length of the femur to get a rough idea of height,’ I said. ‘As for race, a lot of the teeth have cracked or fallen out, but there are enough left to see they were more or less upright, rather than jutting forward. So she was white, not black. I can’t completely rule out yet that she wasn’t Asian, but…’
‘But there’s not many Asians in the Hebrides,’ Duncan finished for me, looking pleased with himself.
‘That’s right. So we’re probably looking at a white woman in her twenties, about five-seven and big-boned. And I found metal buttons, along with what was left of a zip and bra hook, in the ash. So she wasn’t naked.’
Duncan nodded, bright enough to understand what that meant. The fact she’d been dressed wasn’t conclusive, but if she’d been naked then the likelihood was that we’d have been looking at sexual assault. And therefore murder.
‘Looks like it was definitely an accident, then, eh? She just got too close to the fire, something like that?’ He sounded faintly disappointed.
‘That’s how it looks.’
‘Could she have done it to herself? Deliberately, I mean?’
‘You mean suicide? I doubt it. She’d have used an accelerant, and as I’ve said, an accelerant wouldn’t have caused this. And there’d be a container somewhere nearby, which there isn’t.’
Duncan rubbed the back of his neck. ‘What about the, er, you know, the hand and feet?’ he asked, almost sheepishly.
I’d been waiting for that. But the light coming through the dirty windowpane was already beginning to dim, and I still had a lot to do.
‘I’ll give you a clue.’ I pointed at the greasy brown residue that clung to the smoke-blackened ceiling. ‘Remember what I said about that?’
Duncan looked up at it. ‘That it was fat from when the body burned?’
‘That’s right. That’s the key. See if you can work it out.’ I drained my mug and handed it back to him. ‘Right, I need to get on.’
But once he’d gone I didn’t start work right away. Now I’d cleared away most of the covering layer of ash I could start to remove the surviving bones, bagging them for proper examination later. Even though I’d been deliberately thorough, I’d found nothing that pointed to a suspicious death. No visible knife marks on the bone, no other sign of skeletal trauma or injury. I’d even found the hyoid, the delicate horseshoe-shaped bone that so often breaks during strangulation, buried in the ashes. It had been reduced almost to the fragility of powder, so delicate that the slightest nudge might break it, but it was still whole.
So why did I still feel I was missing something?
A wayward gust of wind from the holes in the roof chilled me as I stood looking down at the remains. I went to where the skull lay canted on the floor, crazed with heat fractures. The cranium is made up of separate plates that butt against each other like geological fault lines. The blow-out had left a hole nearly the size of a fist in one of them, on the occipital bone at the back of the crown. Small fragments of bone lay on the floor around it, blown there when the hot gases had made their explosive exit. That was another indication that the damage happened in the fire-if the hole had been caused by an impact the fragments would have been driven inwards, into the skull cavity.
Yet something about the skull bothered me, a sort of nagging neural itch. Almost involuntarily, I found myself starting to examine it again.
As though with malicious timing, the daylight had begun to fade with increasing speed. Last night I’d avoided working at night because I didn’t want to make mistakes. Now I felt I would be making an even bigger one if I didn’t. I moved the floodlight, but it still wasn’t bright enough for what I wanted. Taking out my torch, I set it on the floor so it shone on to the gaping skull cavity.
Light spilled eerily from the empty eye sockets as I turned my attention to the shards of bone that lay on the floor. Most were tiny, no bigger than my thumbnail. I’d already recorded their positions on the graph paper but now, like a ghoulish jigsaw puzzle, I began trying to piece them back together.
It was something I’d normally only attempt in a laboratory, where I had the right clamps, tweezers and magnifying lenses to help me. Here I didn’t even have a table, and my progress was made even slower by my cold-numbed fingers. Gradually, though, I fitted the fragments together until I had a sizeable section.