An Unsuitable Death (20 page)

Lambert nodded. ‘We’ve already identified her from dental records. She was an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl from Oldford.’

Despite himself, Saunders was suddenly and unexpectedly stricken with the pity of it, as the thing he had cut up turned suddenly from so much putrefying meat into a human creature, struck down at an age when she should have been full of aspiration and potential. He said dully, ‘You were quick. I only did the autopsy yesterday morning.’

Lambert decided he might draw Saunders into the case if he offered a few of the facts the man seemed to find so reassuring. ‘There were twelve murders on our patch and the areas immediately surrounding it in the six weeks you gave us for the outside limits of this death. Nine of them were domestics; the other three all have a corpse present and correct. So we checked the missing persons register for our area. This girl was already registered as a MISPA — we scan the computer files automatically when we have a murder victim.’ Chris Rushton would be pleased to hear him singing the praises of the technology he often affected to despise, he thought with a grim smile.

Saunders digested the logic of these procedures, then nodded his satisfaction. ‘Well, it was murder, I should think. She didn’t die in the Wye, this one. She was dead when she went into the water.’

‘Alison Watts.’ She could have a name at least, even though such things were no longer of any concern to her. ‘How do you think she died, Mr Saunders?’

A few minutes earlier, the man behind the desk would have bridled and said stiffly that his findings were in his report. Now he said, ‘Vagal inhibition. Asphyxiation or strangling, in layman’s terms. But it’s difficult to be absolutely precise as to how this came about. The neck has been too severely eaten away by the creatures of the river, you see. I showed the police liaison officer the problem when we were doing the PM. But I could get her out again if you’d like to —’

‘No! No need for that. I understand the problem,’ said Lambert hastily. He found the man opposite him looking up in surprise at this unsuspected squeamishness in a senior officer.

‘Well. I’m pretty sure from the damage to the internal organs of the throat that she was strangled. Probably with some sort of ligature. Rope or wire, in all probability; there isn’t enough left to provide any detail of what sort of ligature, I’m afraid.’

‘So everything points to the fact that she’s been in the river for a long time. But she couldn’t have been dumped in the river near her home and taken this long to drift down to Chepstow, could she?’

‘No. We’ve had plenty of rain in August and September this year. Even if a body got caught up in debris near the bank somewhere, it would have moved down to Chepstow within a week at most, I’d say. She was weighted down, Mr Lambert. There isn’t much of her feet left, I’m afraid, but the injuries around her left ankle suggest that a rope or wire was tied round it — presumably with something heavy attached to the end of it.’

The two of them were silent for a moment, picturing the incident two to three months ago when the body was slipped into the Wye, carefully weighted to guard against its discovery, probably somewhere near the girl’s home, thirty miles upstream of where they sat. Then Cliff Saunders said quietly, ‘I imagine the rope detached itself when the foot was no longer there to retain it. Otherwise the poor kid might still be lying at the bottom of the Wye.’ He was moved at last, this man who so spurned the use of the imagination, by his vision of the waste of this young life.

Lambert said slowly, ‘So she was killed somewhere away from the river — we don’t know how far away — and dumped into the river at some point we may never find. Probably ten to twelve weeks ago.’ The facts were stark enough. He did not quote the statistic which showed that when murders were not solved within the first week, the chances of finding the culprit decreased sharply. No doubt a forensic biochemist was well aware of such facts.

Saunders said, ‘She wasn’t a virgin. That’s in my report, of course. But there was no chance of establishing whether this was a sex crime, I’m afraid. The flesh was much too far gone to ascertain whether there were any traces of bruising or scratching on the inner thighs, or anywhere else for that matter.’

‘No, I didn’t expect there would be.’ And no semen or pubic hairs or clothes fibres from the man who had done this — if it was a man. The river had long removed such traces.

Saunders, appreciating now how his report provided many more questions than answers for the police, said, ‘The chemists are working on her clothes, but I don’t hold out much hope for you there. Washed clean by the Wye, I’m sure.’ He had the air now of a man who wanted to help, who recognised the awful complexity of this death for the people who had to find out who was responsible for it. He weighed his thoughts for a moment, then said, almost reluctantly, ‘There’s one other thing, which is only touched upon even in my report, because it’s not a matter about which one can speak with certainty so long after death. There’s not much of the genitalia left, but I’d say from the condition of the internal organs that this was a girl who was sexually active. Frequent intercourse, I should think. Whether with one partner or several, you’ll no doubt find out in the course of your enquiries.’

It had cost this constricted man quite a lot to move from the facts of his dissecting slab into such speculation, and both of them knew it. Lambert stood up. ‘I expect you have daughters yourself, as I have.’ Saunders nodded bleakly. ‘Thank you for your help. I don’t suppose anything more will occur to you, but if you should think of something else which might be of help, please ring me.’

The scientist nodded. ‘Where will you begin?’

‘With the people who were with her last. With her family, to start with. And no doubt in due course with her sexual partner, or partners.’

None of these, of course, might be the person who was with her last of all, the person who had abruptly stilled this young life and watched her weighted body sink into the depths of the Wye. Starting so long after the event, it might be that they would never discover that ruthless operator. It wasn’t an investigation to look forward to.

And the victim was beginning to emerge now as a real person, not the cipher she had been when John Lambert had enjoyed the colours of the forest and the glint of the river on his way to Chepstow. The drive back to Oldford, shadowed now with this death and its consequences, would be altogether more sombre.

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