“Please do. But get a DNA analysis done, anyway. It might be useful for determining identity, or identifying any living descendants.”

Williams nodded. “Very well.”

“And what about radiocarbon dating?”

“Really, Chief Inspector, shouldn’t you leave the science to the scientists? There’s too big a margin for error in radiocarbon dating. It’s mostly useful for archaeological finds, and I think you’ll find our friend here is a little more recent than that. Now, if there’s nothing else…?” He turned back to the skeleton. “The height of the subject was easy enough to determine in this case by simple measurement once we got the bones arranged in their original positions. A meter and a half – between a hundred and fifty-four and a hundred and fifty-five centimeters.”

“What’s that in feet and inches?” Banks asked.

“Five foot two.” Dr. Williams looked over and smiled at DS Cabbot. “But I can’t be sure about the eyes of blue.”

Annie gave him a chilly smile. Banks noticed her roll her eyes and tug her skirt lower over her knees when Williams had turned away.

“Also,” Williams went on, “you are dealing with the remains of a young woman.” He paused for dramatic effect.

Annie shot him a quick glance, then looked down at her notebook again.

“Go on,” Banks said. “We’re listening.”

“In general,” Williams explained, “a male skeleton is larger, the bone surfaces rougher, but the main differences are in the skull and the pelvic area. The male skull is thicker.”

“Well, what do you know?” Annie muttered without looking up.

Williams laughed. “Anyway, in this case, the pelvis is intact, and that’s the easiest way for the trained eye to tell.” Williams reached over and put his hand between the skeleton’s legs. “The female pelvis is wider and lower than the male’s, to facilitate child-bearing.” Banks watched as Williams ran his hand over the bone. “This pubic curve is definitely female, and here, the sciatic notch.” He touched it with his forefinger. “Also unmistakably female. Much wider than a male’s.” He hooked his finger in the sciatic notch, then looked at DS Cabbot again as he caressed the skeleton’s pelvic area. Annie kept her head down.

Williams turned back to Banks. “The symphyseal area here, as you can see, is rectangular. In males it’s triangular. I could go on, but I think you get the point.”

“Definitely female,” Banks said.

“Yes. And there’s one more thing.” He picked up a small magnifying glass from the lab bench and handed it to Banks. “Look at this.” Williams pointed to where the two pelvic bones joined at the front of the body. Banks leaned over, holding the glass. On the bone surface he could just about make out a small groove, or pit, maybe about half an inch long.

“That’s the dorsal margin of the pubis’ articular surface,” Williams said, “and what you’re looking at is a parturition scar. It’s caused by the stresses that attached ligaments put on the bone.”

“So she’d given birth to at least one child?”

Williams smiled. “Ah, you’re familiar with the technical terms?”

“Some of them. Go on.”

Annie raised her eyebrows at Banks, then got back to her notes before Williams could nail her with his leering gaze.

“Well,” Williams went on, “there’s only a single pit on either side of the pubis, which would strongly suggest that she only gave birth once in her life. Usually, the more times a woman has given birth, the more apparent the parturition scars are.”

“How old was she when she died?”

“I’d have to do more comprehensive tests to be certain of that. With X rays of the ossification centers – the centers that basically produce the calcium and other minerals that make up bone – we can make a reasonably accurate determination. We can also do a spectrographic analysis of bone particles. But all that takes time, not to mention money. I imagine you’d like a rough estimate as quickly as possible?”

“Yes,” said Banks. “What do you have to go on at the moment?”

“Well, there’s epiphyseal union, for a start. Let me explain.” He looked over toward Annie like a professor beginning his lecture. She ignored him. He seemed unperturbed. Maybe this sort of ogling was just a habit with him, Banks guessed, and he didn’t even notice he was doing it. “Here,” Dr. Williams went on, “at the very ends of the long bones in both the arms and the legs, the epiphyses have all firmly united with the shafts, which doesn’t usually happen until the age of twenty or twenty-one. But look here.” He pointed toward the collarbone. “The epiphysis at the sternal end of the clavicle, which doesn’t unite until the late twenties, has not united yet.”

“So what age are we looking at? Roughly?”

Williams scratched his chin. “I’d say about twenty-two to twenty-eight. If you take in the skull sutures, too, you can see here that the sagittal suture shows some signs of endocranial closure, but the occipital and the lambdoid sutures are still wide open. That would also suggest somewhere in the twenties.”

“How accurate is this?”

“It wouldn’t be very far off. I mean, this is definitely not the skeleton of a forty-year-old or a fourteen-year-old. You can also take into account that she was in pretty good general physical shape. There is no indication of any old healed fractures, nor of any skeletal anomalies or deformities.”

Banks looked at the bones, trying to imagine the young woman who had once inhabited them, the living flesh surrounding them. He failed. “Any idea how long she’s been down there?”

“Oh dear. I was wondering when you’d get around to asking that,” Williams folded his arms and placed his forefinger over his lips. “It’s very difficult. Very difficult indeed to be at all accurate about something like that. To the untrained eye, a skeleton that has been buried for ten years might look indistinguishable from one that has been buried, say, a thousand years.”

“But you don’t think this one has been buried a thousand years?”

“Oh, no. I said to the untrained eye. No, there are certain indications that we’re dealing with recent remains here, as opposed to archaeological.”

“These being?”

“What do you notice most about the bones?”

“The color,” said Banks.

“Right. And what does that tell you?”

Banks wasn’t too sure about the usefulness of the Socratic method at a time like this, but he had found from experience that it is usually a good idea to humor scientists. “That they’re stained or decayed.”

“Good. Good. Actually, the discoloration is an indication that they have taken on some of the color of the surrounding earth. Then there’s this. Have you noticed?” He pointed to several places on the bone surfaces where the exterior seemed to be flaking off like old paint.

“I thought that was just the crusting,” Banks said.

“No. Actually, the bone surface is crumbling, or flaking. Now if you take all this into account, along with the complete absence of any soft or ligamentous tissue, then I’d estimate it’s been down there for a few decades. Certainly more than ten years, and as we already know, it’s unlikely she was buried after 1953. I’d go back about ten years from there.”

“1943?”

“Hold on. This is a very rough guess. The rate of skeletal decay is wildly unpredictable. Obviously, your odontologist will be able to tell you a bit more, narrow things down, perhaps.”

“Is there anything else you can do to get a little closer to the year of death?”

“I’ll do my best, of course, but it could take some time. There are a number of tests I can carry out on the bones, tests we use in cases of relatively recent remains as opposed to archaeological finds. There’s carbonate testing, I can do an ultraviolet fluorescence test, histologic determination and Uhlenhut reaction. But even they’re not totally accurate. Not within the kind of time frame you’re asking for. They might tell you, at a pinch, that the bones are either under or over fifty years old, but you seem to want year, month, date and time. The best you can realistically hope for is between thirty and fifty or fifty and a hundred. I don’t want to appear to be telling you your job, but probably your best chance of finding out who she was and when she was killed is by checking old missing-persons files.”