‘THREE HUMAN SKELETONS,’ THE PATHOLOGIST SAID, ‘almost certainly the remains of very young children, but I’ll get to that presently.’

Harry was hot. The room was smaller than he’d expected. Having been invited by Rushton to be present at the pathologist’s examination – the remains were all still technically his responsibility – he’d hoped to be able to position himself in the furthest corner. It wasn’t going to be. No one was getting too far away from the action today – there just wasn’t the space. A stainless-steel counter, almost a metre wide, ran around the perimeter of the room. The floor was tiled and appeared to slope downwards, allowing for easier sluicing towards the central drain. Above the counters, glass-fronted cupboards lined the walls. Three gurneys were positioned in the centre of the room. They left little room for the pathologist, his two technicians, the team of three police officers and himself. Twice already, Harry had had to side-step, finding himself in the way. He looked at his watch. They’d been in the lab less than five minutes.

‘The one we have here,’ continued the pathologist, stepping up to the first gurney – Harry had been introduced to him fifteen minutes ago but couldn’t recall his name – ‘St Barnabas number one, we’ll call it for the time being, has been in the ground the longest. We can see almost complete skeletonization, with just the remains of muscle and ligament holding together the bones of the thorax and the abdomen.’ He began walking round the gurney, heading for the skull. ‘The right arm appears to have broken away at the shoulder when the grave was disturbed,’ he said, ‘and part of the ulna from the left arm hasn’t been recovered yet. A couple of the metacarpals from the left hand are also missing. The brain and the internal organs will be long since gone, of course. We found some traces of fabric around the upper body and two tiny white buttons that had fallen into the ribcage.’

‘Lucy Pickup was buried ten years ago,’ said Rushton. ‘Is that consistent with…?’

The pathologist held up one hand. ‘The rate of skeletonization is highly variable,’ he said. ‘It depends on the soil, the success of the embalming process if any has taken place, depth of burial and so on. The soil in the area where the bodies were found is alkaline, which would normally slow the rate of decomposition; on the other hand, this is a very young child. Very little body mass. On balance, I’d say a burial timescale of between five and fifteen years.’

‘We’re going to need a bit more than that, Raymond,’ said Rushton, who’d positioned himself at the foot of the gurney, directly opposite the pathologist. Raymond, that was his name. Raymond Clarke, one of the approved pathologists on the police list.

‘How old would you say she is?’ continued Rushton.

‘I’m only just getting started,’ replied Clarke. ‘And we don’t know whether number one is a she yet. As to age, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Based on the skeleton we have an estimated height measurement of 87 cm, which would put our little friend here in the fifteen-to-thirty-six-month bracket. Then we look at the rate of ossification.’

‘Fusion of the bones?’ asked Rushton.

Clarke gave a single nod of his head. ‘Ossification occurs in eight hundred points of the body and can offer some very useful clues as to age,’ he said. ‘An infant is born without carpal bones in the hand, for example. Then we have the cranium. There are five major bones in a newborn’s skull, which gradually fuse along specialized joints called sutures. The newborn also has a number of fontanelles or spots of soft membrane on the skull. On our friend here they’ve closed over, suggesting a child of at least twenty-four months.’

‘Between two and three, then?’ asked Rushton. ‘Could be Lucy.’

‘Very possibly,’ said Clarke. ‘So now we look at the injuries sustained to the corpse.’

Harry wondered if anyone else was as hot as he. Why would a pathology room be warm? You’d expect the opposite, surely, to keep the bodies in good condition. The two detectives Rushton had introduced him to – he was blowed if he could remember names – were standing like a couple of statues a few inches to his left. One of them, tall and very thin, looked to be in his late thirties. His hair was as thin as the rest of him and he appeared to have no eyelashes. The other detective was a year or so younger and powerfully built. Neither looked as uncomfortable as Harry felt. Maybe they’d just had more practice hiding it.

‘I’ve received the coroner’s report into the death of Lucy Pickup,’ Raymond Clarke continued, turning away from the corpse to a laptop computer. He peeled the surgical glove off his right hand and hit a key to activate the screen. ‘It’s all here if anyone wants to look. It refers to severe blunt-force trauma to the right posterior part of the skull, specifically the parietal and occipital bones, following a fall from around fifteen feet on to solid flint flagstones. Displaced fractures of the skull caused considerable internal bleeding and the force of the impact would have sent severe destructive shock waves through the brain. Death would have been almost instantaneous.’

Rushton and the taller of the two detectives closed in around Clarke. All three men peered at the computer screen. Harry stayed where he was. He already knew how Lucy had died. She’d fallen, tumbled to her death in his church, and her little skull…

He was looking at that skull now. The pathologist could take as much time as he liked, he knew it was Lucy. ‘In addition,’ Clarke was saying, ‘the spinal cord was broken in two places, between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae and slightly higher, between the fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae. There was also a femoral shaft fracture on the right leg.’ He turned away from the computer, caught Harry’s eye for a second and then stepped back to the gurney. ‘If we look at the head of little miss,’ he said, ‘and yes, gentlemen, I’m coming round to the idea that she was a little miss, we can see the extent of the trauma to the skull.’ Pulling his glove back on, Clarke slid his hand under the skull and turned it so his audience could see where the skull bones had collapsed. ‘These injuries are pretty much consistent with a fall from a considerable height,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had chance to properly examine the spine yet, but if we look at her right leg, the break across the femur is quite visible. Can you see?’

‘Could that have occurred last night?’ asked the stockier of the detectives. He was a sergeant, Harry thought. A sergeant called Russell. Luke Russell.

‘Not impossible,’ said Clarke. ‘But if you look at the X-rays taken for the coroner’s post-mortem, the lines of breakage are very similar. Later on today, we’ll take more X-rays. We can compare the two, just to be on the safe side.’

‘If her body was subjected to a post-mortem examination,’ asked the tall, thin detective, whom Harry thought was the more senior of the two, ‘wouldn’t it be obvious? Don’t you have to cut the chest open, remove the organs?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Clarke. ‘A full internal post-mortem involves cutting through the ribcage and removing the breastplate. The internal organs are taken out, examined, put inside a biohazard bag and replaced inside the chest cavity. The top of the skull is sawn open so the brain can be examined. All very difficult signs to miss.’

‘So…’

‘Unfortunately, not much help to us here because a full internal post-mortem wasn’t done on Lucy Pickup, just an external examination. It’s always a bit of a judgement call, whether or not to go the whole way and open the body up. The circumstances surrounding the death are taken into account, quite often the wishes of the family are considered. My guess is that the examiner at the time didn’t feel the full Monty was merited. What we do have, though, are signs of the embalming work done.’