body in it, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not even any personal possessions that might lead to an ID.’
‘No, but there might be some trace evidence,’ said Cooper. ‘It was almost certainly being used to house itinerant workers.’
‘I’ll suggest making it a higher priority. OK?’
But Cooper continued to pace, unsatisfied. ‘These victims didn’t go missing at the same time,’ he said. ‘There’d have been a major enquiry, if there had been three. We’d still be looking for them now. There must be a connection between them, though.’
‘I repeat, we haven’t found three bodies. It sounds ridiculous to say “only” two, but …’
‘But you’re right. We need to look more closely. Extend the area of search. You know, I was thinking about the Fred and Rosemary West case. Those girls who were offered cheap accommodation in the Wests’ house, and never left. If I remember right, not all the bodies were found at the house. There was a second burial site, at some property connected with the Wests.’
‘I remember. Any ideas, then?’
Cooper sat down, looking suddenly tired. ‘Well, I’ll need to go through the files again, Diane.’
‘Do that. If there
‘It’s another Catch-22. We need to make the connections first to find her. And we need to find her to make the connections.’
Mentioning it to no one, least of all Ben Cooper, Fry took half an hour to visit Edendale Museum for herself. She had to show her warrant card to get admission, because the museum was closing for the night.
‘The hand of glory, Sergeant?’ said the attendant. ‘One of our most popular exhibits. The kids love it. Little ghouls, most of them.’
‘Is this a real human hand?’
‘Certainly, certainly. I’ll show you.’
Fry followed the attendant to the display case. So Cooper thought she would never have heard of such a thing as a hand of glory, did he? Well, there he was wrong, for once. She was from the Black Country, and the area had its own mummified hand of glory, so called. That one had been taken from inside the chimney of a pub when it was being renovated. The White Hart at Caldmore Green.
Everyone knew the White Hart in the Black Country. Back in the sixties, the A34 Murderer had been caught because he was overheard asking a victim the way to ‘Karma Green’. Until then, police had thought he was a Brummie, from the neighbouring city of Birmingham. But only Black Country folk pronounced Caldmore as ‘Karma’. A killer’s origins had given him away.
Once, Fry had seen the object itself in Walsall Museum, above the central library on Lichfield Street. It had been just one artefact among the scold’s bridles and Second World War gas masks, a historic collection of iron locks, and some gaucho spurs and stirrups. She’d heard that the museum had taken it off public display at one time because it was frightening the children too much, but you could still see it if you asked. It had become a sort of under-the-counter hand of glory.
‘This is one of Edendale Museum’s most popular exhibits,’ said the attendant. ‘Well, one of the most viewed, anyway. Not everyone approves of it.’
‘A bit controversial, is it?’
‘Let’s say the reactions to it vary considerably. There are many people who refuse to believe that it’s actually a real hand. Even when we explain the whole thing to them, they still don’t believe us. They go away thinking it’s a plastic reproduction, which it isn’t.’
Of course, the White Hart at Caldmore Green had a ghost or two of its own. There had allegedly been a death in the attic where the ‘hand’ was found, the suicide of a servant girl. A previous landlord had reported hearing sobs coming from the attic room, and an investigation found nothing but the mysterious handprint of a child in the dust.
Whether the White Hart hand of glory had ever belonged to the servant girl was doubtful, though. Fry had seen it just as she was beginning her training to join the police and had already started her course at UCE in Perry Barr. Even if she hadn’t already picked up a smattering of medical knowledge, it would have been obvious to her that the object in the museum was actually the severed arm of a small child, torn off right up to the scapula, then pickled in formalin.
Despite the story that had become attached to it, she was pretty sure that Walsall Museum’s hand of glory was more likely to be a medical specimen from the mid-nineteenth century. If that was supposed to be a magical item used to aid burglaries, there must have been some malefactors being badly misled by their hand-of-glory supplier. How or why a medical specimen had come to be concealed in the chimney of a pub, no one was saying. Everyone preferred the stories of ghosts and magic, obviously.
‘
‘Sorry?’
He pointed at a printed card inside the case. ‘It’s the spell you’re supposed to use with the hand of glory. If you do it right, it not only protects you, but provides light that only you can see. Naturally, it was used mostly for nefarious purposes. Anything useful always is, don’t you find?’
The phenomenon of general credulity on the subject baffled Fry. Fair enough, if there was something genuinely mysterious and unexplained, you might be forgiven for letting loose the imagination and coming up with your own interpretation. But when the scientific facts were staring them in the face, how could people ignore them and believe instead in something that flew in the face of the evidence? Some would believe that the world was flat, or that the Earth circled the Moon, just because they wanted to believe it. Others had faith in the magical powers of a pickled hand or a severed head.
Good luck to them. But if she found them putting their crazy ideas into practice, she’d be obliged to lock them up. Prison or high-security psychiatric hospital, she didn’t really mind. So long as colleagues like Ben Cooper didn’t get in her way with some well-meaning rubbish about cultural identity.
But here, in Edendale, was a genuine hand of glory.
‘The only other one that we know of is in the museum at Whitby,’ said the attendant.
‘Obtaining a human hand under the proper circumstances could prove to be quite difficult in this day and age,’ said Fry.
‘I expect so. But …’
‘What?’
‘Well, there are ways and means, aren’t there? You can find people willing to do anything, for the right price.’
DCI Kessen was standing near the back of the CID room when Fry returned. Before she could get her coat off, his voice stopped her.
‘Ah, DS Fry. Do we have any possibilities yet from the missing persons reports?’
Not knowing what else to do, Fry looked down at her desk. A misper report sat right there, left for her by someone while she was out.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Let’s have it, DS Fry.’
Fry picked up the report and read it for the first time. ‘This is a local woman who was reported missing four years ago. She’s five foot seven, twenty-four years old, reddish hair.’
‘Red hair? Is that a match?’
‘The older body is missing a head.’
‘So it is.’
‘But it’s the closest we’ve got at the moment, sir.’
‘Who made the report?’ asked Kessen.
‘A sister.’
‘Is it possible she would still have some of the missing woman’s possessions?’
‘Something that would retain a print, you mean?’
‘Exactly.’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Fry.
