only this one sign of a possible sexual assault. Was the attacker interrupted? Yes, interesting.’
‘Not a bruise made by a blow, then. A hand gripping the leg? But I would expect two separate marks, at least.’
‘No, no, no,’ said Mrs Van Door. ‘You misunderstand. If you look more closely, you will see small punctures where the flesh is swollen. This is not an injury caused by the bruising of fingers. I suspect these are teeth marks, Chief Inspector.’
Tailby perked up with sudden interest. ‘Someone bit her,’ he said. ‘Someone smashed her skull, then bit her on the thigh.’
‘Possibly,’ said the pathologist. ‘Interesting?’
The detective peered more closely at the mark. It looked no more than a bruise to him.
‘Can you be sure?’
‘Well, no. I need to obtain the opinion of a forensic odontologist, of course. I have already contacted the University Dental School in Sheffield. We can get photographs and impressions, and excise the area around the bite to preserve it. And then we can compare the impression with a suspect’s dentition. It’s up to you to produce the suspect, of course.’
‘It’s an odd place for a bite.’
‘Yes. They are usually on the breasts in these cases, rather than on the thigh. In fact, I saw a report recently about a research project conducted by a forensic odontologist. It was entirely concerned with how bite marks differ according to the
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shape of the victim’s breast, the cup size, the age of the victim and even the amount of droop in the breast.’
Tailby was intrigued. ‘How on earth did he manage all that?’
‘Designed a mechanical set of teeth and recruited twenty female volunteers — goodness knows where from.’
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‘Students, I suppose,’ said Tailbv, reluctantly impressed. But I’m sure bites on the thigh are not unknown in sexual
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assaults either. In the absence of any samples for DNA analysis, Chief Inspector, this is probably the best you could have hoped for.’
Tailby stared at the pathologist. ‘So, let’s sec. The attacker strikes her over the head two or three times. When she is on the floor he pulls down her jeans and her pants, then bites her once on the thigh.’ It didn’t quite ring true somehow, though he knew there had been far more bizarre and ghoulish cases, far
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more perverted killers who committed much worse acts on the bodies of their victims. ‘Ah, you would like to indulge in a little mutual speculation, Chief Inspector?’ said the pathologist. ‘On that basis then, why not consider another scenario? A voluntary sexual act. The bite on the thigh is someone’s idea of erotic foreplay.’
‘Possible. Then something goes wrong.’
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‘The girl objects to the bite, perhaps.’
‘Yes, she pulls away, changes her mind. They argue; he gets angry.’
‘Sexually fuelled frustration. A powerful force.’
‘I can buy that,’ said Tailby. ‘There’s no way of telling which of those it was from the nature of the bite, I suppose?’
‘Mmm. A good odontologist may be able to reproduce the angle of the bite and the depth. He might suggest the position of the attacker’s head at the moment the bite was inflicted.”
Tailby looked again at the naked limbs of the fifteen-year-old girl. Her body was shockingly white except for the areas on her flank and the left side of her chest, where lividity had set in, the blood settling to the lowest point of gravity during the time she had lain dead in the bracken on the Baulk.
The bite mark was situated high on the inside of her right
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thigh, where the living flesh had been at its softest and most
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vulnerable. The picture suggested by Juliana Van Door of the position of the attacker’s head made Tailby feel more uneasy than anything else he had heard so far.
But the pathologist was fiddling with a table full of gleaming, sharp instruments, eager to get on with the next stage of the
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process of reducing Laura Vernon to her component parts. 1 ailbv and his team had to do the same thing, in a way. That
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was the essence of victimologv. the process of getting to know the intimate details of the victim as a means of establishing the connection to her killer.
‘If your scenario is correct/ he said, ”aura’s attacker will be much easier for us to find — he must have been
