lake, just by sniffing the bubbles on the surface.’
‘You’re kidding.’
Cooper looked at the German Shepherd sitting quietly by its handler’s side. He thought what the dog did with its nose was better than radar, actually - but he couldn’t think what else to compare it to.
‘But it’s not just managing the dog,’ said the handler.
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‘Archaeological field techniques can be useful in this job. We’re trained to analyse vegetation and changes to the landscape caused by burials.’
‘How do you do that?’
‘Well, above a grave the vegetation is poisoned at first by too much raw nutrient in the soil. From the corpse, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘But as time passes, the nutrients break down, and plant growth gets unusually lush. So a very green patch in an area of sparse vegetation can be a clue to the site of a grave.’
Cooper studied the dog handler. The man had a Scots accent, but that didn’t necessarily give credence to the pig rumour. He wasn’t even in uniform, but was wearing a blue boiler suit.
‘That makes sense.’
‘It doesn’t always work, though. We’ve been out to sites where the corpse has only been in place a few weeks, but the soil and vegetation has settled back into place. It’s incredible how quickly that can happen. Then you’ve got a real problem.’
They both gazed down into the woods, where the university team and the SOCOs were still working.
‘Sometimes, you know,’ said the handler, ‘it’s as if the landscape just accepts a body and digests it completely, given time.’
Fry walked across and drew Cooper away from the dog handler. ‘The opinion of the experts is that any missing bones could simply be a natural result of a body being reduced to a skeleton,’ she said, as if he’d asked her the question. ‘No skin and muscle to hold it together. But I still think you’d need to physically separate some of them from the skeleton. Don’t you?’
‘You think someone might have come across the skeleton and decided to take a few trophies instead of reporting it?’
‘It’s a possibility. But you know perfectly well it could also
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have been somebody who knew the remains were there, and simply waited until the time was right.’
‘Who would do that?’
‘It would have to be someone fascinated by the process of death.’
‘You’re thinking that he might have strangled Audrey Steele after she was dead?’
‘Why else would he take the hyoid bone?’
‘We don’t know that he took it. We know that it’s missing, that’s all. The anthropologist’s report said it could have been carried away by an animal. A rat or a fox. Or a bird - he said it might have been a bird, too. Diane, that bone could be anywhere by now.’
‘He’s been coming back to the body,’ said Fry firmly. ‘If anyone or anything took that bone, it was him.’
‘How many people would recognize a hyoid bone if they saw one? How many would even know it exists?’
But Fry wasn’t going to give in. ‘Anyone with some training in anatomy. In fact, anyone with experience of bodies.’
For a moment, they watched the university team getting back to work with their spades and the dog quartering the ground lower down the slope.
‘Diane, I’ve been thinking abut Tom Jarvis,’ said Cooper. ‘He has four dogs running loose on his property down at Litton Foot. Well, three now. He’s had them a while, too since they were puppies.’
‘So?’
‘How come none of them alerted him to the presence of a decomposing body a few yards from the edge of his property? Surely the dogs couldn’t have missed the smell, even if he didn’t notice it himself?’
‘Was the body exposed to the air during decomposition?’
Cooper hesitated. ‘When it was found, it was.’
‘But it was already skeletonized by then.’
‘Yes. The thing is, we’ve been assuming it was exposed to
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the air the whole time. That would fit in with the time scale, the rapid rate of skeletonization. But in some of the earlier stages, the smell must have been pretty bad. It would have spread over a wide area, especially if it had been carried on the wind. You wouldn’t need a dog trained in locating human remains. Any mutt with a functioning sense of smell would have noticed it.’
They walked on a few steps, Fry silent as she let Cooper think it through. He stopped and turned towards her.
‘On the other hand, if the body was originally covered or wrapped in something, the smell would have been confined, but the rate of decomposition would have been slower.’
‘There’s another implication to that,’ said Fry.
‘Yes, I know. It would definitely mean that someone returned to the scene - and exposed the body. But the lab didn’t report any indication of postmortem interference with the remains. None that might have been of human origin.’
‘We could get the SOCOs to go over the scene again.’
