Margaret had acquired the status of a local hero, a rallying point for Catholics hiding their faith. Then, when it became possible openly to espouse that faith, she became the focus of a campaign for sainthood, led by the sisters of the Order of the Blessed Pearl, who got their reward in 1970 when Margaret was canonised by Pope Paul VI.
According to Wikipedia, the Blessed Pearl had never been one of the major orders of nuns. The Mother House was in York, less than a mile away from the house in the Shambles where Margaret had lived with her butcher husband and three children. And, apparently, assorted hidden priests. The chapel of the Mother House held the order’s most sacred relic, the embalmed heart of the saint. Again, Paula felt that shudder of revulsion. It seemed fundamentally primitive to her to revere the body parts of the long dead, however spiritual they might be considered.
Apart from the Bradesden establishment, there were also convent houses in Liverpool, Galway and another in rural Norfolk. None of them had schools attached, though the Norfolk nuns had run a children’s home until 1982. There appeared to be no whiff of scandal associated with any of them. Lives of quiet piety seemed to be their speciality. They didn’t even go in for the obvious good works of teaching or caring for the sick and elderly in the wider community. Really, Paula thought, what was the point of them?
She’d got this far in her deliberations when Stacey dropped a sheaf of papers on her desk. ‘I’ve sent you digital copies, but I know you like to work with paper,’ she said.
‘What’s this?’ Paula glanced at the top sheet, a list of names.
‘Electoral rolls. Nuns vote. Who knew? And they have to register under their real names, not their aliases, so it makes it easier to track them from place to place.’ Stacey picked up the first group. ‘These are the nuns who were at Bradesden when it closed down. Or at least they were there when the electoral roll was compiled the previous year. I’ve got twenty-three of them at that address.’ She gave a quick glance round the room and dropped her voice.
‘I matched them against the 2011 census, and they all showed up – all except one. That gave me details on age, and that in turn let me in to birth records. So I’ve got them all down with d.o.b. and the address of where their family was living when they were born. Not hugely helpful, but it might come in useful.’
‘Nice one,’ Paula said. ‘Can you search the current electoral register for these other locations?’ She pointed at the list of convents on her screen. ‘Supposedly the nuns from Bradesden were shared out among the other houses of the Blessed Pearl. Let’s find out who’s where, and if anybody’s unaccounted for. Oh, and while you’re at it, can you go back further and get me a list of the nuns who were at Bradesden five and ten years before the closure? I’ve got a feeling the women we’re really going to be interested in are the ones who were there for a long time.’
Stacey folded her hands in the namaste gesture and dipped her head in a bow. ‘Your mouth to my ear.’
Paula snorted and cut a knowing glance towards Sophie. ‘Just make sure you cover your back.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll fill in the trench as I go. You won’t get anything that doesn’t have the patina of legitimacy.’
Which, Paula thought, would slow things up no end. ‘I’m not even sure why Rutherford thinks we should be investigating this. All we’ve got is a collection of bones. OK, when there are that many, chances are something very wrong has gone on. But unless they’ve been shot through the head or hit with knives or machetes so hard there are notches on the bones, we’ve got no way of establishing suspicious death, let alone murder. At best, all we’re going to be able to do is charge a bunch of probably elderly nuns with illegal disposal of bodies. Which is not what this unit was set up to do.’
Stacey nodded. ‘It might not even be illegal disposal. I’ve been looking at the crime scene photos and there’s a whole graveyard round the other side of the convent. Headstones and marble chips and everything. Nuns and priests, that’s who got the grave marker treatment. So they probably had all the licences and permits necessary for burials.’ She shrugged. ‘Let’s just hope there’s not some proper major incident going unnoticed out there.’
13
Not everyone involved in law enforcement is comfortable with the idea that psychology is a legitimate science. They prefer the more quantifiable hard sciences where samples can be analysed using replicable and reliable methods. In an ideal world all cases would provide that sort of evidence. In reality? Dream on.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
The intricacies of forensic science had never been Alvin Ambrose’s comfort zone. He hadn’t even got a single science GCSE. He wondered whether the new guv’nor was deliberately trying to wrongfoot him or just didn’t know enough about the skill sets of his team members yet. Either way, it wasn’t the perfect strategy for getting the best out of him. Or out of the crime scene techs and the lab team.
Just as five police forces had banded together to form ReMIT, so they had collaborated with a private company in setting up a joint forensic science service. The days when crime scene evidence was analysed by a national forensic service paid for by taxpayers were long gone. Now the jobs went to the lowest bidder. And the collective lab somehow always seemed to end up in that slot.
The labs were physically situated on an industrial estate just off the M62, theoretically equidistant from
