‘I doubt if we’ll find it now.’
‘Incidentally, the head was hacked off with some force, going by the state of the vertebrae.’
Diamond had a brief, vivid image. It wasn’t long since he’d eaten breakfast. ‘After death?’
‘Let’s hope so. I’ve no way of telling. She appears to have been a healthy individual. The skeleton was normal in development, with no evidence of earlier fractures.’
‘What about her build? Was she sturdy?’
‘No more than average.’
‘Now the critical question,’ Diamond said. ‘How long is it since she died? When we last spoke, you said up to twenty-five years.’
‘You know the answer, then.’
‘But you had only one bone to work from.’
‘Correct. Good, wasn’t I?’
‘You’re standing by the estimate?’
‘When it comes to telling the age, more bones don’t necessarily yield more information. As you know, I carried out extensive tests on the femur.’
‘Twenty-five years is a lot to work with.’
‘Now you’re asking another question.’
‘Am I?’
‘You want a time frame. The answer is – and this can only be an estimate based on observation – that the bones have been in the ground for more than ten years. No soft tissue remains and there’s some coarsening and discoloration that I would expect from the temperature changes of a series of summers and winters. Yet there are still traces of the candle-wax odour given out by the fat in the bone marrow, so these remains are not all that old.’
‘Between ten and twenty-five?’
‘Best I can do for you.’
‘You found the zip under the pelvis. Presumably it was a zip-fly from a pair of jeans. I’d expect someone of her age to be wearing jeans. All of the fabric had rotted away, I suppose?’
‘Completely. Nothing remained in the soil samples.’
‘The zip survived because it was metal. Wouldn’t she also have been wearing a belt?’
‘We didn’t find one. Not everyone wears one. They wear their jeans so tight that there’s really no need for a belt.’
‘If she’d had coins in her pockets, they could help.’
‘How? What could they tell you about her?’
It was Diamond’s turn to air some knowledge. ‘They show the year they were minted, don’t they? We could narrow that time frame.’
‘I’m with you now,’ Lofty said. ‘But no joy there. I checked with the crime scene people who were at the site and they found nothing else of interest. No coins, jewellery, belt buckle, shoes. Not even the hooks and eyes of a bra.’
Diamond could picture the look on Duckett’s charmless face as he announced he’d found nothing more. He thanked Lofty, put down the phone and went to look for Ingeborg. She was at her computer. He told her about the fifteen-year time frame. ‘We’re looking for a young woman aged seventeen to twenty-one who went missing between 1984 and 1999.’
She turned to look at him. ‘1987, guv.’
‘That isn’t what I said.’
‘That was the year of the great storm. October, 1987.’
‘Well?’
‘When so many trees came down. She was buried in the hollow left by a tree’s roots.’
She was bright. He wished he’d thought of that. ‘But can we be sure that tree came down then?’
She nodded. ‘I checked with the Lansdown Society.’
‘The
‘There’s a society dedicated to keeping Lansdown unspoilt. I believe they’re a mix of landowners and wildlife enthusiasts. They monitor everything up there, all the activities.’
‘And they knew about that tree?’
‘As soon as I asked.’
He raised both thumbs. ‘So the time frame comes down to twelve years. You’re a star, Ingeborg. And now you can become a megastar by checking the missing persons register for those years.’
‘I already have, guv.’
‘You’ll get a medal at this rate.’
‘Not when you hear the result. I looked at all the local counties, made a list of missing girls under twenty-five, but I’m not confident she’s on it.’
‘Can you show me?’
She worked the keyboard and four names with brief details appeared on the screen.
‘Why so few? Hundreds of people go missing.’
‘We narrowed the criteria. These are all the search gave me.’
‘So what’s the problem with them?’
‘Look at the descriptions. The first girl, Margaret Edgar, was five foot eleven and Hayley Walters was only half an inch less. Gaye Brewster had broken her left arm and had it pinned some weeks before she disappeared. That would surely have been noticed by Mr Peake. Olivia Begg was about the height of our victim, but she went in for body piercings and nothing like that was found at the site.’
‘Those rings people wear in their…?’
‘Places I’d rather not mention.’
‘The killer could have removed them. He removed the head.’
‘True, but Olivia went missing only in 1999, at the margin of our time frame, and even that’s in doubt. There was an unconfirmed sighting of her in Thailand two years later. I doubt if she’s ours.’
Diamond exhaled, a long, resigned breath. ‘I’ve got to agree with you, Inge. They’re not serious candidates. When you think about it, plenty of young women of this age leave their families and friends and quite often it doesn’t get reported because no one is alarmed. It’s their choice. They hitch up with a pop star or go travelling or end up on the game. They don’t make the list of missing persons.’
She raked her hand through her long blonde hair and clutched it to the nape of her neck. ‘So what else can we do?’
‘Ask ourselves questions about the killer. Why choose to bury the body at Lansdown?’
After a moment’s reflection she said, ‘It’s remote. He wouldn’t be noticed if he picked his time to dig the grave.’
‘True.’
‘Where the tree was uprooted the soil would be looser to work with. He’d have a ready-made hole in the ground and he could use the soft earth to cover the corpse.’
‘You’re right about that. It was buried quite deep, not the proverbial six feet under, but all of three.’
‘Deep enough.’
He nodded. ‘Most murderers don’t appreciate the difficulty of digging a grave in unsuitable ground. The body found in a shallow grave is a cliche of the trade.’
‘So he chose his spot wisely, but he’d still have to transport the body there.’
‘Well, the ground slopes down a bit, but you could drive across the field in, say, a four by four.’
‘This is looking like someone who knows Lansdown well.’
‘Either that, or he got lucky,’ Diamond said. ‘The body was undiscovered for at least ten years and probably several more. It was deep enough to avoid the interest of foxes and dogs for a long time.’
‘It was a dog that found the bone in the end,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Yes, and I wonder why, after so long. Had something happened to disturb the grave?’
‘Dogs do go digging.’
‘Not that deep. Miss Hibbert didn’t say anything about the dog burrowing. She seemed to suggest he found it
