way, once reports from the experts started thumping on to her desk.
‘Dr Rosa Kane,’ she said. ‘Do you know anything about her?’
The list of accredited experts and consultants had recently been updated. Someone had wielded a new broom and put his own stamp on the list, bringing in people with fresh ideas.
‘Not a thing,’ said Hitchens. ‘But we have an appointment to meet her tomorrow.’
Fry took note of the ‘we’. She made a show of writing down Dr Kane’s details before handing back the card. If the psychologist turned out to be fat and forty, or a wizened old academic with grey hair in a bun, Fry suspected that she’d become the liaison officer, not Hitchens.
She stood up and moved to the window. The view of Edendale from the first floor wasn’t inspiring. There were rooftops and more rooftops, sliding down the slopes to her right, almost obscuring the hills in the distance, where the late afternoon sun hung over banks of trees.
Whoever had designed E Division’s headquarters in the 1950s hadn’t been too worried about aesthetics. Or convenience either. The public were deterred from visiting West Street by the prospect of an exhausting slog up the hill, and the lack of parking spaces. Because of its location, Fry missed the sensation of normal life going on outside the door. There had
always been that feeling when she served in the West Midlands - though maybe not since they’d started building their police stations like fortresses.
‘You haven’t finished the transcript,’ said Hitchens.
‘I think I’ll wait for the tape, sir, if you don’t mind.’
‘There isn’t much more, Diane. You might as well finish it.’
Fry bit her lip until the pain focused her mind. Of course, even in Derbyshire, all the darkest sides of human experience were still there, hidden beneath the stone roofs and lurking among the hills. This was the smiling and beautiful countryside, after all.
The transcript was still in her hand. Holding it to the light from the window, she turned over to the last page. The DI was right - there were only three more paragraphs. The caller still wasn’t giving anything away about himself. But she could see why somebody had thought of calling in a psychologist.
Detective Constable Ben Cooper watched the dead woman’s face turn slowly to the left. Now her blank eyes seemed to stare past his shoulder, into the fluorescent glare of the laboratory lights. The flesh was muddy brown, her hair no more than a random pattern against her skull, like the swirls left in sand by a retreating tide.
Cooper was irrationally disappointed that she didn’t look the way he’d imagined her. But then, he’d never known her when she was alive. He didn’t know the woman now, and had no idea of her name. She was dead, and had already returned to the earth.
But he’d formed a picture of her in his mind, an image created from the smallest of clues - her height, her racial origins, an estimate of her age. He knew she had a healed fracture in her left forearm. She’d given birth at least once, and had particularly broad shoulders for a female. She’d also been dead for around eighteen months.
There had been plenty of unidentified bodies found in the Peak District during Cooper’s twelve years with Derbyshire Constabulary. Most of them had been young people, and most of them suicides. In E Division, they were generally found oon after death, unless they were dragged from one of the reservoirs. But this woman had been neither.
In profile, the face was cruelly lit. Shadows formed under the cheekbones and in the eye sockets. Creases at the corners of the eyes were picked out clearly in the lights. He could see now that it was a face with a lot of character, marked by life and formed by experience. A woman in her early forties. Someone’s daughter, and someone’s mother.
But the human remains found by walkers in the woods at Ravensdale had lain there a long time, exposed to the weather and the attention of scavengers. The body had decomposed beyond recognition. It had begun to disappear under the growth of moss and lichen, its shape concealed by the blades of coarse grass that had grown through the eyes of the skull.
The head continued to rotate. It travelled through three hundred and sixty degrees, revealing the back of the neck then the opposite profile, finally coming to a halt facing forward again.
‘What about the eyes?’ said Cooper. ‘Are those her proper eyes?’
‘We’ll try a couple of different colours. Blue and brown, perhaps.’
Suzi Lee had cropped dark hair and long, slender hands. She was a forensic artist who worked with the Pathology department at Sheffield University. Cooper watched her fingers stroke the sides of the reconstructed head, as if feeling for the shape of the skull that lay beneath the clay.
‘Blue and brown? We don’t know which?’
‘The eyes are one of the first parts of the body to decompose. There’s no way we can tell what colour they were in life.’
7
‘It was a silly question,’ said Cooper.
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘OK. Here’s another one, then - just how accurate is this reconstruction?’
‘Well, like the eyes, the appearance of the nose and mouth can’t be predicted with any confidence, so they’re largely guesswork. If I use a wig for her hair, that will be a stab in the dark, too. But the overall shape of the head is pretty accurate. That’s the foundation for a person’s physical appearance. It’s all a question of bone structure and tissue depth. Look at these ‘
She showed him a series of photographs of the skull, first with tissue depth markers glued to the landmark locations, then with a plasticine framework built up around them. The numbers of the markers still showed through the plasticine like a strange white rash.
‘Let’s hope it’s good enough to jog someone’s memory, anyway,’ said Cooper.
‘I take it this is a last resort?’ said Lee. ‘Facial reconstruction usually is.’
‘The clothes found with the body had no identification. There was no jewellery, or other possessions. And no
