The Accomplice

  Zita looked at the hand nearest to her, lying on the table, the bones of the thumb curved in under the very slight angle made by the arrangement of the metatarsals and phalanges. She resisted an impulse to lift it, to take it in her own hand. “I suppose,” she said tentatively, “the really important question is how long has it been there.”

  Dr Pigot was now standing at the foot end of the table, his hands in his pockets, his conjuring of information from bones was over. “That’s easy,” he said. “A long time.”

  Zita waited for an elaboration. “How long is long? How long does it take for a body to decay to a skeleton?”

  “Well, that depends, as scientists always say. It depends on the conditions of burial, as you can imagine: the length of time the body is in the air between death and inhumation, whether there is a coffin or not, whether there is a shroud or clothes, all these things have a bearing. A coffin with plenty of air and woodshavings or vegetable matter, straw or hay, makes for faster putrefaction. The flesh liquefies and the bones are freed very quickly, in say a year. If, on the other hand, a body is put into the ground without a coffin and with clothes on, it will be preserved for a surprisingly long time, especially if the ground is free draining and well tamped down: no oxygen, no water, you see.” He was leaning with the heels of both hands on the edge of the table, bending slightly over the skeleton as he talked, a man thoroughly at home.

  “Shall I tell you how I know all this? It is all real experience, y’know. Not book learning. We had National Service in my day and I did mine straight after the war in Germany. It was what decided me to go in for medicine, and for pathology at that. I was part of a team investigating war crimes: not finding the criminals; finding the crimes. We dug up bodies to investigate illegal deaths of various sorts. Strange, isn’t it, that after all that mass slaughter, the Blitz, Auschwitz, Dresden, Katyn, there were teams of people going meticulously round to find out how and why the crew of a Polish bomber or a troop of partisans lost their lives.”

  Zita noticed how much more fluently he talked as he relived his youth, losing the habitual hesitation of English professional speech. The past spoke through him; he became its mouthpiece. She could see a thinner, more youthful, Pigot, still essentially the same, applying the same enthusiasm and dispassionate interest to the dreadful task he had been given, able to abandon thought of the human beings who had been shot, tortured, murdered and betrayed, in order to observe the rates of decomposition and what accelerated them. She could imagine the group of English squaddies digging in the sandy soil of the north European plain, uncovering the pits of bodies, neatly stacked like a log pile, or tumbled untidily where they had fallen, shot, into the graves they had dug themselves. She recalled news items that she had read some years ago about the most famous of those mass forest graves, at Katyn. The victims there had been Polish Army officers, thousands of them, shot in the back of the neck by the Russians. She imagined an overview of Europe, a sort of moral satellite photograph of the fields and forests from Berlin to Moscow with the secret graves burning red, like the aerial photographs used by archaeologists to make the earth reveal the past buried below. And where had the Balts been in all this? Had they been the instruments, the accomplices, of the Germans, or had they been victims too?

  “We spent our time digging up the war. Mass graves of Jews and Poles, buried in thin German coffins with rhomboid lids. They had almost entirely gone, melted away. The single grave of a British pilot buried in woodland in all his clothes with a bullet hole in the back of his neck. Now he was in a remarkable state of preservation. Two and a half years on and his friends would have known him at once, no problem. The clothes protect the corpse, you see, prevent the entry of insects, absorb water, encourage good saponification, adipocere formation. You know what that is?”

  Zita confessed that she did not. “Very little criminal work,” she explained, when he looked as if everyone ought to be familiar with adipocere.

  “It’s the transformation of the water and fat of the body into a wax-like substance of fatty acids. The hydrogenation takes place on the fatty parts of the body through the action of enzymes.” Pigot seemed pleased with the opportunity to talk about a subject which he still found fascinating forty years on.

  “And had adipocere formed on this child?”

  “This one? No, or at least if it had it was all rotted away. Strange, that, because it was buried directly in the earth. There was no sign of a coffin or a box that had rotted and collapsed around it. Adipocere can only form if there was sufficient body fat in the first place: women and obese men are best. Perhaps this was a skinny child. Many prepubertal children have a very low ratio of fat to body weight, especially boys.”

  Zita thought of Tom’s twig-like limbs and his torso with its scaffolding of bone visible through almost transparent skin. He was so thin because he could not eat normal food, living on pureed pap which he swallowed with resentment and difficulty.

  “So,” she summarized in her orderly fashion, “it is a child, possibly a boy, about seven years old, of Caucasian origin.” She hesitated. “When was he buried?”

  Pigot rubbed his head behind his right ear, roughly. “There you have me. I couldn’t say at all. The skeleton was very well arranged, to judge from the photographs that the archaeologists took. No bone tumble. The bones are not much worn, you can see that. But whether we are talking about ten years, twenty years, fifty years, I couldn’t say. Skeleton cases presented to us like this are relatively rare in police work, y’see. Usually we are looking for a body or signs of a body. Bits of flesh and blood stains, OK, but a complete corpse with no meat, that’s another matter. I don’t think I’ve seen one like this since I was in Germany in ’46. There are several lines to follow. Reskimer and I will share them out. A very good fellow, Reskimer. I worked with him once before, about five years ago. We can take cross-sections of bone and look at the development of fungal growth. That could tell us something. There are other tests too, thin-layer chromatology and ultra-violet fluorescence may help. I hope Reskimer’s excavations may give us something from the earth levels, root growth, that sort of thing. We’ll have to find out very straightforward facts, like when the rose bed was planted. Reskimer may come up with something simple and conclusive from the debris, like a button or a bit of metal off the clothing that is easily datable. Otherwise, perhaps carbon dating, which is a bit out of my field. The thing about these tests is that one by itself is not going to tell you anything conclusive, but running several should give us a ten- or twenty-year time frame.”

  Zita could not imagine Stevens being satisfied with this scientific reluctance to prejudge the facts. “And what have you told the police? Presumably, the age of the skeleton is crucial for them. Either it falls into the category of a crime to be pursued or not.”

  Pigot’s fluency had dried up again. He spoke once more with the mumbling of the educated Englishman. “Well, as to that, Stevens seems pretty sure, from other evidence, that it is a recent case.”

  “Recent? How can it be? You’ve just said that a body without a coffin and dressed in clothes decays more slowly than most. That must put it, what, fifty years back?”

  “Oh, no,” said Pigot unhappily. “I couldn’t say categorically fifty years. It could be much less.”

  “Did you give him a figure?” Zita persisted.

  “No, I wouldn’t commit myself. But I had to agree, when he said could it be thirty-two years, that it could. It’s very difficult once you get to arguing about twenty or thirty years. I can tell you straightaway this child is not a hundred years old. Bones that have been in the earth that long have discoloured much more than this; and their texture is quite different, they lose their mineral content and become lighter, more friable. These are too sturdy to be that old.”

  Zita let it go at that. “We’ve been talking as if it were a crime we were dealing with. There is no possibility that this is a plague victim or accident or something else?”

  Pigot would be no m
ore definite on that subject. “The cause of death of a skeleton is not always obvious, but that hole in the back of the skull makes a fairly convincing claim. It must have been done with some heavy, pointed instrument, but whether it was deliberate or accidental, pathology won’t reveal.”

  “But if it was an accident, why was he buried where he was?”

  “Exactly, so the presumption remains murder.”

  * * *

  That evening was Zita’s quintet night. Lynne was able to go home at her usual time and Valentina stayed to baby-sit. Yevgenia was to come round after dinner to spend the evening with her. Zita left home thankfully. She ought to have cancelled this evening’s meeting, but rearranging was always difficult and unpopular with her fellow players, and she often found that problems that had entangled themselves in impenetrable knots during the day, loosened themselves as she played and that, the following day, they were more easily disentangled. There was something about a strings ensemble, she thought as they were tuning their instruments at the start, that was physically as well as emotionally releasing. Violinists and cellists toss and sway in unison, like tree tops or waves in the wind, the music or their instruments carrying them with them into motion, so that in the more vigorous or romantic moments of Tchaikovsky she felt as if they were all five of them in a little boat in a storm at sea, their music the wind that sang in their ears and swept the air and water around them. When eventually, more or less successfully, they reached the end, she felt as if she had been rescued and was climbing ashore, at the same time purged and healed.

  The most important thing she had learned that day, she realized in the car on the way home, was of Stevens’ conviction that the skeleton was thirty-two years old. Why thirty-two years? What had happened thirty-two years ago that he could be so specific?

  11

  Valentina left the following day to return to Oxford to install herself in her new flat and to immerse herself in academic life. She departed professing that the holiday had done her a great deal of good, that she felt refreshed and renewed. Her daughter, on the other hand, felt diminished by the visit and said goodbye with a feeling, she hoped well enough hidden, of relief. Valentina had made no more reproaches about her way of life and the overshadowing past, although Zita was conscious that her opinion had undergone no change during her stay. She had half-hoped that Valentina would say something more on the subject so that she would be able to voice the angry responses that she had thought of, later. But she did not feel so secure of her innocence of the charges against her that she could reopen the debate herself.

  However, she was softened towards her mother, touched by her efforts towards Tom, who had enjoyed her company. She had wondered, a little unkindly, whether they had been made partly to annoy Lynne. For whatever reason, Valentina had spent several hours each afternoon with her grandson and his computer. Zita was not sure what they did together, though she could see that it stimulated Tom who had enacted none of his thrashing rages during the visit. Valentina had made no comment about him, apart from saying that he was much more numerate than Zita had ever been. With his grandmother’s departure Tom withdrew into frustration.

  “It’ll take a long time to settle him down again after her,” Lynne said with gloomy pleasure.

  Tom refused to exercise his normal methods of communication, the eye-signals that conveyed yes and no, the eye-pointing in answer to questions that allowed him to indicate his choice of food and clothes. In the evenings he would not sleep and he and his mother were often locked in wordless wrangles which exhausted both of them. Zita wondered whether her obsessive interest in the discovery of a child’s body, buried secretly in a garden, was a case of wish fulfilment.

  She was wearing her co-respondent shoes when she went to see Stevens later that week, put on to cheer herself up after an early morning battle with Tom. If she had realized then how much he disliked her, she thought afterwards, she might have chosen a different pair. She gave clothes an importance that was almost superstitious. She rationalized this by saying to herself that what one wore delivered messages subliminally, that even the most obtuse, unintuitive of people picked up, without knowing it, and translated into associations. The trick was to know yourself the message you were conveying, otherwise you were like Tom, relaying misconstrued messages. She had chosen the shoes for herself; she had not thought of their significance to a policeman. She was sure that it was the co-respondent shoes that did for her with Stevens. Or perhaps they were simply a magnet, drawing out his general dislike of women? of lawyers? of women lawyers? of dark-haired women? or his particular loathing of Zita herself.

  She had telephoned to make an appointment which had been conceded, but only grudgingly, so she was not surprised to be told that the Superintendent was out when she arrived at his chosen time. She settled herself to wait, which she was obliged to do for some twenty minutes or so until he arrived in a flurry of papers and assistants, and for a further ten minutes until he was ready to see her. Once they were seated opposite one another in his box-like office he went straight to the point.

  “You want to know about the body at Asshe House and what we are doing about it? I told you on the phone that we have set up an incident room and have assigned two officers to work on the case under my supervision. They have already interviewed Mr and Mrs Loftus, your clients in London, and we are seeing the previous occupant very soon.”

  “I understand from Dr Pigot that poor Yorick, the skeleton, could have been there for a hundred years,” she said.

  Stevens’ eyes were cold and grey, unfriendly in his massive, hairless skull. The texture of his scalp looked like suede; Zita wondered what it would feel like to the finger tips.

  “I follow your literary references, Ms Daunsey, there’s no need to translate for me.” Zita, who detested being called Ms, registered her error and his sneering response without displaying any reaction. She tucked her feet under her chair and cursed Pigot whose foolish nickname she had taken over. “Yes,” he went on, “it could be a hundred years old, that skeleton; it could be thirty and the person who bashed the child’s skull could still be walking the streets of Broad Woodham.”

  “I simply wondered whether police time and money were being used in what might well be a wild goose chase.”

  “What would you rather we do with police time, investigate a murder, albeit an old one, or chase parking offenders?”

  She did not shift her gaze and their eyes locked. He was in his mid-fifties, she reckoned, a blunt, irritable man, not stupid, with a slow-burning anger that fuelled his energy. Underpromoted, unfaithful wife, unreasonable boss, ungrateful children, overwork, money worries; she wondered what it was that gave him the air of melancholy. Or perhaps it was not ingrained; perhaps it was she who provoked it. The silence lengthened while she debated whether her ends would be best served by being aggressive or placatory. She did not have to choose, for he said suddenly, “In 1988 a child’s body was discovered in Yorkshire, or rather a child’s skeleton, dug up by a dog. The father was convicted of murder more than twenty-five years after the crime was committed. You may have heard of the case.”

  “Yes,” said Zita reluctantly. She remembered something about it: the use of archaeological evidence had set a precedent for British courts.

  “There is no reason why a murder thirty years old should not be solved and properly solved with a conviction and sentence in the courts. The past should have its justice.” He paused, staring abstractedly at the floor in front of his desk, at her co-respondent shoes. “In any case, it is not such a random search as you imply. This body may be a child I’ve been looking for for thirty years and more.”

  “You mean you’ve known all along who it is?”

  “No.” His humour had improved. “No, I don’t know. I just have a case in mind.” He shifted some papers on the desk, leaving the pile marginally more disorganized than before.

  “What is this case? Could it really have anything to do with Asshe House?”

  �
�A Saturday evening in October 1960. A small boy went to buy some sweets and a comic from the newsagent in the corner of the Square, St Michael’s Square. Dandy or Beano were the comics they used to sell then, or Eagle. And the sweets, you’re too young to remember them, liquorice Catherine wheels, sherbet fountains, love hearts. He went to buy them on his bike, though he didn’t live far away, in a row of cottages in Ormond Street; they’ve been pulled down since. We like to think it was a safe world in those days; kids could ride their bikes, walk the streets, go to school, to the shop and no harm would come to them. But it wasn’t a safe world, not for this child. He set out about five; it was getting dark, cycling along the pavement under the street lights. He got to the sweet shop all right. It’s gone, that shop. It’s the travel agent’s now, do you see, on the corner with Flood Street, opposite your offices. He bought a Beano and a packet of sweets, Refreshers I think they were, and set off home. But he never arrived. And we never found his body. The bike was found in the river. Eddie Cresacre was his name. Seven years old, a well-grown lad, open, chatty, not timid. He would talk to anyone and he clearly did.”