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  He took a sip of his coffee and made a face; also a mental note to go to the supermarket on the way home.

  “The victim was a petite young woman, both in her height, which from the length of her femur I would estimate to have been approximately five-foot, but also in her bone structure; her facial bones were incredibly delicate. I’ve asked forensic anthropology to look at her bones, to see if there’s anything that might indicate that some muscles were more developed than others.”

  Forensic anthropology is a sub-field of physical anthropology, the study of human remains, that involves applying skeletal analysis and techniques in archaeology to solving criminal cases.

  Liam made a confused face. “Why would they be developed?”

  “If she was a runner or a dancer for instance, we would expect to see enlarged leg muscles in life, but with only bones to work on we need to look for what are called bony attachments or prominences being more developed than usual. Enhanced bony attachments can inform us about bulky or elongated muscles and other things like that when she was alive.”

  Craig nodded. “It could help us ID her, Liam. John, how many of her bones do you have?”

  The pathologist shook his head hopelessly. “Just her skull, ribcage, the vertebral column and one long bone, a femur, all found in that corner.” He glanced hopefully at Des. “Unless your CSIs have found us more.”

  Des glanced up from the hunched position that he’d adopted on his stool; he was a big man but had almost managed to curl himself into a ball where he sat. Craig wondered whether the posture was more comfortable for him somehow, perhaps from his years of hunching over to examine tiny samples. If so he didn’t even want to speculate about the condition of his spine.

  “They found some additional evidence scattered a little more widely at the hotel site, including a radius and ulna from a right forearm and some of the small bones of her feet and hands, so I can let you have those soon, John. I just need to check them for prints and particles first. But I haven’t heard anything from Grace yet at the city dump.”

  The pathologist gave a pragmatic nod, but the words prompted a thought from Liam.

  “So, if Kelly’s men didn’t dig down at all, that means all those small bones were just lying loose with the skull and other stuff. But surely it also means the CSIs aren’t likely to find anything at the dump, because she was buried in the floor and the rubble dumped there must have only come from the walls?”

  Craig considered the point for a moment, finally giving a half-nod. “Yes…that might be the case if they didn’t dig down at all, but we’re not certain of that yet. Also, we need to rule out any evidence that might have migrated and become embedded in the base of the walls in the past eleven years.”

  Liam screwed up his face, not convinced but with nothing useful to use to contradict him.

  John picked up his report again.

  “OK, one of the other things I did, apart from organising the forensic anthropologist and dentist, is that I enquired about having a reconstruction made of the victim’s face.”

  Three sets of eyebrows shot up but Liam was the first to speak, making a practical point.

  “Doesn’t that cost a fortune, Doc?”

  “Yes, it’s a lot, but unless we find some definitive forensic evidence to identify her, we may have to proceed with it.” He turned to Craig. “Is there a missing person that fits the bill, Marc?”

  Craig’s mouth fell open. Missing persons. He knew there was something he’d forgotten to ask Davy to do.

  Liam saw his panic and waved him down.

  “Don’t worry. I told the Boy.”

  Liam had called Davy the ‘Boy’ since he’d first joined the squad as a shy recruit in twenty-eleven, and despite him now being a soon-to-be-married grown man the D.C.I. had never let it go. Davy actually quite liked it, more so as he aged; it reassured him that compared to most of the other people around him he was still young.

  Craig’s relief was felt by everyone. “Thanks for that, Liam. I can’t believe that I missed it.”

  “Aye well. You were tangled up in all those floors.”

  A quizzical look from the others brought a quick explanation and then John restarted his report yet again.

  “I’ll give it until tomorrow afternoon, Marc, and if you’ve no match from missing persons then, I’ll get the forensic artist on the ball.”

  He took another quick sip of his coffee, this time making a face that Des didn’t miss.

  “Here now, don’t you be moaning about my coffee! That jar cost me six quid.”

  “When? Ten years ago?”

  John had been joking but to everyone’s dismay the scientist nodded yes.

  “About that. I don’t use it much. I drink tea myself.”

  Liam raised his mug smugly. “The good stuff.”

  Craig and John set their cups down, slowly sliding them away as John returned to his earlier point.

  “The thing that I can say is that we won’t need the help of the HRS. This young woman lived in modern times-”

  Craig cut in. “Did you get that from her bones? They looked very clean.”

  “That’s because they escaped the normal darkening from being exposed or buried in earth, although the skull displays a little. But actually it’s her teeth that make me say she’s modern-”

  Craig interrupted again. “But you said you couldn’t really see them. Her jaw was locked.”

  John wondered if he would ever be allowed to get his report out.

  “True, I couldn’t open her mouth, but I could look at them from behind and underneath, and I saw something that definitely wouldn’t have been around in ye olden days. A metal post. One of her upper front teeth was an implant. She’d probably knocked it out in a fall or playing games. If we’re lucky the post will yield some identifying information that could help ID her.”

  There was silence while everyone took in the information and then Des approached the woman’s likely time of death from another slant.

  “We would have known she was modern anyway because she must have died at the time the foundations of the hotel were laid, mustn’t she? And we know that was in oh-seven.”

  John shook his head. “No. As we said before, we might know that’s when she was buried there, but we can’t know that’s when she actually died. She could have been moved there from a primary burial site, although that one would’ve had to have been indoors as well, because of the condition of her bones.”

  Craig made a face. “Actually, we don’t even know that oh-seven was when she was buried at Howard Tower, John. It might have been years earlier.”

  Since Liam had explained about the floors Craig nodded him on to explain about the flooded basement as well. By the time the D.C.I. had finished, the scientists were gawping at their police counterparts. Des found his voice first.

  “You’re seriously saying that she could have been buried in the flooded basement of a government building for years, and just floated through concrete to the top where she was found this week?”

  Craig cut in.

  “We can’t answer that until we know when the basement was filled in and with what, and whether movement through that material is even possible. Davy’s checking the feasibility with a structural engineer.”

  There was a moment’s silence while the various possibilities registered on everyone, and then Craig moved on.

  “Anything on her cause of death, John?”

  The pathologist screwed up his face, still picturing his petite charge floating upwards through a sea of concrete.

  “There were no fractures on the skull or on any of the bones that I’ve got, so I can definitely say that COD wasn’t a head injury or a fat embolism from a fracture of the femur I’ve got. There was nothing on the ribcage or spinal column either, so no bullet or knife nicks suggesting shooting or stabbing. Although they’re only the possible bone injury causes of death, of course, so they tell us nothing about any possible soft tissue damage that might have happened
within.”

  “Elaborate, please.”

  “Well, for instance, the killer might have stabbed her in a major internal organ; heart, lungs or spleen so she might have died from heart or respiratory failure or haemorrhage, or they could have severed her spinal cord, causing paralysis of her respiratory nerves and suffocation. Done with skill, none of those would have left any mark on her bones.” He considered for a moment and then added. “They could have stabbed her through an eye too, I suppose, without leaving any-”

  Craig waved him down. He’d heard enough.

  “I’m sure we’ve all got the picture, John, so thanks for that.”

  Liam smirked at the slight sarcasm, its mildness reminiscent of the pre-March Craig. He wondered idly whether PMC might become shorthand for that halcyon period in future, then realised that pre-March and post-March had the same initials so he gave it up.

  John continued in a slightly huffy voice.

  “I was just giving you information. Anyway, I’ll need to do some tests to get anything further. I’m sampling her bones to get a chemical and geographic profile, just in case she came from somewhere other than here, and I’ll see if we can extract anything for DNA.”

  “Thanks.”

  Craig turned to the Head of Forensics.

  “Des, any sign of a blade or bullet in the samples your CSIs have brought in so far?”

  “I wish. It would make things simple. But no, there was nothing like that. I can tell you that she had long dark hair, and that there was something red either in her clothing or in whatever possessions she had with her. I’ve found three red fibres that seem identical, but I’ll need to get them tested for material, dye colour, etcetera. I’ll let you know when I find anything.”

  Craig nodded and then summarised where they’d got to. “OK, so we have a young woman, perhaps even a teenager. Small stature, fine facial bones and long dark hair, who died from a so far unknown cause at some point either in two-thousand-and-seven or a few years before that judging from the modern dental post, and was buried, either as the primary or secondary burial site, in a building either when it was publically owned by the government or the Howard Tower Hotel owned and opened in two-thousand-and-seven by The Barr Group. Is that about it so far?”

  John hemmed and hawed whether to add something else and decided that he probably should.

  “I don’t think she died much before two-thousand-and-seven.”

  Des frowned at him. “We’ve no evidence for that yet!”

  But Craig seized on his best friend’s words, sitting forward eagerly. “Tell me why.”

  The pathologist was already half-regretting that he’d said anything, but he brazened it out, giving a very unlike him, almost cavalier, shrug.

  “I could say that I feel she was a modern woman, but that’s only part of it, I just think that dental post is too sophisticated to have been inserted a long time ago, and by a long time I mean even as far back as the millennium. From the front the tooth looks perfect, and the post’s metal is still bright... well, like I said, I’m not a dentist so I can’t be sure, but... just call it a hunch.”

  “OK. We won’t rule it out, but for now we investigate by the book.”

  Craig drummed his fingers along the bench he was sitting beside for a moment then he stood up, speaking again.

  “By tomorrow we’ll hopefully have whatever other forensic evidence there is to retrieve from the city dump, some additional information on her country of origin, muscular development if any and dentition, and if no-one matches on missing persons John will reconstruct her face. You’ll get that description across to Davy, John, with Des’ hair colour and likely red dress?”

  The pathologist nodded.

  Craig knew they’d got much as they were going to for now. Meanwhile, he had an appointment in court and Liam had work to check, and most important of all that evening he had a personal call to make.

  ****

  The City Dump.

  Grace Adeyemi never swore; because of a promise that she’d made to her mother thirty years earlier, and because it didn’t fit with her image of a good Christian woman, which she firmly believed that she was. Or at least she’d been attempting to be one for three decades, which was why she’d originally promised her mother never to swear, but today that pledge was proving a mountainous challenge for her.

  The senior CSI hunkered back on her heels and partly unzipped her once-white forensic suit, now stained a grubby grey from the stony detritus of the building site and blotched with patches of murky unnamed substances with stenches that were beginning to make her feel sick, all of them acquired in her search for their victim’s missing bones.

  She rested even further back on her heels to take a breather, but also to recall the fateful day that she had decided not to swear. It had been on a summer holiday home to Nigeria, where her western city impatience had exposed itself when the family car had got caught behind a man strolling cheerfully down the centre of their village main street with his dog. Her building teenage annoyance at having to leave her friends behind in Glasgow to visit her grandparents had vented itself on the hapless villager, his slow pace of life resulting in her rolling down the car’s passenger window and calling him a “stupid git”.

  Whether the man’s shock or her grandmother’s had been greater Grace couldn’t remember, but no-one had spoken a single word to her for a week, condemning her to eat and sit in silence. She had never forgotten the shame, but it had taught her that not only were impatience and rudeness always unacceptable, so was expecting anyone else to see the world in the way that you did.

  Which was why, as well as taking a breather, she was mentally counting to ten at the agonising slowness of the junior CSI working by her side. She could have pushed the youth aside and done his work in a third of the time, but then she would be behaving exactly as she had once done to the strolling man.

  As it happened Grace’s forbearance was about to pay dividends, as the young man suddenly turned to her with an extended palm and a stunned look on his face. In his hand lay the piece of evidence that would help John Winter ascertain how their victim had been murdered, and tell Craig that the motive had been very personal.

  ****

  Laganside Courts. Oxford Street, Belfast. 6 p.m.

  Craig didn’t know whether to laugh or swear about the afternoon that he’d just spent, being asked inane and sometimes blatantly bizarre questions by Rowan Drake, every one of them a ploy to show that the police had been guilty of some corruption in order to trigger a mistrial, but all failing to demonstrate that they had even misspelt his name.

  By the time he exited the courtroom, all but the most diehard journalist and civic minded citizen in the public gallery had gone, so he was surprised when he heard a soft click of heels behind him in the foyer and a voice that he recognised calling out his name. He turned to see Maggie Clarke, the news editor of The Belfast Chronicle and his senior analyst’s fiancée struggling to prevent a sheaf of paper tumbling from her arms on to the marble floor and hurried to help her, smiling quizzically at her being there. The journalist read his mind.

  “I’m writing a book on the Drake case, remember?”

  “Sorry, yes, I remember now. Are you here every day?”

  She gave him a martyred look. “Every single one of them. I think I’m even here in my dreams. It’s never ending.”

  They were walking through the courts’ deserted reception and out onto Oxford Street, when Craig’s phone started to buzz.

  “Sorry, Maggie, I have to take this.”

  She smiled her understanding and began walking towards her car.

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  The detective knew that he should reply but he was too transfixed by the number on the screen; not the answer-phone’s, calling him back now, but the missed call number that said Katy had actually been in touch. Knowing that the voice message had to be from her he pressed to listen, realising suddenly that the nervous feeling he had wasn’t, as it wou
ld have been in the past, excitement at hearing her voice, but trepidation at what she might say. Her recorded words did nothing to calm his dread.

  “We need to meet and talk, Marc. Could you let me know if Friday evening suits, please.”

  He would make it suit, although he was less and less sure what to say to her for the best. He’d proposed marriage so many times that he was bored by the words, “Will you marry me?” but where else could he go from there?

  Just as he texted back “yes” another call came through, one that promised far fewer complications. It was Liam with an update, so Craig did what he always did when emotions became too much trouble; he suggested to his deputy that they meet at The James in ten minutes, where he could bury his personal problems under a ton of work and a pint.

  ****

  The C.C.U. Tuesday. 9.40 a.m.

  If possible, Craig’s mood was even worse than it had been the day before and, while the squad could speculate about the possible causes of it, Katy and Drake’s court-case being Top of The Pops, no-one was prepared to take the risk of actually asking him why.

  Which was why Liam, instead of his usual, “Morning, boss” upon arrival decided to have a confab with Aidan Hughes instead. They’d exchanged a look the day before that suggested the other might have some useful ideas to sort Craig out, so as soon as he’d ascertained the state of Craig’s mood from Nicky, Liam sidled across to the D.C.I.’s desk.

  He stood looking down at the ex-Vice cop for a moment, fascinated by the way he was shovelling peanuts into his mouth. Aidan had given up a thirty-year smoking habit five months before and had taken to eating for six instead. Strangely it hadn’t made him gain any weight which made Liam envious; he only had to look at a cake and it had set up home on his paunch and invited its mates to move in as well.

  He decided to ask the secret.

  “How come you’re not the size of a house, Hughes?”

  Aidan mumbled his reply through a mouthful of nuts, “Gym.” When he’d swallowed them he elaborated, “I joined in March ’cos I knew I’d put on weight once I gave up smoking, and now I go three nights a week.”