The Doll's House - [5]

They had searched the Police National Computer and made the customary missing persons enquiries, but had come up with nothing. So Helen had decided to head straight to the police mortuary to see if Jim could throw any light on who she was and how she had come to this.

‘She’s been starved,’ Jim offered as his opening salvo. He was not without compassion, but he was to the point, years of service and hundreds of corpses having eroded his desire to engage in pleasantries. ‘Her stomach has shrunk to the size of an orange, bone strength has been compromised and I found traces of non-edible objects – wood, cotton, even metal – in her digestive system.’

Helen nodded.

‘I’ve more work to do, but so far I can find no obvious cause of death. The neck and vertebrae are intact, there are no bullet or knife wounds, no signs of manual or ligature strangulation either, so for now we’ll assume that she starved to death.’

‘Jesus.’

‘This would fit with a few other things I’ve observed. Her skin has a grey, leathery quality – even where it has been well preserved – and her eyes have deteriorated markedly. I would say she was virtually blind by the end. Also, bloods show that she had a total absence of vitamin D in her system.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Taken all together it suggests that she was kept in total darkness in the final weeks or even months of her life.’

Helen couldn’t find words to express her horror this time. Had this young woman starved to death in a lightless hell?

‘Anything else?’ Helen said quickly.

‘You’ll note the tattoo – a bluebird on the right shoulder – done sometime in the last three to five years. Also, the pitting around the groin area. Looks like historic evidence of an STI – I would hazard molluscum contagiosum, but I’ll confirm when I’ve done more tests.’

‘How long has she been buried?’

‘Hard to say with any real accuracy. As you can see, the body has started to decompose. Skeletalization is about thirty per cent complete but there is still plenty of skin remaining and the hair is largely intact. Heat speeds up decomposition, cold slows it down and it was pretty chilly down there. So I would estimate two to four years.’

Helen exhaled – those parameters were too broad for her liking.

‘But I do have something else that might help,’ Jim continued. Turning, he offered Helen a small metal bowl. Helen peered into it – a small, electronic device lay inside.

‘Your victim had a heart condition. This is her pacemaker,’ Jim explained, wiping rust and dried blood off the unit, ‘complete with manufacturer’s logo and serial number.’

Helen mustered a half-smile: finally some good news.

‘Run that serial number down,’ Jim continued ‘and you’ve got your girl.’

9

DC Sanderson approached the flat in Millbrook with a heavy heart. Increasingly this was her lot in life – sweeping up the cases that no one else in the Major Incident Team wanted. Helen, Lloyd and a number of the others had been out at Carsholt, doing the interesting stuff. What had they left her? A glorified missing-persons case. She didn’t blame Helen, who had always treated her fairly and encouraged her as a fellow female officer. No, she laid the blame squarely at Lloyd Fortune’s door, who she felt favoured the new DCs over her. It wasn’t fair – she was more experienced, knew Southampton better than these blow-ins – but station politics is a fickle business.

The interior of the flat didn’t improve her mood. It was amazing what landlords could get away with these days, now that no one could actually afford to buy a property. The one-bed flat was cramped and unprepossessing. Damp hugged the ceiling, the windows were ill-fitting and draughty and she was sure there were things living behind the skirting boards. Or perhaps dying. The whole place smelt of decay.

Still it was someone’s home and the tenant – Ruby Sprackling – was somebody’s daughter. Alison, her mother, flanked by her worried husband, Jonathan, paced the floor. Tears were not far off, so Sanderson decided to press on and get as much info as she could.

‘There have been a lot of… issues over the last couple of years, but she wouldn’t take off like this,’ Alison was saying. ‘She was due to move back into the family home next week, we’d been talking about it for months, we’d made arrangements…’

‘Could she have got cold feet?’

‘No’ was the swift response, although Sanderson detected a hint of doubt. She was also intrigued by the fact that the stony-faced husband had not said a word.

‘You said that she had been in contact with her birth mother recently?’ Sanderson continued.

‘Not recently, but on and off during the last two years.’ Ruby’s father was keen to talk about this topic. ‘She was a terrible influence,’ he said further, ‘got her into drugs, skipping school, there was trouble with the police. Ruby completely ballsed up her A-Levels because of that bloody woman.’

A sharp look from Alison made him rein in his anger. He ceased his rant but was unrepentant. He knew what he thought of Shanelle Harvey and wasn’t minded to change his opinion. His promising daughter had gone completely off the rails in the last year, prompting furious bust-ups and recriminations within the family – all because of an innocent and well-intentioned desire to create a bond with her biological mother.