cracks that ran from the eye socket up towards the crown of the head.
‘Here’s a better image of the top of her head – see the way the fractures waver across the bone?’
We nodded.
‘That’s a sign that she was already dead when the injuries happened. A post-mortem fracture has these crumbly edges – it’s like snapping a biscuit in two. You won’t get a clean line. If you’re alive, the break will be straight because the bone has more give in it. Think of snapping a piece of chocolate. You get a straight edge.’
‘I’d rather not think about food in this context,’ Derwent said. ‘If you don’t mind.’
‘Really?’ Dr Early looked surprised. ‘I always think the biscuit and chocolate analogy works for juries. Everyone can visualise it.’
‘It’s very helpful,’ I said and she beamed.
‘The other thing is the colour of the break. See how it’s lighter than the rest of the bone? Definitely post-mortem. What I can’t tell you is how she acquired the injuries. It could have been accidental. Dead bodies are really hard to manipulate – dead weight is a bugger to move around, no matter how strong you are or how small the victim is. So he could have dropped her a few times or whacked her into a doorway without meaning to hurt her.’
‘When he was finished with her he didn’t care any more,’ I said, and something in my voice made Derwent turn to look at me with a raised eyebrow. Dr Early didn’t seem to notice.
‘Probably not. She became a problem. Something to be dumped, not cherished.’
‘Cherished is an odd word to use. He killed her,’ Derwent said.
‘Mm, but how he killed her is the point. No nicks or marks on the bones, so almost certainly not stabbing – she had no defence wounds on the bones we recovered from her hands and arms either. Her hyoid bone is intact, which strongly suggests she wasn’t strangled. I think she was asphyxiated. It doesn’t take long to starve the brain of oxygen and achieve loss of consciousness so she would have had minimal opportunity to fight back and harm herself. I think he smothered her not long after he kidnapped her.’
The muscle was flickering in Derwent’s jaw. ‘Where’s the fun in that?’
‘That’s not a question I can answer,’ Dr Early said seriously. ‘But I think it’s worth looking at Willa Howard in more detail.’
I had been strenuously avoiding looking at Willa Howard in any detail at all. There was something more unsettling about the images of her, probably because she was more recognisably herself than her sister in death. The flesh had melted away from her body but there was still skin on her bones, and much of her hair had survived, spread out around her in straw-like profusion. She was lying on her front with her head turned to one side, her hands by her sides, palm up.
‘Willa was over here.’ Dr Early pointed to another squiggle on the map, further away from the hide. ‘When you visit the site you’ll see why she was found first – the body was in the lee of a fallen tree. A visitor to the site decided the tree would make a great vantage point for a picture, even though it was off the path. He stumbled over her.’
‘Jesus,’ Derwent muttered.
‘It must have been quite a shock,’ Dr Early agreed. ‘Luckily for him she was quite advanced in decomposition. The worst part – from the point of view of smell and maggots and so forth – is between four and twenty days after death. The gases build up inside the body. Once the abdominal wall is breached the body deflates and starts to dry out and most of the insect activity is from beetles, mites – that kind of thing. She was well into this stage when she was found in the first week of December, which was some five weeks after she disappeared.’
‘So you think she was killed straight away as well.’
‘It seems possible. But unlike Sara, she did have some injuries we can see. This is an X-ray of her skull – see the missing tooth at the front, here? That was broken off around the time of her death. The root is still there.’
‘Sara was missing teeth too,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes, but we recovered them. They became dislodged from the jaw after the gum deteriorated, once there was nothing holding them in place. Willa’s was snapped off and we didn’t find the tooth.’
‘It doesn’t rule out asphyxiation, does it?’
‘Not at all. We don’t know what method he employed but he may have needed to use more force on Willa. She was a little taller and heavier than Sara.’
‘And she was angry. She’d been drinking and arguing with her boyfriend.’ I could imagine her, her body humming with adrenalin and fear, lashing out at Leo Stone because how dare he attack her …
‘There was the blood on the plastic in the cupboard,’ Derwent said. ‘That had to come from somewhere.’
‘Probably this injury, or a nosebleed. Something like that. Unfortunately we did lose a certain amount of detail to decomposition before she was found.’ Dr Early peered at the X-ray as if it would reveal something new to her. ‘There are three things, really, that I wanted to draw to your attention. One: Dr Hanshaw also concluded that the women were asphyxiated and there’s nothing to contradict his assertion. As I said, without being able to see the physical manifestations of asphyxia – the pinpoint haemorrhages and so forth – it’s a case of excluding other modes of death. We are left with asphyxia as the most likely method of murder, as it’s relatively non-violent.’
‘Unless he poisoned them,’ Derwent said.
‘I know you’re joking but we did test for poisons. We tested their bone marrow and their hair, and it’s the hair that’s the second thing I want to talk about.’
‘What about it?’
‘Look at the condition of Willa Howard’s hair compared to how it was in life.’
‘Being dead isn’t great for your looks, as I understand it,’ Derwent said.
‘No, but it doesn’t change the consistency of your hair so quickly,’ Dr Early countered.
Willa’s hair had been long, smooth and thick. Every witness in the bar had commented on it. I frowned at the dry, frizzed-out thatch that covered her scalp. It was orange-tinged and it had snapped off in several places, leaving the ends uneven. ‘It looks as if it was bleached.’
‘That’s exactly what happened. She was soaked in bleach. I’d guess her entire body was immersed in bleach at least once if not more.’
‘To eradicate evidence?’
‘Maybe. Or to try to slow decomposition. The third thing about these bodies is the most interesting, at least to me. The women seem to have died relatively quickly after they were kidnapped, but they weren’t dumped in the nature reserve for a significant period of time after their deaths.’
‘How significant are we talking?’ Derwent asked.
‘Weeks. Maybe more in the case of Sara Grey. And I know that because of the insect activity I mentioned earlier. Dr Hanshaw got a forensic entomologist to sample insect life from the bodies
