Page 29 of The Family Remains

19

June 2019

Samuel

‘Hi Saffron.’

‘Hi, Sam. Results are back. Can you talk?

I grimace a little. I don’t like to be called Sam. But I like Saffron very much, so I let it pass.

‘Sure.’ I put my sandwich back into its paper container and touch my lips with a paper towel. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Well, looks like our girl was roughly twenty-seven to thirty-three years old. Five foot two. Small build. That’s the easy bit.’

‘OK,’ I say. ‘What’s the difficult bit?’

‘Dichotomous results re the condition of the bones. It looks like they may only have been in the water for a relatively shortamount of time. A few months. Maybe a year. But the bones themselves are at least twenty years old. Probably closer to twenty-five.’

‘So …’ I pause, unable to locate the second half of the question as I’m still pondering the first.

‘So, it looks like the bones had been stored somewhere for a very long time. And then moved. We found traces of foliage in the plastic bag. Traces of cobweb. Some insect matter. That’s all being tested now, separately. We should have results in an hour or so. There were a couple of other things.’

‘Yes?’

‘Bunions. The female had bunions. And signs of wear in the knee joints. The sort of wear and tear often seen in intensively trained dancers, ballerinas. Could be something to explore? And also, some fabric fibres. Possibly from whatever the bones had been wrapped up in before they were transferred to the plastic bag. You never know. They might yield something we can use. Particularly if it’s an unusual fibre.’

‘Any signs of what might have been the cause of death?’

‘There’s that slight fracture to the left side of the skull, on the temporal.’

‘Caused by?’

She pauses briefly and I hear her exhale her breath. ‘Blunt force trauma.’

I close my eyes and sigh. ‘So – an act of violence?’

‘Yes. I would say that with ninety-nine per cent certainty.’

I feel the weight of this land hard on my shoulders. We are now officially dealing with a murder case. A murder case with barely any physical or circumstantial evidence.

But on the plus side, time is not of the essence. Whoever this poor woman was, she’s been dead for over twenty years. I can take my time. Nobody breathing down my neck. On the downside, this is the sort of case that could have me chasing shadows into corners for months and months and into infinity. This is the sort of case that nobody will be interested in. At least, not until I can find out who this girl might be.

Not until I can tell someone who it is that we’re looking for.