Page 6 of The Unseen (Echoes from the Past #5)

FOUR

Quinn pushed Alex’s pram down the corridor of the mortuary, disregarding people’s curious glances.

Alex was asleep after their walk, and she saw no harm in bringing him along to her meeting with Dr. Colin Scott.

The door to his office stood wide open, making it easier for her to maneuver the pram inside.

“It is Bring Your Child to Work Day?” Colin joked. He sat behind his desk, a surgical mask hanging around his neck and his sandy hair twisted into an artful man-bun.

“I don’t have a child minder,” Quinn explained.

She’d have to find someone eventually if she planned to keep working, but she wasn’t ready to leave Alex just yet.

He was only ten weeks old, not nearly old enough to entrust to a stranger, and her hours were flexible enough that she could work around Gabe’s schedule, making sure that one of them was always there to look after the baby.

“Well, if he doesn’t mind, I don’t mind,” Colin replied. “Come through.”

Quinn followed Colin into the lab where the skeleton was laid out on a slab. Now that it was lying flat, Quinn was sure it had been a man, and a powerfully built one at that. Colin’s assistant, Dr. Sarita Dhawan, stood bent over the skelly as she worked on extracting a tooth.

“Good morning, Dr. Allenby,” Sarita called out as she dropped the tooth into a plastic container. “Congratulations. May I take a peek?” she asked, smiling at Alex.

“Of course.”

Sarita pulled off her latex gloves and came to peer into the pram. Alex was still sleeping peacefully. His face looked as round as a full moon and his mouth was slightly ajar. His lashes brushed his rosy cheeks and several dark strands of hair had escaped from his knitted hat .

“Oh, he’s lovely. He looks just like your husband.”

“Don’t I know it? Not a trace of me in there,” Quinn said, shaking her head in mock dismay.

“You’ll just have to have another one,” Colin quipped as he smiled at the sleeping child.

“Have you been spending time with Aidan?”

“Who’s Aidan?” Colin queried.

“Never mind. Tell me about the skelly.” Quinn left the pram in a quiet corner and came to stand next to Colin by the well-lit slab.

“All I can tell you with any certainty is that what we have here is a male in his late thirties or early forties who lived approximately one hundred years ago.”

“Is that all?”

“I’m afraid so. The white powder on the tub and on the floor was lye.

Whoever killed him used the lye to erase any shred of genetic information.

Believe it or not, lye is making a comeback as a means of disposing of corpses.

Mostly animal carcasses, of course, not human.

When submerged in a vat of lye and water and heated for several hours, the carcass liquefies and boils down to a few ounces of brown sludge.

Had our perpetrator heated that tub, there’d be nothing left of Mr. X, not even bone fragments. ”

“Do you think the killer might have been a scientist?”

“I doubt it. People have used lye to accelerate decomposition for centuries. Traces of lye can be found in most plague pits from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This person was most likely well educated, but not a scientist.”

“Is there nothing we can learn from him?” Quinn asked, nodding toward the skeleton. “Can you tell how he died? ”

Colin shook his head. “There are no signs of obvious violence, and I found no traces of blood in the tub. The skull is intact and there are no nicks or scratches on the bones, which might have been there had he been shot or stabbed. Of course, that’s not conclusive.

The bullet might have lodged in soft tissue, but then we probably would have found it at the bottom of the tub after the tissue decomposed.

Likewise, he might have been stabbed. The knife doesn’t always graze the bone.

He might also have been poisoned or asphyxiated. ”

“Do you think he was killed in the tub?” Quinn asked, desperate for something to go on.

“Possibly. Or he was murdered elsewhere and placed in the tub after the fact, which was actually very clever on the part of the killer. The porcelain tub was the perfect receptacle. As the body decomposed, the fluids simply drained away. This left behind a skeleton that’s as clean as a plastic skelly used in biology class. ”

“They really knew what they were doing, didn’t they?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Do you think the killer was deranged?” Quinn asked.

“What makes you ask that?”

“Who, in their right mind, would leave a body to decompose in their own home and not eventually get rid of the remains?”

“Who is to say the killer left the body in their own house? Perhaps the house belonged to the victim.”

“Would no one have found him then? And what about the blocked panel? Surely, someone who had access to the house knew there was a bathroom connected to that particular bedroom.”

“You’d be amazed how many human remains are found entombed behind walls and beneath floorboards.

People think that burying someone within the confines of the house gives them control over the situation.

It’s entirely possible that whoever killed Mr. X sealed off the room then sold the house to some unsuspecting individual who never bothered to study the blueprints very carefully.

Had the Glovers not hired an architect and decided to renovate, they’d never have discovered our man.

He’d have remained in that room for another hundred years. ”

“Yes, you’re right. Mrs. Glover’s grandparents might have had nothing to do with this man’s death. They might have bought the house never suspecting that human remains were hidden behind the bedroom wall.”

“Rhys will not be pleased with the results,” Colin mused. “Not enough information to build an episode around.”

“What about the tooth Sarita extracted?” Quinn asked.

“We’ll use the tooth to perform isotope analysis, but it’s a lengthy process, not to mention costly, and the BBC might not wish to foot the bill, since, in the end, all it might tell us is that the person enjoyed a plentiful diet, consisting of foods readily available on the British Isles.

Judging by the man’s height, I’d say he got plenty of nutrients during his formative years.

Proving he wasn’t a pauper will do little to advance your hypothesis. ”

“So, it’s of no help to us whatsoever,” Quinn concluded.

“Precisely.”

“Rhys is a master storyteller. He’ll think of something,” Quinn replied.

Colin had no idea that she could see into the past when holding an object that had once belonged to the dead.

If there was something to see, she would see it, and Rhys would take the facts and turn them into supposition, which would make for a riveting episode of Echoes from the Past .

Quinn thanked Drs. Scott and Dhawan, said her goodbyes, and wheeled Alex’s pram out of the mortuary. Now that she knew for certain she had no facts to go on, it was time to see what the Fabergé egg had to tell her.