The cadaver dog search had made good progress while I’d been away. There had been no more false alarms, and the middle floor was mainly wards, which were larger and easier for the dog to search than the cubbyholes and crannies of the level above.
I rejoined them after lunch. It took longer to walk back to St Jude’s than I’d expected, and I didn’t exactly rush. The search team would call if they found anything, and after what had happened at Lola’s I needed time to clear my head. I’d driven part of this route before but never walked it and, although I knew there was a shortcut through the woods, finding it was another matter. The streets all looked the same, run-down terraces and boarded-up properties scrawled over with graffiti. I was beginning to think I’d got myself lost when I turned a corner and saw trees at the end of the road, a dark green border among the tired bricks and concrete.
The woods on this side were fenced by ramshackle metal railings. A gap in them revealed a muddy path, covered by fallen leaves and overgrown with hawthorn bushes. Pushing through them, I found myself surrounded by gnarled trunks and twisted branches, unable to see the road that lay only a few yards away. I halted for a few moments, enjoying breathing air that smelled of earth and leaf mulch. I couldn’t see where the path was leading as it weaved around tree trunks, but I had a good idea. It came as no surprise when I found myself in the clearing with the lightning-struck oak inside the ruins of the ancient church.
I stopped at its edge, realizing I’d followed the same route Lola must have taken when I’d seen her here. A lone rook launched itself from the ivy-choked stones, but otherwise the clearing was deserted. In the days since I’d been there the rain had stripped most of the leaves from the trees. Set against the nearly bare branches, the crumbling gable wall looked even more stark.
I went to the same fallen pillar as before and sat down. The memory of the ugly scene at Lola’s ached like a bruise. Ward was right. The circumstantial evidence against Gary Lennox was compelling. He would have known at least one of the two entombed victims, had the building skills to build the false wall and had lost his porter’s job at St Jude’s under a cloud over missing drugs. Yet none of that would count for anything if he’d been incapacitated by a stroke for the past year and a half. That would rule him out of any involvement not only in Darren Crossly and the unknown woman’s murders, but Christine Gorski’s death as well. Lennox couldn’t have been responsible for any of them if he’d been a bedridden invalid at the time.
Unless his mother had lied.
The dates could be easily checked once the police had a court order to see his hospital and GP records. It might have been better for Ward to have waited until then, but I could understand why she hadn’t. Accessing confidential medical information wasn’t always straightforward, and Ward was under mounting pressure for results. Lennox’s guilt could be quickly established if his fingerprints matched those from the crime scene. If they did, this would be a huge coup for Ward on her first outing as SIO.
If they didn’t, then it would effectively end the police case against Gary Lennox, regardless of how long he’d been ill. And I’d have brought down all this fresh misery on Lola and her son for nothing.
Telling myself I hadn’t had a choice didn’t make me feel any better. Nor did the fact that Gary Lennox clearly needed proper medical care. That could have been arranged without what amounted to a police raid.
But I’d spent long enough brooding. Climbing to my feet, I brushed myself down and made my way back through the woods. The police officer patrolling the perimeter at the back of the hospital didn’t want to let me through, fixing me with an unfriendly stare as he made a call on his radio to confirm it was OK. It had started to cloud over as I walked through the wasteland of demolished outbuildings behind St Jude’s. I paused next to the mound of rubble where the morgue used to be. The new morgue, I reminded myself, remembering the cobwebbed original in the basement. The mound of broken concrete and bricks reached above my head, but as I paused to look at it fat drops of rain began to spatter down. The respite was over.
Leaving what remained of the morgue behind, I went to get changed.
It was late afternoon before Whelan came back to St Jude’s. The cadaver dog had worked its way down to the ground floor by then, where the open main doors at least allowed a trickle of fresh air and daylight inside. Even though the Labrador still had the basement to search, there was too much ducting and pipework for any false walls not to be immediately obvious. There was a sense that we were approaching the end now, that St Jude’s had exhausted its supply of surprises.
I should have known better.
We were in an X-ray suite from which all the equipment had been removed. Torn notices to switch off mobile phones hung from the walls, while the doors of empty changing cubicles stood open like looted sarcophagi.
‘Dr Hunter?’
I looked round to see Whelan in the doorway. Even in his mask I could see he didn’t look happy.
‘You’re needed in the basement,’ he said, turning and setting off down the corridor without waiting.
He’d reached the steps leading down to the lower level by the time I’d caught him up. ‘Has the search team found something?’ I asked.
‘They’ve got a piece of burnt bone in the boiler room, but they can’t say if it’s human or not.’ I was behind him on the steps but he didn’t look around. ‘We wondered where you’d got to earlier.’
‘Didn’t you get my message?’
‘That’s not the point. You should have told us before you left.’
‘You were busy and I was just getting in the way,’ I said, irked. ‘I thought I’d be better doing something useful.’
‘Well, next time clear it with us first.’
As far as I was concerned, there wouldn’t be a next time. But I guessed I wasn’t the only reason for the DI’s bad mood. ‘How did it go after I’d left?’
His sigh was answer enough. ‘Oduya’s causing problems. He’s advised Lennox’s mother not to give consent for her son’s fingerprints to be taken. Or hers, either. Says if we want them we’ll have to charge them first.’
That would be a blow for Ward. Unless they were given voluntarily, the police were only legally allowed to take a suspect’s fingerprints once they’d been charged. Gary Lennox was in no condition to give his consent, so permission would have to come from his mother. If she refused, it prevented the police from comparing her son’s fingerprints with those found at St Jude’s. The investigation would be at a stalemate.
‘What’s Oduya hoping to gain by that?’ I asked, as we reached the bottom of the steps.
‘Nothing, it’s just a spoiler tactic.’ Whelan set off down one of the passages. Pipes and ducting ran along the walls and ceiling, and small floor lights had been spaced out to show the way. ‘He’s trying to stop us seeing Lennox’s medical records, as well. He says if we’ve a case we should present it, otherwise we should stop persecuting a sick man.’
‘But if Lennox is innocent it’s in his own interests to be ruled out.’
‘Try telling your friend that.’
He’s not my friend. I didn’t blame the DI for being angry, though. If Lennox’s fingerprints were at the scene, left on the paint cans and in the mortar of the wall itself, then it would effectively confirm his guilt. Being blocked from establishing that on a point of law would be incredibly frustrating for the police.
But I could also understand why Oduya was doing it. Gary Lennox couldn’t speak for himself, so Oduya was going to speak for him. He’d represent the man as best he could, even if it meant delaying the police investigation. For all his self-promotion, I was starting to realize that the activist was genuinely doing what he thought was right, not simply posturing for effect.
It wasn’t going to win him any popularity contests.
‘Don’t you have enough on Lennox to bring charges?’ I asked.
Whelan shook his head. ‘Arrest, yes. Charge, no. Without the fingerprints it’s all circumstantial.’
‘Didn’t you find anything at the house?’ They would have carried out a search for any incriminating evidence at Lola’s when they arrested her son.
‘Nothing that helps. A pile of old comics and birdwatching magazines, but that was about it. Lennox was a real Billy-no-mates. He didn’t even have a computer or a mobile phone.’
The more I heard, the worse I felt. ‘How is he?’
‘Not good. The hospital have got him on fluids, antibiotics and God knows what while they run tests, but he’s in a bad way. Whether he’s guilty or not, we did him a favour getting him out of that place. If that’s how she cares for her own son, I wouldn’t like his mother looking after me, nurse or not.’
‘Has she said anything?’
‘Swear words, mainly. She’s got a foul mouth on her, that one. Turned the air blue when she talked about you.’ Whelan found that amusing, at least. ‘I don’t think you’re on her Christmas-card list any more.’
He veered off along another passageway. Its low ceiling dripped with water and the walls were beaded with condensation. The boiler house lay at the end of it, hidden behind heavy metal doors. Inside was a complicated assembly of tanks, pipes and valves that disappeared into shadow. In its prime it must have been like a furnace down here, hissing with fire and steam like the engine room of an old ship. Now the huge machinery was cold and dead. Beneath the smell of corrosion was the taint of old oil, so faint it was barely there. But the further in we went, the more another odour asserted itself. Soot and cold ashes. Something had been burned in here. Not recently, but not so very long ago either.
The search team were waiting by the boiler. Rusted and ringed with protruding rivets, the huge metal cylinder was eight or nine feet in diameter, like a giant tin can laid on its side. In one end was an open circular hatch, set low down by the floor. Floodlights had been positioned around it, backlighting the ghostly white figures so it looked as if they were huddled around a campfire.
‘Show me,’ Whelan said.
One of the figures, barely identifiable as a woman in the coveralls and mask, stepped forward. ‘This was buried in the ash inside the boiler. Pretty sure it’s bone, but I can’t say if it’s human or not.’
She handed Whelan a plastic evidence bag containing something small and dark. Whelan examined it under the light before passing it to me.
‘What do you reckon?’
The object resembled a burnt peanut shell. It was tubular in shape, no more than a centimetre or two in length with slightly flared ends. The surface was blackened, with a few charred tags of soft tissue still clinging to it.
‘It’s an intermediate phalange,’ I said. ‘A finger bone.’
‘So it’s human?’
‘Unless you get many chimpanzees or brown bears in North London, yes, it’s human.’
Whelan gave me a sour look, but I wasn’t being flippant. The phalanges of brown bears and some primates were superficially similar to ours, and I’d worked on cases before where animal bones had been mistaken for human. Even so, I wasn’t in any real doubt about what we’d found here.
‘They burn body parts in hospitals, don’t they?’ one of the search officers asked. ‘Could it be from an amputation?’
‘They’d have proper incinerators for that,’ Whelan told her, looking up at the metal cylinder. ‘This is an old coal boiler. It’d be for heating and hot water, not burning surgical waste.’
‘This didn’t happen when the boiler was running,’ I said. ‘Coal burns at a high temperature. It’d have been as hot as a crematorium in there, so any bone would have been calcified. It’d be white, not black like this. That’s a sign it burned at a lower temperature.’
Bone follows a predictable path when it’s exposed to fire. First it darkens, changing from the dirty cream of its normal colour through brown to black. Then, if the fire is hot enough, the bone turns to grey and then chalk white. Eventually, it will become light as pumice as the natural oils are burned away and only the calcium crystals are left.
Whelan looked towards the hatch. ‘Anything else in there?’
‘Don’t know yet,’ the officer said. ‘We backed off as soon as we found the bone. No obvious body parts, but it’s full of ash and cinders. There’s no way of saying what else is buried under it.’
Whelan was examining the floor in front of the boiler, where pale smears of grey marked the filthy concrete. ‘There’s ash spilled here. That from you?’
‘No, it was there already.’ The woman sounded offended.
‘Was the hatch open or closed?’
‘Closed.’
Whelan considered it for a moment longer, then bent to peer inside the hatch.
‘Can’t see much.’ His voice boomed inside the boiler. ‘Pass me a torch.’
Someone stepped forward and handed him a flashlight. Whelan leaned further inside, upper body disappearing into the round hatch.
‘Hard to tell what was burned in here. There’s a lot of ash but that could just be from before it was decommissioned.’
Extricating himself awkwardly, he straightened. He was holding a small, blackened cinder on his palm.
‘That isn’t bone,’ I told him.
‘No, but it’s not coal either. Looks like charcoal. There’s a load of it in there. Someone’s been burning wood.’
‘Can I take a look?’
Whelan handed me the torch and moved aside. A sooty, metallic smell of combustion filtered through my mask when I crouched down and leaned into the boiler’s mouth. My head and shoulders cast a shadow that blocked the floodlight, but the torch beam revealed a mess of cold ash and cinders, black islands in a grey sea. Whelan was right: there was a lot of what looked like burnt wood in there, carbonized to charcoal. It was possible that there could be more bone among it, but there was nothing immediately recognizable as human. I started to back out, then stopped as my torch beam passed over the back of the boiler.
‘There’s something else.’
Barely visible, an object was partially buried in the ash. Only its uppermost tip was showing, flattened and roughly triangular in shape. To a casual glance it could have been another piece of charred wood.
‘I think it’s a shoulder blade,’ I said.
I made way for a SOCO to take photographs, then bent through the hatch again. The curved rim dug against me as I leaned inside, reaching for the buried object. It shed ashes as I pulled it free, its triangular shape emerging from the cinders like a shark fin. Giving it a gentle shake to dislodge the clinging ash, I levered myself back out of the boiler and turned to show Whelan.
‘It’s a scapula. Human,’ I added, before he could ask.
The surface of the shoulder blade was blackened, but like the phalange there was still a weight and heft to it. The fire had been hot enough to burn away most of the soft tissues, but not enough to calcify the bone.
Whelan examined it. ‘We can rule out surgical waste anyway. I could see the odd finger finding its way inside, but not something this big. Question is, where’s the rest of the body? Unless it was dismembered and they only burned some of it in the boiler.’
That was one possibility. This wouldn’t be the first murder where the victim had been cut up and the various parts disposed of in separate locations. But I didn’t think so.
I took the blackened scapula back from Whelan. ‘Cutting up a shoulder’s a different proposition to an arm or a leg, or even a head. It’d mean sawing up the torso, which is a big, messy job, and I can’t see any cuts on this. The body can’t have all burned away either. A wood fire wouldn’t be hot enough, even if an accelerant was used as well.’
‘What about the wick effect?’ the SOCO who’d taken photographs suggested. ‘You know, when the body fat catches fire and burns like a candle till there’s next to nothing left. I’ve heard of that happening.’
So had I: I’d even come across the grisly phenomenon once myself. Under certain conditions, when the body burns, its layer of subcutaneous fat can melt and soak into clothing. The fabric then literally acts like the wick on a candle, causing the body to slowly burn away until little more than ashes are left.
But that was a freakishly rare occurrence, and I doubted it was the explanation here. ‘It takes a lot of body fat for that to happen, and even then not everything burns away. Some of the bigger bones and extremities usually survive.’
‘They could be hidden under the ash,’ the SOCO offered.
‘Not an entire body,’ I said. ‘We should be able to see more than this.’
We could rule out scavenger activity as well. Animals couldn’t have got into the boiler if the hatch was closed, and I doubted they’d have tried anyway. Even if a larger scavenger, like a fox, had ventured this far into the basement, the bones would have been too burnt to be of any interest.
Whelan had squatted down to examine the ashes spilled on the floor below the boiler’s hatch. ‘So you’re saying somebody burned a body in here, then came back afterwards and took away what was left.’
‘Not all of it,’ I said, putting the scapula into an evidence bag.