AS WERE TWO DISTINCTLY SEPARATE SETS OF ADULT PRINTS,
THE WARD WAS NOW SECURE, a policeman at the door preventing unauthorised entry.
Earlier, Inspector Edward Trueman from the uniform branch had organised his men for a thorough ward by ward, room by room, cupboard by cupboard, office by office, store by store search of the entire hospital. Every nook and cranny, every possible hiding place where a four-year-old, dead or alive, could have been hiding - or have been hidden. The search was programmed on a master list operated by two female WPCs and regularly updated by Trueman.
Once a room or area had been searched, Trueman had crossed it off from his master list and marked it off on the appropriate floor plan, many of which had been taken down from the corridor walls and removed from their glass-fronted frames, a litter of glass and wooden frame parts cluttering up the floor of the engineering department.
However, before the team had completed the search from roof to basement, the dread news had come that the little girl’s body had been found. Or to be precise, that the body of a little girl had been found but none of the police had any real doubts that the body would turn out to be that of Emily Black.
The police procedure now switched from a search for a missing girl to a murder investigation.
After delivering the awful news to the Blacks, Yarrow requested Suzanne Fillmore to arrange for friends or neighbours to sit with the devastated parents, for relatives to be informed, and then advise him when Derek or Jenny were in a fit state of mind to be taken to the hospital mortuary for formal identification of their murdered child. However, this could not take place until the Home Office pathologist had viewed the body at the scene.
Inspector Trueman took over the security of the murder scene and set up the process of a fingertip search around the site.
West Garside station was not large enough to maintain a dedicated fingerprint department, so Bullock had arranged for the Divisional fingerprint team to travel down from Wetherby to carry out the massive task. Within four hours of the discovery of the body, the team was in place, meticulously dusting and printing every surface within the ward, every surface dusted and examined, countless prints lifted and collated. Later, anyone who had legitimate access to the ward would be fingerprinted: the nurses, doctors, orderlies, relatives, and the children themselves; dozens, hundreds of prints to be collected, collated, compared, and concluded.
The glass beneath Emily’s bed was carefully removed and printed. Small prints, obviously a child’s prints, presumably little Emily’s, were lifted, as were two distinctly separate sets of adult prints, the first, middle, ring finger, and a thumb, the prints of two people who had held the glass in addition to the little girl. The hope was that one set of prints belonged to the abductor. Prints from Emily’s dead fingers would be taken for elimination purposes.
The fire escape door through which it was believed that the murderer had taken Emily was thoroughly dusted, and all prints found were lifted and carded, as was the rear emergency ambulance entrance gate.