In the morning DCI Whitestone and I made the ten-minute walk from West End Central in Savile Row through St James’s Park to the Westminster Public Mortuary on Horseferry Road.
The black Bentley Bentayga was parked on a double-yellow line outside.
Mo Patel saw us coming and quickly tapped on the rear window, a nervous little Buddhist monk of a man.
Harry Flowers got out and came towards Whitestone. I put myself between them.
‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ I told him.
‘I just want to see Jess,’ he said, his voice cracked with grief. ‘I need to see my girl.’
‘Not going to happen,’ Whitestone said.
I pushed him away and we carried on into the mortuary.
Flowers shouted after us. ‘Don’t forget who owns you,’ he told Whitestone.
I turned back to him, but she took my arm.
‘Not now,’ she said.
We signed in at the desk for the Iain West Forensic Suite.
And as we got into the lift for the basement, I could see Harry Flowers on the far side of the plate glass, staring at us.
DCI Pat Whitestone did not look at him.
But she knew he was still there.
‘You ever work a stalking case?’ she said.
I nodded. ‘Some.’
‘It’s never over, is it?’ she said. ‘Not until someone is dead.’
We stood in our blue scrubs and hairnets, the temperature in the Iain West Forensic Suite as always just one degree above freezing, and we waited for the verdict of Elsa Olsen, forensic pathologist.
There was a single stainless-steel bed in the room.
But it held nothing but a metal bowl.
Elsa smiled with polite apology, like a dinner party hostess whose main course is going to be unexpectedly delayed.
‘The body I have examined is too far gone to tell us the full story,’ she said, no trace of her native Norway after an adult lifetime in London. ‘It has been in the ground for – I would estimate – somewhere between three weeks and a month.’
I felt my stomach fall away.
How long have we searched for you, Jessica?
A shade over three weeks.
We waited.
‘Nature is very efficient at breaking down a body that has been buried in soil,’ Elsa continued. ‘Inside a coffin, any coffin, decay would take a lot longer. And many years longer in a coffin made of something like oak, like the coffin of Dr Stewart McGlenny. But the body you found beneath Dr McGlenny’s coffin was in a thin HRP and so nature worked a lot faster, although nowhere near as fast as if the body had been left above ground or in water. But the more advanced decomposition, the harder it is to answer the four questions of death,’ Elsa said. ‘Cause? Mechanism? Manner? Time? I can take a good guess at the time because a body begins to decompose four minutes after death and then follows the same four stages wherever it is buried – autolysis, bloat, active decay and skeletonisation. After around one month, between stages three and four, the body starts to liquefy. And that is what is happening to this body. Which is why a visual ID is impossible.’
‘But the rate of decomposition is consistent with the time of Jessica’s abduction?’ Whitestone said.
Elsa nodded. ‘But cause, mechanism and manner are impossible to gauge from the autopsy. There was no visible skeletal damage that could have been caused by a weapon. The skull was intact. No ribs were broken. But after autolysis – the initial decay, the chemical breakdown of tissues and cells – we lose a lot of the story because there is so much less to analyse. The heart stops pumping and blood stops circulating and the cells are deprived of oxygen and the dead lose their voice, or at least they find it much harder to tell us their story.’
I shivered in the freezing room.
‘I can no longer look at lividity, rigor mortis, body temperature, cadaveric spasm, the contents of a stomach or what I find in the fingernails,’ Elsa said. ‘No skin cells, no blood, no semen. The usual clues have all evaporated into eternity. In the end, there is only decay. At first the dead speak very clearly to us. But then they slip away.’
The newly dead do not go far, I thought.
‘But – just to confirm, Elsa – the timing works perfectly for us?’ Whitestone said. ‘Just give me that, will you?’ She shook her head. ‘Why can’t you say it?’
‘Because even the timing becomes problematic after a corpse is this old,’ Elsa said. ‘It could be three weeks old. It could be six. But the internal organs decay in a very specific order. The very last to decay is the uterus in a woman and the prostate gland in men. The organs that bring life are the last to decompose in death. And the uterus in the body you found is the only internal organ that is still intact. I can say that the subject is a young female in her twenties who died within seven days of the night that Jessica Lyle went missing.’
I looked at Whitestone and she nodded.
What else did we need for identification?
‘But there is one big problem,’ Elsa said. ‘I have the dental records of Jessica Lyle. Her parents went to a lot of trouble to take care of her teeth. She didn’t have one cavity.’
‘What does that mean?’ I said.
‘The body you found had a poor person’s teeth,’ Elsa said. ‘There are fillings, gaps, a broken crown. And one of these.’
With a long thin pair of tweezers, Elsa reached into the stainless-steel bowl sitting on the stainless-steel bed and extracted something.
She held it up for us to see.
A single white tooth with what looked like a grey metal screw on the end.
‘This is a dental implant,’ Elsa said. ‘From the cheaper end of the market. My lab tells me it was made in Riga.’
‘Latvia,’ I said.
‘But if the body wasn’t Jessica Lyle,’ Whitestone said, ‘then who was it?’
And suddenly I saw it clear.
‘Her name was Minky,’ I said. ‘She was a dancer at the Western World. She went out with Derek Bumpus and then she went missing around the same time that they took Jessica.’ I turned to Whitestone. ‘That female DNA they found at Bumpus’s apartment? We need to check it out again.’
I remembered Snezia telling me that Minky had probably gone home or landed a rich man or simply moved on.
‘The truth is that nobody cared about her,’ I said. ‘They looked for her. But they just never looked hard enough.’