The Tooth Tattoo (13 page)

‘Hers?’

‘We can’t say yet. I’m having the scene examined for evidence of violence.’

‘Was she attacked, then?’

‘Unfortunately she was in the water too long to tell.’

She paused as if to play the statement over. ‘I hate to say it, but this has all the hallmarks of an unsolved case.’

He wasn’t being goaded into submission. ‘You’re entitled to your opinion, ma’am.’

‘What makes you think this isn’t an accidental drowning?’

‘In all my time here, I can’t recall any accidents below Pulteney weir, where she was found. You don’t find swimmers or canoeists there.’

‘She could have climbed over the railing,’ Georgina said.

‘Why?’

‘Suicide, obviously.’

‘But the iPod was found on the river bank further down.’

‘So you’re working on the basis that she was murdered and dumped in the river? A pretty big assumption from one lost iPod.’

‘We’ll know more when the crime scene investigators report.’ He decided this wasn’t the best time to tell her he’d asked for a second autopsy.

‘You
may
know more. Have you checked with missing persons?’

‘The first thing we did. Since then we’ve enquired at all the colleges and hotels.’

‘No names yet?’

‘So far, no.’

‘You’ve hit the buffers, then. Better scale everything down and get the room back to normal.’

‘I haven’t told you about Professor Hackenschmidt.’

She blinked rapidly. ‘Who’s he?’

‘The world expert on facial reconstruction using computer imaging. He and his team in Philadelphia are already at work.’

‘Did you say Philadelphia?’ Georgina was tight-lipped now.

‘He works from CT scans.’ Another bit of technological jargon coming to his aid.

‘Is this coming out of your budget?’

Diamond’s way of dealing with awkward questions was to ask one himself. ‘I expect you’re up with computer imaging, ma’am?’

‘I’ve heard of it, but I didn’t expect you of all people to give any credence to it. How much will this cost?’

‘I’m told the professor is only too pleased to be involved.’

‘Small wonder, if we’re paying. I hope you asked for an estimate.’

‘One of my team is dealing with it.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘John Leaman.’

‘Good. He’s no fool.’ Having said this, even Georgina seemed to realise Diamond could take offence. ‘This is just the kind of outsourcing we’ve been discussing on the Home Office course. These are tough economic times. We can’t employ experts for this and that and go way over budget. We need to make better use of our own resources.’

Diamond wasn’t backing down. ‘I wouldn’t trust this lot to reconstruct a face. We’d end up with something out of
Frankenstein
.’

‘Be serious, Peter.’

‘I am. You asked if we’ve hit the buffers and I’m telling you we haven’t. It’s all in train, if you’ll excuse the pun. Can’t be stopped now. As soon as the professor sends us a likeness we’ll forward copies to Japan and get them on TV and in the papers. Speeds up the whole enquiry. Once the woman is identified we’ll get to the truth of it, I promise you. Maximise our resources.’ The last words tripped off his
tongue so glibly that Georgina was caught off guard. She drew a long, fatalistic breath and returned upstairs to consider her options. Dismantling the incident room might not be the best way forward.

At mid-morning, significant news came in from Keith Halliwell at the mortuary. The second autopsy had been conducted by Dr. Bertram Sealy, as Diamond had hoped.

‘And what did he find?’

‘He asked me to tell you he was sorry to have missed you, guv.’

‘Typical bloody Sealy.’

‘But he did find something the first man missed. There’s a bone called the hyoid in the throat, above the Adam’s apple, quite small and delicate and shaped like a horseshoe and not attached to any other bones. He removed it and pointed out that it was damaged, fractured at one end.’

‘Meaning that violence has been done to the neck?’

‘It’s the only sign of violence he could find, because of the bad condition of the flesh.’

Diamond whistled. ‘Fracturing of the hyoid bone is a common sign of manual strangulation. This could be it.’

‘I think it must be. He says it’s highly unlikely this was caused accidentally when the body was being recovered from the river, or while it was submerged. To break a young person’s hyoid bone you have to exert real pressure on the neck.’

‘Is this going into Sealy’s report?’

‘I asked him. He’s a pain. He kept me dangling for about ten minutes while he went through all the other symptoms of strangling: bruising, facial congestion, bleeding into the neck muscles. None of this showed because so much of the flesh had gone rotten in the water. Finally I got it from him. Cause of death: asphyxia by compression of the neck. His words.’

‘That’s all we need, Keith. We’re in business.’

‘I thought we were already.’

‘Nothing can stop us now, not Georgina, the coroner, Portishead. Tell Bert Sealy he’s my hero.’

There are times in police work when nothing goes right. Most days seemed like that to Diamond. Just occasionally there’s a break in the clouds and you have to make the most of such moments. Within twenty minutes of the call from Halliwell he heard from the search team at Green Park. Fibres had been found on a bramble bush on the river bank, and there were twin lines in the mud suggesting somebody had been dragged down the slope to the water.

‘Heel marks?’ Diamond said on the phone to the supervisor of the crime scene team. These days crime scene investigations were farmed out to private firms: outsourcing, as Georgina would put it.

‘Very likely.’

‘If she was wearing shoes, they may be in the water. I’ll arrange for the sub-aqua team to take a look. Is it deep there?’

‘Don’t know. I haven’t been for a swim.’

Now Diamond remembered the voice of a man he’d tangled with before, a smart-arse with a liking for sarcasm. ‘You’re Duckett, aren’t you?’

‘Who else did you expect? We’re a small business, not the Co-op.’

‘Surely you can tell at a glance if the river’s deep.’

‘It shelves steeply.’

‘And did you find any shoe prints near these marks?’

‘Far too many. We’ll need to check what every one of your search team was wearing.’

‘You’ll be telling me we corrupted your scene.’

‘A line of policemen tramping through? Give me a break. And presumably you had a look yourself?’

‘Only by the access path.’

‘Was there one? It’s like a football field here.’

‘The fibres,’ Diamond said. ‘What are they like?’

‘Like fibres.’

‘Wool, cotton, man-made?’

‘We won’t know until we get them under a microscope.’

‘And I suppose the iPod has gone to the lab as well?’

‘Where else?’

After the call had ended, Ingeborg said, ‘I heard you asking about the iPod, guv. I wonder if it’s still in working order. They’re well constructed. It would be good to know what music she liked.’

‘How will that help?’

‘It kind of brings her alive.’

He gave her a baffled look.

Ingeborg added, ‘Well, it tells us more about her. Any new information must be welcome.’

‘Give them a call at the lab if you like. I don’t fancy discussing music with the guy at the scene.’

Early in the afternoon when America was starting up, John Leaman took a call from Philadelphia. He discussed it with Ingeborg. ‘I’ve just been speaking to one of the professor’s team. He wants to know about the dead woman’s hair.’

‘What about it?’

‘The style, I suppose. It doesn’t show up in the CT scan, but they’d like to know what we observed. When they send us an image they want the look to be as lifelike as possible.’

‘Did you tell him she was in the water for weeks? It doesn’t do much for a girl’s hair.’

‘Can we say anything about the cut?’

‘Okay. It’s thick, dark hair with a fringe and cut sheer at the back. You can tell him that.’

‘I’d be happier if you did.’

She began to laugh ‘Aren’t you comfortable discussing hairstyles with another guy? I’ll speak to them if you like.’

Keith Halliwell was back from the autopsy looking pleased with himself.

Diamond soon altered that. ‘Now we know it’s murder, we must pull out all the stops. That’s a musical expression,
in case you weren’t aware of it. Try the embassy again for names. They promised to get back to us.’

‘Be good if we could send them the computer picture. What’s the latest from Philadelphia?’

‘Inge was talking to them about hair. They must be close to sending an image.’

‘They know she’s Japanese, do they? Japanese in our opinion, anyway.’

‘They can tell from the shape of the skull, can’t they?’

‘I was told it isn’t obvious.’

Halliwell did his best to reassure. ‘I expect they’ll give her the almond-shaped eyes.’

‘Christ, I hope so.’ Diamond had a fleeting vision of a Betty Boop cartoon. ‘You’re making me worried. I’m less confident now than I was.’

‘About the whole case?’

‘The picture they’re sending.’ Diamond vibrated his lips. ‘And the whole case, if I’m honest.’

‘But the case is keeping everyone busy. Georgina was gobsmacked.’

He raised a smile. ‘Yes, that was a nice moment.’

A knock on the door interrupted them. It was Ingeborg. ‘Guv, I’m sorry to butt in, but you ought to hear this. The people at forensics found that the iPod was working okay and I asked them to play it for us. Hold on a mo and I’ll put it through to your hands-free.’ She touched the amplifying phone on his desk and music filled the room – music of an unexpected kind. She stood with arms folded.

Glances were exchanged. This was the first time Beethoven had been heard in Diamond’s office, an event about as likely as finding the
Judgement of Paris
on his wall.

‘Bit highbrow for me,’ he said. ‘I was expecting something Japanese. What is it?’

Halliwell shook his head.

‘John Leaman says it’s a string quartet,’ Ingeborg said. ‘At times it sounds like a full orchestra, but four instruments can make a big sound.’

‘This is on the iPod?’ he said.

‘This and a whole lot more. Whoever she was, she was into classical music.’

The heavy notes from the cello were starting to rattle the framed photo of his late wife, Steph. ‘Turn it down, will you? I can’t think with that row going on.’

She did so. ‘The point is that it ties in neatly with the tooth tattoo.’

‘Any kind of music would have tied in with that,’ he said. ‘The Stones, the Beatles.’

‘Duke Ellington,’ Halliwell said.

Ingeborg smiled. She had to admit that they were right. ‘And now we know she had better taste than any of us.’

The computer image from Philadelphia appeared on Leaman’s screen towards the end of the afternoon. Everyone got up for a look. Leaman rotated the face through several angles. This was definitely a young woman of Eastern appearance, with high cheekbones, a small cupid-bow mouth and widely spaced eyes topped by well-defined eyebrows. She had the fringe and fine head of hair Ingeborg had described.

‘How do they know she wore lipstick?’ one of the civilian computer operators said.

‘They don’t. It’s a balance of probabilities,’ Leaman said. ‘Most Japanese women I’ve seen use make-up.’

‘Wouldn’t it be more useful to show her without any?’

‘I don’t see why. We’re issuing this to help people recognise her.’

‘The eyebrows are a bit thick.’

‘They have to give her some, don’t they? We told them she had a good growth of hair.’

Halliwell said, ‘It seems to me a lot of this is guesswork.’

Leaman wasn’t having that. ‘Only the superficial stuff. The bone structure is entirely real.’

‘But the fleshy bits can’t be. How do we know her nose looked like that?’

‘They choose from a bank of features. She’s what’s known
as a Mongoloid type and that means small, flat noses. The Japanese were ahead of most other countries in making a data bank of soft tissues.’

‘One thing we can all agree on,’ Diamond said. ‘This is easier on the eye than the photos taken at the autopsy. Back to work, people. I want a copy emailed to the Japanese embassy now and we’ll go public with a press release tomorrow morning.’ After the first buzz of interest was over, he said to Halliwell, ‘What do you think, Keith? Will it help?’

‘To me, it looks like everyone’s idea of a Japanese woman. There’s not much character you can pick out.’

‘It’s a proper face. Remember the photofit pictures we used to work with? Compared to this, they were like kids’ drawings.’

‘But is it reliable?’

‘We’ll find out. If it isn’t, it could do more harm than good.’

He gave his attention to the press release. The tooth tattoo would be featured and so would the clothes the dead woman had been wearing. Until a definite connection was made with Green Park he couldn’t mention the iPod and the interest in classical music. He seemed to have spent the best years of his career waiting for forensics to go through their painstaking procedures.

But there was a big plus. The printouts of the computerised face from several angles made a pleasing difference to the display board. He thought about sending copies upstairs to Georgina, but in the end decided to let well alone. With any luck the ACC would be dealing with her backlog of paper work after a week’s absence.