Page 19 of The Girl in the Grave
The worry she’d felt before was nothing compared to how fast her heart was racing now. Her anxiety had just reached a whole new level.
Thirty
Carl opened his eyes, blinked several times then realised where he was. ‘Oh shit, I didn’t?… Josh, I’m sorry, I’ve been feeling a bit rough since I got up. I just looked at that scalpel slicing into her skin and can’t remember anything else.’
Josh handed him a bottle of cola he’d got from the vending machine down the hall.
‘It’s fine. Do you want to go to A&E to get checked out?’
‘No, God no. I’m okay, I’ll be fine.’
Abe had gone back in to help Beth, so only Josh remained to offer Carl his hand and pull him to his feet.
‘Well you don’t look fine; you look like shit. Claire can finish off the photography and Sam can be exhibits officer. Sykes is on her way to pick you up and take you home. No arguments.’
Carl nodded, and Josh felt sorry for him. ‘I’ve told her to pick you up from the rear entrance to the mortuary, so you don’t have to walk all the way through the hospital. Is that okay?’
‘Thanks, Josh, I really am sorry.’
Josh left him sitting on a chair sipping at the bottle of sugary cola, needing to get back inside and see if he’d missed anything. He walked in and heard a sucking noise: talk about bad timing. He looked to see Beth tugging the girl’s brain gently out of her skull and wondered if he should have waited a little bit longer. He didn’t like this part, or the sound when the ribs were cracked open with a pair of pruning shears to remove the breast plate. He shuddered; how Beth did this every day then went home and slept at night amazed him. Then again, how did he do what he did and sleep at night? According to Jodie he slept too well and snored most of the night. Just thinking about her made his nerves jangle; she’d started screaming at him this morning before he’d even had the chance to warm his bowl of Shredded Wheat up in the microwave. He didn’t know what to do to save their marriage; he’d tried everything; he’d been willing to try anything, but now he didn’t know if Jodie even wanted him to try.
‘How’s Carl? Hello? Earth to Josh – don’t you go fainting on me now!’
He turned to face Beth and realised both she and Sam were staring at him.
‘He’s okay, Sykes is coming to pick him up and take him home. Sorry, I was thinking.’
Sam laughed. ‘Don’t, it’s a dangerous game, boss.’
He smiled at her, then turned his attention to the table and watched as Beth methodically finished the rest of the post-mortem. She’d taken a variety of samples from the various organs and tissues of the body, and Abe was in the process of stuffing a bag containing the girl’s organs back inside her abdominal cavity, ready to be sewn back up. It was brutal and sad, there was no doubt about it.
‘There are no obvious signs of injury apart from the self-inflicted damage to her fingers which look as if she tried to claw her way out of an enclosed space. I’m not the expert, but there are minute traces of something green under her nails. I checked the bottom of the coffin she was buried under and there are no splinters of wood, signs of damage from scratching or any sign of plant life or moss. She has to have tried to claw her way out of somewhere for her to rip her fingernails off like she has, but I don’t think it was from underneath the coffin. I think she died from asphyxiation due to a lack of oxygen in a confined space. We’ll know for sure once the blood results are back; there’s a simple test they can do which will confirm the measure of carbon monoxide in the blood. If it comes back at more than three per cent, it’s a definite.’
‘So, she was put in a confined space and suffocated to death?’
‘Yes. I don’t think the burial site was the primary scene, Josh.’
Josh turned to Sam. ‘Do we think she was put into a wooden box, a crate, maybe a coffin and left to die? But where, and why remove her from that to put her into the grave?’
‘I don’t know, maybe it was easier to hide her body that way. It’s pretty hard to disguise a box or a coffin.’
‘Who has access to wooden boxes, crates or coffins and the facilities to store and transport dead bodies?’
They all spoke at the same time.
‘Undertakers.’
‘Beth, does it say on the paperwork which funeral home dealt with Florence’s funeral?’
She stripped off her gloves and apron. ‘Let me go and check, I’m pretty sure it was Dean&Sons.’
Josh could feel a whole multitude of questions bursting through his mind. His phone began to ring; he saw Sykes’s name on the screen, and he put his phone on to loudspeaker.
‘Boss, you’re in luck. We were just about to leave Dalton View when I got that email you sent. I showed it to the staff, and we have a positive ID on the tattoos. The girl is Chantel Price. Staff from Dalton View, a place that provides support to help young people about to transition to live independently once they reach eighteen, have identified her. Her caseworker has agreed to come down and do the official ID.’
‘When was the last time they saw her, and why did they not report her missing?’
‘They last saw her around sixp.m. on the second of May. She walked out with her suitcase and a backpack. They said she’d refused to stay there any longer and got picked up by a male in a car. She would have been eighteen on the third of May, so she was leaving the home the next day and had refused any further help. They didn’t think there was much point in reporting her as missing when she was legally entitled to leave the next day anyway.’
