Dusty Death Read Online Free PDF

‘Jack Chadwick had found a lot of other fibres at the site. Has anything useful come of them?’
    â€˜Not as yet. They come from a dozen different garments and furnishings, but some of them may have predated this death by several years. Forensic will retain them, in case we can match them up with anything we discover on a suspect at a later stage in the investigation. The probability is that we won’t get anything very useful from them.’
    DC Gordon Pickering was the latest addition to Peach’s CID team. He was lanky, fresh-faced, twenty-two and very keen. He said, ‘Are we any nearer to an identification of this woman?’
    â€˜Nearer, perhaps, but we’re not nearly there yet, lad. We don’t know who she is but we know a little more than we did yesterday. She’s young, for a start. Probably between eighteen and twenty-five when she died, as far as they can tell from what’s left of her.’
    â€˜Dental records?’
    â€˜It’s in hand, but it takes time. She hadn’t had a lot of dental work, but hopefully there’s one filling, and a distinctive enough jaw pattern to get an identification. Eventually. None of our Brunton dentists has found a match, so she’s probably not local.’
    â€˜How long before we know?’
    Peach allowed himself a rueful smile; he was as anxious as young Pickering to pin down this victim, so he was not going to squash his enthusiasm. ‘Impossible to say, because it’s out of our hands. They got a bit of DNA from a nerve still there at the base of a tooth, but that will only be useful at a later stage, when we’ve got a possible match. We’ve asked dentists nationally to check their records, but we’re dependent on them for the degree of urgency they give it. We really need a name. However, we’ve got something already. One of the people in the forensic lab at Chorley is apparently an expert in what he calls “Tooth Morphology”. He reckons teeth are fascinating little things – takes all sorts, I suppose. Apparently this lady had “shovel-shaped incisors”. This means that she was more likely to come from an Asian group than a Caucasian one.’
    Lucy Blake said, ‘So she was probably Indian or Pakistani.’
    â€˜Not necessarily. There’s a strong incidence of this type of teeth in the Chinese, for example. And don’t forget she’s probably not from our Brunton Asian group.’
    DC Murphy said, ‘I suppose we’re quite sure this is a suspicious death?’
    Peach smiled grimly. ‘I thought you’d never ask. In fact, we’re quite sure this was murder. There isn’t much flesh left on the skeleton, and what there is is severely damaged by the fractures and abrasions caused by the clearance machines. But the PM shows quite clearly that this girl was strangled.’
    The discovery of a body beneath the rubble of Brunton received muted coverage in the national newspapers and television.
    It would have been different if they had been able to carry a picture of that skeletal arm, rising from the ground as if beseeching justice from the heavens, but that image was denied to them. And as yet there was no hint of the sexual dimension to this crime which would guarantee their full attention. They had to be content with the bald police announcement that the unidentified body of a woman had been discovered on an industrial site, that it had been there for some time, and that until more facts could be established the death was being treated as suspicious.
    Local radio was rather more excited about it. The News Editor at Radio Lancashire made as much of a sensation as he could of an event which could enliven a drab time at the end of February. He sent a young woman reporter to the place, who described the landscape as if it were a bomb site in Iraq, teeming with unseen terrorists, rather than a levelling of the ground for a five-storey office block,