Written in Bone Read Online Free PDF Page A

blasé but the attempt wasn’t entirely convincing. ‘Go and get it, Duncan.
Duncan.
’
    The young PC was still staring at what was left of the body. The blood had left his face.
    ‘You OK?’ I asked. My concern wasn’t entirely for his sake. I’d worked on more than one body recovery where a green police officer had vomited on the remains. It didn’t make anyone’s job any easier.
    He nodded. His colour was starting to come back. ‘Aye. Sorry.’
    He hurried out. Brody regarded the remains.
    ‘I told Wallace it was a strange one, but I don’t think he believed me. Dare say he thought I’d gone soft after a few years off the job.’
    He was probably right, I thought, remembering the doubts I’d harboured myself only a few minutes before. But I couldn’t blame Wallace for being sceptical. What I was looking at was freakish enough to flout all apparent logic. If I hadn’t seen it for myself I might have thought the report was exaggerated.
    The body—what was left of it—was lying face down. Without going any closer, I played my torch on the unburned limbs. The feet were intact from just above the ankle, and what made the sight even more disturbing was that both were still wearing trainers. I moved the torch beam higher, until it shone on the hand. It was the right one, and could have belonged to either a small man or a large woman. There were no rings, and the fingernails were unvarnished and bitten. The radius and ulna protruded from the exposed tissue of the wrist, their bone burned a dark amber close to the flesh and quickly becoming blackened and crazed with heat fractures after that. Just before where they should have joined the elbow, both had burned right through.
    It was the same with the feet. The charred shafts of the tibia and fibula emerged from each as if the flames had eaten away everything up to this point, then came to an abrupt halt where the fire had burned them away halfway up the shin.
    But other than that the surviving limbs showed little evidence of the fire that had destroyed the rest of the body. The main damage was caused by rodents or other small animals gnawing at the flesh and unburned bone. What soft tissue remained was starting to decompose normally, a marbling effect evident beneath the darkened skin. There was virtually no insect activity—often a vital indicator of how long decomposition has been under way. But given the cold, wintry conditions that was only what I’d expect. Flies need heat and light.
    I shone the torch around the room. The remains of a fire lay in the hearth, and at some point a smaller one had been lit on the flagged floor. It was a good six feet from where the body lay, but that didn’t signify anything. Unless they were unconscious, no one remained still when they caught fire.
    I turned the torch beam on to the ceiling. Directly above the body the cracked plaster was smoke-blackened, but not burned. An oily, brownish deposit coated it. The same fatty residue was also on the floor around the remains.
    ‘What’s all that brown stuff?’ Fraser asked.
    ‘It’s fat. From the body, as it burned.’
    He grimaced. ‘Bit like you get with a chip-pan fire, eh?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    Duncan had returned with the floodlight. He stared wide-eyed at the skeletal remains as he set it on the floor.
    ‘I’ve read about this sort of thing,’ he blurted. He immediately looked embarrassed as we all stared at him. ‘Where people burst into flames for no reason, I mean. Without burning anything else around them.’
    ‘Stop talking rubbish,’ Fraser snapped.
    ‘It’s all right,’ I said, turning to Duncan. ‘You’re talking about spontaneous combustion.’
    He nodded eagerly. ‘Aye, that’s it!’
    I’d been expecting this ever since I’d seen the remains. Spontaneous human combustion was generally thought of in the same terms as yeti and UFOs: a paranormal phenomenon for which there was no real explanation. Yet there were well-documented cases