‘And the other five per cent?’
‘Instinct. But then, you told me to leave that out of the equation.’
MacNeil smiled. ‘So I did. What else can you tell me?’
‘I can tell you that this child probably came from one of the poorer developing countries, and that she had two very distinctive visual characteristics.’
MacNeil was taken aback. ‘How the hell can you tell all that from a bunch of bones?’
‘Because she’s good at what she does, Mr MacNeil,’ Tom said, taking obvious pride in her expertise. ‘Amy was one of the best forensic odontologists in London before...’ He’d started down the road before he could stop himself, and his hesitation only drew attention to itself. ‘Before the accident,’ he added quickly. ‘You don’t ever lose those skills.’
Amy blushed and kept her focus on the skull. ‘It’s Mongoloid, you see. I know that’s not very PC, but none of these terms are. Skulls are either Negroid, Caucasoid or Mongoloid.’
Tom said, ‘I’ve always thought that Caucasoid sounded like a sanitation robot from Star Wars.’
MacNeil didn’t smile. ‘And Mongoloid is what, Asian?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Amy said. ‘Eskimo, Japanese, Chinese... all Mongoloid. It’s how I’d describe myself.’
MacNeil looked at her slanted almond eyes and high cheekbones, her fine jaw and shallow brow, and thought that he would be more likely to describe her as beautiful. Her long, shiny black hair was drawn loosely back and tied at the nape of her neck, and her fringe came down almost to her eyelashes. She glanced up to find him staring at her, and her eyes flickered quickly back to the child.
‘But it’s really the teeth that tell us most about her. The Mongoloid characteristics of the skull are more muted in one so young, but Mongoloids typically have shovel-shaped upper incisors.’ She pointed to each of them in turn. ‘Also, the tooth crowns are more bulbous, and again the incisors tend to have shorter roots.’
‘So how do you know she wasn’t like you? Chinese, or Asian, in origin but born and raised in the UK?’
Amy smiled. ‘Because her teeth are perfect,’ she said. ‘She’s had no dental treatment. None whatsoever. Didn’t need it. No sugar in the diet, a decay-free mouth. Which would be very unusual in a ten-year-old British kid.’
‘She was ten?’
Amy nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Margin of error?’
‘Plus or minus three or four months. The development of the teeth is a very accurate indicator.’
MacNeil mulled over for a moment everything she had told him. ‘You said she had two very distinctive visual characteristics.’
‘She was Asian, of course. And by that I don’t mean Indian or Pakistani. More like Chinese. I know you think we all look alike, so to your eye she probably wouldn’t have looked dissimilar to me at the same age. Except for one particularly compelling feature.’ She paused, leaving MacNeil impatiently waiting to hear what that might be. ‘She had a very marked harelip,’ Amy said. ‘At least, that’s what you would know it as. We would call it a cleft palate.’ She turned the skull towards him and tilted it back so that he could see it better. ‘A serious defect in the maxilla — the bone which holds the upper teeth. The cleft can be minor, or severe, as in this case. It can be unilateral, or bilateral. This one is unilateral. You can see the severe displacement of the upper anterior teeth.’ Amy looked at MacNeil. ‘I’m afraid this was a very distinctive-looking little girl. She would have turned heads. And she probably got a really hard time from the other kids at school.’
An electronic rendition of ‘Scotland the Brave’ burbled inappropriately somewhere deep within the folds of MacNeil’s coat. He fumbled to pull his mobile phone from his pocket and expose the lab to the full, unmuffled performance of his ringtone. When he had switched it back on earlier, he had seen that there were two missed calls. Both from Martha. She had left messages, but he had not picked them up. The display told him it was her again. He cut off the call without answering it, and thrust the phone back in his pocket.
‘An important call, then,’ Tom said.
MacNeil shrugged off his embarrassment. ‘My wife.’
‘Ah,’ said Tom. ‘She who must be obeyed.’ He paused. ‘Or not.’
MacNeil said to Amy, ‘You’ll write me up a report before you go?’
‘Of course.’
He nodded. ‘Thanks.’ And he pushed his hands in his pockets and headed for the door. Tom watched him leave with clear contempt. ‘You were pure genius,’ he said to Amy, ‘and all he could say was thanks.’
‘I was just doing my job, Tom. When he does his job, there’s probably not many people who even say that.’
Tom humphed. ‘He’s a cretin. God knows what any woman sees in him.’
‘You mean his wife?’
‘She’s probably got a white stick.’
‘They’re separated.’
Tom looked at her, surprised. ‘Well, aren’t you just a fund of interesting information. How the hell do you know that?’
Amy blushed and shrugged and turned back to the bones to hide her discomfort. ‘I don’t know. It’s just something I heard, that’s all.’
Chapter Four
Pinkie often dreamt of his mother. He knew she was his mother, because in his dreams that’s what he called her. But she didn’t really look anything like the woman he remembered from his childhood. Which was always disappointing when he woke up. Pinkie usually found reality disappointing. He liked to think that his waking hours were really dreams, and that his dreams were real. That way he could do anything he liked, and when he fell asleep, well, none of it had happened. It was a neat way of dealing with the strange things that pleased him. Things that others might not understand.
Right now he was back in his grandparents’ house. This was real. He remembered it so clearly. All those nights spent sleeping on the sofa in the front room. Icy cold in the winter. Hot and stuffy in the summer. And the bookcase that stood against the far wall, at the end of the sofa where his pillow went. He had lost count of the mornings he had woken before anyone else, and lain looking at those books lined up along the shelf at his eye level. Books with weird and wonderful titles — Eyeless in Gaza, Cloud Howe, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Written by people with the oddest names — Aldous Huxley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Ernest Hemingway. Who in God’s name was called Aldous?
It had taken him a long time, two years maybe, before he had ventured to slide one of the books from the shelf and gingerly open its yellowed pages. His grandfather had taught English at the local grammar school, and so there were all kinds of books on that shelf. This one was called Brighton Rock by someone called Graham Greene. He had only meant to read the first sentence. Which stretched to a paragraph, and then a page. And then another. In a year, he had read every book on the shelf. But that first one had always stayed with him. A strange darkness about it, set in an era before his time, beyond his ken. And a hero, or rather, anti-hero, with whom he had found instant empathy. The teenage gangster, Pinkie. Ruthless, heartless, manipulative. Quite compelling. Flawed, of course, but then weren’t we all?
He immediately adopted the nickname for himself. Pinkie. And insisted that’s what the other kids at school call him. It never struck him how risible it might seem to them, or how ridiculous it sounded. Because for him the name was synonymous with the character. And that’s who he wanted to be. It caused a great deal of hilarity at first, but that soon stopped. No one laughed at Pinkie a second time.