‘Between ten and twenty-five?’
‘Best I can do for you.’
‘You found the zip under the pelvis. Presumably it was a zip-fly from a pair of jeans. I’d expect someone of her age to be wearing jeans. All of the fabric had rotted away, I suppose?’
‘Completely. Nothing remained in the soil samples.’
‘The zip survived because it was metal. Wouldn’t she also have been wearing a belt?’
‘We didn’t find one. Not everyone wears one. They wear their jeans so tight that there’s really no need for a belt.’
‘If she’d had coins in her pockets, they could help.’
‘How? What could they tell you about her?’
It was Diamond’s turn to air some knowledge. ‘They show the year they were minted, don’t they? We could narrow that time frame.’
‘I’m with you now,’ Lofty said. ‘But no joy there. I checked with the crime scene people who were at the site and they found nothing else of interest. No coins, jewellery, belt buckle, shoes. Not even the hooks and eyes of a bra.’
Diamond could picture the look on Duckett’s charmless face as he announced he’d found nothing more. He thanked Lofty, put down the phone and went to look for Ingeborg. She was at her computer. He told her about the fifteen-year time frame. ‘We’re looking for a young woman aged seventeen to twenty-one who went missing between 1984 and 1999.’
She turned to look at him. ‘1987, guv.’
‘That isn’t what I said.’
‘That was the year of the great storm. October, 1987.’
‘Well?’
‘When so many trees came down. She was buried in the hollow left by a tree’s roots.’
She was bright. He wished he’d thought of that. ‘But can we be sure that tree came down then?’
She nodded. ‘I checked with the Lansdown Society.’
‘The what?’
‘There’s a society dedicated to keeping Lansdown unspoilt. I believe they’re a mix of landowners and wildlife enthusiasts. They monitor everything up there, all the activities.’
‘And they knew about that tree?’
‘As soon as I asked.’
He raised both thumbs. ‘So the time frame comes down to twelve years. You’re a star, Ingeborg. And now you can become a megastar by checking the missing persons register for those years.’
‘I already have, guv.’
‘You’ll get a medal at this rate.’
‘Not when you hear the result. I looked at all the local counties, made a list of missing girls under twenty-five, but I’m not confident she’s on it.’
‘Can you show me?’
She worked the keyboard and four names with brief details appeared on the screen.
‘Why so few? Hundreds of people go missing.’
‘We narrowed the criteria. These are all the search gave me.’
‘So what’s the problem with them?’
‘Look at the descriptions. The first girl, Margaret Edgar, was five foot eleven and Hayley Walters was only half an inch less. Gaye Brewster had broken her left arm and had it pinned some weeks before she disappeared. That would surely have been noticed by Mr Peake. Olivia Begg was about the height of our victim, but she went in for body piercings and nothing like that was found at the site.’
‘Those rings people wear in their…?’
‘Places I’d rather not mention.’
‘The killer could have removed them. He removed the head.’
‘True, but Olivia went missing only in 1999, at the margin of our time frame, and even that’s in doubt. There was an unconfirmed sighting of her in Thailand two years later. I doubt if she’s ours.’
Diamond exhaled, a long, resigned breath. ‘I’ve got to agree with you, Inge. They’re not serious candidates. When you think about it, plenty of young women of this age leave their families and friends and quite often it doesn’t get reported because no one is alarmed. It’s their choice. They hitch up with a pop star or go travelling or end up on the game. They don’t make the list of missing persons.’
She raked her hand through her long blonde hair and clutched it to the nape of her neck. ‘So what else can we do?’
‘Ask ourselves questions about the killer. Why choose to bury the body at Lansdown?’
After a moment’s reflection she said, ‘It’s remote. He wouldn’t be noticed if he picked his time to dig the grave.’
‘True.’
‘Where the tree was uprooted the soil would be looser to work with. He’d have a ready-made hole in the ground and he could use the soft earth to cover the corpse.’
‘You’re right about that. It was buried quite deep, not the proverbial six feet under, but all of three.’
‘Deep enough.’
He nodded. ‘Most murderers don’t appreciate the difficulty of digging a grave in unsuitable ground. The body found in a shallow grave is a cliché of the trade.’
‘So he chose his spot wisely, but he’d still have to transport the body there.’
‘Well, the ground slopes down a bit, but you could drive across the field in, say, a four by four.’
‘This is looking like someone who knows Lansdown well.’
‘Either that, or he got lucky,’ Diamond said. ‘The body was undiscovered for at least ten years and probably several more. It was deep enough to avoid the interest of foxes and dogs for a long time.’
‘It was a dog that found the bone in the end,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Yes, and I wonder why, after so long. Had something happened to disturb the grave?’
‘Dogs do go digging.’
‘Not that deep. Miss Hibbert didn’t say anything about the dog burrowing. She seemed to suggest he found it near the surface.’
‘What are we saying, guv? Some person was digging there? Why would they do that?’
Out of nowhere he became confessional. ‘When I was about eleven we used to make camps in the woods and smoke our fathers’ cigarettes and look at girlie magazines.’
Ingeborg didn’t really want this insight into his misspent youth and couldn’t see how it impacted on the investigation.
‘The space under the root system would make a good camp if you dug into it,’ he said.
‘Not my scene,’ she said, with a mental image of the adult Diamond sitting in the mud reading soft porn. ‘But I see what you’re getting at.’
‘Do kids still do that – make camps?’
‘I expect so – but I doubt if they’d choose Lansdown. It’s a long way from habitation.’
‘The crime scene people found some ringpulls.’
‘Adults?’
‘You might have a picnic there on a warm day.’
‘But you wouldn’t go digging for bones.’
His thoughts went back to something John Wigfull had told him. ‘A few weeks ago they re-enacted a Civil War battle up there. Grown-ups playing soldiers. If you were defending a stretch of ground and needed to dig in you’d be glad of a position like that.’
‘It wasn’t the Western Front,’ Ingeborg said. ‘The Civil War was all about man to man fighting, not trenches.’
‘You’d need to store your supplies somewhere. You’d look for an obvious place like that, partly sheltered. I reckon they’re the people who disturbed the grave. If they unearthed a femur in the heat of battle they’re not going to give it much attention. That could be how it came to the surface.’
‘Does it matter?’
He didn’t answer that. He was on a roll. Thanks to John Wigfull, he could air his second-hand knowledge with impunity. ‘Most weekends in the summer there’s a muster somewhere. That’s what they call it, a muster. The Sealed Knot came to Lansdown this year and they’ve been before, but not every year. Obviously they had a major muster in 1993, the anniversary.’
‘Of the Battle of Lansdown?’
‘Three hundred and fifty years on.’ He paused, as if to weigh the evidence. ‘We’re looking for a killer who buried his victim in the hole left by the tree. Depth, soft earth to cover her with. She’s been buried at least ten years. I’m thinking about 1993, right in the middle of our time frame.’