‘Looks like something’s happening,’ Terry said, staring through the binoculars.
About a mile away a line of cars and vans was racing across another road in the direction the helicopter had taken. Terry gave a grunt of satisfaction.
‘Good riddance.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Come on. The real thing should be here soon.’
It had taken two days to finalize all the necessary paperwork and arrangements for Monk’s temporary release. I’d spent most of that time in the mortuary. Cleaned of the thick coating of peat, the full extent of the young woman’s injuries was shockingly apparent. There seemed hardly any part of her skeleton that wasn’t damaged: in places only the decaying tendons and soft tissue held the bones together. It was the sort of trauma you’d expect from a car crash, not something inflicted by a human being.
‘The post-mortem wasn’t able to establish a definitive cause of death,’ Pirie told me, apparently unperturbed. ‘There are any number of injuries that could have been responsible. Many of the internal organs and soft tissues are ruptured, the hyoid bone is broken and there are fractures to several cervical vertebrae. The damage to the thoracic cavity would almost certainly have proved fatal, as the splintered ribs penetrated the heart and lungs. In fact, the injuries suffered by this young lady are so severe that shock alone would probably have killed her.’
Young lady sounded curiously old-fashioned. Prim, almost. For some reason it made me warm to the odd pathologist. ‘But . . . ?’ I prompted.
I was rewarded with a thin smile. ‘As I said yesterday, skeletal trauma is more your field than mine, Dr Hunter. I can’t rule out strangulation, but the blows to her head were so forceful that her vertebrae and hyoid would probably have broken anyway. The attack must have been quite frenzied.’
‘How do the injuries compare with Angela Carson’s?’
I’d only been given a copy of the earlier post-mortem report that morning. I hadn’t had a chance to read it fully, but the similarity of their injuries seemed undeniable.
‘The soft tissue was too degraded to distinguish any signs of sexual assault, unfortunately. I’d hoped the peat might have preserved it adequately, but the physical trauma and shallowness of the grave worked against us. A pity.’ He sniffed regretfully. ‘The Carson girl also suffered mainly facial and cranial trauma, although nowhere near so severe as this. But as I understand it in that instance Monk was interrupted by the police, which perhaps explains why these injuries are so much more . . . pronounced.’
They were that, all right. Against the dull silver backdrop of the examination table, the features barely looked human. The front of her skull had been crushed in like a dropped egg, while the remaining skin and soft tissue of the face were pulped into the fragmented bones of the cheeks and nasal cavity.
‘I believe psychologists claim this sort of facial disfigurement is an expression of the killer’s sense of guilt. Eradicating their victim’s accusing gaze. Isn’t that the accepted explanation?’
‘Something like that,’ I agreed. ‘But I can’t see Jerome Monk as the remorseful type.’
‘Quite. In which case he either has a truly terrifying temper, or he disfigures his victims for pleasure.’ He looked at me over the tops of his half-moon glasses. ‘Frankly, I’m not sure which is the most disturbing.’
Neither was I. A fraction of the force used would still have been fatal. Whoever this was, she hadn’t just been beaten to death: she’d been pulverized. It was overkill in a very literal sense.
I’d expected the pathologist to leave me to work with an assistant, but he stayed to help with the grisly task of cleaning the remains: first cutting away the soft tissue then helping me disarticulate the skeleton so it could be soaked in detergent. It was a necessary part of my work but not one I enjoyed. Especially not when the victim was little more than a girl, and I’d a daughter myself.
But Pirie showed no such qualms. ‘I’m always keen to learn new skills,’ he said, delicately teasing a tendon away from its connected bone. ‘Although I accept that these days that probably puts me in a minority.’
It took me a second to realize he’d been making a joke.
In the end, confirming that the dead woman was Tina Williams was relatively straightforward. The clothes and jewellery the body was buried in matched those the nineteen-year-old was last seen wearing when she’d disappeared from Okehampton, a market town on the northern edge of Dartmoor, and dental records confirmed her identity beyond doubt. Although the jaw and mandible were shattered and the front teeth broken, enough remained to provide a positive ID. The attack had been extensive but not methodical. Either Monk didn’t realize his victim could be identified from her dental records, or he didn’t care.
But then he probably never expected her body to be found.
I’d been able to add little to what we already knew. Tina Williams had suffered horrific blunt trauma injuries. Most of her ribs and the clavicle had simple fractures caused by a swift downward force, as did the metacarpals and phalanges of both hands. Although her face had LeFort fractures, formed when force from an impact dissipates along certain buttressing areas of the cranium, the rear of her skull was intact. That suggested she’d been lying face up on soft ground when the injuries had been inflicted.
Yet she seemed to have made no attempt to defend herself. Typically, when the forearm is raised to block a blow, it’s the ulna that takes the brunt of the force, causing a wedge-shaped break called a ‘parry fracture’. Here the ulnae and radii in both forearms had a combination of simple and more complex, comminuted fractures. That pointed to one of two scenarios. Either Tina Williams was already dead or unconscious during the attack, or she’d been trussed and helpless while Monk broke most of the bones in her body.
I hoped for her sake it was the former.
It was hard to say what had caused the injuries, but I thought I could guess. While Monk was powerful enough to have inflicted many of them with his bare hands, the frontal bone of Tina Williams’ skull – her forehead – bore a distinctive curved fracture. It was too big to have been caused by a hammer, which would in any case more than likely have punched straight through. It looked to me like something that might have been caused by a shoe or boot heel.
She’d been stamped on.
I’d worked on any number of violent deaths, but the image conjured up by that was especially disturbing. And now I was about to come face to face with the man who was responsible.
The sound of the helicopter rotors had all but disappeared as Terry and I went back to the small township of police trailers, cars and vans that had now sprung into life around the moorland track. The constant traffic was churning the moor into a quagmire. Duckboards had been set down as temporary walkways, but black mud oozed up through their slats, making them treacherously slippery.
I hadn’t expected to be here more than a few days, but the convict’s surprise offer to show us where Zoe and Lindsey Bennett were buried had changed all that. While Wainwright would remain in charge of any excavation, Terry had told me Simms wanted me on hand when – if – any more bodies were found.
‘Are you nervous? About meeting Monk, I mean?’ Kara had asked the night before.
‘No, of course not.’ I had to admit I was more curious than anything. ‘It isn’t every day you get to meet someone like him.’