‘The police have already dusted for fingerprints,’ replied Gareth. ‘They’ve done all the ground floor and Millie’s room. I think they were just covering themselves. They didn’t find anything.’
‘What about Joe?’ asked Harry. ‘What does he say happened?’
‘Joe heard Tom yelling and got up,’ said Gareth. ‘He heard banging around downstairs, put his waterproofs on – showing great presence of mind for a six-year-old – and went out. He saw Tom lying in the mud and helped him carry the bag, with Millie in it, back to the house. I’d got up for a pee, realized the back door was open and come down. Got the fright of my life. All three of them, soaked to the skin and covered in mud. Tom started yelling about this little girl of his, Alice was all for rushing them to A&E, I took a look outside and realized I’d better get the police on the blower. Just what have they found out there?’
‘Not clear yet,’ lied Harry. He’d been asked not to mention the full extent of what had been discovered in the garden. ‘I’m sorry about the wall. If I’d had any idea …’
Gareth was staring at the row of three hooks that hung by the front door. ‘That’s funny,’ he said.
‘What is?’ asked Alice, who was halfway down the stairs. Harry turned to smile at her and couldn’t bring himself to do it. That wasn’t a face someone could smile at.
‘My keys. They were missing earlier, remember?’ said Gareth. ‘Did you find them?’
Alice shook her head. ‘They were probably there all along,’ she replied.
‘They weren’t. I checked after the kids had gone to bed. I had to dig out my spare set to use in the morning. How could they have got back here?’
Alice looked from Harry to her husband. ‘Tom could have …’ she began.
‘Why would Tom hide his dad’s keys?’ asked Harry, trying to curb his impatience – they didn’t know everything he did. ‘If he’d wanted to open the front door in the night there were other sets he could have used, weren’t there?’
Alice nodded. ‘Mine were there,’ she said, glancing up at the hooks. ‘They still are. And he didn’t open the front door. It was locked when we came down.’
‘He thought someone had come into the house earlier this evening,’ said Harry. ‘He was upstairs with Evi and came rushing down in a panic. Remember? He made us check the ground floor.’
‘Exactly,’ said Gareth. ‘We checked. No one was in the house.’
‘No, they weren’t,’ said Harry. ‘Question is, were the keys?’
52
‘THREE HUMAN SKELETONS,’ THE PATHOLOGIST SAID, ‘almost certainly the remains of very young children, but I’ll get to that presently.’
Harry was hot. The room was smaller than he’d expected. Having been invited by Rushton to be present at the pathologist’s examination – the remains were all still technically his responsibility – he’d hoped to be able to position himself in the furthest corner. It wasn’t going to be. No one was getting too far away from the action today – there just wasn’t the space. A stainless-steel counter, almost a metre wide, ran around the perimeter of the room. The floor was tiled and appeared to slope downwards, allowing for easier sluicing towards the central drain. Above the counters, glass-fronted cupboards lined the walls. Three gurneys were positioned in the centre of the room. They left little room for the pathologist, his two technicians, the team of three police officers and himself. Twice already, Harry had had to side-step, finding himself in the way. He looked at his watch. They’d been in the lab less than five minutes.
‘The one we have here,’ continued the pathologist, stepping up to the first gurney – Harry had been introduced to him fifteen minutes ago but couldn’t recall his name – ‘St Barnabas number one, we’ll call it for the time being, has been in the ground the longest. We can see almost complete skeletonization, with just the remains of muscle and ligament holding together the bones of the thorax and the abdomen.’ He began walking round the gurney, heading for the skull. ‘The right arm appears to have broken away at the shoulder when the grave was disturbed,’ he said, ‘and part of the ulna from the left arm hasn’t been recovered yet. A couple of the metacarpals from the left hand are also missing. The brain and the internal organs will be long since gone, of course. We found some