The Altered Case by Peter Turnbull Read Free Book Online

make.’
    ‘I see.’ Dr D’Acre turned back to the tables and continued to observe the skeletons. ‘We have,’ she said, ‘two mature adults, one male and one female, plus three young adults, all female.’ She paused. ‘It is a family, I’ll be bound. You know if I was a betting lady I would lay good money that what we have here is a family with one daughter who grew up to be significantly taller than her parents and her sisters. Such is not unknown, and is commonly referred to as a “throwback gene”, but “dormant gene” is the preferred term. Somewhere back along the line of this family an ancestor had congress with a tall person and a height-inducing gene was introduced into their line. We often observe much the same in this part of England, Ms Pharoah.’
    ‘Really, ma’am?’ Carmen Pharoah allowed herself a brief but still reverential eye contact with Dr D’Acre. ‘That is quite interesting.’
    ‘Probably not so much in London,’ Dr D’Acre continued, ‘but up here in the frozen north, the wilderness that extends north of the River Trent, but particularly north of the River Humber, it is not at all unusual for stocky, swarthy, dark-haired people to produce a tall, blue-eyed blonde child. The Viking legacy you see. The Vikings left the beginnings of permanent settlements. They left place names and names for geographical features like “foss” for “waterfall”, and they also left their genes.’
    ‘That is quite interesting, ma’am,’ Carmen Pharoah replied, ‘and, as you say, no Viking influence in London, so that doesn’t happen.’
    ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Dr D’Acre rested her fingers on the lip of the nearest table to which she stood. ‘But I will be very surprised if these five people were not related in life, and were not related in their manner and time of death.’ She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and walked to the table upon which the male skeleton lay. She then reached upwards with a controlled and a confident movement and pulled down the microphone until it was level with her mouth at perhaps, estimated Carmen Pharoah, about two feet distant. ‘Date . . . today’s date, please, Sheila,’ Dr D’Acre said for the benefit of the audio typist who would shortly be typing her words into a word processor, ‘and also the next case number, please.’ She paused and then commenced her commentary. ‘The body is that of a mature adult male. It is completely skeletal. There is no trace of muscle or sinew, which indicates a burial in the damp, clay soil in the Vale of York of at least twenty years.’ She turned to Carmen Pharoah and explained, ‘Plenty of microscopic bugs in the soil to feast on the flesh. If they had been buried in a desert or in very cold areas then some flesh would remain, particularly in the cold areas.’
    ‘Yes, ma’am.’
    Dr D’Acre forced open the mouth of the skeleton and remarked, ‘British dentistry is noted, and with a gold filling, no less, which indicates late twentieth and early twenty-first century dentistry, unless the victims were especially wealthy, in which case the time of death could equally be much earlier in the twentieth century, even earlier than that, but gold fillings ceased to be a symbol of wealth after the Second World War.’
    ‘I see, ma’am,’ Carmen Pharoah responded.
    ‘Yes, courtesy of the good old envy of the world National Health Service, and were never to my taste.’ Dr D’Acre folded her arms. ‘I understand from Mr Hennessey that there is witness evidence which indicates a burial of about thirty years previous but forensically and pathologically speaking, I cannot find anything which would indicate a time of death so precisely.’
    ‘Understood, ma’am,’ Carmen Pharoah replied.
    Dr D’Acre unfolded her arms. ‘But . . . let’s press on and see what we can find. No injuries seem to have been sustained by the skeleton. There is no evidence of a blunt or sharp force trauma. So, for an explanation of