Walking with Ghosts by John Baker Read Free Book Online

you’ve come to see me.’
    He led her into the office and retrieved a large file, which he flipped open. ‘Mrs India Blake, deceased.’ He sighed looking down at a photograph of the woman, taken a few weeks before her abduction. ‘Such a waste.’
    Marie looked over his shoulder. India Blake had been a striking woman. She was thirty-six, but could easily have passed for someone in her late twenties. The photograph was taken by some fashionable professional, and showed a beautiful woman wearing a thirties’ style coat with heavily padded shoulders. The coat was open, revealing a black lace blouse and a skirt with a cut to die for. The gaze of the woman was upward, past the left shoulder of the photographer, nonchalant, wistful, as though the camera had caught her unawares, in a private moment.
    Behind her was a parapet, and beyond that a series of rooftops. It could have been taken on the city walls, or the roof of the Minster, but Marie didn’t think so. Maybe the photographer had a penthouse studio somewhere?
    Cod handed her a list of substances found in and around the allotment shed. ‘That’s a list of everything we’ve identified,’ he said. ‘The second column shows where it was found, and the third column is a guesstimate of the approximate quantity.’
    The next photograph had been taken inside the allotment shed shortly after the corpse had been found. If you looked really hard you could have identified her by the hair. There was no face left. The bugs and crawlies had got inside her eyes and stripped the flesh from her nose. Her lips had gone, as had most of the tissue from the inside of her mouth. There was still some flesh on her forehead and chin, creamy coloured, like full-fat cheese, but with black marks.
    The body had been concealed beneath the flooring of the shed. A couple of teenagers looking for somewhere to screw had disturbed the flooring and found something that put a strain on their relationship before it ever got going.
    ‘Piophila casei,’ Simon Cod told her. He held up a cellophane bag. Inside was a small fly. ‘Known as the cheese skipper, because it’s a pest in stored cheese and bacon, which to its simple mind is dead meat. This is the adult variety. She appears quite early on a dead body, but her larvae are never apparent before two months, and often take between three and six months to show themselves. There were no cheese skipper larvae on the body of India Blake.’ Marie peered at the fly, but didn’t find it very interesting. ‘OK ’ she said. ‘So this, thing , tells us that death occurred less than two months before the body was discovered. So she was alive for about a month after she disappeared?’
    ‘Right. But, speaking biologically, death is more of a process than an event. Different tissues and organs die at different rates. We also found these.’ He showed her another sample. ‘The pupa of Diptera, blowflies to you. The adults are usually the first to arrive, they colonize the natural openings of the body, the mouth, nose, eyes, ears, vagina, penis, anus, and any injury sites.’
    ‘Yuk,’ said Marie.
    The doctor smiled. ‘Yuk, indeed, Marie. Having said all that, they usually concentrate on the head area, or on open wounds. But in the case of Ms Blake there was a heavy infestation of the vaginal area. This would lead us to suspect some injury in that area, maybe the result of a rape, perhaps something worse.’
    ‘You don’t know?’
    ‘There wasn’t enough tissue left to know, but the circumstantial evidence leads us to speculate.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘Yes, these little chaps’ - he indicated the pupa of the blowflies - ‘tell us almost to the day when she died. Give or take a day either side, she had been dead for three weeks.’
    ‘No longer?’
    He shook his head.
    But she was missing for three months. How long does it take to starve to death?’
    She didn’t starve to death. She dehydrated. She was undernourished, too. There seems little