The room was chill and devoid of natural light. The stainless steel refrigeration units lined one wall, and in the centre of the room were four autopsy tables glinting under the fluorescent light. The one closest to the door was laid with a blue sheet, and on it, the small skeleton had been pieced together, laying intact, the bones a shade of dark brown.
Dr Isaac Strong had his back to Erika, and when he heard her enter he straightened up, and turned. He was tall and thin and wore blue scrubs, a white face mask and a tight fitting blue cap. His assistant, a young girl worked quietly and respectfully, neatly snipping a small lock of the wiry brown hair, still attached to the skull. The latex of her gloved hand crackled as she placed the lock of hair in a small clear evidence bag.
‘Hello Erika.’
‘Thank you for calling me, Isaac,’ she said looking past him to the skeleton. There was an unpleasant smell, of stale water, decay, and a meaty aroma of bone marrow. She looked back to Isaac’s face. He pulled down the white mask, raised his immaculately shaped eyebrows, and smiled, breaking through the formality. She smiled back briefly. She hadn’t seen him for several weeks. Their friendship was strong, but faced with death, and in this formal setting they were professional. They nodded, reverting to their roles of Forensic Pathologist and Detective Chief Inspector.
‘Procedure dictates that I’ve had to put through a call to the SCIT at Scotland Yard. I presume on Sunday things move a little slowly, but I thought you would like to know my findings.’
‘You’ve contacted the Specialist Casework Investigation Team? That means you’ve identified who this is?’ asked Erika. He put up his hand.
‘Let me start from the beginning,’ he said. They moved closer to the autopsy table, the grime on the bones contrasted with the pristine sterile sheet where they were neatly arranged. ‘This is Lan, my new assistant,’ he said indicating the elegant young Chinese girl. She nodded, just her eyes showing over her mask.
‘Okay. You can see on the left side of the skull there’s a fracture,’ said Isaac, gently lifting a matted swirl of coarse brown hair and pulling it away, exposing a crack in the smooth bone of the skull. ‘It’s six centimetres in length, and I believe this was caused by a blunt object, you can see the impact point here, just above the left eye on the temple. I can only hypothesise at this time that it may have been the cause of death. It certainly would have caused considerable trauma. Two of the teeth are missing, at the top front, and one of the left incisors,’ he said moving his gloved hand down to the upper set of browny yellow teeth. ‘Six of the ribs are broken. So is the wrist of the right hand, and there are two fractures on the left femur,’ he said moving down the small skeleton to indicate the points. ‘The body had been wrapped tightly in plastic, which has kept much of the skeleton intact. Typically in waterways, lakes, or quarries there are pike, freshwater crayfish, eels, and all manner of bacteria and microbes, which will feast and break a corpse down. The plastic protected the skeleton from all but the smallest of microbes which would have consumed the body.’
Lan stepped away from the autopsy table and retrieved a small stainless steel trolley, which she pushed toward them. On it there were some personal effects removed from the skeleton, placed on another small square of material.
‘We found several scraps of woollen clothing, a line of buttons to indicate this may have been a cardigan,’ said Isaac showing where some brown threadbare pieces had been reassembled into a vague shape. ‘There is also a belt made from a mix of synthetic plastics, you can see the colour has gone but the buckle remains tied.’ Lan held up the belt, fastened in a small loop. Erika saw just how tiny the waist must have been that it encircled.
‘And there was a small piece of nylon material, still attached to and tied amongst the hair, I think this was a ribbon…’
Erika paused for a moment and swept her eyes across it all. The skeleton, small and vulnerable, stared back at her with empty eye sockets.
‘These are the belongings of a young girl?’ said Erika.
‘Yes. I believe so.’
‘Do you have any idea of age?’ Erika looked up at Isaac, expecting a blunt response, and for him to give his usual scalding reply, that that this was too early to know for sure.
‘I believe that the skeleton is of a seven year old girl called Jessica Collins.’
Erika looked between Isaac and Lan, momentarily stunned. ’What? How do you know?’
‘It can be very hard to determine the sex of skeletal remains, in particular if death occurred before the age of puberty. The small amount of clothing encouraged me to take a leap, and we looked into all the cases of missing girls between the ages of eight and sixteen reported in the past twenty-five years. We focused on the missing child reports in the South London area and Kent borders. When the names came back, I requested dental records. We’ve matched the teeth to the records of a girl called Jessica Collins.’
Lan went over to the counter and returned with a folder. Isaac took it and slid out an x-ray image, holding it up to the light.
‘I don’t have a light box anymore, the old one has conked out and I’m waiting for new bulbs,’ he said ruefully. ‘One of the hazards of x-rays going digital… But this is taken from dental records in July 1989. Jessica Collins was playing in the garden and was hit in the jaw by a cricket ball. She was six years old. If you can see here, there was no damage, but the x-ray showed that the front teeth are indented and slightly twisted, and the bottom set too is uneven. It’s a perfect match.’
They looked back at the skeleton. The top teeth, brown and crooked, the jawbone lying neatly beside it, missing teeth, both giving up the secrets of the skeleton’s identity.
‘I’ve managed to extract a small amount of bone marrow, and it’s going off the lab shortly, but I’m just covering all the bases. I can confirm this is Jessica Collins.’ There was a pause. Erika ran her hand through her short blond hair. ‘When did you come to the UK, what year?’
‘It was September 1990,’ she replied.
‘Do you remember the Jessica Collins case?’
Erika paused for a moment and raked through the memories of when she moved to the UK from Slovakia, aged eighteen to work as an au pair for the family with two small children in Manchester.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t speak much English, and it was all a culture shock. For the first few months I was working in their house, and I stayed in my room, didn’t have a TV…’ Erika stopped and realised that Isaac’s assistant was watching her closely. ‘No, I’m not aware of the case.’
‘Jessica Collins went missing on the afternoon of the 7th of August 1990. She left her parents house to go to her friends birthday party in the next street. She never arrived at the party. They never found her. It was as if she’d vanished into thin air. It was a major headline story.’
Isaac took another piece of paper from the file. It was a photograph of a young blond haired girl with a wide smile. She wore a pink party dress with matching thin belt, a blue cardigan with a white trim, and white sandals with a multi coloured pattern of flowers. In the picture she posed in front of a dark wooden door in what looked like a living room.
There was something about her toothy grin, with the crooked bottom teeth in the picture, which she could see replicated on the jawbone with matching teeth laying on the autopsy table, which made Erika gasp.
‘Yes, I remember,’ she said softly, now recognising the picture. It had been used in every newspaper story.
’And right now, we’re the only three people in the world who know what happened to her,’ said Lan, speaking for the first time.
‘Apart from the bastard or bastards who killed her,’ added Erika.
7
It got dark as Erika drove back to her flat from the mortuary in Penge. There was little traffic on the roads, and as the light faded, a low fog descended, and so did the gloom in her heart. Throughout her career cases came and went, but there were always some which affected her. She didn’t need to work out any date
s, for it was always there in the back of her mind. She’d become pregnant, quite by accident late in 2008. She’d fought with her husband Mark, he wanted to keep the baby and she didn’t. She’d had the pregnancy terminated. Mark hadn’t given his blessing, but he had told her that he would support her in what she wanted to do.
It had been a rough year in the aftermath, she’d lurched between relief and revulsion. She’d blamed herself and she’d blamed Mark for not fighting her hard enough.
It had been a very early on in the pregnancy, but she had been sure it was a girl. If she’d gone through with it she’d now be seven. A baby would have changed things. Mark had offered to be a stay at home dad.
The roads slid past, grim and grey and the tears poured down Erika’s face. If Mark had stayed at home, he wouldn’t have been there at work that fateful day when he was gunned down. She gulped and sobbed, and then suddenly a woman with a little kid darted out from behind a parked car. Erika slammed on the brakes just in time, and came screeching to a halt. The woman was young and dressed in a thick pink bomber jacket. She waved that she was sorry and pulled the little kid who was dressed in a skeleton Halloween costume. It turned its little head and a tiny skeleton face stared into the bright headlights. Erika closed her eyes tight, and when she opened them, they were gone.
* * *
When she arrived home. She flicked on the central heating and kept her coat on as she made herself a large coffee and then settled down on the sofa with her laptop. She went straight to Google and typed in “Jessica Collins Missing Girl” a whole page of results came up and she clicked on the first, a Wikipedia entry.
* * *
Jessica Marie Collins (born 11 April 1983) disappeared on the afternoon of 9 August 1990. Shortly after leaving her parents house in Avondale Road, Hayes, Kent to attend the birthday party of a school friend.
On the afternoon of 7 August at 13.45 Jessica left her parents house, alone, to make the short walk to a neighbouring house 1 Avondale Road where her friends birthday party was being held. She never arrived. It wasn’t until 16.30, when her parents, Colin and Marianne Collins arrived to collect her, that they raised the alarm.
The disappearance quickly attracted wide media coverage in the UK press. On 21 August, Scotland Yard released photo-fit images of a dark haired man that they wanted to trace in connection with Jessica’s disappearance. The man had been seen walking with a young girl close to a local parade of shops three hundred yards from Avondale Road on the afternoon of 7 August 1990. The dark haired man was never found.
In September 1990, another man, 33 year old Trevor Marksman was arrested by police and questioned, but was released six days later without charge. Police enquiries continued into 1991 and 1992. The missing persons enquiry was scaled back in late 1993.
No further arrests were made and the case remains open. Jessica Peter’s body has never been found, and the case remains unsolved.
* * *
She checked out the location of Hayes quarry on Google Earth. It was less than two miles from Avondale Road where Jessica went missing.
‘Surely the quarry must have been dredged when Jessica went missing?’ said Erika to herself. She then logged into HOLMES the online police database. The HOLMES system had been in use since 1985, but it took several years for all forces to adopt it fully, and much of the older casework was still recorded on paper. Details of the Jessica Peter’s case were sketchy. Erika tipped her head back against the sofa cushion and tried to absorb the information.
When she closed her eyes, an image rushed at her. A skull with bare eye sockets, the jaw and teeth opening wider. She got up to make some coffee when her phone rang. It was Superintendent Yale.
‘Sorry to cut into your Sunday night, Erika, but we’ve just had an offer come in from Jason Tyler. He’s agreed to name four of his associates, and hand over emails, and records of bank transfers.’
‘You make it sound like he’s buying a house from us…’
‘You know the score, Erika. We can hand this over to the CPS knowing we’ll get a result and probable conviction. It’s a result you should be proud of.’
‘Thank you, Sir, but the prospect of Tyler going down for a reduced sentence doesn’t make me feel proud.’
‘But he’ll go down.’
‘And what’s he going to do when he’s released? Start up a candle making business? He’ll be back, dealing.’
‘Erika where is this coming from? This is the result we wanted. A strong result. He’s out of action, we get to his associates, cut off supply to the dealers.’
‘What happens to Theresa, and the kids?’
‘They’ll testify, probably via video link, and they get a new identity.’
‘Theresa has an elderly mother and two aunts.’
‘And that’s very sad, Erika, but she must have known what she was getting into when she hitched her wagon to Jason Tyler. Or did she think all the money coming into their fancy house was from a candle making business?’
‘You’re right. Sorry, Sir.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘About the skeleton we found in hayes quarry. It’s been identified. A seven-year-old girl called Jessica Collins. Went missing in 1990.’
Yale whistled on the other end of the phone. ‘Jesus, that’s who you found?’
‘Yeah. I know the Forensic Pathologist, he’s notified the Specialist Casework Investigation Team, but I’d like to be the SIO on this case.’
There was a pause.
‘Erika, what are you talking about? You were assigned to The Projects Team as part of Specialist, Organised and Economic Crime.’
‘But Sir, I discovered the remains. It’s on our patch. The missing person case was originally led out of our borough…’
‘And a lot has changed since the 1990s. We don’t deal with kidnap or murder. You know that, we deal with proactive contracts to kill, major drugs suppliers, multi-dimensional crime groups, including ethnically composed gangs, and serious large scale firearms trafficking…’
‘And when I joined your team you said I was foisted on you like the aunt that no one wants to have for Christmas…’
‘I didn’t say it quite like that, but you are now a valuable part of my team.’
‘Sir, I can solve this case. You know my track record with solving difficult cases. I have unique skills which would benefit a historical murder enquiry…’
‘And yet after all these years you are still a DCI. Have you even considered why?’
Erika was silent on the end of the phone.
‘I expressed that wrongly, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But the answer is still no.’
8
Just before nine pm, Erika parked her car and crossed the road to Commander Marsh’s house. It was a smart area of South London near Hilly Fields Park, which looked out over the London skyline, glittering in the darkness.
The large double aspect bay window on the ground floor was in darkness, but lights were on in houses up and down the street and a couple of small groups of little children dressed in Halloween costumes were being escorted down the street and across the road by their parents.
Marcie Marsh emerged from the gate of a house a little way down the road, and with her were two tiny blurs of pink. They came toward her and she could see it was their twin girls dressed as identical fairy princesse, each carrying a little plastic pumpkin filled with sweets. Marcie wore black leggings, pointy ears and her face was painted like a cat. Erika couldn’t help but feel irritated by the costume.
‘Erika what are you doing here?’ she said stopping at the gate. The two little dark haired girls looked up at her. Wee they five or six? Erika couldn’t remember.
‘I’m sorry, Marcie. I know you hate me making house calls, but this really is very important. I just need to speak to Paul. He’s not answering his phone.’
‘Did you try the station?’ she asked opening the front gate and ushering the girls down the path.
‘He’s not answering there either
.’
‘He’s not here,’ she replied.
’Trick or treat!’ cried one of the girls rushing back toward Erika and holding up her pumpkin.
‘Trick or treat!’ screamed the other.
‘Oh dear. I don’t have any sweets… but here’s something to get some more!’ Erika pulled out two five pound notes and dropped one in each pumpkin. They looked up at Marcie, unsure if this was allowed.
‘Wow, look at that, say thank you, girls!’
‘Thank you, Erika,’ they both squeaked. They were very cute, and Erika smiled back at them.
‘Just remember to brush your teeth after all those sweets.’
The girls nodded solemnly.
Erika smiled, ‘I’m sorry Marcie. I really need to speak to Paul. Do you know where he is?’
‘Hang on…’ she opened the door and told the girls to go and get ready for bed and then came back out. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’ she sighed.
‘Tell me what?’ said Erika surprised.
‘We’re separated. He moved out three weeks ago.’
‘No. I’m sorry. I really didn’t know… Where is he?’
‘He’s been staying at the flat. In Foxberry Road, until we sort something…’
They paused for a moment looking at each other. A cold blast of wind wheeled round the side of the house. The girls shrieked from upstairs.
‘I have to go, Erika.’
‘I’m really sorry, Marcie.’
‘Are you?’ she replied pointedly.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘I’ll see you around,’ said Marcie, and she closed the front door.
Erika heard the twins shrieking, and went back to her car.
9
Number ninety-seven Foxberry Road loomed over Erika as she pulled up outside. It was at the end of a long line of terraced houses, three storeys high, running down from Brockley train station.