The Backs (2013) (21 page)

‘And these things were out of your price range?’

‘I wasn’t jealous, if that’s what you’re thinking. I was chasing every job I could because I
needed
the money. Worrying about it was my only obsession. But then here was someone who had it, but was no happier than I was. I wondered whether I should learn to be content with my life, and I also wondered about her and all the other things she had that brought her so little joy.’

She lifted her head and looked at Goodhew through splayed fingers. ‘I know where you think I’m going with this. You’re sitting there remembering
Fatal Attraction
and
Single White Female
right now. But I’m actually far too dull to boil bunnies.’

‘So, what did you do?’

‘I started asking her about herself and, although she had always been happy to boast about anything she thought I might admire, she was much more reticent when it came to personal details. It was fair enough; I’ve always been quite a private person myself. So I shared a few stories and soon she opened up a little. A lot, in the end. We both did. It was the beginnings of our odd friendship.’

‘Not so odd. Plenty of people bond by learning about each other.’

‘Rather premeditated on my part, though.’

‘Does that really matter?’

She didn’t bother to reply. ‘We had some similarities: our unhappy marriages for one. And our ever decreasing options for another. I was trying to keep up with the course fees, while my husband was out running up debts faster than I could pay them. I told her I dreamt of slipping out during the night and leaving him with all the bills. She seemed to think I was joking, at that point.’

‘But you weren’t?’

She sighed and finally her hands fell away from her face. ‘No. It wasn’t a clear plan or anything, but once I’d voiced the idea, it didn’t seem so stupid.’

‘But she wasn’t interested?’

‘Not immediately, no. I’m sure you know as much about Mary as I do, but she was part way through her divorce when she found out that Greg . . . that her toy boy lover had taken up with one of her own daughters. I thought she’d brush it off, then one day she phoned me. She sounded scared and asked me whether I’d been serious about vanishing. When I met her, she had a bandage on one hand, then she lifted her T-shirt and showed me her ribs. She was a mass of bruises down one side. She’d been kicked, and her hand had been damaged as she tried to stop him.’

‘Who?’

Lesley shook her head. ‘She refused to say. She said it was obvious, now she’d seen it. Then she was adamant that she needed to use the money gained from the divorce and leave.’ Lesley screwed up her nose. ‘I suspected Greg had hit her – he had a wild streak, “He liked it rough” as she would say. She said she liked it too, at the time – said it increased the orgasm. Those were the kind of details I never wanted to know. And violence is still violence, in my mind.’

‘So Greg was still around then?’

‘Yes, we planned this before Becca’s death.’

Goodhew shook his head and slumped back in his chair. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘We had almost everything in place, but Mary couldn’t then leave in the middle of a murder trial. I thought she’d shelve the whole idea, but she phoned me soon after Greg’s conviction. I was desperate by then, so I jumped at the chance.’

‘Explain the plan.’

‘We chatted about all sorts of different ideas, but what did either of us know about fake identities? Nothing. So we needed to come up with an idea that was as simple as possible. Both Mary Osborne and Lesley Bough are average English names, so we set up new bank accounts in each other’s destination country, then just swapped our documentation. Only our passports were risky; we both ordered new ones. We used our own photos but chose hair, make-up and clothes that suited the other person.’

‘So you left the country on Jane’s passport?’

‘Yes, with Jane’s picture in it. It was one trip each, and once we were out of the country we planned to stay out.’ She shrugged. ‘It has worked so far and if anyone had found me, the plan was to say, “Sorry, must be a different Mary Osborne”.’

‘And why didn’t you?’

‘I saw the news stands. Gerry Osborne in the papers was one thing but when I realized Jane had turned up I thought . . . I don’t know, actually. When it came to it, I couldn’t pretend.’

‘And the postcards?’

‘We tried to guess how we’d feel one year, two years and further down the line. We wrote them one night and swapped cards so we could post each other’s home at regular intervals. I posted Mary’s to her old house. Is that how you found me?’

‘It was the biggest lead.’

She looked a little rueful. ‘I wondered if those cards were a step too far. They were my idea actually, so a bit of an own goal then.’

‘Don’t you miss home?’

‘No. My husband’s debts spiralled – way over fifty thousand pounds as far as I could tell. Then my mother died, leaving me just under twenty thousand pounds, and I realized that if I took that and ran I might just have a chance to make a new start. I can’t go home, because some of those debts are in my name, and my husband’s not . . .’ she fished around for the word. ‘He’s not a decent man,’ she concluded.

‘That sounds like an understatement.’

‘I just want the chance to stay clear. I’m now the happiest I’ve ever been, and I’d be pleased if you can tell that to Mary.’

Goodhew paused, and doodled a small cube on the corner of the page. ‘Sure,’ he said finally. ‘Please excuse me.’

He’d run out of things to ask for the moment. Of course there were plenty more questions, but right now he was too distracted by Marks’s phone call and his subsequent failure to return. From across the table, Lesley Bough watched him with the same open expression he’d noticed in the first photo he’d seen of her. The foreboding he now felt hadn’t seemed to reach her side of the desk but, then again, she didn’t know about Marks’s phone. The same phone that Marks had taken with him because only the major incident team had its number. Or the message Marks had left which read:
phone this mobile if it’s urgent.

They’d arrived back in the UK in the small hours, before travelling by taxi back up the M11 to Cambridge. Now they stood side by side in the morgue, staring down at the corpse. Neither he nor Marks spoke, but Goodhew guessed they were wondering pretty much the same thing:
Is it her?

Some bodies were horrific, others were so far gone that it was almost impossible to believe they’d ever lived. This one fell somewhere between the two.

At first glance it was little more than a skeleton, badly damaged, depersonalized and sexless. The burial and staining from the damp earth had left it looking like it had come from a film set, or was an ancient relic: one of the exhibits lying in museum display cases, which school children ogle and want to replicate for Halloween.

But they were both focusing more closely now. Sykes, the pathologist, rested one gloved hand on the corpse’s forehead. ‘Adult female, by the way.’ He held a pointer that resembled a broken aerial in the other hand, and rotated it over the centre and then the lower half of the skull.

‘The body was packed into a small area, force being involved at that point, then the crushing from earth, hardcore and finally stone slabs would have caused even further damage.’ He checked that they had both absorbed this comment before moving on. ‘It would be easy to attribute that compression as the cause of this damage, but it isn’t. The facial area received repeated heavy blows that caused collapse of the nasal and jaw areas. In two places’ – he directed the pointer at the centre of the chin, then under the lower jaw – ‘the blow was struck, with force, by a thin but hard edge.’

Sykes straightened and demonstrated what he meant by gripping an imaginary handle, as though he was holding a canoe paddle and stabbing it vertically. ‘A spade would be my first suspect, pointing downwards the first time, with the victim lying on her back on the floor. Then, the second time, more at the angle you’d shovel coal.’ He emphasized this point by changing the angle and repeating the action a couple more times.

‘And, given enough force, the damage would be catastrophic,’ Marks commented.

This struck Goodhew as a case of stating the obvious and, judging by the pathologist’s own expression, Sykes probably agreed.

Sykes drew closer to the body again. ‘There was no shortage of force here. It didn’t kill her, though.’

A tremor of nausea rippled through Goodhew’s gut. ‘She was dead already?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Well spotted.’

‘I haven’t spotted anything. I was just being optimistic.’
That sounded wrong.
The nausea took another minute to drift away.

Marks frowned. ‘What killed her, then?’

‘That’s straightforward enough.’ Sykes pointed to the ribcage. ‘See that?’

‘Oh yes.’ Goodhew saw it too: the bones scored by a blade that had penetrated between the sixth and seventh ribs on the victim’s left side. ‘How many times was she stabbed?’

‘At least four. This one is the most obvious incision but then there are other marks – here, here and here. The attacker used a great deal of force and, because of the relatively close proximity of the wounds, either restrained her or continued to stab her when she was beyond the point of struggling. Judging by these marks, I think we’re looking for a blade that’s about four centimetres at its base, and likely to be a minimum of fifteen centimetres in length.’

Goodhew recalculated. ‘An inch and a half by six, sir.’

‘Imperial’s easier to picture,’ Marks explained.

One side of Sykes’s mouth smiled. ‘You’ve used that one before.’

Goodhew’s attention had meanwhile moved back to the head. ‘That damage wasn’t an attempt to prevent identification, though, was it?’

‘Working out people’s motivations is hardly my field. This kind of damage could well have slowed identification, but if the body had been found quickly there’s no reason to think we wouldn’t have fingerprints. Even now there is still plenty of opportunity for at least a partial match with dental records, while the possibilities of DNA identification go almost without saying. So, no, there is nothing much here that will prevent us from identifying her. But the plan may have been to delay the identification, or make it difficult for anyone apart from us.’

‘That would seem to imply that someone else was expected to discover the body.’

Sykes shrugged. ‘As I say, the crime itself is your field, not mine.’ Sykes double-tapped his pointer on the sternum. ‘That’s not all this corpse can tell us, though. Look at these.’

Both Marks and Goodhew leant in closer to the right-hand side of her chest.

‘Broken ribs,’ Marks observed. ‘How long ago?’

‘Three or four years before death. The breaks themselves occurred during the same incident, and at the same time she shows—’

Goodhew spoke up before Sykes could finish. ‘That she had broken bones in one hand.’

‘Very difficult to spot, but you are correct.’

Marks spoke next. ‘And this injury is likely to be the result of the victim trying to defend herself?’

Sykes nodded. ‘But during the earlier assault, not at the time of her murder.’

‘Yes, yes, I realize that. And how long for DNA and dental identification?’

‘DNA? Not this week. The dental won’t be tonight, but possibly tomorrow. Who do you think she is?’

‘Mary Osborne.’

‘Rebecca Osborne’s mother?’ Sykes studied the body and exhaled slowly through his nostrils as he did so. ‘It’s more than possible, not just because of the location of the corpse either. You’d be surprised how often I see one family member in here, then another arriving later. Do you have any idea how often a sudden or violent death is followed by an accidental one a couple of years later?’

Goodhew’s memory jumped back to several incidences where the bereaved had explained how a new death had been the second or third to strike their family in a short space of time. He felt surprised that he’d never actually made the same observation himself, but clearly Sykes had been right when he’d said his view of any case was different from theirs.

‘Except, of course, neither was an accident,’ Sykes continued, ‘and we’re looking at the same cause of death for both.’

‘And the same killer?’

‘Highly, highly probable. I conducted Rebecca Osborne’s autopsy too, and the force of the attack and the determination to kill was simlar in both.’ Sykes looked up brightly. ‘And if that’s the case, and if this is Mary Osborne, then Greg Jackson is in the clear.’

Goodhew’s thoughts were already converging on Rebecca Osborne, and he suddenly became aware that he was staring at Sykes. He glanced at Marks in time to catch his boss’s expression.

‘We’ll need to update the family,’ Marks said. He began to fasten his jacket. ‘Goodhew, are you ready?’ He turned to thank Sykes who then followed them towards the exit.

‘I’ll send you the full report as soon as – and let you know if anything else turns up in the interim.’ Sykes raised his gloved hand instead of offering it for them to shake. ‘I don’t think any of us were expecting this development when we ate breakfast this morning,’ he added, as they left.

But Goodhew had noticed Marks’s reaction, and he wasn’t quite so sure.

Marks said very little during their taxi ride from Addenbrooke’s to Parkside.

‘When will you be visiting the Osbornes?’ Goodhew asked.

‘Straight away, I think.’

‘It’s about three a.m.’

Marks turned on the courtesy light over his head and scrutinized his watch for several seconds. ‘I hadn’t realized. In the morning, then.’ He turned the light out again. ‘People don’t think clearly in the small hours. Me included,’ he added finally. He then leant back in his seat, with his head on the headrest. He closed his eyes.

Goodhew knew this was a sign to stop talking. ‘How much will you tell them?’ he asked.

Several seconds ticked by before Marks answered. He spoke softly, so that the driver couldn’t hear. ‘Two facts only: Mary Osborne’s not in France, but she might be . . .’ he paused to think through the words in case the driver could overhear, ‘. . . she might be with Sykes.’