Broken Homes

types of brick bond if you counted Tudor and the other early modern styles, but I kept that to myself.
    Somebody sensible had strung reflective tape from tree to tree to mark our path downhill to where I could hear the rumble of a portable generator and see blue-white camera flashes, yellow high-viz jackets and the ghostly figures of people in disposable paper suits.
    Back in the dim and distant past, your victim was bagged, tagged and whipped away to the mortuary as soon as the initial photographs were taken. These days the forensic pathologists stick a tent over the body and settle in for the long haul. Luckily, back in civilisation it doesn’t take that much longer. But out in the country there’s all sorts of exciting insects and spores feasting on the corpse. These, so we’re told, reveal ever so much information about time of death and the state the body was in when it hit the ground. Getting it all catalogued can take a day and a half and they’d only just started when we arrived. You could tell that the forensic pathologist wasn’t happy to have yet another random set of police officers interfering with her nice scientific investigation. Even if we were good boys and wore our noddy suits, with the hoods up and masks on.
    Neither was DCI Manderly, who’d got there before us. Still he must have reckoned the sooner we were started the sooner we’d be gone, because he immediately beckoned us over and introduced us to the pathologist.
    I’ve been racking up some corpse time since I joined the Folly. And after the hurled baby and the Hari Krishna with the exploded head, I’d thought myself toughened up. But, as I’ve heard experienced officers say, you never get tough enough. This body was female, nude and caked in mud. The pathologist explained that she’d been buried in a shallow grave.
    ‘Only twelve centimetres deep,’ she said. ‘The foxes would have had her up in no time.’
    There was no sign of staging. So Robert Weil, if it had been him, had just dumped her in the hole and covered her over. In the harsh artificial light she looked as grey and colourless as the holocaust pictures I remember from school. I couldn’t see much beyond the fact that she was white, female, not a teenager and not old enough to have loose skin.
    ‘Despite the sloppy burial,’ said the pathologist, ‘there’s evidence of forensic countermeasures, the fingers have all been removed at the second knuckle, and of course there’s the face . . .’
    Or lack thereof. From the chin up there was nothing but a pulped red mass flecked with white bone. Nightingale crouched down and briefly got his own face close enough to kiss where her lips had been. I looked away.
    ‘Nothing,’ Nightingale said to me as he straightened up. ‘And it wasn’t dissimulo either.’
    I took a deep breath. So, not the spell that had destroyed Lesley’s face.
    ‘What do you think caused that?’ Nightingale asked the pathologist.
    The pathologist pointed to where the top of the scalp was traced with tiny red furrows. ‘I’ve never seen it in the flesh, so to speak, but I suspect a shotgun blast to the face at close range.’
    The words ‘Perhaps somebody thought she was a zombie’ tried to clamber out of my throat with such force that I had to slap my hand over my mask to stop them escaping.
    Nightingale and the pathologist both gave me curious looks before turning back to the corpse. I ran out of the tent with my hand still over my mouth and didn’t stop until I cleared the inner forensic perimeter where I could lean against the tree and take my mask off. I ignored the pitying looks I got from some of the older police outside – I’d rather they thought I was being sick than that I was trying to stop myself from giggling.
    PC Slatt wandered over and handed me a bottle of water.
    ‘You wanted a body,’ she said as I rinsed my mouth out. ‘Is this your case?’
    ‘No, I don’t think this is us,’ I said. ‘Thank god.’
    Neither did Nightingale, so we drove back to London as soon as we’d stripped off our suits and thanked DCI Manderly for his co-operation – Nightingale drove.
    ‘There were no vestigia and it certainly looked like a shotgun wound to me,’ he said. ‘But I’m minded to ask Dr Walid if he might like to come down and have a look for himself. Just to be on the safe side.’
    The steady rain had slacked offas we drove north and I could see the lights of London reflected off the clouds just beyond the North