78

Tuesday 20 January

The lab tests confirmed the age of the woman who had been partially incinerated in the van as being between eighty and eighty-five.

Whoever she was – or rather had been – she was not the missing Rachael Ryan. Which now left Detective Sergeant Roy Grace with a second problem. Who was she, who had put her in the van, and why?

Three big unticked boxes.

So far no undertakers had reported a missing body, but Grace could not get the image of the woman out of his mind. During the past couple of days some of her details had been filled in for him. She was five feet, four inches tall. White. Lab tests carried out by Dr Frazer Theobald on her lung tissue and on the small amount of flesh intact on her back confirmed that she had been dead for some considerable time before the van caught fire – several days before. She had died from cancer secondaries.

But, it seemed, the county of Sussex was knee deep in little old ladies who were terminally ill. Some of its towns, like Worthing, Eastbourne and Bexhill, with their high elderly populations, were jokily known as God’s waiting rooms. To contact every undertaker and every mortuary was a massive task. Because of the pathologist’s findings, the case was regarded as bizarre rather than as a major crime, so resources allocated to it were limited. It was virtually down to Roy Grace alone.

She had been someone’s child, he thought. Someone’s daughter. She’d had children herself, so she had been someone’s wife or lover. Someone’s mother. Probably someone’s grandmother. Probably a caring, loving, decent person.

So how come her last journey had been buckled into the driver’s seat of a stolen van?

Was it a sick prank by a bunch of youths?

But if so, where had they taken her from? If an undertaker’s premises had been broken into and a corpse stolen, surely it would have been reported as a matter of urgency? But there was nothing on the serials. He’d checked them all, for three weeks back.

It just did not make sense.

He expanded his enquiries to undertakers and mortuaries beyond Sussex and into all the bordering counties, without success. The woman must have had family. Perhaps they were all dead, but he hoped not. The thought made him sad. It also saddened him to think that no undertaker had noticed her absence.

The indignity of what had happened to her made matters worse too.

If she wasn’t the helpless victim in some sick prank, was there something he was missing?

He replayed the scenario over and over in his mind. For what possible reason would someone steal a van and then put a dead old lady into it?

How stupid would you have to be not to know there were tests that would prove the old woman had not been driving, and that her age would be worked out?

A prank was the most likely. But where had they got the body from? Every day he was broadening his search of undertakers and mortuaries. There had to be one, somewhere in this country, that had a body that was missing. Surely?

It was a mystery that was to remain with him for the next twelve years.