Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Without speaking, Stoddart turned and walked off the road and put himself at the slope of the moor as it rose up from the road to the tops. The cops were suddenly aware that they were expected to follow. They did so, but not without a struggle. Stoddart was a man in his middle years but was also a man of immense physical strength. Clearly so, given the short work he made of the slope.

“He makes it look like a Sunday morning stroll to the news agent’s.” Piper clutched at a strand of heather and hauled himself a few feet further up the slope. His shirt was saturated with sweat. Behind him, Hamilton murmured something about them going back and fetching one of the police Landrovers. Eventually they stood beside Stoddart, who showed no sign of his exertions.

“Yon tree.” Stoddart pointed across the blue-grey-black, flat, gently undulating landscape.

“What tree?” Piper panted, scanning the landscape.

“Yon tree.” Stoddart nodded to the area ahead of him, still pointing. Then Piper saw a small tree of limited growth in the middle distance. “I see it.”

“Walk towards it. You’ll come across the bones near the tree, about three hundred yards short of it.” He turned and walked down the slope.

Piper and Hamilton watched Stoddart go. “Day off.” Piper smiled. They then turned and looked at the moor. “It’s a fine day for it, anyway. Some folk do this for a pastime and you and me get to be paid for it. Come on.”

They found the bones just where Stoddart had said they would find them. The skeleton was on its back. The skull grinned at them.

“Well, he was right, in a sense,” Piper said, “six days wouldn’t have made a deal of difference in this case. Even if it is murder.”

It was, in the event, a very, very clear case of murder.

“A very clear case of murder.” Dr. Reynolds reclined in his chair. He consulted his notes as he spoke on the phone. “Either that or someone caved in the skull of an already deceased person, but I doubt it. It’s the sort of injury you get if you put a pickaxe handle over someone’s head.”

“A pickaxe handle.” Donoghue scribbled on his notepad whilst holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder.

“Or similar.” Reynolds reached for his notes. “You see, it’s a linear fracture, many years old; we can tell that by the faded colour of the splintered pieces, and it’s that which makes me think that this is not a case of someone happening upon a skull and fracturing it out of devilment. The other thing that makes me think that this injury is the cause of death is the angle — it’s square on the back of the head, at the very back of the skull. The deceased would have been standing when he was struck from behind.”

“It’s a male?”

“Oh yes, male skeleton. The perpetrator would have been smaller than the victim. He was a six-footer in life.”

“I see.”

“Now, as well as the cause of death,” Reynolds glanced about his small office in the pathology department in the bowels of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and again felt a longing for better, larger working facilities, “as well as that, I can tell you a number of other things. He was middle-aged when he died, fifty-five years of age, plus or minus a year.”

“That’s accurate.”

“I took a tooth from his upper teeth and cut it in cross section — that enables us to date it within a twenty-four-month age range.”

“So he was fifty-four or fifty-five or fifty-six?”

“Yes.”

“When do you think he died?”

“That’s difficult to tell. Certainly it’s a period measured in years. It’s completely skeletal, no trace of matter on the bones at all, and that process of skeletalisation takes years. In cases like this, it’s really up to the police to date the skeleton rather than the pathologist. You know, the corpse under the patio dates from the time the patio was laid, that sort of thing.”

“Fair enough.”

“But in this case there is nothing that I can detect which enables me to date the time of death with any degree of accuracy. It may even have been buried shallowly and have worked its way to the surface, which may explain why it was not discovered earlier.”

“Possibly, but it was on a stretch of privately owned moorland where only the gamekeeper wanders. When he phoned us he said that he thought they were sheep bones, it was apparently only a matter of chance that he got close enough to see that it was a human skeleton. If he hadn’t got so close, the bones would probably have remained unnoticed for several years to come.”

“Lucky, or unlucky, depending on your perspective. I mean, lucky for you and the ends of justice, unlucky for the perpetrator.”

“Indeed. If he or she is still with us.”

“What I can do, and will do, is to remove the jaw and send it to the School of Dentistry. If you can provide a short list of names at some point, they’ll match it with the dental records of those names and if there’s a match, you have a positive ID.”

“Thanks. We’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll have my report typed up and faxed to you ASAP. Noreen’s not in yet. I fear that she probably had too much colourless liquid for her supper again last night.”