Solo - Jack Higgins [23]
'A lady of considerable character, Superintendent. She paints, you know. Water colours mostly. She had quite a reputation, under her previous name.'
'Morgan, sir? Yes, I was wondering about that. Mrs Wood was widowed, I presume?'
'No, Superintendent - divorced.' Francis Wood smiled faintly. 'That would surprise you, the Church of England holding the views it does. The explanation is simple enough. To use an old-fashioned term, I happen to have private means. I can afford to steer my own boat. There was a gap of a year or two when we first got married when I was out of a job and then my present bishop wrote to me about Steeple Durham. Hardly the hub of the universe, but the people there had been without a rector for six years and were willing to have me. And my bishop, I might add, is a man of notoriously liberal views.'
'And the child's father? Where could we contact him? He'll need to be notified.'
Before Wood could answer, Mrs Carter left and his wife turned and came towards them. She was thirty-seven, Baker knew that from the information supplied by Stewart, and looked ten years younger. She had ash blonde hair tied at the nape of her neck, pulled back from a face of extraordinary beauty and the calmest eyes he had ever seen in his life. She wore an old military trenchcoat which had once carried a captain's three pips in the epaulets, his policeman's sharp eyes noticed the holes.
'I'm sorry to have to ask you this, but it's time for formal identification, Mrs Wood.'
'If you'd be good enough to lead the way, Superintendent,' she said in a low, sweet voice.
Doctor Evans, the pathologist, waited in the postmortem room, flanked by two male technicians, already wearing white overalls and boots and long pale-green rubber gloves.
The room was lit by fluorescent lighting so bright that it hurt the eyes and there was a row of half a dozen stainless-steel operating tables.
The child lay on her back on the one nearest the door, covered by a white sheet, her head raised on a wooden block. Helen Wood and her husband approached, followed by Baker and Stewart.
Baker said, 'This isn't going to be nice, Mrs Wood, but it has to be done.'
'Please,' she said.
He nodded to Evans who raised the sheet, exposing the head only. The girl's eyes were closed, the face unmarked, but the rest of the head was bound in a white rubber hood.
'Yes,' Helen Wood whispered. 'That's Megan.'
Evans covered the face again and Baker said, 'Right, we can go.'
'What happens now?' she said. 'To her?'
It was Francis Wood who said, 'There has to be an autopsy, my dear. That's the law. To establish legal cause of death for the coroner's inquest.'
'I want to stay,' she said.
It was Baker who by some instinct got it exactly right. 'Hang around here if you want to, but within five minutes, you'll think you're in a butcher's shop. I don't think you'd want to remember her like that.'
It was brutal, it was direct and it worked so that she broke at once, falling against Wood, half-fainting; Stewart ran to help him. Together, they got her from the room.
Baker turned to Evans and saw only pity on his face. 'Yes, I know, Doc. A hell of a way to make a living.'
He walked out. Evans turned and nodded. One of the technicians switched on a tape recorder, the other removed the sheet from the dead girl's body.
Evans started to speak in a dry unemotional voice. 'Time, eleven-fifteen p.m. July twenty-first, nineteen seventy-two. Pathologist in charge, Mervyn Evans, senior lecturer in forensic pathology, University of London Medical School. Subject, female, age fourteen years one month. Megan Helen Morgan. Died approximately seven-fifteen p.m. this date, as a result of a hit and run driving accident.'
He nodded and one of the technicians pulled back the rubber skull cap, revealing immediate evidence of massive cranial fracture.
Continuing to speak in that same precise voice, detailing every move he made, Evans reached for a scalpel and drew it around the skull.
Francis Wood came in through