The Tooth Tattoo(24)

The first duty of the police was to identify the dead woman, but this was difficult. She was way past the point when anyone would recognise her. A body in water will sink to the bottom and only rises to the surface when decomposition begins and gases form within the stomach and lungs. The time this takes depends on the water temperature. In icy conditions, months. In the Avon in a typical English summer, not much less.

In this case the decomposition was plain to see. Significant areas of the skin and tissue had peeled away.

The deceased was short, at just under five feet, and slight in build. Her hair was natural black, and cut sheer at the back. She had a full set of teeth, with some whitened fillings. The white T-shirt and black jeans she was wearing gave no clue as to her identity. Nothing was in the pockets. She wore no jewellery.

The missing persons register was consulted. Nobody from the local area matched the description, such as it was.

An early decision was taken by the coroner to order an autopsy. It was carried out by one of the hospital’s team of clinical pathologists. The police, who provided continuity of evidence, were in attendance. Sometimes new information is discovered at this stage. Not this time.

Identity: unknown.

Cause of death: uncertain.

The pathologist – a man who didn’t like wasting time – was unwilling to speculate how this young woman had died. The obvious assumption would have been that she had drowned – difficult to prove in any case and impossible in this one. Drowning is one of the most problematic of all causes of death to diagnose. For one thing, the immersion in water, possibly for a considerable time, rots the body and vitiates the evidence. If the internal organs have deteriorated, as they do in quite a short time, they won’t provide confirmation that the victim was struggling to breathe.

In this case, the classic signs, the plumes of froth at the mouth and nostrils, must have dispersed long ago and any internal froth at the trachea and bronchi would have vanished. There were no obvious external marks of injury apart from minor lacerations probably caused by the body being moved with the current and striking submerged rocks and objects. Anyway, the state of putrefaction would have masked anything less than severe wounding. All the pathologist would say was that from the general deterioration she must have been immersed for a minimum of two weeks and probably longer.

He added that a diagnosis of drowning is invariably a best-guess situation and this would be a very inferior guess that he wasn’t willing to hazard.

He estimated her age at between twenty and thirty.

As for identification, her own family would not have recognised her. Under water the body assumes a face-down position, with the face, arms and legs dragging along the bottom.

It was only after the post-mortem, when the clothes were being put in a bag for storage, that a medical student assisting the pathologist happened to draw his attention to a faded label on the white cotton knickers.

‘Sir, have you noticed this?’

He had not, whatever it was, and he was not overjoyed to be told. ‘Noticed what?’

‘I believe this writing is Japanese.’

‘Why? Can you read it?’

The student reddened. ‘No, but I spent some of my gap year in Tokyo. I can tell the difference from Chinese.’

‘So?’

‘So if her knickers were made in Japan, isn’t there a chance she was Japanese?’

‘Unless, like you, she travelled to Japan in her gap year. Or unless Japanese knickers happen to be on sale at Marks and Spencer. Or Tesco. I’m a histopathologist. My expertise doesn’t stretch to ladies’ underwear.’

‘It was just something I noticed.’

‘Full marks.’ Said with no gratitude.

‘Isn’t there a way of telling?’

The pathologist gave a long-suffering look to the police witnesses, pulled up his face mask and asked the mortuary attendant to return the body to the table. ‘You thought we were through, ladies and gentlemen, and so did I. From the state of her, I wouldn’t know if she’s Japanese or from up the road, but there is a way of finding out a person’s racial origin from the teeth. There’s a difference between people of Caucasian origin and the Mongoloid group of Asia and it’s known as the shovel tooth – a concavity at the back of the upper incisors.’ He leaned over the skull and opened the jaws. ‘We don’t routinely go into this kind of detail. Can we get a better light on this?’ First, he ran his little finger along the back of the teeth. Then he used a dental mirror.

An uncomfortable silence followed.

‘Hey ho,’ the pathologist said without a glimmer of pleasure, ‘this may be significant. These appear to be shovel teeth.’