“What was all that about?” Annie asked when they were back in the car.

“What?”

“Asking him if he’d been arrested. You know an offense like that is hardly still going to be in records.”

“Oh, that,” said Banks, buckling up and settling back in the passenger seat while Annie started the ignition. “I just wanted to see whether he’s a good liar or not. People usually lie the first time when you ask them if they’ve ever been arrested.”

“And?”

“Well, there was a slightly different inflection on that last ‘no,’ the lie, but not different enough to convince me he’s not a good liar.”

“Bloody hell,” said Annie, heading off down the drive and spraying gravel, “a proper Sherlock Holmes I’ve got beside me.”

It was only a short drive down Longthorpe Parkway from police headquarters to the District Hospital, and early that Friday afternoon the traffic was light. Instinctively, Michelle found herself checking her rearview mirror to see if she was being followed. She wasn’t.

She parked in the official visitors’ area and made her way to pathology. The forensic anthropology department was small, just a couple of offices and one lab, and none of the staff was permanent. Dr. Cooper herself lectured in nearby Cambridge, in addition to her practical duties at the hospital. There certainly weren’t enough skeletons to justify a full-time forensic anthropology department—most counties didn’t even have one at all and had to hire the services of an expert when circumstances demanded—but there had been enough Anglo-Saxon and Viking remains found in East Anglia for a small, part-time department to be thought justified. For the most part, that was Wendy Cooper’s main area of interest, too—ancient remains, not skeletons of boys buried in 1965.

“Ah, DI Hart,” Dr. Cooper greeted her in her office, standing up and shaking hands. “Good of you to come.”

“Not at all. You said you had something to tell me?”

“Show you, actually. It’s not much, but it might help. Follow me.”

Curious, Michelle followed her into the lab, where Graham Marshall’s bones were still laid out on the table and Tammy Wynette was singing “Stand By Your Man” on Dr. Cooper’s portable cassette player. Though still a dirty brownish-yellow, like bad teeth, the bones were a hell of a lot cleaner than they had been a few days ago, Michelle noticed. Dr. Cooper and her assistant, nowhere in sight at the moment, had clearly been working hard. The body looked asymmetrical, though, Michelle noticed, and wondered what was missing. When she looked more closely, she could see it was the bottom rib on the left side. Hadn’t they been able to find it? But no, there it was on the bench Dr. Cooper led her toward.

“We couldn’t see it before because of the accumulated dirt,” Dr. Cooper explained, “but once we’d cleaned it up, it was plain as daylight. Look.”

Michelle bent closer and looked. She could see a deep, narrow notch in the bone. It was something she had come across before. She looked at Dr. Cooper. “Knife wound?”