“To each her own. So first we’ll ask around about the tats and the takeaway, starting here. They were professionally done, even if they are common designs, so we might get lucky with some artist recognizing his or her handiwork, or remembering the birthmark.”

“I still can’t get over how young she was,” said Geraldine. “Just lying there on the table like that, so vulnerable.”

“Obviously old enough to get involved with some nasty people.”

“Come again?”

“Well, you don’t think all this just happened to her by accident, do you?”

“You’re not trying to say she was on the game or something, are you?”

“I don’t know about that,” said Annie, “but I don’t think we’re dealing with a complete innocent here. The doc found semen in her vagina, anus and esophagus.”

“You don’t have to remind me,” said Gerry, sipping more brandy. “She was raped.”

“He said the odds are that it didn’t all come from the same person, but there’s no telling how many as yet. We’ll know after Jazz has done the DNA testing.”

“She was gang-raped?”

“It’s likely. But the rapists didn’t kill her,” Annie went on quickly. “That was someone else, later, in a different vehicle, after she’d walked half a mile back up the road. It was the broken rib piercing her heart that most likely killed her, the doc said, though she’d probably have died from her other injuries eventually. Remember, the doc also said from his examination of the footmarks that it looked very much as if she was kicked to death by just one person. She may have been raped by the men in the van, but she was still alive when they threw her out into the ditch. So what does she do?”

“She starts walking home.”

“Right. Makes sense, doesn’t it? The poor lass is stark naked, and in pain from the sexual assault and the tumble into the ditch, so she wants to get help, even get to a hospital, perhaps. Or home, as you say. Maybe she sees a light on in the Ketteridge house, but she can’t climb over a wall and a barbed-wire fence in the state she’s in. Maybe she’s hoping for a gate or something, some means of entry. Whatever. She’s lost. She starts walking back in the direction they came from—the van came from—and they’ve gone on ahead. Where are they going? Don’t forget, if you turn right at the bridge at the bottom of Bradham Lane, you’ll soon get to a roundabout that’ll get you to Leeds, Bradford and points south in no time.”

“You know,” Gerry mused, “we’re only assuming she was naked when they kicked her out of the van, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe it was the other person who took her clothes, the killer.”

“Good point,” Annie conceded. “But I reckon if those blokes in the van were having sex with her, she probably had her clothes off, or most of them. And I doubt they’d have given her time to put them on again before they chucked her out.”