Lynley had phoned him with the information that one of the wounds on the boy hadn't been inflicted by the Swiss Army knife that had apparently been responsible for the others, including the fatal piercing of the femoral artery. After reading through the basic facts in the report, St. James gave a more careful scrutiny to everything related to this particular wound. He noted its size, its position on the body, and the marking left on the bone beneath it. He stared at the words and then walked contemplatively to the window of his lab, where he watched as Peach rolled blissfully below him in a patch of garden sunlight, exposing her furry dachshund belly to the twelve o'clock heat.
The Swiss Army knife, he knew, had been found in a grit dispenser. Why hadn't the secondary weapon been left in the same place? Why cache one weapon but not the other? Those questions, of course, belonged in the realm of the case detectives and not the scientists, but he believed they needed to be asked nonetheless.
Once they were asked, there seemed to be only two possible answers: Either the second weapon identified the killer too closely to be left at the scene or the second weapon had been left at the scene and the police had mistaken it for something else.
If the first supposition was the case, he could be of no assistance in the matter. If the second was the case, a more detailed study of the crime scene evidence was in order. He had no access to that evidence and he knew he wouldn't be welcome in Derbyshire to finger through it. So he returned to the post-mortem report and he sought anything within it that might give him a clue.
Dr. Sue Myles hadn't missed a thing: from the insects that had taken up residence in and on both of the bodies during the hours they'd lain undiscovered on the moor to the leaves, flowers, and twigs that had become caught up in the hair of the girl and the wounds on the boy.
It was this final detail—a sliver of wood some two centimeters long found on the body of Terence Cole—that St. James closed in on curiously. The sliver had been sent on to the lab for analysis, and someone had appended a note in pencil in the margin of the report, identifying it. From a phone call, doubtless. When officers were pressed, they didn't always wait for official word from the police lab before they moved on.
Cedar, someone had printed neatly in the margin. And next to it in parentheses the words Port Orford. St. James was no botanist, so Port Orford illuminated nothing for him. He knew it was unlikely that he'd be able to track down on a Sunday the forensic botanist who'd identified the wood, so he gathered up his paperwork and descended the stairs to his study.
Deborah was within, absorbed in the Sunday Times magazine. She said, “Trouble, love?”
He replied, “Ignorance. Which is trouble enough.”
He found the book he was looking for among the dustier of his volumes. He began leafing through the pages as Deborah joined him by the shelves.
“What is it?”
“I don't know,” he said. “Cedar. And Port Orford. Mean anything to you?”
“Sounds like a place. Port Isaac, Port Orford. Why?”
“A sliver of cedar was found on Terence Cole's body. The boy on the moors.”
“Tommy's case?”
“Hmm.” St. James flipped to the back of the book and ran his finger down the index under cedar. “Atlas, blue, Chilean incense. Did you know there were so many kinds of cedar?”
“Is it important?”
“I'm beginning to think it could be.” He ran his gaze further down the page. And then he saw the two words Port Orford. They were listed as a variety of the tree.
He turned to the indicated page, where first he took note of the picture which featured a sample of the coniferous tree's foliage and then read the entry itself. “This is curious,” he said to his wife.
“What?” she asked, sliding her arm through his.
He told her what the post-mortem had claimed: that a wooden sliver identified by the forensic botanist as Port Orford cedar had been found in one of the wounds on the body of Terence Cole.
Deborah looked thoughtful as she shrugged back a heavy mass of her hair. “Why's that curious? They were killed out of doors, weren't they? Out on the moors?” And then her eyes widened. “Oh yes. I do see.”
“Exactly,” St. James said. “What kind of moor has cedars growing on it? But it's more curious than that, my love. This particular cedar grows in America, in the States. Oregon and northern California, it says.”
“The tree could have been imported, couldn't it?” Deborah asked reasonably. “For someone's garden or for a park? Or even a greenhouse or conservatory. You know what I mean: like palm trees or cactuses.” She smiled, her nose wrinkling. “Or is that cacti?”
St. James walked to his desk and put the book down. He lowered himself slowly into his chair, thinking. “All right. Let's say it was imported for someone's garden or a park.”
“Of course.” She was with him, tagging her own thought onto his. “That still begs the obvious question, doesn't it? How did a cedar tree meant for someone's garden or a park get to the moor?”
“And how did it get to a part of the moor that's nowhere near someone's garden or a park in the first place?”
“Someone planted it there for religious reasons?”
“More likely no one planted it at all.”
“But you said …” Deborah frowned. “Oh yes. I see. I suppose the forensic botanist must have made an error, then.”
“I don't think so.”