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He moved closer to her and looked down at the fuzzy black-and-white image. It was little shadows, blotches. It took a moment or two for him to realise what it was. ‘It’s a foot!’ he exclaimed in amazement at the complexity of it. He turned to her. ‘Are all those separate bones?’
She smiled. ‘Yes! Marvellous, isn’t it? You can see a skeleton, and it’s hard to realise it is mere fragments of a person. And of course, we hardly ever know who. At first, in medical school, we were given the names, but they’re not real. It’s . . . better now to think of them being what’s left of someone.’
He looked at it again. ‘How do you know if you’re seeing something normal, or not? What’s that – that smudge there? It’s blurred.’ He peered closer.
‘That is what I was looking at. It’s a lot whiter than the rest of the bone, and a bit wider. See?’
‘Yes. What is it?’
‘It’s an old break, well healed. There are more of them.’
‘She has lots of broken bones? An accident?’ He winced at the thought of bones snapped, jagged. He had only broken a bone once, playing football, but it had hurt appallingly. His arm had healed in about six weeks, but it still ached now and then.
‘I don’t know,’ she said gravely. ‘A different bone and I would say probably an accident, a certain fracture of the wrist. You can put your hand out to save yourself when you’re falling. But some bones, fingers, forearm, toes . . .’
‘You mean de
liberate? You think he hit her? Hard enough to break bones?’ A hatred boiled up inside him towards Graves. If he had been there, he would have lashed out and hit him back. Is that what Graves had done when he couldn’t control Ebony? Then he remembered what Mrs Warlaby had told him and knew it was the truth.
‘Probably. But the interesting thing is this . . .’ Miriam pointed out the whitest part of the bone.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What does it mean?’
‘That’s where it healed.’
‘Why is it interesting?’
‘Look at it through the magnifying glass.’ She passed it to him and Daniel peered at the pictures. Enlarged, it was still not clear to him. ‘The thickness of it, the density. And the other bones as well,’ she prompted.
‘They don’t look so dense. At least, they don’t to me. What am I missing?’ He turned to her. Her eyes were shining, and there was a faint flush in her cheeks.
‘You’re looking at a bone that was broken a long time ago,’ she said quietly, but there was a tension in her voice. ‘Probably over twenty years, at least. And the bones in general are losing mass. They are more brittle than when they were broken, not as dense.’
‘An illness? Is that why they broke? Then the illness was cured!’ he exclaimed.
Her face was bleak for just an instant, and then it cleared again. ‘No, there is no cure for it . . . better diet, perhaps. More exercise. It delays it, but doesn’t cure it.’ A shadow of humour crossed her eyes. ‘The bones were broken more than twenty years ago, at least. More like twenty-five. The less density is because she is older. People’s bones do become less dense as they grow older. That is why when old people fall, they so often break bones, where younger people don’t. Children’s bones are far less fragile. Sometimes they bend instead of breaking. Women tend to lose bone strength more than men. This woman is a lot older than Ebony claimed to be. About ten years, I’d say.’
‘Why would she do that?’ he asked. ‘How could she get away with it? Ten years? That’s an awful lot . . .’
She turned away.
‘Wouldn’t people know?’ he asked. ‘Do you think it has anything to do with her death? That Graves found out . . .?’
‘Do you think it’s such a sin?’ she asked, looking not at him, but at the X-ray again. ‘She had children. She can’t have been that old.’
He looked at Miriam, bent over the magnifying glass again. He remembered what fford Croft had said about her studies, her intelligence, and that the authorities had not recognised her achievements, or given her degrees, even though she had passed all the examinations.
Nobody cared how old a man was in marriage, but a woman had to be young enough to bear healthy children, to be acceptable as a bride. That meant probably his own age, or less. Ebony had lied for a good reason. ‘But she was funny, charming, brave and clever, according to what Mercy Blackwell told me,’ he said aloud. ‘And beautiful, in her own way. Why should Graves care?’
‘I don’t think it had anything to do with it,’ she replied. Her loss of composure had been so slight perhaps he had only imagined it, because he had made an insensitive remark.
‘What then?’ he said. He was lost.
‘Remember the clothes, and the boots in particular?’
‘Yes.’
‘Those boots don’t fit her very well.’
