Phosphate Rocks Chapter 20: Barbie Doll

The detective inspector smells of lily-of-the-valley today. John watches the way she absent-mindedly strokes the hollow below her throat as she tells him the news. 

The autopsy has been suspended. The corpse, preserved in several layers of hardened phosphate rock powder, was moved to a specialist forensic morgue. As the pathologist chipped through the carapace, the contents began to liquefy. After confirming the presence of human remains by chemical analysis, they sealed the shell and its grisly, deliquescent contents. 

John is aware that she is watching his reaction. 

He controls it carefully, unsettled by a new sense that she distrusts him. What has changed? 

‘Here.’ She plonks a thick dossier on the table. Motes of dust dance in the February sunlight. 

‘Perhaps you saw one of this lot hanging around the factory.’ 

John shrugs. City docks are a magnet for misfits: those who work there, legally and illegally, and those who are lost. 

‘One of this lot?’ 

‘Reported missing, never found.’ 

So, in the absence of forensic clues, the police are hoping that the body in the phosphate cave was that of a vagrant, a tramp, a runaway. 

‘Mispers,’ she adds. 

He opens the dossier reluctantly, knowing what to expect. So many of the photos are of bairns with shy, smiling faces. Little souls changed overnight by the rush of hormones, from sweet, docile children to angry, rebellious teenagers. Children who vanish, their families left in limbo, uncertain how to grieve – for their innocents who must surely have been abducted by evil hands unknown, or for their own failings as parents which led their offspring to run away and break all contact, or the worst combination of both. 

Mispers. Whispers.