Free Human Remains by Elizabeth Haynes

could start asking for more overtime money. ‘Just one thing, sir.’
    ‘Annabel?’
    ‘I’ve been doing some research on unexplained deaths where the deceased has remained undiscovered for some time. It seems that the number of these cases so far this year is unusually high. I’ve done a chart…’
    Dutifully Kate toggled from the tactical presentation over to the chart I’d finished earlier, nicely designed to show a huge spike.
    ‘I should point out that the spike shows this year to date, whereas all the other years are complete. If things carry on at the average rate for this year, we can expect the figure to be over thirty. As you can see, we’ve never had more than eleven in a year before.’
    I looked anxiously around the table. Everyone was sitting in stony silence looking at my chart.
    At last, Mandy Spitz spoke. ‘Sorry, Annabel, I’m not clear – are these murders?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re people who have died in their own homes and not been found for a long time.’
    I thought I heard a noise like someone snorting, probably Carol. Someone else was whispering something. I felt my cheeks start to grow hot.
    Frosty cleared his throat. ‘Do you have any theories as to why there are so many? Anything linking them?’
    ‘Well,’ I said, glancing at Kate and giving her a nod, ‘the next slide shows some interesting points of note…’
    It was just a few bullet points to get their attention. ‘There is an unusually wide age range this year. The youngest was just twenty-one – that’s Rachelle Hudson, I’m sure you all remember her – and the eldest in her early nineties. But there are people in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties as well. In all the previous years, we only ever had two people found like this who were under sixty. One of those was a likely drug overdose, and another one was believed to be a suicide. All but one of the people this year have no apparent cause of death.’
    ‘You mean they’re just so decomposed, we can’t tell the cause of death?’ the man in the cardigan said. His voice was deep, sonorous, as though it came from some vast cavern within him.
    ‘Yes, partly,’ I said, warming to my subject now, ‘but also the majority of these people were found in normal places in their homes: lying on their beds, or sitting in their armchairs. In previous years we’ve had bodies found decomposed under a makeshift noose, for example, or in the bath, as though they might have drowned. Some of the incident logs aren’t specific about the location of the body, but, even so, there don’t seem to be many that we could put down to anything other than that they – well, that they just died.’
    ‘Sir, I did some work with Hampshire on the Rachelle Hudson case,’ Ellen Traynor said to Frosty. ‘It was quite strange at the time. It wasn’t just that she’d apparently chosen to withdraw from society; she seemed to have chosen to die.’
    ‘Chosen to die?’ DI Frost said. The whole room was silent.
    ‘Yes. There was no food at all in the house. Not a crumb. She was lying on the bed in the flat, very badly decomposed. The coroner couldn’t establish a cause of death but his theory was that she’d starved.’
    ‘Nicer ways to end it all than that,’ Mandy said.
    ‘Quite.’ Andrew Frost fell silent and studied the slide. I began to feel uncomfortable again.
    ‘I’m not sure if this is the right forum for this, really,’ he said at last. ‘If there was anything to suggest foul play…’
    ‘Only the unusual ages,’ I said. ‘And the fact that they all appear to have gone totally unmissed. You do get that sometimes with elderly people who are so afraid of being shipped off to a home that they actively avoid contact with the outside world, but not with younger people.’
    ‘Is this just our borough?’ Ellen asked then. ‘What about other parts of the county?’
    I’d forgotten all about my last slide; I could have kicked myself. ‘That’s