In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson

“Here,” Dr Williams went on, “at the very ends of the longbones in both the arms and the legs, the epiphyses have all firmly united with the shafts, which doesn’t usually happen until the age of twenty or twenty-one. But look here.” He pointed towards the collar-bone. “The epiphyses at the sternal end of the clavicle, which doesn’t unite until the late twenties, has not united yet.”
    â€œSo what age are we looking at? Roughly?”
    Williams scratched his chin. “I’d say about twenty-two to twenty-eight. If you take in the skull sutures, too, you can see here that the sagittal suture shows some signs of endocranial closure, but the occipital and the lambdoid sutures are still wide open. That would also suggest somewhere in the twenties.”
    â€œHow accurate is this?”
    â€œIt wouldn’t be very far off. I mean, this is definitely not the skeleton of a forty-year-old or a fourteen-year-old. You can also take into account that she was in pretty good general physical shape. There is no indication of any old healed fractures, nor of any skeletal anomalies or deformities.”
    Banks looked at the bones, trying to imagine the young woman who had once inhabited them, the living flesh surrounding them. He failed. “Any idea how long she’s been down there?”
    â€œOh dear. I was wondering when you’d get around to asking that.” Williams folded his arms and placed his forefinger over his lips. “It’s very difficult. Very difficult indeed to be at all accurate about something like that. To the untrained eye, a skeleton that has been buried for ten years might look indistinguishable from one that has been buried, say, a thousand years.”
    â€œBut you don’t think this one has been buried a thousand years?”
    â€œOh, no. I said to the untrained eye. No, there are certain indications that we’re dealing with recent remains here, as opposed to archaeological.”
    â€œThese being?”
    â€œWhat do you notice most about the bones?”
    â€œThe colour,” said Banks.
    â€œRight. And what does that tell you?”
    Banks wasn’t too sure about the usefulness of the Socratic method at a time like this, but he had found from experience that it is usually a good idea to humour scientists. “That they’re stained or decayed.”
    â€œGood. Good. Actually, the discoloration is an indication that they have taken on some of the colour of the surrounding earth. Then there’s this. Have you noticed?” He pointed to several places on the bone surfaces where the exterior seemed to be flaking off like old paint.
    â€œI thought that was just the crusting,” Banks said. “No. Actually, the bone surface is crumbling, or flaking. Now if you take all this into account, along with the complete absence of any soft or ligamentous tissue, then I’d estimate it’s been down there for a few decades. Certainly more than ten years, and as we already know it’s unlikely she was buried after 1953 , I’d go back about ten years from there.”
    â€œNineteen forty-three?”
    â€œHold on. This is a very rough guess. The rate of skele-tal decay is wildly unpredictable. Obviously, your odontologist will be able to tell you a bit more, narrow things down, perhaps.”
    â€œIs there anything else you can do to get a little closer to the year of death?”
    â€œI’ll do my best, of course, but it could take some time.
    There are a number of tests I can carry out on the bones, tests we use in cases of relatively recent remains as opposed to archaeological finds. There’s carbonate testing, I can do an ultraviolet fluorescence test, histologic determination and Uhlenhut reaction. But even they’re not totally accurate. Not within the kind of time-frame you’re asking for. They might tell you, at a pinch, that the bones are either under or over fifty years old, but