laserdisc10
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Thinking about this a little more but after posting these thoughts will move my brain to something else as this is a more than slightly disturbing train of thought.
Now that I'm considering what we've seen (admittedly very little) and now been told, it's probably reasonable to assume that the police have searched the house to some extent - checked under beds, in cupboards and freezer, probably even a cursory sweep of the loft. The question is, how thorough can you REALLY be?
Let's assume for a moment that the body was indeed in the loft - first of all, if the average loft is anything like my family's loft, there are a HUNDRED hidden places you could hide something child-sized (bear in mind also that Tia was very small for her age, again I'm disturbing myself typing this) - boxes, inside pieces of furniture, hidden under some of the various piles of different types of insulation, in amongst clothes rails... Again, my loft may be significantly worse than many peoples' because I come from a whole family of hoarders, but my point still stands. Possibly the police may have had to really tear the place apart and cut into insulation in order to find the hiding place, which realistically they wouldn't be able to do unless they had real evidence to back it up. Bear in mind that I'm the person that posted that EVERY family home of a missing child should be searched, but I don't believe they should ransack the place unless it's justified.
Let's also assume for a second that the dogs that were taken in on Wednesday WERE trained to sniff out cadavers (I don't actually think that they were but I'll play devil's advocate for a moment) - firstly if a body was in the loft, could the dogs detect that? From seeing drug dogs in airports etc I think they have to be quite close to what they're sniffing in order to detect anything but I'm only theorising - does anybody know how close a cadaver dog has to be to a cadaver in order to detect and signal? Can even the best dogs detect something 15 feet above them with a ceiling and insulation in between?? I can't see how they could've got cadaver dogs up into a loft, and even when up there would it be safe for a dog, which wouldn't know where to safely put its feet etc?
Ever since the ladders were taken into the house earlier I've been thinking about our own loft, and honestly I can imagine it would be quite easy to hide any number of things up there that would be very difficult to find unless you were really really searching.
As for the decomposition odour, it can't be put off forever, but the odours can certainly be disguised, and the odour wouldn't "sink" so much, so I doubt it would be detected in the house just yet. I'm guessing the reason that the police originally thought today's search would take "days" when it ended up only being a couple of hours is because once they got into the loft, the air made it clear that they were in the right place, and then it was just a case of systematically taking the place apart.
Guess the police will explain it all in a way that hopes to sound logical once they've worked on it. However, it's been said a few times in other fora that posters lived in that estate or those identical to it in the same area. What they've said is that the Lindens (grandmother's place) is 1960s/1970s build and non too substantial or well constructed. It may be they used pre-formed trusses for the roofs. If so, pre-formed trusses are not intended to support the old-style loft spaces. In fact, architect and renovation sites online warn about putting much weight at all in the roof-space, because pre-formed trusses are not designed to take much load. Attempts to use under-roof spaces which are built using pre-formed trusses can actually collapse the roof, apparently. People in such dwellings are warned not to attempt to use the under-roof area for attic-conversions, for example and councils would not give approval. People in such dwellings are warned that if they absolutely must store items in the roof-space, to ensure the items are light in weight
Based on the above, I doubt there would be many items in the grandmother's under-roof space, as tenants would doubtless be warned by council (the legal owners?) about the dangers and penalties
I know in my parents' house, the attic was solid as a rock and as in your case, held a variety of quite substantial and weighty items in addition to being floored throughout. But economies in construction have resulted in use of pre-formed roofing and with it, the lack of useable attic space, apart from insulation batts and maybe the odd box of Christmas trimmings
