by Tana Collins
Will coloured. ‘I’m into all things retro and I like the feel of a proper address book. It’s my nineteenth soon and Rachel is helping me organise it. I met up with her earlier and we were going through the guest list.’
‘What is she wearing today, just out of interest?’ asked Watson. Fletcher noticed that Watson had remained fairly silent up till now, allowing Fletcher to take the lead.
Will shrugged. ‘A denim skirt, pale blue vest top and cardigan, and she had her raincoat with her.’
The description matched the clothes of the dead girl. Fletcher suddenly felt a lump in her throat. Surely discovering her identity was all but academic now. What would Will do about celebrating his nineteenth now? It wasn’t going to be much of a celebration.
The door reopened and Sarah walked back in, clutching several passport-sized photographs.
‘What’s happened? What have I missed?’ She must have sensed the change in atmosphere, thought Fletcher, studying the photographs Sarah had given her.
‘They’re asking heaps of questions about Rachel but they won’t tell us why.’ Will rubbed his forehead.
Fletcher could hear Watson trying to calm the students down, but she was too focused on trying to work out if the animated girl in the photograph was the same young woman who was now lying dead in the mortuary, and why Rachel had given her housemates a different address to the one she had given the department.
She studied the photograph: same shoulder-length blonde hair, same oval-shaped face. It could be her. It looked like her. But they would need a positive ID to be absolutely certain. They needed to get hold of Rachel Abbie’s father. Perhaps they’d find him at this second address. And she wouldn’t mind looking at Rachel’s bedroom. They would have to take the mobile phone. As she was forming a mental checklist of actions that needed to be taken, she wondered how Jim was getting on with the post-mortem.
Chapter 7
Jim Carruthers leant over the slim, naked body of the dead girl. He quite often used to cadge a cigarette off John Mackie before or after a PM, but the last few months he’d gone on a health kick. He’d stepped up the hillwalking and had even started running. He knew that the renewed exercise and concern about his health was due to his brother’s shock heart attack. After burying his head in the sand he’d finally had his own cholesterol tested and it was on the high side. As was his blood pressure. It hadn’t come as a surprise. He’d refused a cigarette, but looking at the latest murder victim he knew he’d be needing a stiff drink later that night.
He gazed sadly at the young woman who lay dead on the mortuary table. All sorts of questions flooded his mind. Why had she been killed? Who had killed her? Would the murderer kill again? However, first things first. They were here to establish how she had been killed. It looked like a straightforward strangulation but post-mortems sometimes threw up surprising conclusions. Swallowing down a lump in his throat he steeled himself to be professional.
‘Have you got a name for her yet?’ Mackie picked up the scalpel.
Carruthers dragged his attention back to the PM. ‘We think she’s a student by the name of Rachel Abbie but we still need someone to formally identify her.’
‘So, it’s still Jane Doe then,’ said Mackie. ‘She appears to be in good health. Nice healthy weight. Okay, let’s open her up, laddie.’
Carruthers wrinkled his nose at the smell of decaying flesh. He forced himself to watch as Mackie made an incision from sternum to pubic bone.
Hearing Mackie sigh, Carruthers glanced at the older man. He thought he could see tears in the pathologist’s eyes but imagined he must be being fanciful.
‘Another waste of a young life, eh, Jim?’
‘Indeed,’ said Carruthers, hating being present at yet another PM but knowing he needed to be here for his own peace of mind. It was the least he could do for the victims, and if the PM threw up anything surprising or out of the ordinary that could help the police in their enquiries, then he wanted to be in on it. He thought back to a previous case of a couple of elderly men found dead in a Fife nature reserve. He had been present when Mackie had found a ball of cloth stuffed to the back of the dead men’s throats. Inserted after death. He looked down at the peaceful body of the young woman they believed to be Rachel Abbie and hoped they weren’t going to be in for any nasty surprises.
Fletcher switched the light on in Rachel’s bedroom. She’d managed to get Watson to distract Rachel’s housemates while she’d urgently made a second call to the control room at Bilston to get a local police officer sent to the address in Ashington.
She looked around her. Rachel Abbie’s bedroom was that of a typical teenager. A poster of rapper, Stormzy, hung on her wall, attached with Blu-Tack. Piles of clothes lay on the back of a wooden chair and philosophy text books were scattered on the carpet. Fletcher spotted a copy of Adam Smith. Underneath was a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. She picked it up and looked at it thoughtfully. Wasn’t this the same book that had been lying next to the coffee cup in the hospital room of Serena Davis? She frowned and flicked through it, noting that the author had been an American philosopher. There was an old-fashioned photograph of her on the back of the book. Fletcher took in the strong, almost masculine face and intense stare. There was something she found disquieting about the photo but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She looked over at Watson.
‘Gayle, do you know anything about this author?’
Watson stopped going through the student’s sock drawer and looked up. ‘No. Why?’
‘There was a copy of this book in Serena Davis’s hospital room.’
‘Bit of a coincidence but then again… ’ She looked over at the cover. ‘If Ayn Rand is as famous as Dan Brown… how many people have a copy of The Da Vinci Code?’
Fletcher placed the book thoughtfully on the bedside table before picking up Rachel’s mobile that lay on her pillow. She tried a few buttons before waving it at Watson. ‘Bugger. Password protected.’ She made a mental note to ask Will if he knew Rachel’s password.
‘Probably like most teens she falls asleep with the mobile glued to her ear,’ said Watson.
Fletcher knelt down on the floor and peered under the bed. ‘Just some tissues and a hot water bottle.’ She surfaced and turned to Watson. ‘It used to be bloody freezing in student flats here. There was no central heating. I got chilblains.’
‘Oh, I’d forgotten you went to the University of East of Scotland.’
‘For my sins.’ She took another look at the mobile. ‘It’s a different world to when I was a student. Everything’s on social media. You’re connected 24/7. I wouldn’t want to be a teenager now,’ she said, standing up. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I had a mobile phone and I was on Bebo. But Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and Snapchat – whatever the hell that is. No thank you. I have enough problems with Facebook.’ Occasionally, she still got the odd message from her ex – Mark. She ignored them. He’d proved himself to be a worthless shit.
‘We still need to establish whether Rachel Abbie knew Serena Davis,’ said Watson, as she pulled on her latex gloves.
‘Serena Davis said not and Rachel’s housemates didn’t think so.’ Fletcher lowered her voice. ‘I’m not sure they’re telling the truth.’
‘I got the feeling they at least knew her name.’ Watson glanced at Fletcher.
So, she agrees with me. Interesting, thought Fletcher. But what, if anything, does this prove?
‘Maybe they’ve met her in passing. Castletown isn’t that big.’
Fletcher stopped what she was doing momentarily and looked across at Watson. ‘So why wouldn’t they say they knew the name?’
Watson shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe they thought it was only worth mentioning if they knew her more than in passing.’
‘So much police work is trying to establish patterns and connections between people.’ Once again Fletcher thought about how both girls had been to the library just before they’d been assaulted. And they were both blonde. She wonde
red again if that was significant.
‘We also need to find out if the attacks on Serena Davis and Rachel Abbie were random or if they were pre-planned,’ said Fletcher, opening a chest of drawers. She searched through the woolly jumpers. Shutting the top drawer, she opened the one below. It was stuffed full of socks. Riffling through it, her hand came across something with a sharp edge. It was a photograph. She brought it out, and with creased forehead, looked at it. It was of two middle-aged men in suits. One was handing the other a package. It was obvious from the photograph that the subjects didn’t know they were being photographed. What was this doing in Rachel’s sock drawer?
‘Take a look at this.’ She handed it to Watson.
‘Looks like it’s been taken with a wide-angle lens,’ said Watson. ‘What do you think it means?’
‘No idea, but a random photograph of two men taken from a distance kept in a teenager’s sock drawer? I think we need to hang on to it. It might be important.’
‘She’s not been tampered with sexually,’ said Mackie.
‘That’s a blessing.’ Carruthers shifted from foot to foot. He was feeling squeamish, but even as a DCI he had made himself attend the PMs. He felt it was the least he could do for the victims.
‘Although she’s not a virgin.’ Mackie moved slowly round the body. ‘As far as I can tell her attacker approached her from behind. She has bruising on her shoulder and the marks on her neck are consistent with her being strangled from the front so he must have turned her round to face him.’ He frowned. ‘Why did I not notice this before?’
‘What is it?’
He picked up a hand. ‘The tip of the index finger on the left hand has been severed.’
Carruthers looked over, horrified. Sure enough, the tip was indeed missing. A wave of nausea gripped him and he felt himself go hot, then cold. Dear Lord. He wasn’t going to be sick, was he?
‘Yes, it’s definitely been severed.’
‘Deliberately?’ asked Carruthers, swallowing down bitter acid bile. He’d been to countless PMs but he’d never been sick before. But then again, he’d never faced a victim whose finger had been severed before. But it was strange. Not that long ago he’d been to the post-mortem of a man who’d been pulled from the sea. He’d had a shotgun wound in his chest. So why was he feeling so queasy about a missing part of a finger? Perhaps it was due to the suspicion he had that it had been severed deliberately. Who would do such a thing? A little voice came into his head. A serial killer, that’s who. A serial killer who has taken a trophy. A fresh wave of nausea came on him once more.
So, there was a nasty surprise at this PM, after all. He felt gutted. Did they have a trophy hunter on their hands? he wondered. If they did, it was all pointing in the direction of a serial killer. His stomach lurched at the thought. In all his years as a police officer he’d never had to deal with a serial killer before and certainly not a serial killer who was a trophy hunter. He briefly wondered how the newly-appointed DCI would greet the news. The pressure to solve this case, and quickly, would be immense. She was already looking harassed. Would she crack? But the question was – did he want her to crack? After all, by rights he should have been the DCI on this case, if his hot-headedness on a previous case hadn’t got him demoted.
Mackie was examining the finger with a magnifying glass. ‘Yes, I would say it was severed deliberately. It’s a clean cut.’
‘Before or after death?’ Clearly, he was hoping it was the latter.
‘There was no blood by the hand at the scene, so post mortem.’
Small mercies. Carruthers swallowed with difficulty.
Mackie paused, scalpel in hand, and looked up at Carruthers. ‘The SOCOs didn’t find a weapon at the scene after I left, Jim? You’d be looking for something like a butcher’s boning knife. It’s sharp as hell and has a slightly curved edge. You can buy them in any hardware shop.’
‘No.’ He thought about the SOCOs. They would now be looking for a knife and the tip of a finger, he thought.
He realised Mackie was still talking. He watched and listened as the old Highlander bent over the victim. How long had he been doing this job? Must be coming up to thirty-odd years.
‘Healthy specimen. Of course, she was young. But she was fit. Everything is in order. We’ll have to wait for the results of toxicology to come back. And I know you’re chomping at the bit to know cause of death. Unless toxicology results say otherwise cause of death is manual strangulation.’ Mackie looked over at Carruthers as he said, ‘Whoever extinguished this wee lassie’s life did it with his bare hands.’
‘You definitely think it was a man?’
‘Could be a woman, I suppose.’ Carruthers caught Mackie looking at the lines across the throat. The man’s forehead was puckered. ‘But she would have to be strong. There’s very few defensive marks on her body.’ Once again, he picked up the hands. ‘Nothing under the nails that will help us by the looks of things but we’ll take more swabs.’ He placed them gently down by the side of the body once again. ‘If it’s any consolation I think it was all over pretty quickly and, as I said, that knife is so sharp she’d most probably never have felt the cuts to her face.’
Carruthers was about to say that this was a blessing, but then he remembered the father of this young woman and how his life would soon to be changed forever. Nothing to him would be a blessing. He dropped his head and swallowed hard.
Fletcher left Strathburn Halls and went straight to the central library on King James’ Way. She peered up at the building from across the road. The oldest in Scotland, it had been a library for over five hundred years. She crossed the street, narrowly avoiding a gowned student riding a bike. She tutted. That was an accident waiting to happen. Why on earth would a student ride a bike wearing a gown? Hadn’t the police run a road safety awareness course at the university recently? That student clearly hadn’t been on it. She sighed, and skipped up the worn stone steps and walked in through the enormous front doors to the information desk.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to the old man with the dickie bow sitting behind the desk. ‘Can you help me please? I’m looking to see if a student has taken out a particular book from this library.’
He frowned at her. She noticed a half-eaten sandwich on the table. Unsmiling, he said, ‘Most people usually come in here looking for books. Not looking for students who have taken out books. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to help you. Why don’t you just ask the student?’ He turned away from her rather rudely, picked up his sandwich and took an enormous bite out of it. Most likely supper, given the time.
Fletcher watched as a student scanned all the books she was taking out of the library, mindful it was all automated now. Another change since her university days. She flashed her warrant card at the unhelpful librarian. ‘Oh, I certainly hope you can help. And you don’t want to get on the wrong side of the police, do you?’
Open-mouthed, he stared at her. ‘No, of course not. Always happy to help the boys and girls in blue. What did you say the student’s name was?’
‘I didn’t.’ She wished he’d shut his mouth while he was eating. She really didn’t want to see the food churning around. She rummaged in her bag for the piece of paper she’d put in earlier with the details of the book found with the body. ‘Can you look this book up for me and let me know if it’s currently out on loan, and if so, can you tell me who took it out? The name of the book is A Treatise of Human Nature by–’
‘David Hume,’ the man finished. ‘A fine piece of work. A highly prized book, in fact.’ He wiped the side of his mouth with a dotted kerchief that had been in his breast pocket.
‘Highly prized, as in a lot of students want to take it out?’
‘Well, we have five copies in the library, although that’s not what I meant. Wait a minute. Let’s see what I can do.’
He tapped at the computer, hitting the return button with a flourish. ‘As I thought. All five copies are out at the moment. Wait a second. Let’s see who’s taken them
out.’
Fletcher, in her excitement, leant across the desk.
‘If you don’t mind taking your elbows off the table. It’s made of mahogany and is four hundred years old.’
Almost as old as you, Fletcher wanted to say, but her mother had taught her never to be rude to strangers, so she kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t normally so ageist but this man was really getting on her nerves.
‘I can get a printout of the dates and names of students who have taken this book out in the last month, if you want?’
Fletcher was surprised at how helpful he was becoming. Some might say obsequious.
‘As you can see everything is automated nowadays. People scan their own books here when they take them out and drop them off when they bring them back and we scan them back in.’
‘Actually, I probably just need to know if any students have taken a copy of this book out within the last couple of days. That would be a good start.’
‘As you wish.’ The man typed on a few more keys. He switched the computer round so Fletcher could see the screen. ‘The last person to take a copy of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature out of the library was a Rachel Abbie, earlier today, in fact.’
Bingo. ‘That’s all I needed to know. Thank you.’ She turned away but then, with another question in mind, turned back to face him.
‘Just one final thing – are you able to tell me the exact time the book was taken out?’
‘Receipts are issued to the person who takes the book out.’
Fletcher didn’t know that, but then again, she couldn’t remember the last time she had been in a library. It might well have been when she was a student. She started to feel a bit guilty. With all the government cuts she should really start using her local library a bit more. ‘We’ve got the book that was taken out but we don’t have a receipt.’
‘How careless.’
Fletcher didn’t know if this odious man meant her or Rachel Abbie. Either way, her frustration with him was growing.