‘No, we’re going to the new Indian. The table’s booked for nine.’
‘Impossible.’ She tried to smile sympathetically at him, but the expression felt painful and uncertain. ‘Something important has come up.’
When he saw she was not going to get out of the car, he grimaced. ‘What’s the point trying to organise a night out any more when it’s clear you’d rather be at work?’
‘We can do it some other time. When this investigation is over.’ She listened to him sigh. Why was she treating him like this? Why didn’t she relent, apologise and postpone the investigation for another day? What was wrong with her?
He stood there, staring at her in his socks.
‘There’s no point standing in the cold,’ she said.
‘I know,’ he replied and slinked back into the house like a dog that had just watched the cat steal its dinner.
8
She followed the trail with her torch, hoping the battery would not run out. It was barely a path now, only a couple of feet wide, and uneven with tree roots and half-buried stones. She had been exploring the darkened loch and its adjoining forest for more than an hour, trying to find the track that would lead her back to the waterfall and the mysterious cairn of stones. However, where her map told her she would find the waterfall, she could only make out the dim outline of pine trees and overgrown rocks. She double-checked the notes she had made. This was definitely the place. She pulled her coat tighter around her, and set off deeper into the forest. She worried that this was not a proper search for a crime scene, and that she needed a team of officers and sniffer dogs to guide her to the right location. She was just wasting her time, and should head back home, but she was reluctant to leave after having come this far. Tired, she sat down on a fallen tree trunk and tried to get her bearings. She had already lost her sense of judgement and was now in danger of losing her sense of direction.
The moon came out and filled the forest with a silvery web of light and shade. She noticed that the path had been enlarged slightly, the weeds brushed back on both sides. Someone had been walking back and forth here. She pushed on, her pace quickening, and then she heard the waterfall ahead, hidden behind the trees. She stood for several moments with the sensation that she was no longer alone. She felt as though a stranger had entered the scene and was watching her. She turned sharply but there was no one there. The wind rose and the dappled undergrowth filled with nocturnal contours, shadows multiplying and receding under the swaying branches. She felt a pang of homesickness and a gnawing sense of separation from her children and husband. Thinking that ringing home and speaking to David might soothe her nerves, she took out her phone and tried to place a call, but there was no signal.
She pushed on, following the track towards the waterfall. She froze when she saw the figure of a man standing in the middle of the clearing. For an instant, she thought she had turned McCrea’s cryptic vision back onto himself, and that in following the path to the waterfall she had summoned up his ghost and was about to witness the traumatic scene that haunted him. However, when the figure turned towards her, she saw it was the man she had spotted earlier that day. Disturbed by the detective, he staggered away. A tramp groping about in the undergrowth for a hiding place, she thought. However, when she saw that his right hand was bandaged and there was a stump where his middle finger should be, she shone her flashlight into his face and ordered him to stop.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘Just watching.’ He sounded annoyed at her question. ‘Who are you?’
‘Carla Herron. I’m a police detective. I want to know what you’re doing here.’
‘Taking a trip down memory lane.’ He blinked in the light of the torch. ‘Is it forbidden to walk through a forest and think of the past?’
‘Not at all.’ She lowered the light from his face.
She could hear the ragged sound of his breathing. He seemed anxious now. ‘Don’t think your coming here is going to help things,’ he warned.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘To stop what happened here.’ He looked as though he was scanning the trees, but his eyes were shut tight. ‘I’m so overwhelmed by memories I can hardly think straight.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The pile of stones you’re searching for is over there to the left. Follow the ridge through the trees.’
She walked in the direction he pointed, the ground rough and steep in places, the path barely distinguishable from the undergrowth. She waited, looked back and saw he had disappeared. She waded deeper into the forest. The sound of the waterfall grew in volume, thrusting through the darkness, fed by invisible streams in the hillside. She kept walking and the forest rose above her in the night sky like the shelf of a cliff. After a while, she saw the waterfall tumbling in the moonlight, the jumble of rocks and the gnarled tree roots. A hundred yards further, and she came upon a cairn of stones emerging from the vegetation. She stood, feeling the tension rising in her body. What was this place? A stone cairn hiding a secret? It was certainly the same pattern of landscape features in McCrea’s confession, no doubt about it. She walked towards the cairn.
Half-covered by the stones, she found a cardboard box. She read the words on the lid, Number One Delivery. She put on a pair of gloves from her coat pocket, and with unbelieving hands, she lifted the box from its hiding place. The sides were sticky and sodden. Its bottom collapsed and out dropped the contents. She shone her torch amid the cobwebs and forest litter. At first, she could not make out what she was looking at. Something unreal and grisly. She peered closer, forcing herself not to look away. She shivered and recoiled, taking several steps backwards. Later she would tell her colleagues that it was the most sickening sight she had ever witnessed. What lay before her was a chunk of jagged flesh and long red hair flowing into the darkness. The disembodied head of a woman, her eyes closed. It was her blood that had soaked the cardboard box and the detective’s hands. Something else rolled out of the box. A bloodstained finger, swollen and grey, dropped onto the ground. There was something distasteful about the way it lay next to the head, the discoloured nail pointing blindly into the darkness. Herron almost collapsed. She reached for her phone but still there was no signal. She had to wade back through the darkness and on to the road, before she was able to put the call through, feeling beads of sweat roll down her spine, the hairs on the back of her neck pricking, and her ears ringing as though the bloody head was screaming at her.
9
Afterwards – in the hours before dawn – Detective Chief Inspector Bates and Inspector Morton joined Herron to squint through the shadows at the scene. Herron could see from the way the two men clambered around the clearing, and the heaviness of their breathing, that they were troubled, yet excited, by the grisly finding. She watched them from the periphery. The DCI kept glancing at her as though her discovery of the decapitated head had made her an object of pity rather than admiration.
‘If McCrea hadn’t told his story it might have been a long time before we found this place,’ said Morton.
‘What does that tell us about his link to the body part?’ asked Bates.
Morton went to the edge of the clearing and stood there for a while, his long hair and beard getting wet, his hands clasped behind his back, staring into the early morning darkness and the hanging mist.
He turned back and joined them with an air of calm authority. ‘Perhaps it’s not really that strange,’ he said. ‘The key is that lots of people knew about McCrea’s story. Staff at the hospital, patients, perhaps even relatives. Who’s to say that whoever did this hasn’t cleverly organised it to resemble the confession?’
‘As a way to throw us off his scent,’ said Bates, nodding.
Dawn crept through the trees, revealing a forest floor of dark, jutting things, rotting tree trunks and upended roots. After a pause, Morton said, as if speaking to himself, ‘Yes, that’s wha
t must have happened.’
The DCI cleared his throat. ‘That’s what I think too.’ He turned to look at Herron. ‘What do you make of it?’
The two men watched her as the mist rose slowly through the trees.
She chose her words carefully. ‘The brutality of it, the way the head was arranged here with the finger, suggests someone who is organised and very clear about what he is doing.’ She paused. ‘However, if the tramp with the missing finger is our main suspect, why did he hang around? He should have stayed away, rather than linger in the forest like another signpost.’
‘Another signpost?’
A morbid thought had struck her, that her journey to find the woman’s head had been mapped out for her in advance, with McCrea and the tramp stepping out from the shadows like ghosts of a murder-to-be, guiding her along the way. She felt the tingle of a mysterious intelligence operating in the darkness, a killer reaching out to her and whispering of his dark deeds.
‘Yes, pointing the way to the scene. Like McCrea’s confession and the photographs at Dr Pochard’s house.’
‘Listen,’ said Bates, ‘when you’re writing up your preliminary report of what happened, keep the finger confidential. And don’t let it slip to the media. We should use it to help eliminate fantasists like McCrea. That sort of detail is unusual.’
‘McCrea knows about the finger already.’ She recounted his dream of the woman biting his finger before her head rolled out of his hands.
‘But he doesn’t know that a finger was left behind,’ said Bates.
‘He knows it’s important in the context of the scene. The bitten finger keeps recurring in his dreams and his notes.’
‘Dear God, is there anything new about this crime scene? Anything McCrea hasn’t already mentioned?’
She thought about it for a while. ‘We need to speak to McCrea again and go over his dreams. We need to find what links he might have with the tramp.’
The DCI gave Herron a strange smile and said, ‘Look, Carla, this has changed everything.’ His words sounded more polished than anything else he had said that night. ‘Your diligence is to be highly commended, but the entire investigation will have to begin again from scratch. The tramp is our main suspect, but we will have to re-examine McCrea’s confession and any assumptions we made about it. We can’t allow ourselves to be influenced by psychiatric professionals and their opinions on McCrea’s illness. The truth might turn out to be very difficult for them to swallow.’
Herron exhaled a long breath into the cold morning air.
Bates adopted a more confidential tone. ‘Which is why I am taking you off the investigation. Morton is in charge of it now.’
She could feel the heat rising in her face. Her curiosity had been strongly aroused by the crime scene. Surely, the DCI could sense it, her eagerness to hunt down the killer.
‘But I’m already deeply involved in the case,’ she told him. ‘You should judge me on my performance and decision-making to date, rather than my lack of experience.’
‘There’s no discussion on the matter. This looks to be a murder scene. Only the investigating officers should be here.’
Her face, which had glowed with excitement, and then annoyance, now drained of all colour. She fought to control her feelings. ‘You can’t just kick me off the investigation.’
‘Yes, I bloody well can.’ Bates glared at her, anger gathering in his eyes.
She tried to protest further, but could not find the words, cut off by Bates’s blunt dismissal in a way that felt so stark and absolute. She felt betrayed. Her doubts about her capabilities enveloped her like the mist, shutting her away from the crime scene through which she had so confidently strode minutes previously.
Bates had turned his back to her, and was speaking to Morton in a more familiar manner. ‘They’ve released too many of the psychiatric patients in this bloody country,’ he said. ‘You see them mumbling and shouting on every street corner.’
Morton, however, was gazing at her in a sympathetic way. ‘I don’t agree with your decision to take Sergeant Herron off the case,’ he said, the stubbornness gleaming in his dark eyes. ‘I think she is the best candidate we have to lead the investigation.’
Bates blinked at the senior detective in surprise. ‘Listen, Morton, I had no idea this case would turn out to be so serious when I assigned it to Herron. The thought of having a completely untested officer running the investigation is enough to keep me awake all night.’
‘The fact that she is untested should not be a problem. What’s key is her intelligence and her emotional rapport with McCrea. I think she’s the perfect choice; after all, it was her that brought us here.’
‘But she has no experience tracking murder suspects. I never imagined that McCrea would actually lead us to a body.’
‘When it comes to interrogating disturbed patients in a hospital, no one on the team has that much experience.’
‘Quite. Up till now, our suspects have tended to be sane and at-large.’
‘So this is the first time for the entire team. We’re all on new ground.’
Morton swept his eyes over the clearing, the police tape clinging to the bushes, the trees tossing against the sky and the trampled paths leading up to the stone chamber. Forensic officers in protective gear were crouching and crawling through the undergrowth. Deep in the forest, an animal, a fox or a badger, gave an incomprehensible yelp.
‘All murder investigations have their points of similarity,’ said Morton, ‘and I’ve investigated many, but this one is completely different. The crime scene has been constructed for us. The person responsible has spent time making it mysterious; he’s working us. Sergeant Herron led us here. She understood the path of the killer. Having her lead the investigation makes sense.’
With the air of someone going against his better judgement, but who could also not stand beating around the bush, the DCI replied, ‘OK. Let’s compromise, and say that both you and Herron will lead the investigation. You can also have Ian Shaw and Brian Rodgers to help with your inquiries, along with the usual teams. Is that all right with the two of you?’
Morton looked at Herron and waited until she nodded in agreement, before nodding, too. He gave her a little smile as if to acknowledge their victory.
Bates wagged his finger. ‘McCrea sounds like a tricky bastard. I want you to keep both feet on the ground and in step with Morton. Don’t believe anything McCrea tells you and don’t go off running on your own following hunches. Stick to the facts and don’t underestimate McCrea.’
The three of them stared at the clearing. They could hear the roar of the waterfall, a damp breeze against their faces. Only one thing was certain in Herron’s mind: no matter how the woman had died, it had begun with McCrea and his confession. If she were to unravel the mystery, she would have to return to Ward G and dig out the tunnel the killer had carefully filled in behind him.
*
David hardly spoke to Carla over breakfast that morning, not looking at her and limiting himself to responding in the most taciturn way possible to her descriptions of the forest scene. She apologised for letting him down the previous evening, but still he did not look at her. Not a good sign, she thought. Better leave him be. He crouched over his bowl, a handsome man with slightly greying hair in a wrinkled black T-shirt stained with baby food, shoulders hunched as he sipped methodically at his porridge. He seemed too old to be sitting at the table in such an untidy state. He lifted the spoon towards his mouth, hesitated, and for the first time that morning, turned to look at Carla. His eyes glinted, reminding her of Alice’s just as she was about to throw a tantrum. Not wanting a confrontation, she rose quickly and checked that Alice was ready for nursery and then she put on her coat. On the way back downstairs, she glanced into David’s study. Coursework assessments were scattered all over his desk, some lay open and were half-marked, and others were stacked in untidy bundles. There were more bundles of papers in the living room and in the kitchen, where David was cleani
ng away the plates. In the hall, she picked up and then accidentally dropped her keys. The noises in the kitchen stopped.
His voice floated into the hall. ‘Where are you off to?’
‘Work.’
‘But you’ve been working all night.’
To David the investigation was just another assignment but to her it felt like the most important battleground of her career so far. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I have to go.’
‘I’m surprised you even know what time of day it is.’
She craned her neck to catch sight of the clock in the kitchen. ‘Twenty past nine.’
‘Honestly though, you’re going to be exhausted.’
‘Probably. Don’t forget, the nursery needs to be paid for last month.’
‘I haven’t forgotten.’
She also reminded him that Ben had his first vaccination appointment at ten thirty.
‘For Christ’s sake, I’ll get nothing done today.’ He scowled at her. ‘Early morning is the best time for me to mark papers, but you’ve ruined it. I’ve been too distracted worrying about where you were.’
She got the impression he was finding home life more and more frustrating and was storing up his annoyance so that it could be directed at her. Still wearing her coat, she helped him load the dishwasher, but he’d done most of the work already.
‘Am I supposed to do everything at home?’ he complained.
She turned towards him. His face was pale and his eyes glittered. Was it frustration she saw there? Not frustration but anger. He seemed to be staring right through her.
‘I’m trying to help you before I head back to work.’
‘But your work is spreading into our family life, right into the centre of our home and marriage. Can’t you see? It’s ruining everything.’
She fixed the chairs in their places, her lips shut tight. After all she had been through that night, she had imagined that David could hold the fort at home, step into any breach, but she had been wrong. She should have known better. He was quiet again, head down. Was he sulking? Sometimes it was impossible to know what his feelings were. She gave the table a quick wipe-down.
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