by Tana Collins
‘Christ,’ he said, ‘how far away are the SOCOs? We’re going to lose any evidence.’ He inhaled the salty sea air, tasting it in the back of his throat.
‘That’s if she fell from the cliffs,’ said Fletcher, coming up behind him, fishing out her iPhone and putting it on camera mode. ‘If she’s come in with the tide then evidence will be lost already. The current’s fast here.’ She started to take photos with her phone. ‘You’d be surprised at the quality,’ she said, when Carruthers looked at her questioningly. ‘And it’s better than nothing.’
‘We need to get down there,’ he said, looking for a path between the rocks. His foot slipped, and some pebbles and rocks fell away from the cliffs.
Fletcher pulled him back. ‘Watch it, Jim,’ she said. ‘More to the point, how’s Mackie going to get down there with his back?’ She was referring to John Mackie, the police pathologist, who wasn’t exactly in the first flush of youth.
‘Look, I’m going to see if I can find a safe way down,’ said Carruthers. ‘You and…’ he looked up at the police officer who was standing as far away from the edge of the cliff as she could.
‘PC Brenda Rix, sir.’
‘Right, Andie stay here with PC Rix and wait for the SOCOs.’
‘OK,’ said Fletcher, ‘but for God’s sake be careful. I don’t want to be having to deal with two dead bodies.’
He left her shielding her eyes, scanning the beach, and made his way further up the cliff line. He thought he heard her call him at one point but the noise was lost in the raucous sound of the screeching gulls and the buffeting wind. When he turned to look at her she was standing with her back to him peering out to sea. It must have been the gulls. He carried on, peering down the craggy rocks for a path to the beach.
Suddenly he saw something ahead of him further up the cliffs. An incongruous black object. He made his way towards it, screwing up his eyes in the brilliant sunshine. As he grew closer he recognised it. A pair of binoculars lying on a tuft of grass. He itched to produce a plastic bag from his pocket and carefully bag them but he knew this must be the work of the SOCOs who would need to document in situ. He searched around the vicinity for anything else and discovered a cigarette butt. It looked recent. It would need to go the same way as the binoculars. If they were lucky it might give them some DNA. The question was, how had the binoculars got there?
He straightened up and gazed down at the beach. From this vantage point he had the perfect view of the woman’s body. He thought of the binoculars. Were they hers? Had she been out looking for seals or bottle-nosed dolphins? Perhaps she put the binoculars down to get a closer look at something, got too close to the cliff edge and taken a tumble? This nature reserve was well known for its flowers and butterflies. It wouldn’t be the first time the police had been called to such a scene.
Or were the binoculars used by the person or persons who had reported the body? Carruthers felt uneasy. Couldn’t pinpoint why. Something about this wasn’t right. He once again stared out towards the sea and the lifeless body further inshore. Suddenly his eye caught movement on the beach. Five figures were running towards the woman. He saw two of the figures were Fletcher and Rix. He felt a moment’s irritation with her for disobeying him. He saw an older man with them with his trademark black bag – Dr Mackie. And the two figures in spacesuits were SOCOs. They’d found a way down to the beach. He retraced his steps to where he’d last seen Fletcher. Finding a steep path in between two lines of tall, pink rosebay willowherb, he half stumbled half slid, ripping his shirt on some gorse on the way. He felt a sharp burning pain in his arm. He realised he’d been cut, warm blood seeping through the ripped shirt. He cursed. It was one of his best work shirts. He ran towards the group through the sand and long marram grass.
‘What took you so long?’ Fletcher walked towards him grinning. ‘She’s definitely dead. You OK? What have you done to your arm?’
‘Just a scratch. And did I not give you instructions to stay where you were?’
‘Sorry. I saw the SOCOs had arrived. And you’d disappeared. Mackie doesn’t think she’s been dead for long,’ said Fletcher.
As with any suspicious death Carruthers knew this was now a crime scene, and as he knelt by the body, as close as he could without incurring Mackie’s legendary wrath, he started taking in the details of the woman.
When he examined her face, the part not obscured by sand, he felt sick to his stomach. He swallowed the bile back down. Birds had already been pecking out her left eye and much of her face was missing. He noticed with surprise her eyebrows were so blonde they were almost white. He forced himself to take an emotional step back and look at her dispassionately. She had sustained some sort of head wound. There’d been a lot of blood and from the angle of the neck Carruthers could tell it was broken. Although she was lying on her front, head angled to the side, covered in a film of sand, he could tell she had been an attractive girl. There was a hideous wound in the back of her left leg and lesions and cuts all over her body.
‘How soon will you be able to do the post-mortem?’ he asked.
‘First thing tomorrow morning,’ said Mackie.
‘No sooner?’ asked Carruthers.
Mackie glanced at his watch. ‘It’s gone seven now.’
Carruthers was surprised. He hadn’t realised it was that late. He now knew he wouldn’t get home before ten.
When Carruthers had finished telling both Fletcher and the SOCO team about the binoculars and cigarette butt, Fletcher said, ‘It’s worth conducting a more thorough examination of the cliff, then.’
‘We need to get a team in before it gets too dark,’ he said.
‘Why don’t we make a start now?’ she said. He agreed. They started their search. After thirty minutes Fletcher shouted for Carruthers to come over.
‘Is there a raptor’s nest nearby?’ she said.
‘Why do you ask?’
She pointed. High on a rocky promontory was a slab of what looked like raw meat. ‘There’s been trouble in this area before with land owners poisoning birds of prey, hasn’t there?’
Carruthers swore. ‘Before my time.’ He had only been at the station a year and a half, having moved up from London. He’d started his career in Scotland but an opportunity had come up to work in London and he’d taken it. He’d been happy in London until his wife had left him and moved back to Fife. That had been a bad time in his life. He’d misread the signals. Thought he could win her back and moved to Fife to be closer to her. Love can make a fool out of all of us, he thought. He dragged his mind back to the case.
‘It needs to be bagged and sent for analysis.’ He wondered if sea eagles had been the target. He’d read a recent article about them. What had he done with the magazine? Perhaps he’d already chucked it into the recycling. He resolved to ask his friend, Gill, who worked at SASA, the Scottish Agricultural Science Agency, over in Edinburgh.
He pulled his mobile out of his pocket. ‘Get a team over ASAP.’
‘What do I tell them?’
‘Tell them we’ve got a suspicious death and have discovered evidence of illegal poisoning of birds of prey.’
Three hours later Carruthers let himself into his cottage in Anstruther with a weary sigh. He was desperate for a shower and change of clothes. He was also hungry. Not surprising, given that he’d skipped breakfast and his lunch lay in the bin at work. He went straight to the kitchen, started rummaging around his cupboards. He’d forgotten to do a food shop. There was a tin of tuna, a couple of cans of coke and a bag of pasta. Screwing up his face he walked to the bedroom, stripped off his shirt and, after smelling it and examining the rip, threw it into the bin. He looked at his arm. There was an angry red weal.
Taking a quick shower he pulled on a T-shirt and blue jeans, grabbed his house keys and wallet. Would have headed to his favourite pub, the Dreel Tavern, to treat himself to a pie and pint but it had shut the January of that year and in any case he would have missed last orders. The Dreel was currently under scaffol
ding. It had gone the same way as a number of other pubs and restaurants in the area although he’d heard that the Royal had reopened. He missed the Dreel. He headed instead to the Waterfront Bar down by the harbour where he was friendly with Georgina behind the bar. She’d been known to cook him something this late before.
As he speared a piece of meat from his pie, his thoughts drifted back to the day’s unexpected events. The last moments on this earth of the blonde girl on the beach. Where had she come from? Was it an accident, suicide or foul play? Who made the anonymous call? And how was it all connected to the discovery of the binoculars and slab of meat on the clifftop?
They hadn’t yet found any evidence of poisoning but he knew that if birds of prey were being poisoned the perpetrators would be disposing of the bodies in an attempt to get rid of the evidence. After a second pint he headed home, squeezing past a family of holidaymakers who had stopped on one of the many narrow street corners to admire Buckie House, the famous Victorian house covered in shells. He fell asleep that night dreaming not of the dead girl but of works of art being washed up on the beach to the background noise of a ringing phone.
Dr Mackie took the sheet off the young girl. The pathologist stank of cigarette smoke; Carruthers couldn’t blame him. Even though he was an ex-smoker he was tempted to ask Mackie for one of his fags and save it for later. Carruthers swallowed hard, trying to put the unwelcome smells of disinfectant and decaying flesh out of his mind. He looked at the almost boyish figure. She looked so vulnerable lying there, if a person could look vulnerable when dead.
‘She looks about twenty,’ Carruthers said.
‘I think she’s a bit older. I would estimate between twenty-five and twenty-eight.’
Carruthers was surprised.
‘Eastern European, is my guess.’ Mackie was leaning over her, glasses on the end of his nose.
Carruthers frowned. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘A hunch.’
Carruthers raised his eyebrows. He’d learned to take note of Mackie’s hunches. He was often spot on.
‘How long dead?’ said Carruthers.
‘Can’t say with any accuracy until I’ve done all the tests but several hours at least.’
Carruthers knew better than to push him.
‘Various puncture wounds,’ the pathologist continued.
‘She’s been knifed?’
‘No, no. Not that sort of puncture wound.’ Pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose, Mackie probed a wound in her thigh with his gloved hand. ‘More consistent with being caught on rocks.’
‘Where she fell?’ asked Carruthers. ‘Or would these be rocks in the water?’
‘There’s no evidence she’s been in the water yet,’ said Mackie. ‘But I’ll know more when I examine the lungs. I know what you’re asking. Did she fall to her death from the cliffs? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’
Carruthers nodded.
Mackie made eye contact with him. ‘Don’t quote me on this. I’m not even a third of the way through the PM but if pushed I would say early indications are that she died at the scene by falling from the cliffs.’ He examined her blonde hairline. ‘Broke her neck. No gunshot or stab wounds. She has a severe head injury, which most likely occurred on impact when she hit the ground. You’ll notice there was significant amount of blood at the scene.’
‘Could she have sustained the head injury before she fell?’ asked Carruthers, trying to avert his eyes from the mass of congealed blood and bone splinters in the head.
‘It’s possible.’ Carruthers watched Mackie patting his breast pocket. Absentmindedly looking for his cigarettes. Carruthers would take the smell of cigarette smoke over the smell of a corpse any day.
‘Force of habit, I’m afraid.’ The pathologist carried on. ‘The injury is to the frontal lobe which means if it was inflicted by someone else she would have had to be facing her attacker. She could have staggered backwards and fallen, hitting her body on the rocks which would account for the gashes in her thigh. This is interesting,’ he said. He was staring at the girl’s left ankle. ‘Tattoo. Not one I’ve seen before.’
Carruthers moved closer and peered at the tattoo. It was of an open eye shielded by an eyebrow and what looked like a tear drop underneath. There was also a strange curved line coming out of the bottom left of the eye. ‘Can we get a photograph? It might help with the identification. I’ll then get it circulated.’ Carruthers looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after eleven. ‘We’ve got a team brief at noon. If you get any results, I’ll be on my mobile.’
‘Right you are,’ said Mackie.
Carruthers turned to go. He heard Mackie calling him back.
‘If you want a ciggie, they’re on my desk.’ Carruthers raised his hand in acknowledgment. He was tempted, but this time he managed to bypass them.
The team brief started on time. There was a lot to get through. Carruthers shuffled his notes whilst gazing round the room.
Gayle Watson was fanning herself with a file. It was suffocatingly hot. Carruthers could smell cigarette smoke mingled with sweat. He wondered if Harris had just had a crafty fag outside.
‘We’ll start with the girl on the beach.’ He recounted the findings of the post-mortem. ‘Likelihood is that she’s fallen from the cliffs. However, I left Mackie mid-PM so final results are not yet in.’
‘Suicide?’ asked Harris, cramming his face with a doughnut.
‘It’s possible,’ said Carruthers. ‘Or accident. We’re not ruling anything out. However, if it was an accident, where were her personal possessions? We found no handbag, rucksack, keys or phone.’
‘Definitely suicide, then,’ said Harris, cheeks bulging. ‘Why would you take yer gear with you if you were gonna top yersel.’
‘Taken by the person who made the anonymous call?’ asked Watson.
‘Possible. My gut feeling says not,’ said Carruthers.
‘Nah, reckon it’s a suicide,’ said Harris.
‘They’d have to be one callous bastard to steal her things,’ said Fletcher.
Harris shrugged. ‘There’s a lot of desperate people out there. Maybe they were taken by an immigrant. Can’t move for Poles and Lithuanians nowadays.’
Carruthers caught Fletcher throwing Harris a filthy look. Harris was well known for his view on immigrants and Fletcher for her dislike of Harris. Carruthers wondered, in light of Britain’s shock decision to leave the EU, how many Eastern Europeans would still be here after Article 50 was triggered.
‘We can’t rule out foul play,’ said Carruthers, wondering idly if Harris had bothered to vote in the EU Referendum. It wasn’t a discussion he was prepared to have. He remembered all the bad feeling the Scottish Referendum had caused, having heard stories of members of even the same family being on opposing sides. The station had been no different. He glanced over at their latest recruit. No-nonsense Gayle Watson was a strong advocate of Scottish Independence. He looked back at the photo of the dead girl on the incident board, shuddering as he remembered the details of the post-mortem. He also remembered Mackie’s surprising speculation that the girl might have been Eastern European.
Frowning, he looked at Harris reaching for a second doughnut with his pudgy hand. Wondered if the girl could be an immigrant. Or asylum seeker. There was a big trade to be made from trafficking illegals into the UK. He dragged his thoughts away from the worsening situation at Calais and the increasingly desperate refugees. But the dead girl hadn’t looked Middle Eastern.
‘We also have reason to believe there may be activity of bird poisoning in the area,’ Carruthers continued. ‘The meat we found has been sent for analysis. But we did get lucky. Found a set of binoculars on the top of the cliff, also sent off for examination. Maybe we’ll get even luckier and find some fingerprints or DNA. I’ve called in a favour so we should get the results back pretty quickly.’
‘Could they be the girl’s?’ asked Harris.
‘What would she be doing with binocul
ars and no other personal possessions?’ said Fletcher. ‘If she was using the binos to look at the wildlife you might expect her to have, say, a rucksack? Butterfly or bird book? House keys? Mobile?’
Carruthers shuffled his papers again. ‘It’s possible the two activities are linked, but not necessarily. The binoculars user may have seen the body on the beach and been our anonymous caller. The binoculars user and the poisoner might not even be the same person or persons. At this stage we really can’t be sure of anything.’
‘What if she was a bird watcher who ran into the poisoners?’ said Watson. ‘Could they have killed her and taken all her possessions to prevent identification or to make it look like a suicide? Maybe they got careless and left the binoculars behind?’
‘It’s certainly a theory,’ said Carruthers. ‘Apart from it being a nature reserve I understand it’s an area of Special Scientific Interest.’ He looked over at Fletcher who nodded.
‘Attracts a lot of wildlife enthusiasts,’ she said. ‘It has the pearl-bordered fritillary for starters.’
‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ asked Harris.
‘A butterfly. It’s pretty rare in the UK but it’s making a comeback in Scotland.’
Carruthers smiled. He knew Fletcher liked her butterflies. He’d seen the Butterfly Conservation magazines in her flat.
‘We’ve traced the anonymous call. Came from a phone box over at Windygates.’
Carruthers gazed around the room. ‘Right. Jobs. I want Gayle to chase up the artist’s impression of the girl. I know the poor lassie only had half a face but we should be able to work on the half we do have to get a decent likeness. Also get an interview set up with the media.’
Gayle Watson nodded. ‘Will do, boss.’