by James Oswald
‘Can’t sit around in my flat all day, sir. Going stir crazy.’ At the other end of the line, Ritchie sniffed loudly. She sounded blocked up. ‘Everyone else is off, anyway, so Reg called me in. They’ve found a body. Think it might be that tattoo artist you were looking for. Barry Timbrel?’
Beside him, Mrs Saifre stood, walked back to the fireplace and picked up the statuette again. She had a frown on her face as if she knew what was going to happen.
‘OK. I’ll get there as soon as I can.’ McLean hung up, slipped the phone back into his pocket, never more grateful for its interruption, or for someone to have died. Mrs Saifre’s gaze locked on to his; not concern on her face, nor annoyance at an evening ruined. More the frustration of a child who can’t understand why the world isn’t working the way it’s supposed to.
‘I’m so sorry—’
‘But you have to go. I know. It’s true what they say, we can’t always have the things we want the most.’ Mrs Saifre reached for a cord that hung from the ceiling close to the fireplace, tugged it once. ‘I’ll have Karl take you wherever you need to go.’
‘That’s very kind. Thank you.’ McLean stood up as the bodyguard appeared through a side door. ‘Perhaps another time, then.’
Mrs Saifre’s eyes reflected the leaping flames as she smiled at him then. Either that or there was fire in her soul. ‘Oh, I think so, Tony. You don’t get away from me that easily.’
McLean followed Karl out of the room, back across the hall and out to where the Rolls-Royce was waiting. It was only once he had settled back into the soft leather seat that he realized he’d left his glass on the table by the fireplace, the orange juice inside it untouched.
39
It took an hour to get back to the station, pick up his own car and then drive across town to Cramond. All the while, McLean couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d just survived a horribly dangerous situation thanks purely to blind luck. There was something not right about Mrs Saifre, and it wasn’t just her blatant attempts at seduction. He felt no physical attraction to her. No, that wasn’t being honest. The base part of his nature couldn’t help but be physically attracted to her; she positively screamed sexuality. But he knew that, understood it, compartmentalised it. He wasn’t looking for a relationship anyway, casual or otherwise. But she was fascinating. Dangerously so. And for some reason she was fascinated by him, too.
Ritchie met him in the car park on the edge of Drum Sands, but in the pitch black of a cloudy, moonless night they could have been anywhere. The lights of distant Dalgety Bay and the South Fife coast across the Firth of Forth cast an odd glow, suggesting something sinister lurked in the space between. The darkness and mist in the air made it impossible to tell what, leaving it for the imagination to fill in the void.
‘Sorry to spoil your evening, sir. Only I thought—’
‘Trust me, Sergeant. You’ve nothing to apologize for. Saved me from a very tricky situation.’ McLean pulled a pair of boots out of the back of the car as he spoke, shucked off his shoes and slid his feet into them. Ritchie was already wrapped up in a huge padded jacket, the hood pulled tight so that he could only see her nose. ‘Where’s this body then?’
‘Out on the sands a ways. We’ll have to get a move on, sir. Tide’s on the turn.’ Ritchie hurried away and McLean followed, on to the causeway that linked the mainland with Cramond Island. It was a fair few years since last he’d been out this way, but he remembered the tall concrete pillars of the breakwater, marching out across the beach. The track alongside them speared arrow-straight into the darkness, not at all inviting.
‘Is it far?’ McLean asked as he quickly caught up with Ritchie. She was breathing heavily, and stopped for a moment to choke out a long slippery cough. The answer soon appeared ahead of them, a faint light in the murk. Closer in, McLean made out three head torches and a brighter handheld arc light, all pointed at the gap between two of the heavy concrete pillars. Ritchie quickened her pace for the last few tens of yards, and McLean could see why. Thin waves of seawater were lapping over the sand, each one coming closer as the tide rose. Soon it would be over the causeway, and by the time it turned again anything loose would have been swept away, out into the North Sea and gone for ever.
‘Who found the body?’ he asked as he finally reached the spot. Two familiar figures crouched down beside a crumpled, naked figure. Angus Cadwallader looked up at the question.
‘Evening, Tony.’ He nodded once, then went back to examining his patient.
‘Young couple got stuck out on the island,’ Ritchie said. ‘Walking their dog. Happens quite a lot, I’m told. They had to wait for the tide to go out before they could get back. Dog found this as they went past.’
McLean leaned over beside the pathologist to get a better view. The body was naked, which made him shiver at the cold. It was obviously a man, scrawny and thin. He had tattoos over his arms, legs, back, one spiralling up his neck and on to his face, but he wasn’t completely covered in them like the body in Roslin Glen. He’d been carried by the retreating tide, tumbled over the causeway, but had stuck up against one of the concrete pillars, hugging it as if he’d been alive and clinging on.
‘Can we get a look at his face?’ he asked of no one in particular.
‘Don’t think we’re going to get anything else here.’ Cadwallader leaned forward, took a firm grasp of one of the dead man’s arms and eased him away from the pillar, on to his back. The corpse moved with an odd sucking noise where the wet sand had begun to pull him down. McLean took the portable arc light from the uniform constable who had been holding it over the scene, stepped carefully down to where the body lay. His hair was plastered over his face, and Cadwallader smoothed it away with practised fingers.
‘Dear God. What’s happened to his mouth?’
Cadwallader’s assistant Tracy spoke the words, but it could have been any of them. McLean recognized the face of Barry Timbrel, tattoo artist, from the photographs they’d seen at his flat. He’d not been in the water long; the fish hadn’t started on him. His eyes were white though, as if he’d been suffering from cataracts for many a year, and the tattoos on his neck were faded and old. In many ways he looked peaceful in death. Except for his lips, which were burnt and blistered, cracked brown teeth showing through ragged gaps in the flesh.
‘You seen anything like that before, Angus?’ McLean asked. He knew the answer, of course, even if the implications of it left an ice-cold churning in his gut that had nothing to do with the weather.
‘Indeed I have, Tony.’ Cadwallader levered himself up to a loud popping of knees. ‘Indeed I have.’
Blue flashing lights spiralled lazily on the top of the ambulance as a couple of crime scene technicians loaded the body into the back. The crime scene itself was underwater now, time and tide waiting for no man. McLean looked out over the choppy sea to the far side of the Forth and the lights of Dalgety Bay. But for the grace of God, and two unlucky dog walkers, the body of Barry Timbrel would have been out there too, food for the fishes.
‘What’re the chances? Finding a man like that?’
‘Chances? Slim to nil, I’d say. ’Till it happens, of course. Bit like winning the lottery.’ DS Ritchie stamped her feet, then started coughing.
‘You really shouldn’t have come in, you know. There’s a reason they call it sick leave.’
‘Was in anyway,’ Ritchie said, once she’d managed to stop coughing. Her voice sounded hoarse and nasal. ‘It was doing my head in being stuck at home. And this is on the way out anyway.’ She waved a gloved hand at her face, then started coughing again.
‘Doesn’t really sound like it, you know. Have you seen a doctor?’
Ritchie finished her coughing fit with a throat-clearing bark, then spat on the ground in a most unladylike fashion. Rubbed at her lips with the back of her glove. ‘Gave me antibiotics and said take some rest. They make it sound so easy, but you know as well as I do it’s a pain. Seem to recall you clumping around the station on crutches for a
month or so, getting up everyone’s backs.’
McLean considered the dull ache in his hip, not helped by the cold and salt air. It was the tail end of an enforced period of leave that he’d fought against with every trick he knew. He could hardly blame Ritchie when he’d not exactly been a model patient himself.
‘What do you make of this, then?’ He shrugged his head back in the direction of the ambulance.
‘I read Grumpy Bob’s report on Timbrel. All Stuart’s stuff about the tattoos, too. Wasn’t much else I could do for a while. Definitely your man, but Christ only knows what happened to him to get in that state. Out there.’
‘Christ and Angus Cadwallader, hopefully. At least tomorrow morning once he’s done the PM.’ McLean looked at his watch, noticed that it had stopped being late and was now early. ‘This morning, I should say.’
Ritchie started another rumbling cough, and slammed a gloved fist into her chest a couple of times until it went away.
‘You drive down here?’ McLean asked.
‘No, got a lift.’ Ritchie turned around just in time to see the ambulance pull away. A quick look around the beachfront showed a distinct lack of squad cars. ‘Bugger’s gone and sodded off without me, though.’
McLean shoved his hand into his coat pocket, dug out his car keys. ‘Come on then. I’ll take you home. And I don’t want to see you back in until you’ve shifted that cough.’
40
Thin, watery sunlight struggled to fight its way through the heavy cloud overhead and down into the cavernous depths of the Cowgate. It was early, and McLean hadn’t slept well. His dreams had been filled with fire and brimstone although he’d been cold. It had taken a full ten minutes in the shower, the temperature turned up as high as he could bear, just to get the chill out of his bones.
Even though they’d found the body of Barry Timbrel just the night before, Cadwallader had insisted he would carry out the post-mortem first thing. Someone else would have to be shuffled away to make a space in the schedule, but then it wasn’t as if they were going to complain.
All the way from the station, McLean kept having to suppress the urge to look around, convinced in some paranoid corner of his mind that he was being watched, followed. Even the cars seemed suspicious, passing him slowly as if to give the drivers a chance to check him out. They were driving that way because of the road conditions, of course. Snow still piled up on the pavements and against any car that had been parked for more than a couple of hours. Gritting lorries and snowploughs had been along this road many times, but so far the weather was winning that particular battle.
Stepping into the city mortuary was a relief both from the cold and from the sense of foreboding. McLean nodded at the security guard as she buzzed him through to the business end. The building was always quiet, but at this time of the morning it was almost entirely silent, just the faint whoosh of air in the ventilation system and the squeak, squeak, squeak of his shoes on the shiny linoleum floor.
Angus Cadwallader had already started, ably assisted by Dr Sharp. Another doctor McLean didn’t know was sitting a little way off, witness to the proceedings and quite obviously unhappy about being dragged out of his bed so early in the morning. He was young, rumpled black hair and bristly chin making him look more like a med student than a fully fledged pathologist.
‘Ah, Tony. You made it. Good.’ Cadwallader barely looked up from his grisly work. McLean stepped forward to get a better look, then wished he hadn’t. Barry Timbrel lay on his back, his chest opened up in a neat, bloodless Y cut. Half his organs had already been removed and weighed. Now they sat in little plastic containers to one side, waiting for Tracy Sharp to put them all back again.
‘You said eight o’clock start, Angus.’ McLean glanced at his watch: ten past.
‘Yes, well. Couldn’t sleep last night, so I thought I’d come in and get started early. Tom here was kind enough to agree to witness.’
The young doctor stepped down off his stool, held out a hand for McLean to shake. ‘Tom MacPhail. You must be Detective Inspector McLean.’
‘Thanks for doing this.’ McLean nodded at the body on the slab.
‘Aye, well, Angus didn’t exactly give me much of an option.’ MacPhail grinned, then went back to his stool. He looked half-asleep, and McLean wondered where exactly it was that Cadwallader had found him.
‘So what’s the prognosis then, doc?’ It was a half-hearted attempt at a joke McLean realized he’d used far too many times before.
‘There’s no evidence of foul play. I can tell you that much.’
‘None?’
‘Externally, he’s clean. Well, you’d expect that from being in the water. Reckon he’d been there eight, maybe ten hours tops. He didn’t drown, though. There’s no water in his lungs.’
‘So foul play, then. Someone stripped him and threw him in?’
Cadwallader waved a gore-smeared hand. ‘Not necessarily, no. He didn’t drown, but he might have jumped.’
‘Jumped?’
‘You’ll have heard the schoolboy saying that if you jump off a high building or something similar you’ll be dead before you hit the ground?’
McLean nodded. Best to let Cadwallader go when he had an idea in his brain.
‘It’s nonsense, of course. Most jumpers die from massive deceleration trauma. Broken bones, smashed skull, the shock of impact. Most, but not all.’
The pathologist turned back to his patient, and plunged his hands into the open chest cavity in a manner that made McLean glad he’d not had time yet for breakfast that morning. A couple of seconds and then Cadwallader pulled them back out again, this time cradling something red and slippery.
‘Some. You might say the lucky few, except what’s lucky about a man who jumps off a bridge, eh? Some have a heart attack before they reach the ground. Or the water. This is what killed our man here.’ He held the shiny mass up to the light. McLean already knew it was a heart; not the first one he’d encountered up closer than he would have liked.
‘Heart attack?’
‘Myocardial infarction. Coronary. Heart attack. I don’t think any of them really do justice to what happened to this poor fellow.’ Cadwallader stroked the heart gently with one latex-gloved finger, then handed it over to Tracy to be weighed. ‘This man’s heart pretty much exploded.’
‘Is that natural?’
‘It’s unusual, Tony, if that’s what you mean. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it, though. I can tell you this much. He died in an instant. Probably didn’t know what had hit him. If he’d been fully clothed in the water I might have suggested that he’d just been unlucky enough to be walking along the beach when it happened. But he was completely naked, and this really isn’t the time of year for skinny dipping.’
‘So you reckon he jumped off the bridge.’
‘A bridge, certainly. He was found at Cramond, so he might well have jumped into the river rather than the Firth. Been swept down that way.’
‘What about the burning to his lips?’ McLean recalled the sight from the night before, the light shining on the dead man’s face for the first time, the mess of blisters and ripped flesh around his mouth.
‘What indeed.’ Cadwallader turned to MacPhail. ‘What do you make of it, Tom?’
The young pathologist jumped down off his stool and went to inspect the body, bending down close to the head before straightening up again. ‘Looks like he’s kissed a red-hot poker. The water’s washed it pretty clean, but you can see some evidence of charring, and the blisters are consistent with third degree. Must’ve happened not long before he died. There’s no sign of healing.’
‘Seen anything like it before?’ McLean asked.
‘Can’t say as I have. Must have hurt like buggery, though.’
‘I have, and recently.’ Cadwallader went over to the wall screen, then realized his gloved hands were still covered in ichor. ‘Tracy, can you bring up the Weatherly photos.’
Dr Sharp sighed, removed her own smattered gloves an
d set to tapping at the keyboard. In a matter of seconds a larger-than-lifesize photograph of the dead Andrew Weatherly’s flaccid face appeared on the screen. A click of the mouse and the image zoomed in on the lips. Another few clicks and a second image appeared alongside it; live feed from the camera mounted over the body. Dr Sharp went back to the table, adjusting the direction and focus until there were two sets of damaged lips side by side. It was hard to imagine that the damage hadn’t been caused by the same thing.
‘Well, there’s something you don’t see every day,’ Dr MacPhail said. ‘I don’t suppose we’ve still got him in here.’ He pointed at the first image, Andrew Weatherly.
‘No. He was buried a week ago.’ McLean felt that all-too-familiar churning in the pit of his stomach as the implications built up in his mind. ‘I suppose you’re going to want us to dig him up again now.’
41
‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’
As responses went, it was fairly predictable. McLean stood on the wrong side of Detective Superintendent Duguid’s desk, hands behind his back, trying not to bounce up and down on his feet with impatience. He said nothing, though. Best to make the initial request, then let Dagwood work his way through at his own speed.
‘The man’s only just been laid to rest and you want to go digging him up?’
Actually, his body was lying in a crypt, so removing it would be easy. He’d already pointed that out though, so probably not a good idea to do it again.
‘And this investigation is closed, for fuck’s sake. You told me yourself it was done and dusted. No complications. How the hell am I supposed to take this up with the Deputy Chief Constable? What’s going to happen when the press get a hold of it?’
Hide from them like you did before, most likely, McLean thought. Leave it to a detective inspector to take all the flak.