Sins of the Dead

by Lin Anderson

  McNab glanced about, looking for cameras. She must have guessed this because she said, ‘I took them with my mobile.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘I think you should come in the back with me and I’ll explain.’

  As she ushered him through a set of heavy velvet curtains, any noise audible from the busy main street was immediately extinguished. The silence of the grave, McNab mused. Something that obviously didn’t worry the girl.

  ‘I prepare the deceased. They like to look nice for their loved ones.’ She smiled her pleasure at this. ‘Make-up, even for the men. Death drains the face of colour, you know.’ Spotting McNab’s expression, she added, ‘They don’t want to look like a ghost.’

  McNab, for once, was lost for words. Seeing this, Claire continued, ‘That’s how I know exactly what they look like when I leave them. And how I know when they don’t look the same when I come back next morning.’

  ‘You believe someone’s been breaking in?’ McNab said.

  ‘How else would they manage to spill crumbs on Mr Martin’s waistcoat and red wine on Mr Robertson’s lovely white shirt?’

  McNab had been waiting to hear about disturbed clothing, maybe a semen stain, so the bread and wine had come as a surprise. ‘Bread and wine?’ he checked. ‘Consumed over a dead body?’

  ‘I don’t know if it was actually consumed over the body,’ said Claire, obviously a stickler for accuracy.

  ‘But it was consumed in the vicinity of the body?’ McNab tried.

  She nodded, willing to accept that.

  ‘Do you keep food and wine on the premises?’ McNab asked, somehow confusing the lying in state with an Irish wake.

  Claire shook her head. ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘So whoever broke in would have brought these things with them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Show me the photographs and then let’s take a look round the premises and try and work out how our intruder gained entry.’

  When Claire went to fetch her mobile, McNab took stock of his surroundings. The entire room was draped in blue velvet, which made him think of the Hollywood movie of that name in which sexual perversion and death went hand in hand. Not a comfortable thought. As for the Last Supper connotations …

  Claire arrived as he’d reached this stage in his thoughts, and held her mobile up for him. On the screen was an open casket in which lay an elderly man she called Mr Martin, who looked almost ruddy and definitely not dead. Wearing a tweed suit and a rather splendid red waistcoat, he cut a dashing figure. If this was Claire’s work then McNab was impressed.

  ‘Look more closely at his waistcoat,’ Claire demanded, enlarging the image.

  Now McNab could see the waistcoat was splattered with crumbs, some of them smeared in, turning it into a child’s bib.

  ‘I had to brush out the coffin and sponge his waistcoat down. He wasn’t happy about that,’ Claire declared indignantly.

  She swiped the screen again and another gentleman appeared. Mr Robertson, as she referred to him, was the elder of the two, his crinkled face serenely calm. He too was smartly dressed as though about to go to a wedding, with a bright white shirt and maroon tie. The next photograph showed the damage. The shirt was ruined by splashes of a dark-red liquid, which Claire said smelt like wine.

  ‘Obviously I had to change his shirt. I was embarrassed to tell his daughter in case she thought I did it, so I went out and bought a new white shirt, ironed it and put it on.’ Claire looked distressed by the subterfuge she’d employed.

  ‘That was kind of you,’ McNab found himself reassuring her.

  She looked mollified by that, then said what McNab had been thinking: ‘Why would anyone do that, Detective? Why would anyone so disrespect the dead?’

  McNab shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Claire.’ He paused. ‘Let’s see if we can work out how they got in to start with.’

  9

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’ Rhona’s forensic assistant, Chrissy, asked in an accusatory manner.

  ‘I have been,’ Rhona responded, without mentioning how little time she had spent there.

  Chrissy regarded her with suspicion, but chose not to say anything further. An unusual occurrence for the colourful and garrulous Glasgow girl that she was.

  ‘Coffee, strong?’ she offered instead.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I’ve sent out for two filled rolls.’ Chrissy glanced at the clock. ‘They shouldn’t be long.’ Her admission made it clear that regardless of how much time Rhona had spent with the body, Chrissy knew she would be at the lab first thing.

  Five minutes later, Rhona was sitting at her desk nursing a coffee that would have made even caffeine-addict McNab’s eyes water, with a breakfast roll that contained the full works – bacon, egg and black pudding topped by a potato scone.

  Silence was maintained as they scoffed this particular Glasgow delicacy, Rhona’s minus tomato sauce, Chrissy’s with copious amounts of the stuff.

  ‘So,’ declared Chrissy after wiping the smeared ketchup from her mouth. ‘What’s with this body under London Road?’

  As Rhona began her résumé of the previous night’s proceedings, she became aware from Chrissy’s expression that her assistant’s personal grapevine had delivered much of this information already.

  ‘I spoke to Janice this morning,’ Chrissy admitted. ‘I wanted to check when you’d finished up last night.’ She gave Rhona a knowing smile. ‘I believe our handsome Viking is on the job.’

  ‘He is,’ said Rhona, fully aware of Chrissy’s soft spot for Magnus, his Orcadian accent in particular.

  ‘What does the Prof have to say about it then?’

  ‘He didn’t elaborate.’

  In the interim, Rhona had set up her laptop. ‘Want to take a look?’ she offered an eager Chrissy.

  Video footage was never a substitute for being at a scene. It was like watching a documentary, rather than being a participant in the story. And an image was odourless, where smell was forensically important. Context was everything and being inside that tunnel was completely different from viewing it on a laptop screen. Nevertheless, Chrissy was engrossed. She sat in silence until the end, then asked to have it repeated.

  ‘I’ve been down there,’ she finally said. Chrissy pointed at the wreck. ‘To see that car. It was famous, or infamous, back in the day,’ she explained.

  Rhona assumed Chrissy was referring to her teenage years, when, according to her assistant, she’d been intent on being more of a delinquent than her brothers, albeit briefly.

  ‘Was the tunnel bricked up then?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t go in via that ramp,’ Chrissy said, remembering. ‘We used the air vent along the road near the new Emirates stadium.’ Noting Rhona’s surprise and relishing it, Chrissy continued, ‘Someone has to lift the heavy grid, but below there’s a metal ladder leading straight down.’

  ‘Is there another entrance apart from the vent?’ Rhona asked.

  ‘I think you used to be able to climb over the wall at the old Bridgeton Cross station, which was on that line. Don’t know how accessible the London Road stretch is from there, though, and the air vent’s closer to the Cosworth.’

  Rhona considered whether the Cosworth itself might be significant in the death scene, other than somewhere to lay the bread and wine. ‘Might the dead guy have gone down there because of the car?’

  Chrissy smiled, knowing her prompting had led Rhona to that point. ‘It’s a possibility. You get Cosworth spotters. And he doesn’t look like an Urbex to me,’ she added with a further glance at the screen.

  ‘What’s an Urbex?’ Rhona asked, bemused.

  ‘An urban explorer,’ Chrissy informed her.

  Rhona contemplated this. If the death was a suicide, placing himself next to the car suggested it meant something to him. If it was a homicide, maybe the perpetrator lured their victim down there using the car as bait.

  Chrissy was reading her thoughts, as she often did. ‘So, when do we know if it’s a homicide?
’

  ‘The PM’s this afternoon.’

  ‘You’re going?’

  ‘I want to know how he died,’ Rhona told her.

  10

  Ellie hadn’t slept, except for a short spell between two and four during which she’d found herself paralysed by fear, unable to move her limbs or cry out. She’d imagined herself buried alive, the roof of the tunnel she’d ridden through earlier descending relentlessly down on her. Although her mind had known it was a dream, nothing she had done could break that spell.

  Plucked free at the last minute by unknown hands, her eyes had sprung open on the familiar scene of her bedroom, the light of the street lamp like a beam sent from heaven to save her.

  Sweating and shaken, she’d forced her trembling body out of the bed and, heading for the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water. Even her throat seemed paralysed as she’d forced the liquid down.

  The remainder of the night she’d spent in the chair wrapped in the duvet, rousing herself if she dozed, desperate not to succumb to the nightmare again.

  Now, standing under the shower, she made herself face the reason for the tortured dream. No matter what she’d agreed with Izzy, she would have to tell the police what they’d found inside the tunnel. Anonymously, at least. Once she’d decided this, she felt a little easier. Then she remembered the motorcycle tracks, and Izzy’s reminder that she had touched the body.

  ‘Only his neck,’ Ellie had protested. ‘To look for a pulse.’

  ‘Every contact leaves a trace,’ Izzy had told her. ‘Don’t you watch crime dramas?’ That had been Izzy’s parting shot just before she’d banged the door on her way out.

  Ellie looked down at her hands as though they’d become a foreign body.

  ‘How would they know they were my prints?’ she said out loud. She’d never been in trouble with the police. Had never had her prints taken. She halted there, remembering the breakin at the Harley shop just before last Christmas when three prize bikes had been stolen, and how they’d all had their prints taken to eliminate them from the enquiry.

  Shit. Would her prints still be on record? She had no idea.

  I could ask Michael, she thought, but he would be bound to wonder why.

  Dressed now, she spooned coffee into the cafetière and added boiling water, her hands shaking. Reaching for the remote, she flicked on the TV. It was still on silent from last night when she’d used it as background for her traumatized state. The headlines ran along the bottom, at a speed her brain could barely assimilate, until a sudden image of Parkhead appeared, the stadium car park busy with police vehicles, crime scene tape stretched across the ramp they’d silently rolled their bikes down last night.

  Ellie grabbed the remote and turned up the sound.

  It took seconds for her recent plan to evaporate as the newsreader indicated that the police had been called to a tunnel at Parkhead. There was as yet no news as to why.

  A sudden flash of the cold white face, seemingly frozen under her hands, brought back the terror of that moment.

  They’ve found him.

  She felt a sense of relief as she put distance between herself and that discovery. She wouldn’t have to report the body now, because someone else must have done that. Then a thought, and not a pleasant one.

  Had the person who reported the body been in the tunnel while they were there? Was that who had flashed the torch at her? If it had been, then they would have seen and heard the bikes. Might they think that those riding them had been responsible for the body?

  From thinking she was off the hook, Ellie now realized this didn’t make things better, but maybe worse. Her mobile’s ring startled her even further. Glancing at the screen, she saw Izzy’s name.

  ‘They’ve found him,’ Izzy announced triumphantly. ‘So you can stop worrying.’

  Izzy was fearless, but she didn’t think of potential problems. Ellie wondered if she should outline them for her or just allow Izzy to stay unaware and happy. When Ellie didn’t immediately respond, Izzy came back in.

  ‘Maybe your boyfriend will keep you posted on what happens now.’

  In the present uneasy situation between herself and Michael, Ellie couldn’t imagine that happening, even if she asked him.

  ‘See you later,’ Izzy said brightly.

  With a jolt, Ellie remembered that they were supposed to be leading out the two speedway teams at Ashfield tonight.

  Masking her concern, she attempted a cheerful goodbye and ended the call.

  The TV’s trailing news bulletin had moved on from the Parkhead tunnel to a scene of devastation and death somewhere else in the world. Ellie switched it off. A quick glance at her watch reminded her that if she didn’t get a move on she’d be late for work. She was due at the Ink Parlour this morning and, from memory, had a client booked in for nine o’clock. On her way out the door, her mobile rang again. This time it was an unidentified caller. Ellie swiped to ignore it and, slipping her phone into her pocket, headed out of the flat.

  11

  Her skin shines naked and cold, the threading of blue veins beneath the surface resembling a spider’s web. The open eyes see nothing from their clouded irises. She lies on her back on the hard surface of the table, her hands resting on her breast. Around her is spread a feast, cooked meat and fowl together with ripe fruit. A decanter filled with red wine sits next to a partially eaten loaf of bread. Before all of this sits the sin-eater.

  The description of the painting made Magnus’s skin crawl as much as the image itself. It was this picture he’d recalled on seeing the body in the tunnel, although he hadn’t told Rhona.

  It had taken him hours to locate it on his return from the crime scene. His initial thinking that he had found it online had proved false, only established after much searching. At that point he’d suddenly remembered the book he’d bought when he’d been writing a paper on ‘Psychology and Art’. The book of illustrations had been too tall for the shelf so he’d laid it flat on top of the bookcase.

  Retrieving it, he’d placed it on his desk and began flipping through, even then unsure if it contained the image he sought.

  Eventually, he’d found it. The power of the painting was as he remembered. Even now it struck him like a blow in the stomach and he almost recoiled. Rendered by an unknown artist sometime during the earlier part of the nineteenth century, it depicted a medieval sin-eater, an elderly man who sat by the body of a young woman, bread and wine clasped in his gnarled hands.

  The juxtaposition of the young woman, still beautiful in death, and the ancient goblin-like creature, alive and breathing beside her, was horrible. Even more so was the idea that he was symbolically devouring her sins.

  Magnus pushed his chair away from the desk, distancing himself from the disturbing image, but contemplating what it might offer to their understanding of the scene in the tunnel. The ancient concept and role of a sin-eater was found all over Europe, in both folklore and Christianity.

  In former times, should someone die suddenly with no opportunity to confess their sins and therefore receive absolution, a sin-eater was required to sit with the recently deceased and partake of food and wine next to the body, symbolically consuming their sins to allow them to enter heaven.

  The practice was said to have died out in the early twentieth century, although there was still evidence of it after that in the New World, in particular the remote Appalachian Mountains, probably brought there by immigrants from Europe.

  A sin-eater was a necessity for a community that believed in eternal damnation, but whoever adopted the role wasn’t permitted to dwell among the inhabitants. The sin-eater was essentially an outcast, usually living alone on the outer reaches of society, and called upon only when required.

  No doubt a strange and lonely occupation, although in medieval times at least, a busy one, when death assiduously courted both young and old, and hell was the only alternative to absolution.

  The positioning of the body in the tunnel had appeared to Magnus like
the laying-out of a corpse. The nearby bread partially consumed, plus the wine, was definitely significant in some form. Those considering suicide rarely involved anyone else in the act. So the victim himself would have ritualistically partaken of the bread and wine. Something no doubt Rhona would provide proof of.

  If it was a homicide, however, the bread and wine might well turn out to be the signature of the perpetrator, and perhaps provide a DNA profile of them.

  Unless the perpetrator is forensically aware.

  Most murders happened on the spur of the moment, usually fuelled by drink or drugs, and carried out for the very human reasons of anger, jealousy or revenge. Killers in this category, having not anticipated the outcome of their actions, had no plan as to how they would avoid detection.

  An organized killer, on the other hand, had a detailed plan to follow, a logical reason for their kill, and often boasted a signature.

  They wanted to make their presence known. They wanted to signal their existence. And organized killers rarely killed only once.

  12

  McNab accepted the mug of what he could smell was strong coffee.

  ‘Just the way I like it,’ he told Claire.

  They had gone over the funeral parlour together, checking all the places that might have allowed entry by person or persons unknown. There were, to McNab’s eye at least, no signs of a breakin.

  ‘Who holds keys to the place?’

  ‘Me and Mr Marshall.’ She paused there. ‘I suppose maybe the hearse drivers, but I’m not sure. You’d have to ask Mr Marshall,’ Claire added, like a mantra.

  McNab figured in that moment there were multiple keys among the staff. Probably spares sitting about too. It was obvious that Claire’s boss trusted his workforce, and had no reason to think anyone would want to gain entry for nefarious purposes.

  ‘When will Mr Marshall be back?’ he asked.

  Claire shook her head in apology. ‘Maybe not until tomorrow.’

  Since both the bodies involved had already gone to their eternal rest, plus the place had obviously been cleaned and polished after the said events, McNab didn’t think they would discover any evidence of an intruder, not even a fingerprint. The best he could do was try to ensure it didn’t happen again. He told Claire so.