7
They found the body in the council tip at Nigg, just south of the city. A two-minute drive from Richard Erskine’s house. A party of school children had been out on a field trip: ‘Recycling and Green Issues’. They arrived by minibus at three twenty-six and proceeded to don little white breathing masks, the kind with the elastic band holding them on, and heavy-duty rubber gloves. Everyone wore waterproofed jackets and Wellington boots. They signed in at the Portacabin office next to the skips at three thirty-seven, before squelching their way into the tip. Walking through a landscape of discarded nappies, broken bottles, kitchen waste and everything else chucked out by hundreds of thousands of Aberdonians every day.
It was Rebecca Johnston, eight, who spotted it. A left foot, sticking up out of a pile of shredded black plastic bags. The sky was full of seagulls – huge, fat bloated things that swooped and screamed at each other in a jagged ballet. One was tugging away at a bloodstained toe. This was what first grabbed Rebecca’s attention.
And at four o’clock, on the dot, they called the police.
The smell was unbelievable, even on a wet and windy day like today. Up here on Doonies Hill the rain was bitterly cold. It hammered against the car, gusts of wind rocking the rusty Vauxhall, making Logan shiver even though the heater was going full pelt.
Both he and WPC Watson were soaked to the skin. The rain had paid no attention to their police-issue ‘waterproof’ jackets, saturated their trousers and seeped into their shoes. Along with Christ knew what else. The car windows were opaque, the blowers making little headway.
The Identification Bureau hadn’t turned up yet, so Logan and Watson had built a makeshift tent of fresh bin-bags and wheelie-bins over the body. It looked as if it was going to fly apart at any moment, torn to pieces by the howling wind, but it kept the worst of the rain off.
‘Where the hell are they?’ Logan cleared a porthole in the fogged-up windscreen. His mood had swiftly deteriorated as they’d struggled with whipping black plastic bags and unco-operative bins. The painkiller he’d taken at lunchtime was wearing off, leaving him sore every time he moved. Grumbling, he pulled out the bottle and shook one into his hand, swallowing it down dry.
At long last an almost-white, unmarked van slithered its way slowly along the rubbish road, its headlights blazing. The Identification Bureau had arrived.
‘About bloody time!’ said WPC Watson.
They clambered out of the car and stood in the driving rain.
Behind the approaching van the North Sea raged, grey and huge, the frigid wind making its first landfall since the Norwegian fjords.
The van slid to a halt and a nervous-looking man peered out through the windshield at the driving rain and festering rubbish.
‘You’re not going to bloody melt!’ shouted Logan. He was sore, cold, damp and in no mood for dicking about.
A troop of four IB men and women grudged their way out of the van into the downpour and swore the SOC tent up over Logan’s makeshift fort. The wheelie-bins and black plastic bags were turfed out into the rain and the portable generators set up. With a roar they burst into life, flooding the area with sizzling white light.
No sooner was the crime scene waterproof than ‘Doc’ Wilson, the duty doctor, turned up.
‘Evenin’ all,’ he said, turning up the collar of his coat with one hand and grabbing his medical bag with the other. He took one look at the minefield of crap that lay between the dirt road and the blue plastic marquee and sighed. ‘I just bought these bloody shoes. Ah well. . .’
He stomped off towards the tent with Logan and WPC Watson in tow.
An acne-ridden IB officer with a clipboard stopped them at the threshold, keeping them all out in the driving rain until they’d signed in, and then watched them suspiciously until they’d all clambered into white paper boiler suits.
Inside the tent a single human leg rose out of the sea of refuse sacks, from the knee down, like the Lady of the Lake’s arm. The only thing missing was Excalibur. The IB video operator was sweeping his way slowly around the remains, filming as the rest of the team carefully collected rubbish from the bags surrounding the one with the leg in it and stuffed the debris into clear plastic evidence pouches.
‘Dees a favour?’ said the doctor, handing his medical bag to Watson.
She stood silently while he popped the case open and dug out a pair of latex gloves, snapping them on as if he was a surgeon.
‘Give us a bittie room then,’ he told the bustling IB people.
They stood back and let him get at the body.
Doc Wilson took hold of the ankle with his fingertips, just below the joint. ‘No pulse. Either this is yer genuine severed limb, or the victim’s dead.’ He gave the leg an experimental tug, causing the rubbish in the bag to shift and the IB team to hiss in pain. This was their crime scene! ‘Nope. I’d say that leg’s weil an’ truly attached. Consider death declared.’
‘Thanks, Doc,’ said Logan as the old man straightened himself up and wiped his latex gloves on his trousers.
‘Nae problem. You want us tae hang around till the pathologist and the Fiscal get here?’
Logan shook his head. ‘No sense in us all freezing our backsides off. Thanks anyway.’
Ten minutes later an Identification Bureau photographer stuck his head round the entrance to the tent. ‘Sorry I’m late, some idiot went for a swim in the harbour and forgot to take his kneecaps with him. Jesus, it’s bloody freezing out there.’
It wasn’t much warmer inside, but at least it was out of the rain.
‘Afternoon, Billy,’ said Logan as the bearded photographer unwrapped himself.
The long, red-and-white-striped scarf was stuffed into a jacket pocket, followed by a red bobble hat with ‘UP THE DONS’ stitched into it. He was bald underneath.
Logan was stunned. ‘What happened to your hair?’
Billy scowled as he clambered into his white paper rompersuit. ‘Don’t you bloody start. Anyway I thought you were dead.’
Logan smiled. ‘Aye, but I got better.’
The photographer polished his glasses with a grey handkerchief, and then did the same with the lens of his camera. ‘Anybody touched anything?’ he asked, spooling a fresh reel of film into place.
‘Doc Wilson gave the leg a tug, but other than that it’s fresh.’
Billy snapped a huge flashgun onto the top of the camera, smacking it with the side of his hand until it emitted a high-pitched whine. ‘OK, back up ladies and gentlemen. . .’
Hard, blue-white light crackled in the confined space, followed by the clatter-whirr of the camera and the whine of the flash. Again and again and again. . .
Billy was almost finished when Logan’s phone went off. Cursing, he dragged it out of his pocket. It was Insch, looking for an update.
‘Sorry, sir.’ Logan had to raise his voice over the battering rain on the tent’s roof. ‘The pathologist isn’t here yet. I can’t get a formal identification without moving the body.’
Insch swore, but Logan could barely hear him.
‘We’ve just had an anonymous call. Someone saw a child matching Richard Erskine’s description getting into a dark red hatchback this morning.’
Logan looked down at the pale blue, naked leg sticking up out of the garbage. The information had come too late to save the five-year-old.
‘Let me know as soon as the pathologist gets there.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Isobel MacAlister turned up looking as if she’d just stepped off a catwalk: long Burberry raincoat, dark-green trouser suit, cream high-collared blouse, delicate pearl earrings, her short hair artistically tousled. Wellington boots three sizes too big for her. . . She looked so good it hurt.
Isobel froze as soon as she was inside, her eyes fixed on Logan dripping away in the corner. She almost smiled. Placing her medical case down on top of a bin-bag, she got straight to business. ‘Has death been declared?’
Lo
gan nodded, trying not to let his voice show how much the sight of her disturbed him. ‘Doc Wilson did it half an hour ago.’
Her mouth turned down at the edges. ‘I got here as soon as I could. I do have other duties to perform.’
Logan winced. ‘I wasn’t implying anything,’ he said, hands up. ‘I was just letting you know when death was declared. That’s all.’ His heart was hammering in his ears, drowning out the pounding rain.
She stood her ground, staring at him, her face cold and unreadable. ‘I see. . .’ she said at last.
She turned her back on him, covered her immaculate suit with the standard white boiler suit, pulled on her tiny microphone, recited the standard who, when and where, and got down to work.
‘We have a human leg: left, protruding from a refuse sack from the knee down. Big toe has been subject to some form of laceration, probably post mortem—’
‘A seagull was eating it,’ said Watson, getting a cold smile for her pains.
‘Thank you, Constable.’ Isobel turned back to the stiff leg. ‘Big toe shows signs of predation by a large sea bird.’ She reached forward and touched the pale, dead flesh with her fingertips. With pursed lips she started pressing her thumb into the ball of the foot, feeling the toes with her other hand. ‘I’ll need to get the remains out of the bag before I can give you any estimated time of death.’ She motioned for one of the IB team to come over and made him spread a fresh plastic sheet on top of the shifting floor of rubbish. They dragged the bag with the leg sticking out of it from the pile and onto the sheet. All the time Billy flashed and whirred away.
Isobel hunkered down in front of the bin-bag and slit it open with one smooth pass of a scalpel. Rubbish spilled out of the sack, caught by the plastic sheeting. The naked body was curled in a ball, held in the foetal position with brown packing tape. Logan caught a glimpse of pale-blond hair and shivered. Dead children looked smaller than he’d remembered.
The skin was a delicate shade of milk-bottle white between the swathes of brown sticky tape, faint patches of purple forming over the shoulders. The poor little sod had been upside-down in the bag and the blood had pooled in the lowest parts.
‘Do you have an ID?’ Isobel asked, peering at the small corpse.
‘Richard Erskine,’ said Logan. ‘He’s five.’
Isobel looked up at him, a scalpel in one hand an evidence bag in the other. ‘“He’s” not anything,’ she said, straightening up. ‘This is a girl. Three to four years old.’
Logan looked down at the bundled-up body. ‘You sure?’
Isobel slipped her scalpel back into its case, straightened up slowly and looked at him as if he was an idiot. ‘Medical degrees from Edinburgh University might not be all they’re cracked up to be, but one of the few things they did teach us was the difference between little boys and little girls. The whole absence-of-a-penis thing is kind of a giveaway.’
Logan went to ask the obvious question, but Isobel cut him off.
‘And no, I don’t mean it’s been removed like the Reid boy: it was never there in the first place.’ She picked her medical case up off the bin-bag floor. ‘If you want a time of death, or anything else, you’ll have to wait until I’ve done the post mortem.’ She waved a hand at the IB officer who’d rolled out the plastic carpet for her. ‘You: get all this crated up and back to the morgue. I’ll continue there.’
There was a quiet ‘Yes, ma’am’ and she was gone, taking her bag with her. But leaving a chill behind.
The IB officer waited until she was well out of earshot before muttering, ‘Frigid bitch.’
Logan hurried out after her, catching up as she clumped back to her car. ‘Isobel? Isobel, wait.’
She pointed her keyring at the car: the indicators flashed and the boot popped open. ‘I can’t tell you anything more till I get the body back to the morgue.’ Hopping on one foot, she pulled off a Wellington and dropped it into a plastic-lined box, replacing it with a suede boot.
‘What was that all about?’
‘All what about?’ She went to work on the other Wellington, trying not to get too much garbage on her nice new shoes.
‘Look we’re going to have to work together, OK?’
‘I am well aware of that,’ she said, tearing off the boiler suit, flinging it in with the wellies, and slamming the boot shut. ‘I’m not the one with the problem!’
‘Isobel—’
Her voice dropped twenty degrees. ‘Were you purposely trying to humiliate me back there? How dare you question my professionalism!’ She wrenched open the car door and climbed in, slamming it in his face.
‘Isobel—’
The window slid down and she looked up at him, standing in the pouring rain. ‘What?’
But Logan couldn’t think of anything to say.
She glowered at him and started the car, doing a three-point turn on the slippery road, before roaring off into the darkness.
Logan watched the car’s tail-lights disappear, cursed under his breath, and trudged back into the tent.
The little girl was lying where Isobel had left her, the IB team too busy bitching about the pathologist’s departure to carry out her orders. Logan sighed and hunched down in front of the pathetic, taped-up bundle.
The child’s face was almost completely hidden: the packing tape wrapped tightly around her head. The hands were taped together against her chest, and so were the knees. But it looked as if her killer had run out of tape before they could get the legs secured. That was why the left one had been poking out of the bag for a lucky seagull to nibble on.
He pulled out his phone and called in, asking if they’d had any reports of a missing girl, about three or four years old. They hadn’t.
Swearing softly, he punched DI Insch’s number in to give him the bad news. ‘Hello, sir? Yeah, it’s DS McRae. . . No, sir.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It’s not Richard Erskine.’
There was a stunned silence at the other end of the line, and then, ‘You sure?’
Logan nodded, even though Insch couldn’t see him. ‘Definitely. Victim’s a little girl, three, maybe four, years old, but she’s not been reported missing.’
Foul language erupted from the earpiece.
‘That’s what I said, sir.’
The Identification Bureau team mimed picking up the body and buggering off to the morgue with it. Logan nodded. The one who’d called Isobel a frigid bitch took out a mobile and called for the duty undertakers. It wouldn’t do to cart a dead child about in the back of a grubby van.
‘You think the deaths are connected?’ There was a hopeful edge to DI Insch’s voice.
‘Doubtful.’ Logan watched as the tiny corpse was gently rolled into a body-bag far too big for it. ‘Victim’s female, not male. Disposal’s different: the kid’s been wrapped up in a mile and a half of packing tape. No sign of strangulation. She might have been abused, but we won’t know until the post mortem.’
Insch swore again. ‘You tell them I want that kid done today, OK? I don’t want to spend the night twiddling my thumbs while the media make up horror stories! Today!’
Logan winced, not looking forward to breaking the news to Isobel. In her current mood she was more likely to do a post mortem on him. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Get her cleaned up and photographed. I want posters run off: have you seen this girl?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The blue body-bag was picked up by two of the IB team, and carefully placed in the corner of the tent, out of the way. Then they started collecting the rubbish from the bag she’d been dumped in, making sure it was all properly bagged and labelled. Banana skins, empty bottles of wine, broken eggshells. . . The poor little kid hadn’t even been worth the effort of a shallow grave. She’d been thrown out with the garbage.
Logan was promising to call the inspector back as soon as they’d heard anything when WPC Watson shouted: ‘Hold it!’ She darted forward, grabbing a crumpled-up piece of paper from the rubbish t
hat had spilled out onto the plastic sheeting.
It was a till receipt.
Logan asked Insch to wait while Watson unfolded the grimy scrap. It was from the big Tesco in Danestone. Someone had bought half a dozen free-range eggs, a carton of crème fraîche, two bottles of cabernet sauvignon, and a pack of avocadoes. And paid for it with cash.
Watson groaned. ‘Damn.’ She handed the receipt to Logan. ‘I thought he’d’ve paid by credit card, or Switch.’
‘No way we could be that lucky.’ He turned the scrap of paper over in his hands. Eggs, wine, posh cream and avocadoes. . . The line under the last item caught Logan’s eye and a smile began to blossom.
‘What?’ Watson looked annoyed. ‘What’s so funny?’
Logan held the receipt aloft and beamed at her. ‘Sir,’ he said into the phone, ‘WPC Watson’s found a supermarket receipt in the bag with the body. . . No, sir, he paid cash.’ If Logan’s smile were any wider the top of his head would have fallen off. ‘But he did collect his Clubcard points.’
South Anderson Drive was a bastard at this time of day, but North Anderson Drive was even worse. The traffic was nose to tail all the way across the city. Rush hour.
The Procurator Fiscal had finally turned up, bustled about the crime scene, demanded an update on the investigation, complained that this was the second dead child to be discovered in as many days, implied that it was all Logan’s fault, and sodded off again.
Logan waited until he and WPC Watson were safely cocooned within the fogged-up car before expressing what he’d like to do to the Fiscal with a cactus and a tube of Ralgex.
It took them well over an hour to get from the tip at Nigg to the huge Tesco at Danestone. The store was situated in a prime spot: not far from the swollen River Don, within spitting distance of the old sewage works, the Grove Cemetery and the Grampian Country Chickens slaughterhouse; and close to where they’d found little David Reid’s bloated corpse.
The store was busy, all the office workers from the nearby Science and Technology Park picking up booze and ready-meals for another night at home in front of the telly.
There was a customer service desk just inside the entrance, manned by a young-looking man with a long blond ponytail. Logan asked him to get the manager.
Logan McRae Crime Series Books 1-3: Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin (Logan McRae) Page 6