A huddle of FCBC men, all in hard hats and orange high-visibility jackets, had gathered by the Inchcolm Ferry ticket office. They were clustered together by the statue of a seal, chattering, their breaths steaming white from their mouths in the cold air. One of them saw the car. He pointed at the nearby turning and started jogging alongside the Escort as it took a left off the High Street. The others followed him, the sound of their boots getting louder as the road surface below their feet changed from tarmac to the blocks of rough-hewn stone from which the pier was constructed. In the distance, dwarfed by the gigantic outer cantilever of the Forth Rail Bridge, lay the Consortium’s Safety Boat, the Fiona S. It was tied up at the far end of the Hawes Pier, rocking in the waves, its engine idling in readiness for the arrival of the police. Alongside it stood the corpulent figure of Jim Scott, cameras slung around his neck. He was looking anxiously in the direction of dry land and the Hawes Inn. Recognising the Inspector as she walked towards him, he waved a soup-plate-sized hand, saying morosely on her approach, ‘I hate the water. Can you swim, Alice? I might need help.’
‘Me? I’m a qualified junior life saver – although whether I’d manage without being dressed in my pyjamas, I’m not so sure,’ she replied, throwing her case over the side of the yellow and black craft, then stepping on board and holding out a hand to receive, first, his rucksack of precious equipment, and then his leaden bulk. At the same time, a red life-jacket was thrust at each of them by a passing stranger, the stern rope around his free hand. The photographer, breathing noisily, picked his off the deck where it had fallen, turning it this way and that, examining the catches, trying to work out how it might fit his vast frame.
‘This must be for a child,’ he said, holding it against his fur-trimmed bulk, a look of dismay on his face. ‘It’ll never keep me up. Look at these pathetic, thin flotation bits – they’re not even soft, air-filled. There must have been a leak. They’re not safe.’
‘They’ll inflate,’ the policewoman replied, passing a strap between her legs, ‘when you hit the water. That’s the whole point, so that they’re not too bulky now.’
‘When – don’t you mean if? And there’s a whistle! Fat lot of good that’s going to do as I’m swept out to the open sea . . .’
‘Just put it on, eh?’
No sooner had DC Cairns stepped on deck than she toppled forwards, hitting her elbow on a stanchion. With the last passenger on board, the Captain had ordered that they cast off and one of the deckhands had pushed off from the pier, making the boat lurch forwards in response. Another life-jacket was dropped unceremoniously by the same crew member on top of her crumpled form.
‘Thanks a bundle,’ she murmured sarcastically.
‘Are you lot not supposed to be in a hurry? I’d get inside, eh? Otherwise, you’ll miss the safety briefing,’ he replied, unmoved, stepping around her and holding the cabin door open for the other two.
‘I’ve had my accident already, or had you not noticed?’ DC Cairns countered, righting herself, looking round to take in her surroundings. In the cabin, standing beside the Captain, was the only other member of the crew. He had kept himself busy chatting to his boss, watching idly while his colleague scurried about outside, casting off, pulling in the fenders, then coiling the loose ropes on the deck.
By the time all three passengers plus their equipment were installed safely inside, the vessel had already reached the centre of the firth, and begun to speed up. On hitting its near maximum of twenty-five knots, it started crashing through the waves, the hull slamming down in the troughs, then rising almost vertically and the engine coughing whenever the propellers left the water. Spray started to cascade over the bow, slapping against the glass of the windscreen, mixing with the falling snowflakes. The photographer, his face already pale, clung with both hands to the back of a blue, plastic seat, his feet set wide apart in a desperate attempt to steady himself.
‘Are you not going to sit down?’ Alice asked him, gesturing for him to take the seat beside her.
‘If I move I’ll be sick,’ he said pitifully.
‘We’ll need,’ Alice raised her voice, hoping to be heard above the roar of the engine, ‘stills of everywhere – and video footage of everywhere.’
‘Everywhere?’ Scott retorted, looking doubtful, as if far too much was being demanded of him. Incongruously, for a sea voyage, he had chosen to wear a flat cap, and to emphasize his point he pulled the peak down over his forehead. Seeing him, a passing deckhand cheekily plucked it off his head and handed him a white safety helmet, murmuring, ‘Rules is rules, you’ve got to obey the rules – on this site, any road. Hard hats on this site.’
‘Video of everywhere?’ Scott repeated, holding out a hand for the return of his hat.
‘Everywhere,’ she confirmed, then, seeing his fleshy shoulders droop, she added, ‘it’s only about ten metres by seven, Jim, and that’s at low tide. It’s not huge, OK? Now, we’ll all need to tog up, ideally before we land.’
‘Here? I’m not doing that now,’ he protested, pressing his cameras to his breast with one hand as if they were his infant children. ‘This thing’s bucking like a wild west bronco.’
‘We’re going to a crime scene . . .’
‘Will the suits be any use? Will they not just get soggy?’ DC Cairns interjected, dragging a strand of wet hair out of her eyes. ‘Then they’ll tear.’
‘Or turn to papier mâché, but too bad,’ Alice replied, ‘we’ll have no time when we get there – possibly minutes only. At high tide, the whole rock’s underwater.’
‘Health and safety certainly wouldn’t like it,’ the photographer said darkly.
‘Maybe,’ Alice replied, ‘but fortunately, they’ll never know.’
‘Unless we fall in . . .’ Scott whispered.
‘Dead men tell no tales,’ she quipped, but his look of shock made her relent. ‘Oh, all right, all right. But the second we come to a halt . . .’
Minutes later, the boat veered to the left of Mackintosh rock, the towers of the Road Bridge rising impossibly high above them, and Beamer itself came into view. The Nicola S lay immediately adjacent to the rocky outcrop. Seeing their destination illuminated by the lighting rig the skipper began to slow his launch down, anticipating tying up beside the other Safety Boat to allow his passengers to disembark into the dinghy. A foot or so from it, a deckhand threw a rope to one of the other crew who started pulling the vessels together by means of the bow and stern ropes. Fenders on both craft squeezed to bursting point, the skipper of the Nicola S, a former lobster fisherman, shouted out, ‘Are we to stay then? The body’s still on dry land . . . just. Can we go? Now you’re here there’s not much point in our hanging about, is there? I’d like to get Ewan home, into the warmth. He got an awful shock. Gav’ll row you there. We’ve put the lights back on for you.’
‘That’s fine. On you go,’ Alice shouted back.
Although unnaturally low in the water, the inflatable took their combined weight with the photographer sitting at the stern, acting as a counterbalance to the two women. Every time a wave washed over its sides, he grimaced, imagining the damage the salt water would wreak on his sensitive equipment. Once next to the rock, DC Cairns jumped on it, rope in hand, ready to hold the dinghy steady as they disembarked.
‘You’ll only have minutes,’ their oarsman said, shaking his head at their ineptitude as the photographer lurched towards the stern, grabbing the man’s shoulder to steady himself. Crunching barnacles as she did so, Alice stepped onto land, then walked forwards, zigzagging from one side of the black rock to the other, already scanning its surface for anything, any clue, before it was lost forever beneath the murky waters of the Forth.
On one of the low scaffolding boards, held between two piles of bricks from the partially dismantled lighthouse, lay a silt-covered green glass bottle. She picked it up in her gloved hand, making a mental note of where, precisely, it had been found, for the grid. If Jim did his job properly, there should be no problem. He would
capture everything. But time was short, and when last seen, he was still behind the foghorn building, shooting the body from all possible angles, ensuring that its exact location could be pinned down on this featureless islet. Before he had even got round to removing a lens cover, precious minutes had been wasted by his protracted disembarkation, his togging up and the arranging of his equipment. A three-toed sloth would seem speedy beside him.
Her own scrutiny of the corpse, begun while he battled to stuff one of his corpulent limbs into a paper trouser leg, had revealed no obvious signs of injury to the woman. Her clothes seemed intact, although her tights were torn and she wore no shoes. Importantly, no smell of rotting flesh came from her, and no outward signs of putrefaction were visible. The word ‘fresh’, she thought, applied to a dead woman as opposed to a living, breathing one, had quite a different meaning, quite different connotations. No suggestion of flirtation there.
‘Alice,’ a voice shouted, and she turned to see the photographer signalling to her, his paper suit blown unflatteringly tight over the contours of his rounded, Buddha belly. DC Cairns was hunkered down beside the corpse, and as Alice approached she said something but her words were drowned out by the crashing of the waves.
‘What did you say?’ Alice bawled, turning momentarily away, attempting to protect herself from another gust.
‘We’ll lose her, if we’re not quick,’ the man yelled back. ‘Since we’ve been here, the tide’s moved up at least another six inches, the waves are getting bigger, look – one of her hands is back in the water . . .’
‘You got her in situ – stills and video?’ Her throat hurt with the effort of shouting.
The photographer’s precious cap now back on, its peak protruding from under his paper hood, he nodded in an exaggerated fashion, then moved closer towards her. DC Cairns, her hands almost covering her face, followed behind him, protected by his bulk.
‘I’ve already put my stuff in the boat,’ he said.
‘OK. That’ll have to do, then. You take the head-end, Jim. We’ll take a side each.’ She bent down and gestured for the constable to do the same, ‘On my count. And try not to touch her, lift her through her clothes if you possibly can.
‘Should we not get Gav to help?’
‘No. One, two, three . . .’
To their unspoken relief, pieces of the carcase did not drop off or fall to bits in their hands, as each had imagined might happen, and between them they managed to manoeuvre it successfully into the dinghy. There it rested, in an unnatural pose, legs propped upright against one of the wooden seats, shoeless feet pointing heavenwards. With all the exertion involved, sweat poured down the photographer’s brow as he sat, leaning back in his seat to recover his breath, cap now in hand, his bald pink pate exposed to the falling snow. At that moment, a wave caught them broadside and he shouted ‘Shit!’ Two minutes later, a couple of pairs of gloved hands helped them unload their icy cargo onto the Safety Boat, easing it gently onto the floor of the cabin.
‘OK?’ the Captain shouted, ‘everyone on board?’
‘Aha,’ Gav bawled back. ‘Go canny though, or she’ll roll about the deck like a ball.’
With the Captain’s skilful hand on the throttle, the steady phut-phut of the diesel engine changed seamlessly, first, to a constant thrum and then to a full-blown roar as the craft’s seven hundred horsepower engines started pounding through the waves, making a bee-line for the Hawes Pier. Just as the sun was peeping shyly over the horizon, they drew alongside it with their cold cargo, and wasted no time in unloading it.
No sooner was the body lying prostrate on the bare stone, than the first of the day’s commuter trains rattled its way across the Railway Bridge, heading southwards towards Dalmeny, the Gyle, Haymarket and, finally, Waverley. The passengers within it, asleep, bleary-eyed or blinkered by their newspapers, were unaware that the speck visible hundreds of feet below them was the waterlogged corpse of a woman. One of them, reading the report in the Evening News on the homeward journey, realised what he had witnessed and felt a strange glow of pleasure at his involvement in the drama.
3
Dr McCrae, a slight, effete-looking little man with a permanently dripping nose, was hunched over the body. It had been moved to a cramped backroom in the lifeboat building, a tarpaulin spread underneath to protect it from further contamination. The dead woman lay on her back in a pool of seawater, sightless eyes open, arms stretched wide as if she had been newly removed from her crucifix. The Forensic Medical Examiner’s inspection was almost complete, and with exquisite gentleness, he lifted the head off the canvas sheet and began to part the tangle of matted, dark hair at the back of the skull.
‘That’s more like it . . .’ he muttered to himself, continuing with his task, easing more strands free and, finally, lifting his glasses and the thin gold chain attached to them and putting them on his nose. His face was now only inches away from the dead woman’s skull. After less than a minute, he nodded as if he had found what he was looking for and took off his glasses, resting them on the top of his head, loops of chain now dangling below his ears like gypsy earrings.
‘Anything?’ Alice asked.
‘Aha. She’s got a large contusion over the back of her scalp. There are grazes, too, over the knuckles of both hands, the face, back of the hands . . . and a corker of a black eye. See?’
‘Did she drown?’
‘Think that would that follow, do you, Inspector? You’ll have to wait until they’ve got her on the slab to answer that mystery. But the trauma to the head, the black eye – that’ll certainly give everyone pause for thought.’
The doctor rose, carefully brushed the knees of his white paper suit clear of detritus, latched his briefcase and led the way out of the makeshift mortuary. As they hit the fresh air, snow was still falling around them, but now against a backdrop of dawn sky in which pinkish hues merged into a watery grey background. As if noticing the drifting flakes for the first time, the doctor held out his arms, child-sized palms upwards, allowing them to land on his gloved hands.
‘Every single one unique,’ he said, ‘just like us . . .’
‘The lucky ones among us may last that little bit longer. That injury to the back of her head – have we any clue as to the cause?’ Alice asked.
‘None whatsoever, at present. It could have come from a blow, damage sustained in the Forth, underwater rocks, a pier or something – a fall? Only the Good Lord knows. Once she’s on the slab, as I said earlier, we’ll maybe get a better idea.’ He paused, glancing at the drops of melted snow on his right glove, sniffed, then added, ‘Now, if there’s nothing else, I’m off to the Inn for a café latte, a croissant and, possibly, a kipper. The witness is there.’
‘What a good idea,’ DC Cairns interjected. ‘It’s been a long night. I’ll be having the porridge, followed by . . .’
Alice’s phone went and she clamped it to her ear, a finger to her mouth to silence the constable.
‘How did you get on?’ the Fiscal asked. His voice sounded weary, hoarse, his question tailing off into a bronchitic cough.
‘We got on fine. We’ve got the body back, it’s on its way to the mortuary now and Dr McCrae’s just given it the once-over.’
‘Was there anything obvious on the rock, anything much to see there?’
‘No. Jim Scott took shots of everything, yards of video footage too. Then we just had enough time to bundle her onto the boat before she was carried away in the rising tide.’
‘What does Dr McCrae say?’
‘Dr McCrae says,’ she replied slowly, looking at the diminutive doctor quizzically and reading his moving, but silent, lips, ‘suspicious – we’re to treat it, for the moment, as suspicious.’
‘Okey dokey,’ the man replied, ‘but I don’t think I’ll come out to South Queensferry for that, Alice. Not this a.m. After all, there’s no scene, nothing more to be made of the body – nothing, really, for me to see or do just now. Have you spoken to the mortuary? With this nasty bug, I
should be in my bed. You’ll keep me informed, eh?’
Without waiting for her reply, and coughing noisily as if to impress his state of ill-health upon her, he terminated the call.
‘Yes, suspicious, for now,’ Dr McCrae said, starting to amble towards the public road, adding ‘and that’ll have been Derek Jardine, I’ll be bound? The lazy good-for-nothing! Surprise me – tell me he is going to attend the scene?’
‘He says there’s no . . .’
‘What is it this time, I wonder?’ the doctor cut in, lips pursed tight. ‘A cold, perhaps? A tummy bug? Never mind the fact that we can’t exclude homicide yet. What the heck. I was saying that your witness is in the Inn, by the way. I saw him there when I was waiting for you to come back. The fellow that found her, he’s near the bar.’
‘Are the kippers good? I think I’ll have a kipper,’ DC Cairns mused, returning eagerly to the subject of her forthcoming breakfast and rubbing her hands together in anticipation.
‘Loch Fyne,’ the doctor replied, ‘I checked.’
‘No, not for the moment you won’t, I’m afraid, Liz,’ Alice cut in. ‘Later, maybe. The woman was found near the bridge. We’ll need to check that she wasn’t a jumper.’
‘A what?’
‘Didn’t you know? This place,’ the doctor observed, wiping his nose with a red hankie, ‘is Suicide Central. At least, it used to be.’
‘We’ll need to check that she didn’t jump off the bridge. While we’re here, get them to show you the CCTV footage. If she did, chances are they’ll have got her on it. One other thing, Dr McCrae . . .’
Troubled Waters Page 3