The Skeleton Road

by Val McDermid

  Fraser Jardine’s head bobbed up and down like a nodding donkey on fast forward. ‘Totally. You’d struggle to get two of you in there.’

  ‘And the approach to it? Is that pretty restricted as well?’

  Fraser frowned. ‘What? You mean narrow?’

  Karen nodded. ‘That, yeah. But also, like, how many approaches are there? Is it just one obvious way in and out?’

  ‘Well, it’s on a corner, so I suppose theoretically you could come at it from either side. When you climb out from the skylight on to the roof, if you go left, it would be the second wee tower you come to. I’d started off going to the right so it was the third one I got to.’

  ‘And these approaches,’ said Karen, ‘I take it they’re open to the elements? The wind and the rain?’

  ‘It’s a roof. That kind of goes with the territory.’ He gave a sharp sigh. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to be a smartarse. I’m just a bit shaken up. And my boss, he’s like, “Is this going to hold you up doing your estimates?” So I’m kind of under pressure, you know?’

  Karen patted his upper arm. Even through his overalls, she could feel hard muscle. A man like Fraser, he’d have no trouble carting a body up to a roof pinnacle. It could narrow the suspect field down a fair bit, a crime scene like this. If the victim had died somewhere else. ‘I appreciate that. What’s the building like inside? Did you see any signs that someone else had been there before you?’

  Fraser shook his head. ‘Not that I could see. But I don’t know how easy it would be to tell. It’s pretty messed up inside there. It’s been a long time since they sealed the place up and the weather’s got in. So you’ve got damp and mould and plants growing out the walls. I don’t know how long it takes to turn into a skeleton, but I’m guessing it would be a few years?’

  ‘Pretty much.’ She spoke with more confidence than she felt.

  ‘So if a whole team of guys had been through there years ago, you’d never know. Nature takes over and rubs out the traces we leave behind. Sometimes it only takes a few months and you’d hardly know it was a place where people lived or worked.’ He shrugged. ‘So it’s no surprise I didn’t see any footprints or bloodstains or anything.’

  ‘But you did see a hole in the skull?’ Move them around, don’t let them get comfortable with the narrative. Karen was good at keeping interviews shifting away from solid ground.

  Fraser swallowed hard and did the head bobbing again, his momentary confidence chased away. ‘Right about here,’ he said, pointing to his forehead above the middle of his right eyebrow. ‘Not a huge hole, not much bigger than a shirt button really.’

  Karen gave an encouraging nod. ‘Not very dramatic, I know. But it’s enough. What about clothes? Did you notice if there were any clothes on the body or on the ground?’

  Fraser shook his head. ‘To be honest, I wasn’t really looking at anything else, just the skull.’ He shivered. ‘That’s going to give me fucking nightmares.’ He glanced at her, guilty. ‘Sorry. Excuse the French.’

  Karen smiled. ‘I’ve heard a lot worse.’ She reckoned Fraser Jardine had nothing useful to add to his dramatic discovery. There were more important conversations for her to have now. She turned back to the Mint. There wasn’t much damage he could do with a witness whose contribution to the inquiry was so limited. ‘Jason, sit Mr Jardine down in the car and take a full statement.’

  As soon as the Mint had led Fraser out of earshot, Karen was on the phone to the duty Crime Scene Manager. Karen had worked often with Gerry McKinlay and knew she wouldn’t have to spell out every detail that she wanted covered. These days, it felt like chasing villains came second to balancing the books. Some of the CSMs demanded requisitions in triplicate for every task they undertook. Karen understood the reasoning but the delay to the investigation was always infuriating. ‘What’s your problem?’ one CSM had challenged her. ‘The bodies you deal with, they’re a long time dead. A few days here or there isn’t going to make any difference.’

  ‘You tell that to the grieving,’ Karen had snapped back. ‘Every day is a long time for them. Now get off your arse and do your job like you give a shit.’ Her mother would be appalled at her language. But Karen had learned the hard way that nobody paid attention to prissiness at the sharp end of policing.

  ‘This your skeleton, Karen?’ Gerry asked, the nasal intonation of Northern Ireland obvious in the elision of her name to a single syllable.

  ‘The same, Gerry. According to the witness, it’s in a confined space, difficult to access. The routes in and out are along a roof. They’ve had years of attrition from the weather. So what I think we need is a homicide-trained CSI to do the pix and the fingertip search inside the crime scene. Now it’s up to you whether you want the same person to do the eyeball on the roof or if you think it needs another body. Me, I’d just use the poor sod who’s got to climb up there anyway. I’ve got a uniform restricting access to the skylight that leads up to the roof, so it’s not like there’s any other foot traffic to contend with.’

  ‘What about the route to the skylight?’

  Karen puffed her cheeks and blew out a stream of air. ‘I don’t know what evidential value you’d place on anything you found. The building has been standing empty for twenty years or so. It’s not been vandalised or squatted, but it’s pretty much rack and ruin inside, according to our witness. Sounds like those photos I keep seeing of Detroit. I’m going inside in a minute to take a look for myself. Why don’t you get somebody over here? If they think it’s worth more than an eyeball, we’ll talk again.’

  ‘OK. Will you get it bagged and tagged while we’re still around? So we can see if there’s anything lurking underneath?’

  ‘I’ll do my best, Gerry. But you know what it’s like on a Saturday in the football season. Amazing how many phones seem to lose their signal.’

  Gerry chuckled. ‘Good luck with that one. Catch you later, Karen.’

  One more call to make. She summoned a number from her contacts and waited for it to connect. She could have called out the duty pathologist. But old bones meant one thing to Karen. Dr River Wilde, forensic anthropologist and the nearest thing Karen had to a best friend. Cursed by her hippy parents with a name nobody could take seriously, River had worked harder and smarter than any of her colleagues to earn respect beyond dispute. The women had worked together on several key cases but for Karen the friendship was almost as important as the professional impact of knowing River. When you were a cop, the job got between you and other women. It was hard to build a connection that was more than superficial with anyone who wasn’t in the same line of work. Too much trust could be dangerous. And besides, outsiders just didn’t get what was involved. So you were stuck with other women cops around the same rank as you were yourself. There weren’t that many as senior as Karen, and she’d never really clicked with any of them. She’d often wondered if it had something to do with them being graduates and her having worked her way up through the ranks. Whatever the reason, until Karen had met River, she’d never found anyone connected with law enforcement that she truly enjoyed hanging out with.

  River answered on the third ring. She sounded half asleep. ‘Karen? Tell me you’re in town and you want to meet for brunch.’

  ‘I’m not in town and it’s too late for brunch.’

  River groaned. Karen thought she heard bed noises. ‘Damn it, I told Ewan to wake me before he went out. I just got back from Montreal yesterday, my body doesn’t know what bloody day it is.’

  There would be time for conversation later. Karen knew there would be no offence taken if she cut to the chase. ‘It’s Saturday lunchtime here in Edinburgh. I’ve got a skeleton with a hole in its head. Are you interested?’

  River yawned. ‘Of course I’m bloody interested. Three hours? I can probably do it in three hours, can’t I? An hour to Carlisle, two hours to Edinburgh?’

  ‘You’re forgetting the shower and the coffee.’

  River chuckled. ‘True. Make it three and a quarter. Text me
the postcode, I’ll see you there.’ And the line went dead.

  Karen smiled. Having friends who took the job as seriously as she did was a bonus. She hitched her bag higher up on her shoulder and headed for the side door of the John Drummond School, where a uniformed officer stared glumly across the gravel path at a thicket of rhododendrons. She’d barely gone three steps when she heard the Mint calling her name. Stifling a sigh, she turned to find him lumbering towards her. It never ceased to amaze her that someone so skinny managed to move with all the grace of a grizzly.

  ‘What is it, Jason?’ Would it be a famous first? Would he have discovered something worth listening to? ‘Has he told us anything interesting?’

  ‘Mr Jardine, he heard something about this place. Ages ago, like.’ He paused, expectant, eyes shining, living up to the origin of his nickname, the advert that proclaimed, ‘Murray Mints, Murray Mints, too good to hurry mints.’

  ‘Are you planning on telling me? Or are we going to play Twenty Questions?’

  Unabashed, the Mint continued. ‘What reminded him… When he was driving over here, he rang one of his pals to say he wouldn’t make it to the pub for the early kick-off game.’ He looked momentarily wistful. ‘It’s Liverpool v Man City, too.’

  ‘You should all be supporting local teams, for God’s sake. What’s Liverpool ever done for you, Jason?’ Karen tutted. ‘And now you’ve got me at it, stoating all round the houses instead of getting to the point. Which is?’

  ‘When Mr Jardine said he was surveying the roof of the John Drummond, his pal asked if he was going up from the outside or the inside. Which reminded him that that he’d heard something about the John Drummond before, from some other guy he hangs about with. It turns out that there’s a thing that climbers do with buildings like this. Apparently they go up the outside without ropes or anything.’

  ‘Free climbing?’

  ‘Is that what they call it? Well, apparently the John Drummond’s well known among climbers as a building that’s fun to climb, plus there’s no security to chase you. So our dead guy might not have gone up through the skylight at all. He might have climbed up under his own steam.’

  3

  Professor Maggie Blake swept her gaze around the seminar room, trying to make eye contact with everyone. She was gratified to see that they were all paying attention. Well, all except the geek girl in the far corner who never raised her head from her tablet, not even when she was expressing her opinions. There was always one who defeated her best efforts to draw them in. Even at a special conference like this, where they’d actively chosen to attend a series of lectures and seminars over a weekend. ‘So, to sum up, what we’ve focused on today is the notion that the very act of describing a geopolitical relationship can bring it into being,’ she said, her warm voice animating a conclusion that might otherwise have seemed an anti-climax to the vigorous discussion that had preceded it. Teaching was a kind of theatre, she’d always thought. And her role as the lead actor was always a carefully considered performance. She was convinced it was one of the reasons she’d earned her chair at Oxford by her mid-forties.

  ‘We’ve seen that when the media polarises a conflict as a battle between the good guys and the bad guys, it shapes the way we understand the participants. The language actually creates the geopolitics. We can watch it happening right now with the Ukraine conflict. Because the West needs to demonise Putin, a regime that is in many respects no better than Russia is turned into the victim and thus, the good guy. The reality is that there is always a disconnect between the push towards a binary between good and evil, and the actuality.’

  A hand shot up and without waiting to be invited to speak, its owner butted in. ‘I don’t see how you can be so dogmatic about that,’ he said belligerently.

  It would be Jonah Peterson, Maggie thought. Jonah with his carefully confected hair, his low-slung jeans that revealed the brand of his underwear, his designer spectacle frames and his Elvis sneer. She loved students who disputed ideas, who thought about what they were reading and hearing and found logical contradictions that they wanted to explore. But Jonah just liked contradiction for its own sake. He’d been doing it since the beginning of the course and it was wearisome and disruptive. But these days students were also consumers and she was supposed to engage with irritants like Jonah rather than slap them down the way her tutors and lecturers had been wont to do in the face of wanton stupidity. ‘The evidence of history supports this interpretation,’ she said, determined not to show how much he got under her skin.

  Jonah clearly thought he had her on the run. He wasn’t giving up. ‘But sometimes it’s obvious that one side are the bad guys. Take the Balkan conflict. How can you not characterise the Serbs as the bad guys when they perpetrated the overwhelming majority of the massacres and atrocities?’

  Maggie’s seminars and lectures were always meticulously planned; a cogent construction that built a solid foundation, brick on brick, rising to a clear and supported conclusion. But Jonah’s words jolted her, like a train jumping the tracks. She didn’t want to think about the Balkans. Not today, of all days. Accustomed to guarding her feelings, Maggie’s face revealed nothing. The ice was all in her voice. ‘And how do you know that, Jonah? Everything you know about the Balkan conflicts has been facilitated by the media or by historians with a particular geopolitical axis. You have no direct knowledge that contradicts the theory we’ve discussed this afternoon. You can’t know the nuances of the reality. You weren’t there.’

  Jonah stuck his jaw out stubbornly. ‘I was still in nappies, Professor. So no, I wasn’t there. But how do you know there were any nuances? Maybe the media and the historians were right. Maybe sometimes the media story gets it right. You can’t know either. My view is just as valid as your theory.’

  Pulling rank wasn’t something Maggie generally did. But today was different. Today her reactions were skewed. Today she wasn’t in the mood for playing games. ‘No, Jonah, it’s not. I can know and I do know. Because I was there.’

  Maggie had been aware of the stunned silence as she gathered her notes, her class register and her iPad in one sweep of her arm and walked out. She’d been halfway down the corridor when a fragmented buzz of conversation had broken out and followed her to the front door of the Chapter House, a Victorian copy of an octagonal medieval monastic building now used for seminars and tutorials. She let the heavy oak door click shut behind her and cut down to the river bank that formed the easterly border of St Scholastica’s College. Even in early spring, there was colour and texture in the flower beds that lined the path, although Maggie had no eyes for them that afternoon. She breathed deeply as she walked, trying to calm herself. How could she have let Jonah’s crass comments breach her personal defences?

  The answer was simple. Today she turned fifty. A half-century, the traditional point for taking stock. A day when she couldn’t ignore the events that had shaped her. She might have consigned a chunk of her life to history, but today it seemed destined to emerge from the shadows of the past. It would be churlish to pretend she didn’t have plenty to celebrate. But thanks to Jonah, her attempts to focus on the good stuff had failed. As she walked back up the path to Magnusson Hall, all Maggie felt was the pain of what was lost.

  She’d feared it would be like this. So she’d brushed aside the various suggestions from friends who had wanted to push the boat out with her. No party. No dinner. No presents. Just a day like any other, as far as the rest of the world was concerned. And come tomorrow, there would be nothing to commemorate and she could stuff the history back in its box and consign it to the dark again.

  Maggie made for the Senior Common Room. At this time of day, it would be more or less empty. Nobody would be expecting conversation. As she generally did after a seminar, she’d extract a cappuccino from the machine there then retreat to her set of rooms and get on with some work. Take her mind off her memories with something rather more demanding than a student seminar. She pushed open the door and did a double-tak
e. Instead of a peaceful, empty space, a crowd of familiar faces formed a loose arc around the door. She barely had time to register music and balloons when someone shouted, ‘Happy birthday,’ and a cheer went up.

  Her first thought was to turn on her heel and walk out. She couldn’t have been clearer about the kind of birthday she wanted. And this emphatically wasn’t it. But a second look reminded her that these were her friends. Her colleagues. People she liked, people she respected and even some she admired. However distressed she felt, they didn’t deserve to be slapped down for something they’d done out of love and kindness. And so Maggie nailed on a smile and walked in.

  The afternoon wore on and Maggie smiled until her face hurt. To an outsider, the party would have appeared the perfect celebration, honouring a woman who was clearly a much loved friend as well as a distinguished academic, prolific author, beloved tutor and efficient snapper-up of research grants. Only Maggie knew that her apparent enjoyment was a lie. She wished she could relax and enjoy herself as much as the other guests were obviously doing. But she couldn’t shake off the sadness that was the constant counterpoint to the party atmosphere.

  The music changed from Dexy’s Midnight Runners to Madness. Someone had compiled a playlist solely from her undergraduate years, which was a blessing. Nothing there to provoke a fresh onslaught of unwelcome memories. Welcome to the house of fun, indeed. As if on cue, the latest arrival made an entrance through the French windows that led on to the back lawn and the river. Raven-black hair with strands of silver that caught the light as if they’d been strategically placed for effect. Pale skin, high cheekbones and eyes set too deep to discern the colour until they were inches away. Tessa Minogue strode in with her usual self-assurance, nodding and smiling her way through the knot of people lurking on the fringes of the party where they could enjoy the fresh evening air. Tessa, who knew more about the dark places than anyone else. Tessa, who had been her best friend, then something more than that, and now was her best friend again.