Natural Causes

by James Oswald

  'About six.'

  'And the body's still there?'

  'Yeah, well, the scene of crime team are just finishing up now. They were a bit busy last night, and this wasn't considered high priority.'

  'How can a dead body not be high priority?'

  The constable gave him what could only be described as an old-fashioned look.

  'The police surgeon declared death at seven fifteen last night. We secured the crime scene and I've been here keeping an eye on it ever since. It's not my fault that half the SOC team were out on the piss last night, and quite frankly I think someone from CIB could've come out a bit sooner, too. There's far nicer places to spend the night.' She stomped down the stairs towards the basement. McLean was so astonished at the outburst, he could do nothing but follow.

  A scene of industrious determination greeted them as they reached the bottom of the steps. Thick cables slithered across the dusty floor towards several powerful arc lights; shiny aluminium boxes lay open, their contents piled around; a narrow strip of portable walkway had been set up down the middle of the main corridor, but no-one was using it. Half a dozen SOC officers busied themselves with putting things away. Only one figure noticed their arrival.

  'Tony. What have you done to piss off Jayne McIntyre so early on in your new career?'

  McLean picked his way through the dust and equipment to the far end of the basement. Angus Cadwallader stood by a large hole hacked into the wall, light glaring out from powerful spot lamps beyond. The pathologist looked distinctly uneasy, not his usual chipper and irreverent self.

  'Piss off?' McLean bent down to peer through the hole. 'What've you got for me this time, Angus?'

  Beyond lay a large circular room, its wall smooth and white. Four lamps had been erected near the centre, all angled inwards and down, as if their subject were some up and coming star of the stage. Spread-eagled, desiccated and brutalised, it was unlikely she would be taking any applause.

  'Not a pretty sight is she.' Cadwallader pulled a pair of latex gloves from his suit pocket and handed them to McLean. 'Shall we take a closer look.'

  They stepped through the narrow opening hacked in the brickwork, and McLean instantly felt the temperature drop. The noise of the SOC team fell away as if he had closed a door on them. Looking back, he felt a sudden urge to retreat from the hidden room; not so much fear as a pressure in his head, forcing him away. Shrugging it off with no little difficulty, he turned his attention to the body.

  She had been young. He wasn't sure how he knew, but something about the diminutive size spoke of a life cut short before it had really begun. Her hands stretched out wide in parody of crucifixion; black iron nails hammered through her palms, their heads bent over to stop her ripping them out. Time had dried her skin to leather, stretching her hands into claws, her face into a grimace of utter agony. She wore a simple, floral print cotton dress that had been pulled up over her breasts. McLean noticed in passing how dated it looked, but the detail was soon lost as he took in everything else.

  Her stomach had been opened up, a neat cut from between her legs to between her breasts, the skin and muscle peeled back like a rotting flower. Ribs poked white through dark dry gristle, but nothing remained of her internal organs. Down further still, her legs were splayed wide apart, hips disjointed so her knees almost touched the floor. Her skin had tightened like biltong over dried muscle, each bone clearly visible right down to her slender feet, nailed like her hands to the floor.

  'Jesus Christ. Who could do such a thing?' McLean rocked back on his heels, looking up past the lights to the featureless walls all around. Then into the bright arc itself, as if staring at the glare would wash the image out of his mind.

  'Perhaps a more pertinent question would be when was it done.' Cadwallader squatted down on the other side of the body, drew out an expensive fountain pen and used it to point at various parts of the girl's remains. 'As you can see, something has prevented decay from occurring, allowing a natural mummification to take place. The internal organs were removed, presumably disposed of elsewhere. I'll need to run some tests once I get her back to the mortuary, but I can't see her being killed anything less than fifty years ago.'

  McLean stood up, shivering slightly in the cold. He wanted to look away, but his eyes kept being dragged down to the body at his feet. He could almost feel her agony and terror. She had been alive, at least when this ordeal had started. Of that he was sure.

  'Better send a team in to move her,' he said. 'I'm not sure if the techies can get anything useful from the floor underneath, but it's worth a try.'

  Cadwallader nodded and left the room, stepping around the brick rubble that had spilled in when the workman had knocked the first hole. Alone with the dead girl, McLean tried to imagine what the place must have looked like when she died. The walls were smooth white plaster; the ceiling a neat vault of white-painted brickwork, its apex directly above the dead body. In a chapel, he would have expected to find an altar directly opposite the bricked-up doorway, but there was no ornamentation in the room at all.

  The arc lights cast strange shadows over the dark wooden floorboards, seeming almost to ripple as McLean stood, waiting for someone to come back in. He found the shapes hypnotic, curling glyphs at regular intervals around a wide circle, perhaps three feet in from the walls. Shaking his head to rid himself of the illusion, he stepped out of the central glare of the lights, then stopped dead. His own shadow had moved, gliding over the floor in four different shades. But the patterns on the floor had remained solid underneath it.

  Stooping, he peered closer at the wooden boards. They were polished smooth and only slightly dusty, as if the room had been hermetically sealed until the wall was broken through. The light from the arc lamps was confusing, so he pulled a slender torch from his pocket and twisted it on, pointing it directly at the patterns on the floor. They were dark, almost indistinguishable from the wood. Ornate knots of lines, thickening and thinning as they intertwined to form a complicated whorl. The edge of a circle etched in the floor ran away in both directions. He followed it around anti-clockwise, noting five more intricate marks, all equidistant. The line between the first and the last had been neatly intersected by the falling brickwork of the walled-up doorway.

  Digging out his notebook, McLean tried to make rough sketches of the signs, noting their relationship to the position of the dead girl. They lined up perfectly with her outstretched hands and feet, her head and the central point between her legs.

  'You ready for the body to be moved, sir?'

  He almost jumped out of his skin, spun around to see Grumpy Bob staring through the hole hacked in the wall.

  'Where's the photographer? Can you get him back in here a minute.'

  Bob turned away, shouted something McLean couldn't quite make out. Then a moment later a short man stuck his face into the room. McLean didn't recognise him; another new recruit to the SOC team.

  'Hi there. You photo the body?'

  'Aye.' Glasgow accent, slightly clipped and impatient. Fair enough, he didn't much want to be here either.

  'Did you take any of the markings on the floor here?' He pointed to the nearest one, but the photographer's puzzled expression answered his question.

  'Here, look.' He beckoned the man into the room and pointed to the floor with his torch. For a fleeting instant he saw something, but then it was gone.

  'Cannae see a'thing.' The young man squatted down to look. A heavy odour of soap rose off him, and McLean realised it was the first thing he had smelled since entering the room.

  'Well, can you photograph the floor anyway? All the way around the body. About this far in from the wall. Close up.'

  The photographer nodded, glancing nervously at the silent figure in the centre of the room, then set about his task. The flash gun on his camera popped and whined between each recharge, little explosions of lightning spearing the room. McLean straightened up, focussing his attention on the wall now. Start from the body and work your way out. He
felt the cold plaster through the thin protection of his latex gloves, then turned his hand around and rapped his knuckle on the surface. It sounded flat and solid, like stone. Moving round a bit, he rapped again. Still solid. Glancing over his shoulder, he moved around until he was in line with the dead girl's head. This time his knuckle produced a hollow clunk.

  He knocked it again, and in the confused light of the flashgun and shadows thrown by the arc lamps, it looked like the wall bowed in under the pressure. Turning his hand once more, he pushed gently, feeling the wall give way under his fingers. Then with a crack of brittle bones, a panel about a foot wide and half as tall again split from the wall and fell to the floor. It had concealed a small alcove, and something glinted wetly from within.

  McLean pulled out his torch again, twisted it on and directed the beam into the alcove. A slim silver ring lay on a folded piece of parchment, and behind it, preserved in a glass jar like a specimen in a biology classroom, was a human heart.

  ~~~~

  6

  'Is this the best we can do?'

  Grumpy Bob paced around the walls of the broom-cupboard that was all they could muster for an incident room, complaining all the while. McLean stood silent in the middle. At least there was a window, though it looked out onto the backs of other parts of the building. Across from it, a whiteboard still bore the scribblings of a previous investigation, long-forgotten names circled and then crossed out. Whoever had written them had taken the marker pens away with him, along with the wiper. There were two small tables, one shoved under the window, the other sitting in the middle of the room, but all the chairs had long since departed.

  'I quite like it.' McLean scuffed his shoe on the stained carpet tiles and leant against the single radiator. It was belting out heat even though outside the sun was baking the streets. He reached down to twist the thermostat to zero, but the flimsy plastic casing broke off in his hand. 'Might have to do something about the facilities, though.'

  A knock at the door distracted them. McLean opened it to reveal a young man balancing a couple of boxes on one knee as he tried to reach for the door handle. He wore a brand new suit, and his shoes were polished to shiny mirrors. His freshly-shaved face was round like a pink full moon, close-cropped pale ginger hair frizzing his scalp like a teenager's five o'clock shadow.

  'Inspector McLean? Sir?'

  McLean nodded, reaching out to take the top box before it spilled its contents all over the floor.

  'Detective Constable MacBride,' the young man said. 'Chief Superintendent McIntyre sent me to help with your investigation, sir.'

  'Which one?'

  'Umm... She didn't say. Just that you'd need another pair of hands.'

  'Well, don't stand there in the door letting all this heat out.' McLean dumped the box down on the nearest of the two tables as MacBride came in. He put the other one beside it, then looked around the room.

  'There's no chairs,' the constable said.

  'Looks like her majesty's given us an eagle-eyed detective, sir,' Grumpy Bob said. 'There's nothing gets past this one.'

  'Pay no attention to Sergeant Laird. He's just jealous because you're so much younger than him.'

  'Err... Right.' MacBride hesitated.

  'You have a first name, Detective Constable MacBride?'

  'Umm... Stuart, sir.'

  'Well then Stuart, welcome to the team. Both of us.'

  The young lad looked from McLean to Grumpy Bob, then back again. His mouth hung slightly open.

  'Well, don't just stand around looking like you've had your arse skelped. Get on out there and find us some chairs, laddie.' Grumpy Bob almost chased the constable out of the room, closing the door on his retreating form before laughing out loud.

  'Go easy on him, Bob. It's not as if we're going to get much more help with either of these cases. And he's good. At least at he should be. First in his year to make detective.' McLean opened up one of the boxes, pulled out a thick pile of folders and laid them out on the table: unsolved burglaries, dating back over the previous five years. He sighed; the last thing he wanted to do was wade through endless reports on stolen goods that would never be recovered. He looked at his wrist and remembered that he'd forgotten to wind up his watch that morning. Sliding it off he began turning the tiny brass knob.

  'What time is it Bob?'

  'Half three,' Grumpy Bob said. 'You know, they've got new-fangled modern watches with batteries now. They don't need to be wound up. You might consider getting one yourself.'

  'It was my dad's.' McLean tightened the strap against his wrist, then checked his pocket for his mobile phone. It was there, but it was dead. 'Don't suppose you fancy a walk over to the city mortuary?'

  Grumpy Bob shook his head. McLean knew how the old sergeant was with dead bodies.

  'Never mind, then. You and young DC MacBride can make a start on these burglary reports. See if you can find any pattern that tens of dozens of other detectives have missed. Meantime I'm off to see a man about a mummified corpse.'

  *

  The afternoon air was thick and warm as he walked down the hill towards the Cowgate. Sweat stuck his shirt to his back, and McLean longed for a cool breeze. Normally you could rely on the wind to make life bearable, but for several days now the city had been becalmed. Down in the canyon of the street, shadowed by tall buildings on either side, the heat was stagnant and lifeless. It was a relief to push open the door to the city mortuary and enter the air-conditioned cool.

  Angus Cadwallader was already prepped and waiting when McLean walked into the autopsy theatre. He gave the inspector an appraising look.

  'Hot out there?'

  McLean nodded. 'Like a furnace. You all set up?'

  'What? Oh. Yes.' Cadwallader turned, then shouted for his assistant. 'Tracy, you ready?'

  A short, round, cheerful young woman looked up from a cluttered counter on the far side of the room, pushed back her chair and stood. She wore green medical scrubs, and pulled on a pair of latex gloves as she walked over to the dissecting table. A white sheet covered it, mounded up in the middle over the dead body waiting to reveal its secrets.

  'Right, better get on with it then.' Cadwallader reached into his pocket and pulled out a small jar. McLean recognised the preparation, a mixture of skin cream and camphor designed to blot out the smell of decay. The pathologist looked at it, then at McLean, sniffed, and put the jar back in his pocket.

  'Don't suppose we'll be needing that today.'

  McLean had witnessed too many autopsies over the course of his career. He wasn't comfortable with them, but neither did they sicken him in quite the way they used to. Of all the murder victims, hapless accidents and just plain unlucky people he had seen on this table, the mummified corpse of the young girl was perhaps the strangest. For starters, she had already been cut open, but Cadwallader still examined every inch of her slight frame, muttering observations into a microphone hanging from above. Finally, when he was satisfied her skin would yield no more clues as to her cause of death, he got to the part McLean hated most. The high-pitched whine of the bone-saw always set his teeth on edge, like fingernails scraped down a blackboard. It went on far too long, and ended with the horrible sound of the top of the skull being cracked off like a boiled egg.

  'Interesting. The brain appears to have been removed. Here, Tony. Look.'

  Steeling himself, McLean moved around. Seeing the dead girl's head opened up only made her look smaller, younger. The cavity inside her skull was dull, lined with dried blood and flecks of bone from the saw, but it was plainly empty.

  'Could it have rotted?'

  'Not really, no. Not given the state of everything else. I'd have expected it to have shrivelled up a bit, but it's been removed. Probably through the nose; that's how the ancient Egyptians used to do it.'

  'Where is it then?'

  'Well, we've these samples, but none of them looks like a brain to me.' Cadwallader pointed at a stainless steel trolley upon which sat four specimen jars. McLean rec
ognised the heart he'd seen the day before, but didn't want to hazard a guess as to the other organs. Two more jars stood in white plastic containers to prevent their desiccated contents leaking from large cracks that split the glass. All had been uncovered in hidden alcoves, arranged symmetrically around the dead girl's body. There had been other items in each of the alcoves too, yet another piece of the puzzle still needing to be put together.

  'What about the broken ones?' McLean peered at some browny-grey sludge smeared on the inside of a jar. 'That could be brain, couldn't it?'

  'It's difficult to tell, given the state of them. But I'd hazard a guess that was one of her kidneys and the other one a lung. I'll run some tests to be sure. Whatever it was, the jar's the wrong shape for it to have been her brain. You should know that, Tony. I've shown you enough. And besides, if it did come out through her nose, it would have been pretty well mushed up. No point sticking that in a preserving jar.'

  'Good point. How long ago do you reckon she died?'

  'That's a difficult one. The mummification shouldn't have happened at all; the city's too humid, even in a walled up basement. She should have rotted away. Or at least been eaten by rats. But she's perfectly preserved, and I'll be damned if I can find any trace of the chemicals you'd need to do that. Tracy can run some more tests, and we'll send a sample off to be carbon dated; we might get lucky with that. Otherwise, judging by her dress, I'd say at least fifty, sixty years. Any better than that's up to you.'

  McLean picked up the thin fabric that was laid out on the trolley along with the sample jars, holding it up to the light. Brown stains smeared the lower half, and the delicate lace around the neck and sleeves had frayed into gossamer strips trailing in the air. It was a skimpy thing, a cocktail dress rather than something a young woman might wear every day. The faded floral pattern looked cheap; he turned it around and saw a couple of neatly hand-sewn patches around the hem. No manufacturer's label. It was the dress of a poor girl trying to impress. But as he looked back at her twisted, desecrated body he was all too aware that he knew nothing else about her at all.