Cold Grave

by Craig Robertson

  ‘Yes, next month. Hopefully he won’t be practising his fake psychotherapy for a while.’

  ‘How long do you think he’ll get?

  ‘Years. We’ve got blackmail, perverting the course of justice and interfering with a police investigation. The bastard . . .’ she lowered her voice, ‘the bastard saw pound signs. He was happy for us to think that Paton was the killer. He reckoned he could make a fortune by writing a book about it: “inside the mind of a murderer” – that sort of thing.’

  ‘How much of it do you think he really knew?’

  ‘Plenty. He knew about the four of them meeting the girl even if he didn’t know for sure that one of them had done it. Paton had spilled his guts in therapy and he obviously knew enough to get email addresses for Mosson and Deans and to make up a false one for Bradley to fool the others. Paton was full of guilt about leaving Claire on the island and that bastard Irving took full advantage of it to try to sort his money problems.’

  ‘If he hadn’t, then Deans wouldn’t have reacted the way he did and we might not have found out what the hell happened.’

  Rachel laughed bitterly.

  ‘True, but I’m not about to be thanking him for that,’ she told him. ‘It’s not like you to be seeing silver linings where I’m seeing clouds. Usually it’s the other way about.’

  ‘Maybe I’m seeing the light?’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  She drew a finger tenderly down Tony’s cheek and left him to rescue her dad from Danny’s war stories. Tony turned his back to the path they’d stood on and regarded the marble headstone propped up by single red roses strewn at its base. The flowers had each been dropped there by one of the mourners at the request of Claire’s parents.

  The principal inscription on her headstone mimicked, word for word, the sentiment carved on Lily’s anonymous grey slab in Brig o’ Turk.

  I will fear no evil for thou art with me

  It had been a long time since Tony had had any faith in the protective power of God to deliver anyone from evil and clearly Claire Channing had a very good reason to have feared it. Tony’s belief in life after death was on a par with his belief in God but he knew that it was possible to live with death. He had done so with his parents and now Claire’s parents would do so with her. In a strange sense that at least meant she wouldn’t be alone.

  ‘Dad?’

  The anxiety in Rachel’s voice caused Tony to turn away from the headstone and back to her. He saw Alan Narey yards ahead of her, heading determinedly down the path to where the Channings stood hand in hand by the door to the chapel. Rachel swivelled anxiously to Tony, then back to her father before trying to catch up with him before he reached Claire’s parents.

  Tony could see that she wanted to run after him but a graveyard was hardly the place for that. Instead, she scurried down the path, gently trying to call him back. Winter passed Danny as he went after her, despite knowing that if she couldn’t get to her dad in time, then neither could he. He was at her heels but she was still a few yards from her father, who was now at the shoulder of Ted Channing.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Alan Narey began softly. ‘Mr . . . excuse me.’

  Claire’s father turned, red-eyed and slightly bewildered, ready to accept what he must have assumed were more condolences. He obviously didn’t recognise Alan Narey but stretched out his hand to take the one that was offered to him. Mr Narey wrapped his other hand over Channing’s and held it there.

  ‘I need to apologise to you,’ he told the girl’s father.

  Rachel was at her dad’s side now and placed her hand on his arm, trying to lever his hand from Channing’s but her dad wasn’t for letting go.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t understand . . .’ Ted Channing was saying.

  ‘Come on, Dad,’ she told him. ‘Let’s not bother Mr Channing. This is a difficult day for him.’

  ‘No,’ he told her. ‘No, Rachel. I need to speak to Mr . . . Mr . . .’

  ‘Channing,’ the father told him. ‘Why do you need to talk to me?’

  ‘Please, Dad.’

  ‘Mr Channing, I have to apologise to you – about your daughter.’

  ‘Claire? Why?’

  ‘Claire? I didn’t know that was her name. We called her Lily but we knew that wasn’t her name. We didn’t know her real name.’

  Channing looked confused. ‘And that’s what you’re sorry for?’

  ‘No. Yes. That too. But I’m sorry because . . . Mr Channing, I forget things at times but I remember your daughter. But I didn’t do the right thing by her. I let her down.’

  Channing was fighting to hold back fresh tears, visibly gulping down his emotions.

  ‘How? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Dad. Please, let’s leave Mr Channing.’

  Alan Narey turned to speak to her, his mouth opening but, after an awkward pause, closing again. He thought about it some more.

  ‘No. You leave me. I need to speak to him.’

  She knew he had forgotten her name.

  ‘I was a policeman, Mr . . . Mr Channing. I was supposed to find out who killed your daughter. And I didn’t. I’m sorry but I didn’t.’

  The man looked back at him, a tear forming in the corner of his eye.

  ‘I did my best. I thought I did. I . . . you see, I let her down. I’m a father too, Mr . . . I know what a father would feel. I felt it.’

  ‘But this, this is your daughter?’ Channing asked him.

  Alan turned and looked at Rachel as if only just realising she was there.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

  ‘Mr Narey, your daughter found the man that killed mine.’

  ‘She did?’

  Alan looked at Rachel, confused anew. She nodded at him and was rewarded by a glow of pride.

  ‘I’m . . . I’m still sorry,’ he told Ted Channing.

  Claire’s father tried for an answer but instead opened his arms and the two men hugged, tears tumbling down both their cheeks. They held on to each other for a while until Alan abruptly broke the embrace, looking at Channing with some surprise and turning to his daughter.

  ‘Can we go home now, Rachel? Your mum will be worried about us.’

  She didn’t have the heart to tell him about her mother but instead took his arm in hers and they began walking back down the path together.

  Tony stood aside to let them past, falling into step with Danny and selfishly wondering if either Rachel or her dad had even noticed his presence. It had always been the way he’d liked it, observer rather than combatant, a bystander to tragedy. Now however he was beginning to wonder whether being on the outside of things was where he wanted to stay. Being on the inside brought the risk and reward of hurt and intimacy.

  Just as suddenly, Alan Narey stopped again, a look of consternation on his face, and stood still for an age.

  ‘There’s a saying, Rachel. It goes . . . no, no, don’t help me. I’ll remember it. It’s about . . . dammit.’

  Winter could see that the pain on her dad’s face as he struggled with his memory cut Rachel in two.

  ‘Yes . . .’ He took a deep breath and nodded with relief. ‘You cannot wash blood with blood. Yes, that’s it. All you do is make things even worse. That’s what that man Deans tried to do though: wash blood with blood.’

  Rachel hugged her dad close, burying her head into his shoulder.

  ‘Blood is strong,’ she told him. ‘It makes people do things, good and bad. Come on, we’ll take you back. And I’m going to visit every day. You’ll soon be sick of the sight of me.’

  Winter stood behind them, jealous of their closeness but also absorbed. He wondered lamely whether it was worse to have lost your parents, as he had, or to lose them regularly as Rachel was now fated to do with her dad.

  He thought of the futility of washing blood with blood. And he wondered if he’d ever be able to stop doing it.

  Rachel slowed her step, turning to him with a warm smile and waiting till he caught them up. She slipped her right arm through h
is, her left still entwined with her father’s. Danny stepped up to join them on the other side, linking his arm through Alan Narey’s and completing an unlikely yet appropriate chorus line.

  Together they walked back up the cemetery’s main thoroughfare, the twin chapels directly ahead of them, separated and connected by the towering steeple with its theatrical archway leading to the world beyond. Resisting a last glance over his shoulder towards Lily’s final resting place, Winter forced himself to look ahead. He couldn’t deny that it made quite a picture.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe gratitude, as ever, to everyone at Simon & Schuster UK; particularly my editor Maxine Hitchcock for her endless supply of ideas, patience and reassurance. Thanks too to Emma Lowth and Florence Partridge for always being there to offer help when needed, which was often.

  My head and heart – if not my liver – thanks my agent, Mark “Stan” Stanton for his continuing wise counsel. Less wise but nonetheless welcome advice came from my good friends in The Midnight Plumbers, particularly in this instance to Robert Clubb for his invaluable knowledge of computer geekery.

  For equally expert assistance, I am grateful to Professor Caroline Wilkinson of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee and to Andy Rolph and the staff of R2S Crime in Aberdeen.

  Simon & Schuster proudly present

  WITNESS THE DEAD

  by Craig Robertson

  Out now!

  Ebook 978-0-85720-421-9

  Turn the page for a sneak preview . . .

  Chapter 1

  Early Saturday morning

  They called it the City of the Dead. The sprawling Gothic landscape that perched over Glasgow and contained the remains of fifty thousand lost souls. Now it held fifty thousand and one.

  The flash from Tony Winter’s camera lit up the Necropolis and threw fleeting shadows across the nearby gravestones and the twisted figure of the young woman who lay broken below them.

  Along with the dark-blonde hair that was wetly plastered across her ashen face was a look of terror fitting for someone seeing their last in a Victorian graveyard. Winter shut out the angry buzz from the throng around him and saw only the girl, her skirt pulled obscenely above her waist, her arms and legs splayed wide across the flat top of the raised gravestone that she had been laid out on.

  Her bare feet, streaked with dirt, hung stiffly from either side of the tomb and were being tickled by rogue blades of grass that grew tall by the grave’s edge. But the grass couldn’t cause her to shiver any more than the dank morning air or the chill wind that whirled and whistled round the Necropolis. She was as cold as the stone slab she lay on.

  Under the make-up she could have been anything from eighteen to thirty, but Winter took her to be in her early twenties, Saturday-night glam turned Sunday-morning grim. Her steel-silver skirt had been short enough before her attacker left it high and, to all extents and purposes, absent. Her knickers were minimal, designed more for show than to be practical, and now lay on the grass below her. Her sparkly black top was cut low and set off by the ornate silver necklace that was now wound tightly round her throat. Its sharp edges were biting her skin and had persuaded a dry slither of burgundy to trail towards her cleavage.

  Winter focused on the necklace, his lens picking out its flashy knots and the sharp tips that now met the girl’s torn flesh. He photographed her hands, placed palm up as if in supplication, the pale pink fingernails, which showed no obvious signs of having clawed at an assailant. Her skin was tanned.

  Her light-blue eyes were now staring into some hell beyond her worst nightmare. Her mouth, its pink lipstick smeared, was locked in mid-scream. Winter circled her, patiently, diligently, capturing her from every angle, seizing scale, perspective and horror. Finally, he stood back and took a full-length shot, encapsulating the dignity that had been stolen from her along with her life.

  Words from behind him began to invade his focus, distracting him from the job he had to do. Raped. Strangled. Ritualistic. Barbaric.

  Winter realised it was probably the first time he had truly taken in what anyone else was saying from the moment that he and DI Derek Addison had crossed the Bridge of Sighs into the Necropolis itself. As soon as they had got out of Addison’s car, he knew that his sgriob, that tingle of anticipation at the prospect of photographing what lay ahead, was flaring furiously. He’d itched to see what lay on top of the hill that loomed darkly before them and it tingled again when he’d seen the faint glow of light behind the summit that signalled where the others had already gathered.

  He’d been almost in a dream as Addison led him through the knot of people gathered around the girl. As they’d parted to reveal the brutal sight on top of the tomb, Winter was struck as much with the guilty pang of an undeclared pleasure as with revulsion. Photographing the dead, particularly those so horrifically murdered, gave him an inexcusable thrill that he didn’t dare try to explain, far less justify, even to himself.

  They stood almost reverentially and watched while he worked, their own disgust largely subsumed by professionalism. It was Addison’s words that finally broke his focus.

  ‘So where are her shoes?’ the DI muttered. Then, louder, ‘Where are her fucking shoes?’

  ‘We’ve looked within a forty-yard circle of the grave, sir,’ piped up Sandy Murray, the first of the uniformed constables at the scene. ‘But we haven’t seen anything. We’ll do a wider search once the sun is up properly.’

  Addison nodded but one of the new DCs, Fraser Toshney, interrupted him before he could reply.

  ‘Maybe they turned back into something else at midnight.’ He grinned blackly. ‘Along with her pumpkin coach and ball gown made from rags.’

  The rest of the team held their collective breaths as Addison fixed Toshney with a furious stare.

  ‘Son, you’re new round here, and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that that was a nervous mistake. But if the phrase Cinderella Killer appears in any fucking newspaper, then I’m holding you personally responsible. Do you understand me?’

  Toshney reddened and stammered an apology.

  ‘Yes, boss. I was only . . . Sorry. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. Just go and find me a witness from some of the scumbags here in the middle of the night. Anyway, the slippers don’t turn back into anything. They were given to her by her Fairy Godmother, you ignorant bastard. Now piss off.’

  Addison knew that the breathing part-time residents of the Necropolis, the neds and drunks with their bottles of Buckfast, sleeping bags and discarded needles, had doubtless scattered at the first sign of the approaching plods. Even if Toshney was able to find any of them, it would most likely achieve the square root of hee-haw in terms of useful information. The DC knew it too but wasn’t stupid enough to annoy Addison further, so disappeared over the hill with a nod to one of the uniforms to follow him.

  ‘Okay,’ Addison barked as Toshney left. ‘Now that we are one fuckwit less, let’s continue. Her handbag is just off the path, money in it but no ID. Not a robbery, then, as if we hadn’t already guessed. And any ID that was in there was probably taken to slow us down. Constable Murray, you and your troops search on the perimeter for places he might have dumped it.’

  The cop nodded without much enthusiasm.

  ‘Mr Baxter,’ Addison continued, ‘if you could examine any ground that hasn’t been trampled all over and see if you can tell me if she was wearing shoes on her way up here. Presuming that she did walk here, that is.’

  Campbell Baxter, the rotund, grey-bearded crime-scene manager, frowned at being told how to do his job but acquiesced grimly.

  For the first time, Winter looked across the gravestone and saw DS Rachel Narey looking back at him. It was barely a month since they, or more accurately she, had agreed it would be better if they split up, and here they were, staring at each other across the cold of an early Glasgow morning, a body between them. Their relationship had always been a secret from everyone else and now
its ending was similarly wrapped in silence.

  He saw her seek his eyes above the mêlée, a shared moment, nothing more than a raising of eyebrows, but it said everything. This was bad.

  They watched Addison crouch by the girl’s body, slowly working his way round the tombstone, his head at times uncomfortably close to the girl’s semi-naked body. Narey’s expression flashed distaste.

  Addison finished his circumnavigation and stood, his eyes briefly closing over and exhaling hard. Even for a flippant, war-weary soldier like him, it was harder going than he wished to admit.

  He finally turned to Cat Fitzpatrick, the pathologist at the scene, and gestured for her to join him.

  ‘External signs would suggest she’s had sex recently,’ he said to her. ‘Agreed?’

  Fitzpatrick nodded her accord.

  ‘So, Ms Fitzpatrick,’ Addison continued, ‘I would be grateful if you could tell me two things. One, was she raped? Two, was she alive when it happened?’

  Fitzpatrick sighed.

  ‘We’ll need to get her back to base to give you a definitive answer, but I’ll give you an opinion before we get off this hill. Although I’ll give you an opinion on something else for nothing. The bastard who did this needs his bollocks cut off.’

  ‘No argument here,’ Addison said softly.

  As Fitzpatrick went to work, Addison went over to Narey to get her take on the night’s events, leaving Winter to quietly take shots of the small but busy crowd of cops and forensics gathered in the gloom above the city. He reeled off as many scene-setting pictures as he could despite the risk of the flashgun alerting his subjects to what he was up to. He caught the look of compassion on Cat Fitzpatrick’s face as she worked her way up from the dead girl’s shoeless feet. He framed the solemn discussion between Addison and Narey, his best mate and his former girlfriend, the pair charged with the heavy responsibility of finding out who had done this. He also photographed a young WPC standing on the edge of the group, looking lost and frightened, her damp eyes always returning to the body on the slab. Moving back six feet, he changed his angle and managed to position a seated angel behind the girl, the sculpture’s shadowy head turned away as if the pain of looking was all too much. It was all he needed.