Broken Ground (Karen Pirie Book 5)

by Val McDermid

  As she spoke, the door opened and McCartney almost fell into the office. ‘Opening the door with your elbow’s never a good look,’ Karen said.

  ‘You try balancing three cups and a bag of bomboloni,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Bomboloni? Jings, is it somebody’s birthday or are you trying to bribe me into keeping your nickname secret?’ Karen took two of the coffees from him so he could put down the rest.

  ‘Just trying to be nice, for fuck’s sake.’ He shrugged off his coat and draped it over the back of his chair then ripped open the paper bag to reveal three sugar-coated Italian doughnuts. He pushed them across the desk towards Karen, who didn’t need to be asked twice. One of the reasons she always sent Jason for the coffees was because she was incapable of resisting the pastries.

  McCartney waited till she taken her first bite, then said, ‘Crack on with what interviews today?’

  ‘Mmm,’ Karen moaned. ‘Bloody hell, somebody must have sold their soul to the devil for the recipe for these.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Sorry. Interviews. Tell him, Jason.’

  Jason swallowed a chunk of bombolone in a gulp. ‘I got the DVLA to cross-reference the registered keepers with their driving licences and managed to get current addresses for most of them.’

  McCartney’s eyebrows did a slow rise to amazement. ‘Nice one. Any chance they’ve all bothered to tell the DVLA the last time they flitted?’

  ‘It’s a place to start,’ Karen said firmly. ‘You’re down for four guys – Edinburgh, Camelon, East Kilbride and Portpatrick.’

  ‘Portpatrick? Jeez. That’s a helluva drive just to end up in God’s waiting room. How many’s he doing?’ He stabbed a finger at Jason.

  ‘Six,’ Jason said. ‘All the way from here to the Highlands.’

  ‘And I’ve got the last three. Melrose, Elgin and Dunfermline. Horses for courses, Gerry.’

  ‘So what exactly is the point of this?’ He affected a camp accent. ‘“Excuse me, sir, but do you have an alibi for a Tuesday night in May in 1986?” That’s really going to work.’

  Karen dropped the remains of her bombolone in the bin. McCartney had been too quick to spot her Achilles heel and she’d been too easily suckered. She needed to assert herself before he decided he could get away with the kind of antics nobody tolerated in the MIT. ‘That’s exactly where we’re going to start. And then when we get nowhere, we ask for the DNA sample.’

  McCartney lazily reached over for the list. ‘Why are we bothering with women? It wasn’t a woman that raped and murdered a hooker on an Edinburgh street.’

  ‘Because women have husbands and sons that borrow their cars,’ Jason said. ‘We’ve nailed killers on familial DNA before.’

  ‘Familial DNA’s not going to nail anybody’s husband,’ McCartney sneered.

  ‘We pursue every avenue,’ Karen said. Even McCartney recognised it wasn’t a tone of voice to debate. ‘So let’s get our coffee drunk and get on the road.’

  ‘Are we not going to phone ahead? Portpatrick’s a helluva drive if there’s nobody home,’ McCartney muttered, stirring two sachets of sugar into his coffee.

  ‘We hit them cold,’ Karen said. ‘There’s more than one reason why these are called cold cases.’ The look he gave her was appropriately chilly. ‘I don’t care whether you like the way I do things, Sergeant. Our record speaks for itself in this unit. And while you’re here, you’ll play by our rules.’

  McCartney shrugged one shoulder. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said, the mildness of his tone at odds with the tightness of his jaw.

  At that moment, the last thing Karen felt was in control. She needed a strategy to neutralise whatever Ann Markie had in mind for her. And right then, locking eyes with Gerry McCartney, she was coming up empty.

  10

  2018 – Wester Ross

  The excitement at the successful disinterment of the Indian fuelled a desire in all three of them to crack on and recover the second bike. Any notion of stopping for lunch had fizzled out with the prospect of another dramatic discovery. Hamish had found his second wind and he was as eager to carry on as Alice and Will. He folded himself back into the cab and started up the digger again, repeating the same procedure a couple of feet to the left of where he’d excavated before, leaving a narrow wall of peat between the two holes.

  For the first metre or so, nothing was different. And then it was.

  The teeth of the bucket snagged on something and before Hamish could react, a chunk of wood snapped off and flew through the air, making Will yelp as he jumped aside to avoid it. ‘What the fuck?’ he yelled. But Hamish had already cut the engine and emerged from the cab, joining Alice at the side of the hole.

  There wasn’t much to see. A claggy bed of peat, puddled with water, a jagged edge of wood sticking out of it. ‘I don’t understand,’ Alice said. ‘What happened?’

  Hamish frowned. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Maybe this crate wasn’t buried so deep and the bucket caught the end of a board?’ Will peered down, trying to make sense of what he was looking at. ‘That would work, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Possibly.’ Hamish slid down into the hole. ‘Pass me a spade.’

  Alice did as he asked then glanced at Will. ‘Maybe you could give Hamish a hand?’

  Will did not appear enthusiastic. ‘Wouldn’t I just be in the way?’

  Hamish’s wry smile mirrored Alice’s disappointment at her husband’s unwillingness to help. ‘Probably,’ he said, starting to dig around the broken plank. It was soon plain that the board was buried at an angle, rather than forming part of the top of a second crate.

  ‘That’s weird,’ Alice said.

  ‘Maybe the crate was damaged when they buried it?’ Will offered, determined to be part of the conversation if not the work.

  ‘We’ll soon see.’ Hamish carried on shovelling slices of heavy peat to one side of the hole. Time crawled past for Alice and Will, consigned to the most minor roles in the drama.

  Eventually, Hamish paused. ‘There’s two more boards here. One kind of crossing over the other. It looks to me like the second crate’s been disturbed.’

  ‘Could someone have got here before us?’ Will asked, turning to Alice.

  She shook her head, dubious. ‘I suppose, in theory. Granto buried the bikes with his mate Kenny, but Kenny died from TB not long afterwards. As far as Granto knew, the secret died with him. Nobody ever got in touch with him about it. I don’t see how anybody could have found the location without talking to him. I mean, look how much trouble we had finding it, and we knew the general area we were looking in.’

  Hamish moved the exposed boards and returned to his task, sweat streaking his hair with dark tramlines. The pile of peat grew higher, his digging grew slower till all at once the ground gave way beneath him and he was floundering waist deep in peat, unable to find secure footing. ‘Fucking hell,’ he exploded, desperately struggling to stay upright. ‘Whatever’s down here, it’s slippery as hell.’

  ‘Will, do something!’ Alice pushed him forward and reluctantly, Will slid cautiously into the main hole at the opposite end to Hamish’s flailing arms.

  ‘What do you need me to do?’ Will asked.

  ‘Clear a space around me so I can get out.’ Hamish wasn’t hiding his exasperation any longer. ‘Dig the bloody peat out from in front of me, I’ll be able to pull myself clear.’

  Gingerly Will grasped the spade and started to shift the muck in noticeably smaller amounts than Hamish. ‘Oh, come on, Will, put your back into it,’ Alice said. ‘You need to get Hamish out of there.’

  ‘I’m doing my best,’ he grunted. ‘I don’t spend my days running up mountains with a sheep under each arm.’

  Hamish laughed. ‘That’s right. Give the boy a break, Alice. I’m not in any danger now, I’ve just about found my feet. I don’t think I’ve got further to fall.’

  To Alice, it seemed to take an unconscionable length of time for Will to create an escape route for Hamish. In reality, it was barely half
an hour of messy slog before Hamish was able to drag himself clear with a horrible sucking sound and an impressive repertoire of swearing. Exhausted, he crouched against the wall of the hole, breathing heavily. Will meanwhile had edged closer to where Hamish had been trapped.

  His voice rose in excitement. ‘I think there’s another tarpaulin down here,’ he cried. ‘Look, Hamish, that’s why you were struggling to stand up. You were trying to balance on top of the second Indian.’

  Hamish dragged himself upright and joined Will. ‘Right enough.’ He groaned. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to the top of the crate but we’ll need to clear a bit more peat so we can get a rope round the bike. Chuck down the other spade, Alice, we’ll soon get it done with two of us.’

  They worked in silence, apart from the grunting and heavy breathing that accompanied their effort. Gradually the tarpaulin emerged. Hamish thought it seemed looser than the first one, but said nothing because he couldn’t be sure.

  Then, with half the hole dug clear, Will leaped back with a startled yell. ‘What the fuck is that?’ He pointed dramatically to what had been revealed by his last spadeful of peat, trying to turn what he was seeing into something different.

  Hamish paused and shifted for a better view. He drew his breath in sharply, recoiling from the sight that had so shocked Will. ‘I was right,’ he said. ‘Somebody has been here before us. And he’s still here.’

  11

  2018 – Dundee

  Dr River Wilde had clicked on her last PowerPoint slide when she felt her phone vibrate against her hip. Whoever it was would have to wait until she’d finished running through the week’s reading list for her second-year forensic anthropology students. The undergraduates could find the details of the required texts at the end of her online lecture notes, but River always liked to end the lecture with a quick run-through. That way nobody could claim they didn’t know what they were supposed to have covered before their next session in the dissection room.

  She zipped through the list at top speed then gathered her scant notes and turned her back on the exiting students to check her phone. As she suspected, the missed call was from a withheld number. But there was a voicemail. River would have put money on it being from a police officer. Colleagues would know she was lecturing; friends rang in the evenings when she was less likely to be up to her elbows in cadavers; and because her partner was a senior cop, they generally texted first to arrange their calls.

  Aware that a handful of students were still hanging around near the podium, River tucked her phone back into the pocket of her jeans and faced them. ‘Was there something?’ she asked. Polite, but brisk enough to discourage the trivial questions that one or two students seemed impelled to put to her at the end of every lecture.

  She fielded a couple of inquiries about dates by which assessments were due, refraining from pointing out that they were easily discoverable on the course website, then disengaged, taking the stairs at a jog. When the police called her, it was always a matter of life and death. Literally, not metaphorically. For a forensic anthropologist like River, the death was invariably in the past, the life something to be teased from what the corruption of the expedient grave had left behind. So while she didn’t like to keep the police waiting, she’d never felt the need for the performance of urgency and self-aggrandisement that she’d witnessed in some of her colleagues. You didn’t serve the dead by being self-serving.

  The nearest private space was the mortuary. River used her keycard to enter the secure corridor then turned into the cool space where the cadavers were prepared for dissection. Visitors were always surprised when they walked through the doors. They expected to see bodies on slabs being pumped with embalming fluids. But here there was nothing visible to show that this was a place where bodies were stored. The main part of the room was occupied by large stainless steel tanks. Each was about the size of an American-style fridge freezer lying on its back, and the tanks were stacked two deep. Each had a serial number slotted into a holder. It could have been some arcane industrial food processing plant – a hydroponic system, or a vessel for growing mycoprotein. The reality was at once more extraordinary and more mundane.

  Each tank held a preservative solution and a body. Over a period of months, the bodies would effectively be cured by the salts in the solution. By the end, they would still be soft and flexible so that student anthropologists, dentists and surgeons could learn their trade on something that closely approximated a live body. River’s technicians had even worked out how to simulate blood flow in the cadavers. In her dissecting room, when a trainee surgeon nicked a blood vessel, there was no hiding place.

  That afternoon, there was nothing visible to even hint at what went on there. River leaned against the nearest tank and pulled out her phone, summoning her voicemail. A man’s voice spoke clearly and decisively. ‘Dr Wilde? This is Inspector Walter Wilson from N Division, based at Ullapool. We’ve got a matter we need to consult you on. I’d appreciate it if you could call me back as soon as you get this. Thank you.’ He finished with a mobile phone number. River scrambled in her lecture folder for a pen and played the message again so she could catch the number.

  ‘A matter’ meant human remains. Not a warm body, never that. Those were for the pathologists. When they called for River, it was because they needed someone who could find answers in teeth and bones, hair and nails. Unpicking a life – and often a death – from what was left was her stock in trade. The university website cut straight to the heart of it: Forensic Anthropology is best described as the analysis of human remains for the medicolegal purposes of establishing identity, investigating suspicious deaths and identifying victims of mass disasters. It is a specialised area of forensic science that requires detailed anatomical and osteological training. Being able to assign a name to the deceased is critical to the successful outcome of all legal investigations. The squeamish thought there was something creepy about her work. Not River. Bringing the dead home. That was how she thought of her trade.

  River tapped in Inspector Walter Wilson’s number. He answered on the second ring. ‘This is Dr River Wilde,’ she said. All these years in the job and still, every time she spoke to a cop for the first time, she inwardly cursed her hippie parents. ‘You left a message for me.’

  ‘Thanks for getting back to me, Doc.’ His voice was deep and gravelly, the Aberdeen accent still clear in spite of having had the corners knocked off by time and seniority. ‘We’ve got a body we need your input on. It turned up in a peat bog in Wester Ross earlier this afternoon. Based on the information we’ve got from the witnesses, we think it likely dates back to 1944.’

  ‘And you want me to confirm that?’

  ‘Ideally, aye. We could use your help in trying for an ID as well.’

  ‘When would you like me on site?’

  ‘Well, we’ve got it taped and tented, so it’s reasonably protected. If you could get here for tomorrow morning, that would be good.’

  ‘Where exactly are you?’

  ‘A wee place called Clashstronach. It’s about an hour north of Ullapool, just this side of the boundary with Sutherland.’

  River thought for a moment. It was a long drive, but she could set off within a couple of hours. She was due to take a class in the dissection room in the morning but one of her post-docs could handle it. Cecile had specialised in the spinal work they’d be doing; she’d enjoy the opportunity to strut her stuff. ‘Can you book me a hotel room for tonight?’

  ‘No bother,’ Wilson said. ‘I’ll get you something sorted in Ullapool, that’s handy for our office and there’s a couple of decent places to stay. I’ll send you a text, will I?’

  Two hours later, she was on the road. Four hours should do it, she reckoned. Dundee to Perth, then there would be clots of traffic as she left the city and struck out up the A9, with its average speed cameras and long stretches where overtaking was damn near impossible. But this wasn’t summer, and there would be few tourists and no caravans so once she’d
passed Pitlochry it would be an easy run to Inverness, then a final hour or so with added twists and turns as the road snaked across the Highlands to the west coast. She plugged her phone into the car’s sound system and let rip with her driving music, an eclectic mix that spanned the past thirty years of female rockers. It was one of the few things that she and her partner disagreed about. Detective Chief Inspector Ewan Rigston liked torch singers who delivered big ballads – Adele, Emeli Sandé, Ren Harvieu. Once she’d even caught him listening to Shirley Bassey. River reckoned that was all the blackmail capital she’d ever need with his CID team.

  Amy Winehouse finished belting out her version of ‘Valerie’ somewhere north of Dalwhinnie and River decided she needed some conversation. She cut the music and rang the number of her best friend. She thought it was going to shunt straight to voicemail, but at the last second, Karen Pirie’s voice filled the car. ‘Hey, River, how’s tricks?’ It sounded like they were doing the same thing – driving on a fast road at speed.

  ‘I’m good. I’m heading up the A9.’

  Karen laughed. ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘I wish I was. This is—’

  Karen interrupted with a bad Chris Rea impersonation: ‘—the road to hell.’ Both women laughed. ‘Funny thing is, so am I.’

  ‘Really? Where are you headed?’

  ‘Elgin. I need to interview a woman who owned a red Rover 214 in 1986.’

  River snorted. ‘Has that been reclassified as a crime?’

  ‘Only when Jeremy Clarkson rules the world. No, we’ve got a lead on a car that might be implicated in a series of brutal rapes from the eighties. I’m checking out the possibilities.’

  ‘Is that not what you’ve got Jason for?’