Perfect Remains

by Helen Fields

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Salter said.

  ‘I quite agree, Detective Constable,’ Spurr said. ‘If Ava Turner’s still alive then you need to find her quickly. A man capable of this …’ He didn’t finish and Callanach was grateful. He was all too aware of what the man holding Ava was capable of without anyone lending his brain images.

  ‘Thank you,’ Callanach said. ‘Forgive me for not being able to give you more time.’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ the pathologist said, ‘just find the monster who did this.’ Jonty Spurr left and Callanach closed the door behind him.

  ‘Sir …’ Salter began.

  ‘No,’ Callanach said. ‘We’re not telling anyone, not yet. Everyone is working to full capacity. We won’t get them to achieve more or better. At the moment, this is supposition. There’s not even any hard evidence that the man who has DI Turner is the same man who killed Buxton and Magee. At best, it’s an allegation we’ll prove when we find where he kept them. All right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Salter whispered. ‘It’s just so awful to think of them being tortured like that.’

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ Callanach said. ‘You learn that after a while. You mustn’t put yourself inside their bodies. Keep busy, Salter. Get me a list of websites where you can buy dental tools.’

  ‘We will find her, won’t we, sir?’ Salter asked quietly.

  Callanach wanted to lie but years of police work counselled against it. ‘Keep busy,’ he said again. ‘We can only try our hardest.’

  Chapter Forty

  Louis Jones was proving elusive. Tripp was emailing photos of Jones’s office, if you could call it that, back to Callanach in real time. There wasn’t a calendar or diary to be found, no paperwork on the desk. The drawers were full of paperclips and ancient DVDs but nothing relating to his car business. Mounds of vehicle parts cluttered the lot, numerous cars with dubious histories were randomly parked, but there wasn’t a computer in sight. Likewise, Jones’s file was taking its time being brought to him. After an hour of waiting, Callanach finally lost it.

  He was about to hammer on DCI Begbie’s door when the Chief opened up.

  ‘Come in, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I was on my way to find you.’

  ‘I’ve requested a file and it’s …’ Callanach said.

  ‘I know,’ Begbie said. ‘It’s on my desk. Before you start, there’s a reason. It’s marked not to be opened without the authority of my rank or above.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Louis Jones is on his way here, voluntarily. We’ll speak to him together,’ Begbie said.

  ‘I can’t run this case if you’re keeping information from me. I want to know exactly what’s going on.’ Callanach’s hand slammed down on the Chief’s desk. Begbie glanced at it then picked up a thin, tatty file and handed it over.

  ‘The file is confidential because Jones, previously known to some of Edinburgh’s less law-abiding citizens as Louis the Wrench, was an informant. Fifteen years ago, a three-year investigation was about to collapse with no prosecutions, not even an arrest. It was organised crime. The gang had men on their pay roll inside the police, government, everywhere. Each time we made a move they knew about it in advance. Louis was their go-to guy for vehicles and drivers. He didn’t speak publicly, he wouldn’t have survived long if he had, but the information he fed us was what we needed to close them down. We had a gentleman’s agreement and he’s been left alone ever since.’

  ‘This is too serious to worry about past deals. We can’t even be sure he’s not the man responsible.’

  ‘I can,’ Begbie said. ‘The man you’re looking for is Caucasian. Louis is black. He’s also not the type. I got to know him well enough to be able to tell. He was my source. He’ll talk to me.’

  True to his word, Louis Jones appeared twenty minutes later. Callanach watched Begbie greet him with a handshake and the sort of look that suggested they’d genuinely missed one another. The interview room was forsaken for the privacy of Begbie’s office.

  ‘This is Callanach,’ DCI Begbie told Jones. ‘He’s got hands-on control of the investigation.’

  ‘I thought it’d just be you and me, George,’ Louis said, his voice soft and easy, belying a well-practised watchfulness.

  ‘Not enough time for that. Callanach needs to speak with you. He can be trusted.’

  Callanach wasn’t sure that was true, not if it turned out that Jones had known what was going on.

  ‘Two cars,’ Callanach said, handing over the details. ‘They came to you from a scrap yard in Falkirk. I need the records for each vehicle.’

  ‘I don’t keep records,’ Jones said. ‘It’s all in my head. When you’ve seen the things I’ve seen, you don’t write anything down. What’s this about anyway?’

  ‘Elaine Buxton,’ Begbie said. ‘You know about her?’

  ‘Everyone knows,’ Jones said. ‘What’ve my cars got to do with that?’

  ‘These cars were used by the man we think killed her. So who’s got them?’ Callanach asked.

  ‘That prissy fuckin’ snob? You’re fuckin’ messing with me!’

  ‘Who?’ Callanach shouted. ‘I want a name!’

  ‘I don’t deal with names. What planet is he off?’ Jones asked Begbie who held up a subduing palm.

  ‘What can you tell us, Louis?’ Begbie asked quietly.

  ‘He paid cash. Only uses the cars for twenty-four hours then drops them back. That’s what I do, hire out vehicles, no questions asked. He’s been back six or so times, seemed like such an uptight ass that it never crossed my mind he could be doing anything bad. He joked once about needing a bit of private time away from the wife. I assumed he wanted to be able to cruise for a bit of tail without his other half getting a call from the polis.’

  ‘Description?’ Callanach said.

  ‘Fifties, fat round the middle, bit of a comb-over on top, grey overcoat I remember, jowly face. I don’t want my name dragged into this, George. This is bad news.’

  ‘We need more than that, Louis,’ Begbie said. ‘I owe you and I know it, but I can’t keep you out of this one. You loaned him cars with no checks or records. If this guy turns out to be the killer, even I won’t be able to protect you.’

  ‘I saved your fuckin’ life, George, remember that?’ Jones stood up.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Begbie replied, ‘but one of my officers is going to lose hers if we don’t find this man, so let’s cut the bullshit, shall we? You’ve never done business without certain precautions in place and I don’t believe either of us has changed very much over the years. What were you going to do if he didn’t bring a car back? No name, no address? That’s bollocks.’

  Jones landed back in his chair, swearing at the ceiling. ‘I’m ruined if this gets out, so usual rules apply, right?’

  ‘Usual rules,’ Begbie said.

  ‘I had one of my boys follow him. Standard when people won’t give me details. I take a deposit so it doesn’t really matter if they don’t bring the car back but I need protection in case they use it in a robbery or …’

  ‘Or a murder,’ Callanach finished for him. ‘So you lend the cars but bank the information to bargain with the police.’ He ended the sentence with lengthy swearing in French.

  Begbie ignored it. ‘So what do you know?’

  ‘He took the cars back to a lock-up on Causewayside, dodgy area, not much to see. I can give you the address. It was enough that I’d be able to find him if I needed to.’ Louis scribbled on a notepad on Begbie’s desk. Callanach ripped the paper off and went to the door.

  ‘My name never comes out, you don’t tap my fuckin’ phone, and you don’t quote me in any prosecution papers. Me and my business get left completely alone. We’ve got an agreement, and as far as I’m concerned it still stands,’ Jones shouted after him.

  ‘We understand,’ Callanach heard DCI Begbie say, more for his benefit than Louis the Wrench’s, he was sure. Interpol and its procedures, triple checks and no-compromise policy seemed fur
ther away than ever. Callanach wasn’t sure if he should feel disgusted or grateful. At that moment, it didn’t matter. He began to sprint.

  The garage was one of a block in a back street off Causewayside. There were at least thirty with front-lifting doors so faded and chipped that the colours they had once been were now a distant memory. Disintegrating concrete made rubble of the ground outside and the street lighting was nonexistent. Most of the numbers had been knocked off or graffitied over. Tripp was waiting at the end of the street to wave in the forensic team whose sirens could be heard as they fought traffic. Callanach counted his way down the even side until he reached eighteen. He put on gloves and tried the handle. It was locked. Fetching a crow bar from the car boot, he shoved it into the gap between door and ground. A shearing sound ripped through the air as the wires at the top of the door fought the lock and then it was up, the metal too weakened by age and lack of maintenance to resist for long against Callanach’s determination to get in.

  From the entrance he shone the torch into the darkness at the back, flicking it left and right.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Tripp yelled from the end of the street.

  Callanach, hands on hips, head down, kicked the crow bar into the distance, ignoring the pain it sent through his toes and into his ankle.

  ‘Merde!’ he shouted. ‘There’s nothing here, not a single damned thing.’

  Tripp abandoned his post and came running, staring into the empty hole that was the garage.

  ‘Maybe forensics will find something,’ he tried, but Callanach saw from Tripp’s face that he didn’t believe it.

  ‘Even if we find his DNA, and there’s a chance we might, this bastard’s not in our system. He’s obsessive, has probably been planning this for years. He’s the opposite of a sex offender. Professor Harris had it all wrong. This man is not the least bit compulsive. It’s a matter of pride for him that he’s not that type of person.’

  The forensics van pulled up and a team took over, leaving Callanach and Tripp staring on uselessly.

  ‘I need a cigarette. Come and sit with me.’ They walked around the corner as the crime scene was taped off. No houses overlooked the garages, no pubs exited onto the side road, nobody would hang around there at night, at least not innocently. It was a place designed for the business end of nasty criminal enterprises, the low-rent jobs, burglaries of people who couldn’t afford insurance or alarm systems, organised muggings of the elderly or infirm. It was somewhere the murderer could be anonymous in the company of the nameless and faceless. Perfect for him.

  ‘So he just swapped his vehicle over here then drove his own car home, right?’ Tripp asked.

  ‘Must be,’ Callanach confirmed.

  ‘Damn, he’s good,’ Tripp said. ‘Control room says the garage is owned by a woman who advertised it in the local paper. Man renting it paid for the whole year in cash, which he put through her door in an envelope. That was six months ago. She never met him, just left it unlocked with the key inside. One phone call was all she remembers. Envelope and cash all long since gone.’

  Callanach took a cigarette from the pack in his jacket pocket and stuck it, unlit, in his mouth, dragging air and tasting stale tobacco. His imagination did the rest, spiking nicotine into his blood and blowing out smoke in blue-grey puffs. He felt guilty for wanting it and pathetic for doing it. How could he give up smoking and not be able to give up pretending to smoke?

  ‘What did I miss?’ he asked, leaning back on his elbows and turning his face into the weak sun. ‘There was something, somewhere. What do we know that he doesn’t want us to know?’

  ‘We’ve figured out how he gets his cars, where he does the changeover, the extent of his planning. We even know what he looks like,’ Tripp said.

  All of which should have been vital information, Callanach thought, had real value, moved them closer to him. Only the murderer was still a step ahead, knew exactly which battles he could afford to lose.

  ‘I think he plays it all out in his head. Almost as if he imagines it backwards. He knew we might find the lockup so he paid cash, never met the owner. Same with the cars. It’s all information he knew we might uncover and he’s allowed for it. What could he not have planned?’

  ‘How he chose them. That bit’s personal because the women had to be to his taste, fulfil whatever need he has for them.’

  ‘But we don’t know how or where he saw them. Every lead we’ve had he practically dropped in our laps, except for being seen by Astrid and that’s brought us to yet another dead end. The only thing he couldn’t control was being overheard by the cyclist when he was taking Jayne Magee.’ Callanach walked to a drain where he let the crumpled, unsmoked cigarette fall into the watery depths as Tripp flicked through his notebook.

  ‘I meant to bring you up to date on that,’ Tripp mumbled as he read. ‘The nightclub, The Lane, had no membership for Magee or Buxton. There’s also a shop in the city called “Goodies in The Lane” but no relevance that I can see.’ Tripp flipped over a couple of pages.

  ‘What was it the cyclist heard exactly? Remind me,’ Callanach said, kicking a can against a wall like a teenager, taking his rage out on metal and brick.

  ‘Something about going back to the lane …’ Tripp’s voice rumbled beneath the sound of the can bashing against mortar.

  Callanach stopped kicking and glared at the wall. ‘Say it again,’ he said. ‘Whatever you just said, say exactly the same words again.’

  ‘Liam Granger heard him say something about going back to the lane.’ Callanach stared at Tripp who stared back. ‘Are you sure you’re all right, sir? Only you’ve gone an odd colour.’

  Callanach bent over, head down almost to his knees, panting like a freight train, seeing stars. He’d skipped several meals and missed even more sleep than food. But the phantom nicotine, dredged from the depths of his memory, had worked its magic.

  ‘They’re not dead,’ Callanach whispered. ‘Tripp, they’re not dead.’

  Tripp put a gentle hand on his inspector’s shoulder.

  ‘Can I get you some water, sir? Perhaps you should sit down.’

  ‘Listen to me. The cyclist heard the words “the lane” but what he actually said was “I’m taking you back to Elaine”. It’s what I thought you said when I wasn’t listening properly.’

  ‘But Elaine Buxton’s body had been found by then. He can’t have been taking Jayne Magee to her.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. And Jonty Spurr won’t either. Get in the car.’

  Spurr abandoned whatever he was doing and got straight on the line to Callanach.

  ‘DI Callanach,’ Spurr said. ‘Is there news?’

  ‘No,’ Callanach answered, ‘but there’s hope. The teeth, extracted before the body was burned, we think, and if I recall none still in position in the jaw.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Spurr confirmed. ‘Several smashed though, consistent with use of the baseball bat.’

  ‘Could the teeth and jaw bone have been smashed with the bat after the extractions?’ Callanach asked. There were a few seconds of silence on the line.

  ‘Yes,’ Spurr said.

  ‘So he gave us a body too badly burned to retrieve DNA, left in a place where it wouldn’t be discovered too soon, but sufficiently intact to indicate that the deceased was female and get an estimate of the age. We have blood, but not enough for blood loss to have led to her death in situ …’

  ‘That’s right …’ Spurr said.

  ‘A baseball bat positioned to look hidden but close enough to ensure we’d find it and one tooth with soft tissue attached for DNA. Also, luckily for us, part of her scarf that didn’t burn around the edges. Tell me, Jonty, what of that evidence means the body was Elaine Buxton’s?’

  ‘All of it,’ Spurr replied hesitantly, ‘if this was a normal killer.’ There was a long pause while Spurr took on board the conclusion Callanach had led him to. ‘Or none of it, if he was determined – as well as clinical, precise and obsessive – absolutely determine
d to make us believe that it was Elaine Buxton and willing to kill a different woman to use as some sort of corpse proxy. You think they’re still alive, don’t you?’

  ‘I do,’ Callanach said. ‘Because that’s the one conclusion he absolutely did not want us to draw.’

  ‘Tell me how I can help,’ was Spurr’s response.

  ‘Compare notes with Ailsa Lambert about the body presumed to be Jayne Magee’s. This scenario might explain why the bones and teeth in the barrel degraded at different rates, and why there were no upper teeth found at all. It was your identification of the tool marks in the enamel that did it, Jonty. I can’t thank you enough.’

  ‘Just find DI Turner alive.’

  ‘It’s not Ava I’m worried about,’ Callanach said. ‘It’s the identities of the two dead women and the fact that he’s going to need a third to put in Ava’s place.’

  Chapter Forty-One

  It was a Sunday, and a day and a half since Ava Turner had first set foot in his house. King had lost track of the time, waking in a panic and believing he was late for work. In his exhaustion, he’d fallen asleep a second time until well into the afternoon. He’d been too stressed to eat and the fracturing of his usual routine was irksome. Worse than that, he’d tried to call the weasel at the car lot several times and been met with either a busy tone or the answer phone. It wasn’t as if he’d been able to call from his mobile, either. Each time, he’d had to go to a different pay phone. In the end, he’d had to settle for changing the licence plates on his own car and adding loathsome transfer stripes along the sides. It was the best he could do as a disguise and he’d had the necessary parts ready. He’d always known he wouldn’t be able to rely on the weasel for long. In an hour, when daylight turned to dusk, he’d be on his way to Dundee. He needed a favour from a girl there.

  King went to feed his ladies before leaving. The room was unnaturally quiet, as if he’d disturbed witches in their coven, he thought. They were all eyes watching him enter the suite, suspicious, tense.