‘It wouldn’t. She’s a cool one, is Sarah.’
‘And a looker, as well.’
He frowned. ‘I’ll forget you said that, and so should you, Sauce. Banish lust from your mind and concentrate on your moll. I tell you, mate, I still worry about you and that one.’
‘Then don’t. Cheeky and I have an understanding; she never, ever asks me about the job.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ he drawled. ‘And has she given up driving get-away vehicles as well?’
Yes, Jack knows which buttons to push. ‘That was a misunderstanding,’ I snapped. ‘Her mother pleaded guilty, remember. She said she’d spun Cheeky a story, and naturally she believed it.’
‘With respect,’ he chuckled, ‘it was a plea bargain and the fiscal bought it. She might have finished you, Sauce, yet you’re still seeing her.’
‘Enough, Jack,’ I warned him.
He held his hands up, palms out. ‘Okay, okay. Your life, your career.’
‘Exactly, and I’m not about to risk either.’ He was chasing the wrong hare, anyway. My relationship with Cheeky was working in my favour, but he didn’t know that.
We drifted back to the senior officers’ meeting, which was breaking up with the arrival of the meat porters. We stood together and watched as they lifted the body, shrouded once again, from its temporary resting place, encased it and took it away, the entire exercise completed without a single word being spoken. Just before they folded the sheet over the victim’s face I took a last look, and estimated that he must have been close to my own age, maybe a year or two older, but likely under thirty.
That brought it home to me; this was my job, the one I had chosen, but it had its moments of horror. The chief had been doing it for a lot longer than me, and I knew that he’d seen worse than that, much worse. Little wonder then, that it showed in his eyes, and in DCS McGuire’s, when I looked more closely. If it didn’t, then maybe they’d have a touch of the monster in them. That’s something I’ll guard against in the future, I promise.
Skinner stepped forward, and crouched down beside the grave, making sure that the bright lights above didn’t cast his shadow across it. He peered in, then reached in and touched something. He glanced over his shoulder, at me. ‘See that, Sauce?’ he murmured. He was frowning; still, it seemed to me, not quite himself. I wondered if something else had unsettled him, as well as the presence of his ex.
I knelt beside him, following his pointing finger, to a piece of living root from the tree alongside. ‘It’s been cut,’ I said.
‘Yeah, that and others. But it’s clean. It doesn’t feel that it was chopped through by a spade. Indeed it’s probably too thick for a spade to have got through it in one whack. No, I’d say it’s been severed, by a knife.’ He picked something up, from the ground where the body had lain. ‘See?’ He stood and held it up, examining it closely in the light. ‘It’s the other half, or similar, ripped out and cut off, and not with a bread knife either, but by something very sharp.’
He looked up at Stallings. ‘How was it when it was found, Becky, do you know?’
‘Yes, sir. I was here when they opened it. The turf had been replaced, after a fashion, and there were branches laid over it, and stones, covered in dirt, as if they’d been in the ground and dug out with the soil, then placed on top.’
‘To hide it?’
She frowned, as she thought. ‘No. No, the opposite; I’d say they looked more like protection, as a cover, and as a marker, even.’
‘Interesting,’ the chief said. ‘As you can imagine, I’ve stood over a few informal funerals in my time. Most of you will have too. But I don’t recall ever seeing one that was quite like this. The others were all obviously rushed, and most of the victims weren’t even properly covered. None of them were unclothed, but none of them was treated with any dignity either. This grave was dug carefully and the body was put in it. . How can I say it? It was buried reverentially, wrapped in a sheet.’ He paused. ‘I’d say this was dug by hand. I may be proved wrong, but I don’t see one person doing it alone, not to a depth of about what, twenty inches or more.’
‘Then there was the phone call,’ the head of CID added, ‘through a voice scrambler. The communications centre usually pins down everything incoming, but not this. It was a mobile number, but untraceable.’
‘And they took his clothes,’ Skinner added. ‘It’s as if they were giving him to us, giving this man into our care, and yet they don’t seem to want us to know who he is.’ His eyes pierced me. ‘What do you think of that, Sauce?’
I hesitated; in that group I was so low on the totem pole I was almost holding the thing up. I felt like a student at a practical exam.
‘Come on,’ he insisted. ‘You’re the freshest mind here. What are your instincts?’
I took a deep breath then voiced the only thought I had. ‘Whoever buried him didn’t kill him. They treated him like a friend, not an enemy; like a comrade.’ Something from my schooldays offered itself from my memory. ‘There’s a poem I read once; I don’t remember the words, but it was about a soldier being buried on the battlefield.’
The chief constable nodded. ‘I know the one. Jesus, I don’t like this. Unknown man, a casualty of something. His colleagues can’t dispose of his body properly, so they give it to us for safe keeping, more or less. Which probably means they’re still here. But why?’
‘Surely, sir,’ Jack said, ‘they must assume that we’ll identify him, given our resources. The body’s unmarked; we can mock up a lifelike image for the media, and if that fails, there must be a likeness of him on record, somewhere. We can do a national database search, and put a name on him, eventually.’
‘On the contrary,’ Skinner retorted. ‘It’s just as well I’m not a betting man, or I’d lay you long odds against any of that working and I’d cover any stake you laid down. I didn’t see his hands, but I know his fingertips haven’t been sliced off.’
‘How do you know for sure?’
‘Because they left us his fucking head as well,’ he snapped, ‘lifelike image and all. The man is not on any database, Jack, not prints, not image, not DNA: not any database that we can access, at any rate.’
‘Are you suggesting he’s foreign?’ Becky Stallings asked.
‘I’m suggesting nothing. I’m telling you that as far as we’re concerned the guy we’ve just had carted off to the morgue is a non-person.’
‘So where do we start looking?’ She sounded impatient. It struck me that her tone might be pushing her luck.
The chief raised his eyebrows, peering down at her. ‘Am I wearing a white pointy hat and bejewelled robes?’ She stared at him. ‘Am I infallible? No, I’m not; I know this because I’ve met the real Pope. You do all the routine things, photographic databases, fingerprint comparisons, DNA too, when we get a profile. You do them because I might be wrong. But after you find that I’m not, you fall back on the only asset we’ve got: the body itself. You ever been to the mortuary, Sauce?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.
‘Good, in that case, you won’t need directions there. I want you to attend the post-mortem tomorrow morning.’
‘On my own, sir?’
He frowned at me. ‘You don’t expect me to come with you, do you?’
I gulped, not knowing quite what to read into that, but having enough smarts to keep my mouth shut.
‘Sit in with Dr Grace,’ he continued, ‘and learn from her. Before she begins, I want you to update her on the discussion we’ve had here and to explain to her that we’re looking for any way of identifying her patient, however unlikely it may be. Joe Hutchinson’s the best in the business, but he’s got nothing left to teach Sarah. If there are any pointers there, she’ll find them.’
As he spoke I saw DCS McGuire’s forehead gather into a frown. So did the chief. ‘Question, Mario?’
‘No, boss, not really. I’m just wondering about only one officer attending. Might we not need corroboration for the court at some stage?’
‘I don’t see why. There’ll be two pathologists present. Plus, the way things are, we don’t have any evidence that a crime’s been committed. We couldn’t even do anyone for concealing a death, since they’ve gone out of their way to make sure that we know about it. ’
‘What about the media?’ Becky asked. ‘Do you want me to draft something for the press office?’
‘Hell, no!’ he exclaimed. ‘To tell them what? That someone can’t afford the price of a funeral, so they’ve handed the deceased over to us.’
‘Maybe that’s all it is.’
I didn’t realise that I’d voiced my thought, until four heads turned and eight eyes focused on me.
Then the chief laughed, so loud that a couple of SOCOs looked across, wondering what the joke was. ‘Maybe it is, Sauce. Maybe it is. And you know what? If that’s so I will never have been so happy to have made a fool of myself.’
Dr Sarah Grace
Silly me, thinking for one moment that I could operate as a consultant criminal pathologist in Edinburgh without ever crossing the path of the chief constable, especially when he’s Bob Skinner. I should have known it had to happen, but I hoped it wouldn’t. . or so I told myself.
I knew there would be talk when I made my decision to move back to Scotland from the US. But hell, I should never have gone in the first place. When Bob offloaded me for that fucking witch of a politician, I should have stayed put and fought my corner.
But I didn’t; instead I made nice. When he made his speech about us having fallen out of love, I agreed, and when he said that we should do what was best for our children, well, I could hardly disagree with that one either. Had I known that he was planning to move the witch, Aileen de Marco, into our bed first chance he got, it might have been different.
Okay, our marriage wasn’t perfect; we’d both played away games, but in that respect, the score was Bob three, Sarah two, and maybe he’d been involved in other matches that I still don’t know about, so he wasn’t standing on any high moral ground, not ever.
Looking back, I can see that he sandbagged me when I was at my weakest. I’d lost my parents, and I was still in shock over that, yet he’d left me alone in the USA to take care of the estate and everything, when he could have taken time out at no cost to his precious career. Then someone else died, someone I’d been close with in my younger days and had gotten close with again, someone who’d been filling the void that Bob had left. I might have stayed with him, but it all came to an end.
My husband played Mr Magnanimous then. It was as if my affair had never happened. Sure, he said something about the score between us being even, but the truth was that his great big macho ego made him blank it out. We went back to Scotland, for the new beginning we announced, to establish a stable base for our kids, me full of good intentions, Bob full of. .
Some would call it bullshit, but I’ll be generous and call it the same crusading zeal that had always led him to put his job over me and over our family: apart from Alexis, that is, my former stepdaughter. From the age of around five, he brought her up alone. He had one significant relationship in that time, with another cop, a classy lady called Alison Higgins, but, as he put it when he told me about her, she was as ambitious as him, so it didn’t last. It wasn’t till I came along, after Alex had left home and gone to university, that he had any meaningful time for anyone else.
I have nothing against Alex, far from it; she never did a thing to undermine me, and we get on perfectly well even now, but she and her long-dead mother are the true loves of his life, even if he doesn’t know it. And she is her father’s daughter, in every respect. She’s as precociously outstanding in her profession, the law, as he was in his, and like him she will go to the top, wherever she decides that might be. But like him also, she sets it above everything else in her life, so anyone with whom she becomes involved, and there have been a few already, had better accept that it leaves her incapable of ever focusing fully on a personal relationship. Of all people, Andy Martin should have known that when they got engaged, given that he’s been Bob’s protege from way back, but he didn’t, and that thing crashed and burned. Mind you, from what I hear, he’s come back for seconds.
When I came back myself, from America that first time, weakened, insecure, and diminished, Alex was perfectly nice to me. She loves her young brother, James Andrew, and being his mother always gave me brownie points with her. There being about twenty years between them in age, Jazz may be the closest thing to a kid of her own that she will ever have: sad but true. But when the witch came along, and Bob decided that our marriage had indeed gone stale and the time had come for a nice amicable separation, that was it for Alex and me. No conflict, but no contest either. We never fell out, but I am damn sure that behind the scenes she was part of the team that advised her father on a split deal that worked out very well for him.
It might seem that as the mother of two young children I was in a strong position, but it wasn’t as easy as that. Mark, our other, older, son, was adopted under Scottish law, and that might have been a problem if I had pursued sole custody aggressively. Then there was the property side. Bob’s father’s estate, combined with the insurance that followed his first wife’s early death, left him comfortably off, but my parents left me substantially better fixed than even he was. If that had gone into a common pot, I’d have been a loser. Alex knew that, even if he didn’t, so the deal put on the table was that we each took away what we brought, and that we have joint custody of our three children.
Fair enough, but there was one small, but globally enforceable, clause in the deal, put there by Bob’s lawyer, a partner in his daughter’s firm, that put all the strings in his hands, given the fact that I’d said I was going back to the USA to practise medicine. The children can never be removed permanently from the jurisdiction of the Scottish courts. In theory, I could have gone to the mattresses on that one, but in practice we were negotiating a no-fault divorce. . Hah! Equal fault was the truth of it. . so I had little choice but to sign off on it. What it meant in effect was that I was the one to whom my kids went on their school holidays, while they spent the bulk of their time not just with their father, but, as happened very soon after I left, with the witch, Aileen. Ironic, and then some, that Bob always used to talk about ‘fucking politicians’!
Deal done, marriage ended, I moved back to the land of my birth, to work in New York; I bought a family home outside of the city, and I went back to practising medicine with the living, among disadvantaged people, since I could afford to do that. I settled in. I made the house welcoming for the kids’ first visit, and I arranged my work schedule so that I could spend most of my time with them when they came over. I enjoyed my job too, particularly the novelty of interaction with my patients: by definition, that’s not something that pathologists experience. Eventually I found time to begin a new relationship, with a nice single man, a classy New York Latino, who was even smart enough to bond with James Andrew by taking him to baseball matches. When I mentioned that to Bob in one of our occasional conversations, the sound on the other end of the line was that of a lead balloon going down.
So, there I was, a wealthy, professional, attractive, thirty-something woman with all the flexibility she needed in her life, and a guy to take care of all those things she can’t do for herself, or would rather not. Ideal, yes? On the face of it, absolutely, but there was one problem that I failed to dissolve: the loneliness that had enveloped me, even as a wife and mother.
Looking back, I believe it started that time when Bob was stabbed, and almost died; it was a ridiculous thing, a random street knife crime incident that could have happened to anyone. He hung on the edge for a while, but he pulled through. He has great physical strength, and his body made a complete recovery, but his mind didn’t. It was a different person who emerged from the chemical coma. While the man that I married had been single-minded, the one to whom I found myself married after the stabbing was obsessive, to the exclusion, at times, of everything
else.
It was never the same from then on. He shut me out of his life, and for a while I took myself out of his, until I went back, out of stubbornness as much as love. But he never let me close to him again. We had a married life, and we had a second child, but Seonaid’s birth gave pleasure, not joy. We had meetings of the body, but never of the mind. I put a face on it, but inside, I was living in a bubble.
When, finally, I left him for good, I believed that I would be a whole person again, an independent spirit able to interrelate completely with another. But it didn’t work out that way. Oh, it was fine with my New York guy Armando at first, sex and that was all, but as it can be with these things, we started to drift into something else, and that was okay too, up to a point, until he started wanting more and more from me in commitment terms, and then became more and more frustrated when I found that I couldn’t give it, until one night he asked me how it was that he could be in bed with me and still feel alone, and I realised that I felt the same way.
So we split, last January, and that was probably the lowest point of my life, lower even than when the witch stole Bob from me. I’d had suppressed anger to fuel me then and a clear path to a new life that I thought I wanted. But when Armando and I parted, calmly and rationally (that must be the only way I can do it), my tank was drained. All that I had was my isolation. I had a big empty house, I had a job at which I was okay, but at which I knew I did not excel, and I missed my kids so much it hurt. I was back in the bubble, in a country whose passport I carried, but in which I felt alien.
I don’t know what I’d have done if Master Yoda hadn’t made contact, but he did, on the third Friday in February, out of the blue. His email told me that he’d met Andy Martin at a conference and that Andy had let him have my address, and went on to ask me to please call him on the cellphone number he gave me.
I didn’t leap to the phone: Professor Joe Hutchinson was part of the old life I’d left, and even then I’d rarely ever seen him unless we were surrounded by bits and pieces of human beings. I mulled it over for a couple of days, but on the following Sunday I was feeling so low and weepy after a Skype video chat with Mark, Jazz and Seonaid, and more than a little pissed at having seen the witch passing by in the background, that I dialled his number.
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