There was a reverent tap at his door. Donoghue turned and said, ‘Come in, Montgomerie. Take a pew.’
Montgomerie entered Donoghue’s office carrying an armful of files and sat in the chair in front of Donoghue’s desk. Donoghue sat in his chair and noticed that Montgomerie appeared to have washed his face, there was still a little moisture on his brow and he detected the unmistakable aroma of liquid soap. Whiskers were beginning to appear on Montgomerie’s chin.
‘Quiet night?’
‘Very quiet, sir.’ Montgomerie laid the files on the floor.
‘There are two major inquiries to hand over, sir, both started on yesterday’s back shift.’
‘No action in the wee small hours, then?’
‘Not on the two major cases, sir.’
‘Right, we’ll keep them to the end. Let’s shift the dross first, shall we, weed the garden before we dig it.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Montgomerie reached down beside him and picked up the first case.
The ‘dross’ or the ‘garden weeds’ Donoghue found to consist of a spate of car thefts, two burglaries, one particularly messy involving the near-destruction of the interior of the property; a mugging in the city centre. ‘A bit embarrassing,’ said Montgomerie, ‘victim was a foreigner, came to experience the legendary warmth of the city of Glasgow.’
‘Not been too busy then, Montgomerie.’
‘Quiet, as I said. I’ve really just been taking witness statements and visiting the locuses. They really made a mess of that house, sir, ugh, horrible. The owners have moved into a hotel. I can’t say I blame them.’
‘What happened to the foreigner, the tourist?’
‘The Youth Hostel put him up, sir. A young man in his twenties. I soft-soaped them a bit, you know, victim of a crime, visitor to the city, a guest here, and they agreed to put him up and give him some fodder. He’s going to the bank today to arrange for money to be wired to him here. Best we could do.’
‘Description of the attacker?’
Montgomerie shook his head. ‘From behind. All over before the victim knew what was happening.’
‘An experienced mugger?’
‘Sounds like it, sir.’
‘Mark that one for action, give it to day shift—which is…?’
‘Abernethy, sir.’
A pause.
‘Sergeant Sussock’s day off, sir.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, speak to Abernethy. Ask him to pull all known neds and felons with this sort of track. And that’s it?’
‘Just the two big ones, sir.’
Donoghue sat back and pulled on his pipe and listened attentively as Montgomerie recounted the two ‘big ones’. As Montgomerie spoke, Donoghue inched forward, fraction by fraction, unaware of himself doing so, as details of the missing child were related, worrying enough in itself, but eclipsed by the story of the body found in a shallow grave in a field beside a red road in Lanarkshire. But none the less, Donoghue could not blame Montgomerie for ending the graveyard shift with his eyes closed and his feet on the desk. He couldn’t have taken either inquiry an inch further forward.
‘All right.’ Donoghue took his pipe from his mouth and examined the bowl. ‘All right, you hand the mugging to Abernethy and I’ll speak to him about it later, we can’t give this any sort of priority but it would help international relationships if we could arrest the felon, or felons, keep our end up in the eyes of Interpol. Where does our guest come from, incidentally?’
‘Torquay,’ Montgomerie said, smiling, ‘he’s an Englishman.’
‘Just give it to Abernethy.’
Montgomerie left the room still smiling at his own joke, carrying all the files he had brought with him save for two which Donoghue retained.
Donoghue, alone again, refilled his pipe and began to read the files, digesting the contents. Twenty minutes later he laid the files down. He didn’t like either. He thought that observations contained in both files were valid. Of the Tim Moore case, it was valid to point out that boys of Tim’s social milieu don’t wander off and visit a relative. If they go missing, they have been abducted.
It’s a fear which haunts every parent, a prospect which strikes terror into the heart of any parent. He thought that Richard King had done a good job by organizing a search of likely areas near the family home. Three areas all told. No result: that he felt was good and bad. It meant hope could be kept alive, but so was fear. And with the passing of each hour hope fades slightly and fear increases. He reached for the phone on his desk and dialled a two-figure internal number.
‘Uniform bar,’ said a crisply efficient male voice.
‘DI Donoghue.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Can you locate WPC Willems and DC Abernethy, they’ll be in the building somewhere. Ask them to come to my office, please. As soon as you like. Thank you.’
Tim Moore’s disappearance might be sinister; in fact, Donoghue thought that it had all the hallmarks of a very sordid affair. But the body in the shallow grave in a Lanarkshire field undoubtedly was sinister. It had the certain hand of another or other players about it. He picked up the file on the person believed to be Sandra Shapiro of Egypt and, reading it, had to concede that as in the recording in Tim Moore’s file, the observations were valid. There was as yet no actual evidence of murder because death had been due to drowning. So far the most serious charge that could be preferred was that of interfering with the office of the Coroner, otherwise known as unlawful disposal of the dead, which carried a maximum sentence of four years. But it was early days yet, very early days.
He pulled on his pipe.
He was amused by Dr Reynolds’s confusion at the lack of diatoms in the marrow of the long bones, which ought to be present if the victim had died at sea. Donoghue thought that perhaps Dr Reynolds was a little too immersed in the post-mortem, a little too close to it. He thought that the pathologist ought to step back a little, take the dog for a walk, have a drink in a quiet bar, perhaps. It seemed obvious to Donoghue that the girl had drowned in a saline solution, in a bath for example, or had been drowned, and then immediately after death had been pulled out of the bath and laid on her side with the hypostasis forming where her body touched the floor. The real question was, how did she come to drown? Was it deliberate murder, was it as postulated by King in his recordings of his conversation with Dr Reynolds, as indicated by the rope marks, an ill-advised sex game which had gone horribly wrong? Such things do happen from time to time, but the surviving partner is often wise enough to call the police immediately and offer a full explanation. But it has also been the case that the surviving partner has panicked and has attempted to conceal the body and cover his tracks.
Donoghue glanced out of his office window, the blue sky, the sun already high: he thought that there would be many a man and woman out there who would be remarking on the pleasantness of the day. For him, reading the files, the day was beginning to cloud over, just as many a deep midwinter’s afternoon had been brightened with the concluding of a long inquiry.
There was a tap on his door: soft, reverent-
‘Come in,’ said Donoghue, and only then looked up. Abernethy lean and gauche, and Elka Willems, stood in the doorway. ‘Come in.’ Donoghue smiled. ‘Come in and pull up a seat.’
The two young officers sat, Abernethy in his early twenties, new to CID work, still finding his feet but Donoghue was more than satisfied that he was getting there; Elka Willems, her blonde hair now done in a tight bun and still devastatingly attractive despite the unflattering uniform of a WPC, so much so that Donoghue was instantly reminded of the shock waves which travelled through the building when she first arrived, having transferred from Stranraer.
‘The Moore case.’ Donoghue patted the file.
‘Yes, sir.’ Elka Willems responded knowingly.
‘Has Montgomerie had a word with you about the mugging last night, Abernethy?’
‘Yes, sir. He has.’
‘I’d like you to handle it. Give the details o
f the offence to the collator and ask him to provide you with names of likely suspects and take if from there. I’d also like you to work with WPC Willems on the Tim Moore case. If you don’t know about it, WPC Willems here will fill you in. In fact, here’s the file.’ Donoghue tossed it to the edge of his desk. Abernethy reached forward and picked it up. ‘I don’t like the feel of this one, not at all, time for a house-to-house, I think. Visit his school, speak to the other children, one of them might have seen him getting into a car, one of them might have been approached by a stranger about the time he was abducted. There’s also a good man at the University—Glasgow University—Department of Psychology, a Dr Cass; I’ve picked his brains before and he’s proved to be a real goldmine, you could give him a bell.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘You might ask him for a psychological profile of the sort of person who would be likely to abduct children and if your house-to-house throws up a likely description which might match the profile…we’ll trace him and bring him in for a chat.’
‘Or her,’ said Elka Willems.
‘Or her.’ Donoghue nodded. This was the late twentieth-century and he had grown to fear the sting of the angered feminist.
Abernethy and Willems stood and left his office, walking silently out of the room. They turned the corner, were lost from his sight, but he looked up as he heard the mutter of pleasantries with a rising inflection of surprise, echoing in the corridor. Seconds later Ray Sussock tapped on his door. ‘A word, sir,’ he said.
Donoghue sat back. ‘Come in, Ray, take a seat.’ It was proving to be a busy start to this particular working day, first Montgomerie, then Abernethy and Elka Willems, and now, with no little surprise, Ray Sussock calling in on his day off. Donoghue looked at Sussock as he sat in the chair recently occupied by Abernethy and once again was struck by the weariness about him, the drawn haggard expression in his face, a man overdue for retirement, a man who could take his retirement now for the asking, but ‘personal reasons, sir’ kept him at the sharp end of police work, and kept him doing a young man’s job. ‘So what’s on your mind that you come in on your day off, pleasant as it is to see you.’
‘Do you know what you were doing twenty-five years ago, sir?’
‘Still at school.’ Donoghue smiled and scraped the charred tobacco from his pipe bowl into the ashtray. He split the stem of his pipe and took a pipecleaner from his desk drawer. ‘Deciding whether to stay on and try for University or follow my dad into the shipyards. He was an electrician and could have got me started. Why do you ask? What were you doing twenty-five years ago?’
‘I was a constable. No longer a cub, no longer wet behind the ears, considered experienced, in fact, not a sergeant though, not then, that came later.’ He glanced to one side, then looked at Donoghue and held eye contact. ‘I was standing guard on a recently discovered stolen car in a country lane and I decided to creep up on a rabbit…’ He began to relate the tale but already Donoghue’s scalp was crawling and his fingers fell limp around his pipe bowl and stem, as within his brain alarm bells jangled, jangled, jangled.
He allowed Sussock to relate the story without interruption, held the pause when Sussock had finished and eventually said, ‘Good Lord, Ray. A stolen car, neatly parked, a rural location, a child’s toy rabbit, identical to the locus of yesterday’s grim discovery, except that twenty-five years separates them. It means, I think, that we have to assume that the car we found yesterday is implicated in some way after all. Most probably it was stolen to transport the body in.’
‘That’s what I thought too, sir.’
‘It’s all too much of a coincidence.’ Donoghue shook his head. ‘In fact, it’s not a coincidence. I think that we can’t ignore the possibility that there is a body in a field close to where you stood guard all those years ago. We’ll have to search for it. Can you remember the location?’
Sussock nodded wearily. His day off was disappearing fast. ‘You see, the thing that worries me, sir, is that if there is a body out there, and if they are connected—that is, that they are both down to the same felon—then how many more are there, how many more were done in the period between? And of the one I was standing guard near, if it’s there, is it the first one? Or were there others even before that? How many bodies are we talking about?’
Donoghue raised his eyebrows. ‘Let’s take one stage at a time, Ray.’
‘Yes, you’re right, sir.’
‘I take it that you don’t mind giving up your free time, Ray? I know that it’s been twenty-five years and one day won’t make a great deal of difference but it’s the sort of thing that would nag me if I didn’t address it.’
The phone on his desk rang.
‘I feel the same way, sir. I just wouldn’t enjoy my free time with this on my mind.’
‘Good man. If you can recall the area where the car was found, we’ll search from there, taking the distance of the grave from the car at yesterday’s location as our model. We’ll need a sergeant and half a dozen men.’
‘I’ll arrange it now, sir.’ Sussock stood.
Donoghue picked up his phone. ‘Donoghue.’
‘Dr Reynolds for you, sir.’
‘Reynolds here.’
‘Morning, sir.’
‘Mr Donoghue, good. I gather that you will by now have been apprised of the PM result of the girl who was found in the field?’
‘The one who drowned?’
‘That’s the one. I’m a slow thinker, Mr Donoghue, or I’m probably too close to the job in hand, but I’ve managed to come up with a solution to the puzzle of the missing diatoms. The answer came to me over a whisky last night.’
‘Oh?’
‘I was puzzled why there were no diatoms, and why the hypostasis was in the wrong place for a drowning victim.’
‘Yes?’
‘The answer is obvious. She drowned in a bath or container which contained saline solution, which in turn was by design or accident three per cent salt, the same as sea-water, and after she drowned she was pulled out and laid on the floor where the blood settled in the parts of her body which touched the floor. Simple, really.’
Donoghue smiled. ‘Thank you, sir, that helps us a lot, an awful lot, narrows the inquiry. Means we’re looking for an inside locus. While you are on the phone, can you tell me how possible it would be to identify someone who was murdered twenty-five years ago and has since that time been buried in the same manner as the girl about whom we speak?’
‘Well.’ Reynolds paused. ‘You could sex the remains immediately, any doctor can tell at a glance whether it was a male or female skeleton, because after twenty-five years
a skeleton it would be. After that, the teeth would be the most reliable source of information, they won’t decompose and if you have any idea of the deceased’s identity you can get her dental records, they’ll be filed somewhere and are as unique as fingerprints or a DNA profile. Otherwise it’s police work, identification by means of non-degradable artefacts found with the body: watches, rings, contents of a leather purse or wallet, but as we speak I remember that there is a technique for rebuilding the face and head using the skull as a base, it was pioneered by a Soviet scientist. You may have seen the film Gorky Park.’
‘I have, yes.’
‘The technique featured in that film, it has been adopted and is used in the UK, as you may know.’
‘I did. I’ve never had occasion to use it.’
‘Neither have I, it’s a field of Medical Art. Why do you ask? Do you have another investigation in hand?’
‘No, not yet,’ said Donoghue. ‘We may, just may, have another body, and if we do it will be part of the same investigation.’
‘Good heavens.’ Reynolds sighed. ‘And a twenty-five-year gap between them.’
‘That’s the way it appears, sir,’ said Donoghue. ‘I’ll certainly be in touch if we do find another corpse.’
Elliot Bothwell blinked and moved clumsily as he worked the paper round first one ink-stained f
inger and then the next, and then the next. It was times like this that the job got to him: in this instance the fingerprinting of a corpse in the mortuary of the GRI as a nursing sister and mortuary attendant looked solemnly on, ensuring reverence for the dead and being present as a witness in Elliot Bothwell’s best interest lest a complaint of impropriety be levelled at him. But whatever he did, whatever he had to do, he knew that he would not return to his old job, not no way, not for a pension. His old job was that of chemistry assistant in a tough inner city secondary school, where in the course of his years there he had mixed the same calm chemicals in the room behind the chemistry laboratory, all the while watching the chemistry teacher’s hair turn grey as the man attempted to teach intake after intake of uninterested adolescents. Then one day, while browsing through the Regional Council vacancy list, Bothwell saw the post of forensic chemist with the Strathclyde Police being advertised. He applied. He was interviewed. He was offered the post. He didn’t look back. Most of the work, interesting at first, had become routine. Most crime is petty, but even then he found that no two jobs are quite the same, mostly he dusted stolen cars or scenes of burglary for felons’ latents, but occasionally, just occasionally, there was a stomach-churning job to be done, as in lifting the prints of a young woman who had in life been attractive. Elliot Bothwell was thirty-six, he still lived with his mother in a three-roomed apartment in Queens Park, up a china-tiled ‘wally close’, of stained wood, heavy doors and brass knockers. He wouldn’t go back to his old job, not now, not for a pension.
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