Ahead of the Game

by JD Kirk

  “Mr Lyndsay?”

  He didn’t stop. Not until she shouted a second time, this time with an air of authority that made it clear things would only escalate from here if he chose to keep ignoring her.

  He waited for them to catch up, eyeing them warily as they approached.

  “Yes?” he asked. “I’m meant to be at work.”

  Hamza glanced back in the direction of the school.

  “My other work, I mean.” He looked from one detective to the other, then over to their parked car, trying to piece their identities together from what little evidence he had to hand. “How can I help you?”

  Hamza helped solve the mystery for the man by producing his warrant card. “Detective Sergeant Khaled, Police Scotland Major Investigations,” he said, and the already diminutive Mr Lyndsay seemed to shrink an inch further. “If you don’t mind, we’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “How was your day?”

  Bennet gave a shrug and watched the faces of his fellow pupils go sliding past the window as his mum pulled out of the car park and away from the school. They’d both had a free period last thing, and so had been ready to go the moment the last bell of the day had told everyone they were finally free to leave.

  “That good?” Lana asked. Leaving so sharply meant they were at the head of the queue of traffic turning out onto the main road—the Blar, as it was known locally—and as there were no vehicles coming from the right, she was able to pull away quickly.

  On a normal day, Bennet could detect her physically unwinding as they put distance between themselves and the school. Her breathing would change. Her posture would relax. She’d hum, or sing, or just witter any old rubbish about her day.

  It would last until about Spean Bridge, then the thought of what was waiting at home would drag her mood down again, and they’d travel those final few miles to Roy Bridge in an apprehensive sort of silence.

  Today, though, there was no lightening of her mood. Even the radio, which she was quick to sing along with at the end of the day, seemed to irritate her. She clicked it off with a jab, halfway through Steve Wright’s Factoids segment, where Steve and his co-hosts gleefully spouted some poorly researched bullshit and tried to pass it off as fact.

  “You alright, Mum?” Bennet forced himself to ask, despite the worry he currently had weighing heavily on himself.

  “Fine,” Lana said, a little too quickly and high-pitched to be convincing. She clearly realised this herself and tried to compensate by shrugging and smiling, but this had the opposite effect to the one she’d been going for.

  “Right,” Bennet said, turning back to the window. If she didn’t want to tell him, that was fine. He’d asked. That was the main thing. It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough to worry about.

  “Have you heard from Fergus?” Lana asked.

  Bennet continued to look out of the side window. There wasn’t much to see at the moment but trees, and poor examples at that.

  “No,” he said, after a moment. “Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing,” Lana said.

  “He was off today,” Bennet said, after a pause. “We had Copsand for PE.”

  “I know. I heard,” Lana said. “He must be sick.”

  Bennet nodded, and watched his reflection in the glass do the same. “Yeah,” both versions of him said. “Must be.”

  Lana gave herself a shake, then plastered on a smile that was substantially more convincing than the previous attempt. “I’m sure he’ll be back tomorrow,” she decided. She gave the radio a prod, and music filled the car.

  “Yeah,” Bennet agreed. He checked his phone screen, but found no notifications waiting. “I’m sure he will be.”

  Chapter Ten

  Once again, Logan was grateful to be standing down at the feet end of the gurney. Today, even more so than usual, in fact.

  Shona stood at the head end—if you could call it that, given the victim’s lack of one—her PP gear spattered in blood and bodily fluids, an assortment of tools neatly arranged on a trolley beside her.

  When it came to the mechanics of her job—the part that involved cutting and weighing and measuring and sampling—Shona was meticulously organised. She was, without question, one of the best pathologists he’d ever worked with, and he’d been through a fair few over the years.

  It was more than her organisational skills, of course. It was the way her brain worked. She could answer his questions before he’d even thought of them. She could ‘see’ a murder based on the injuries presented to her. On a pure logic and reasoning front, she was a better detective than he’d ever be.

  Not that he’d ever tell her that, of course.

  Not that he needed to.

  This time though, thanks largely to the incompleteness of the victim, she was at something of a loss.

  “So, you don’t know?” Logan asked, his voice muffled by the protective mask he wore over his nose and mouth.

  “I can make an educated guess,” Shona replied. “But that’s all it’ll be at this stage. And, I can tell you what didn’t kill him, but that would be a very long list, and I’m not sure it would be very helpful.”

  “Maybe give me the highlights,” Logan suggested. “Then tell me your theory.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Shona said. “And, as usual, a lot of this is preliminary, still waiting on results, blah, blah, you know the score. The big news, though, in case you hadn’t spotted it, is that his head’s missing.”

  Logan pointed to the body. “Who, this guy?”

  The skin below Shona’s eyes crinkled as she smiled behind her mask. “Yes, him. It’s meant to be here.” She gestured to where the neck abruptly ended in ragged flesh and gristle. “But it isn’t.”

  “And that’s your expert opinion, is it?”

  “It is,” Shona confirmed. “The good news for him is that it was done post-mortem. Decapitation wasn’t the cause of death.”

  “You sure?” Logan asked.

  Shona shot him a look that said he was skating on thin ice. “Are you casting aspersions on my judgement, Detective Chief Inspector?”

  Logan held up his gloved hands. “Sorry. Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “But, just out of interest, how can you tell?”

  “A few reasons. Some sort of power saw was used to make the cut. Fine-toothed, probably a thin blade. It’s not particularly neat, but a lot neater than it would be if he’d been alive, put it that way,” Shona said.

  “Could’ve been unconscious.”

  “That’s why I said ‘a few reasons.’”

  She drew Logan’s attention to the victim’s back. It was flat against the slab, but there was a noticeable reddish-purple staining creeping up the side of his ribs.

  “Livor Mortis,” Shona said. She didn’t explain any further, and Logan got the impression he was being tested.

  “Red blood cells sinking to the lowest part of the body,” he said, neatly summarising one of the many facts about human corpses he’d picked up over the years that he very much wished he hadn’t. “Takes a few hours, doesn’t it?”

  Shona nodded. “Not bad. And yes, it starts about twenty minutes after death, but takes a couple of hours before it’s noticeable from the outside. Based on his condition, I don’t think there was much blood loss until hours after he died. Certainly not what we’d see with his throat cut, let alone his head removed.”

  “Right. That makes sense,” Logan said.

  “Oh, good. I’m glad you think so,” Shona teased, before turning her attention back to the body. “There are no other obvious injuries, nothing to suggest drowning or asphyxiation. Poisoning or a drug overdose are both still on the table, but there’s nothing in the initial tests, and no signs that he was a habitual drug user.”

  “So, your theory is…?” Logan prompted.

  “I’d put money on the head having a dirty great dent in it, when it eventually turns up,” Shona said. “You know, if I was a betting woman.”

  “You’d have to find one
hell of a specialist bookie,” Logan remarked.

  Shona smiled at that line, too. “I think he was killed by a blow to the head, his body lay on its back for three or four hours, then the head was removed and he was relocated to the tunnel. That’s my educated guess.”

  “Aye, well, we might have to wait a while to find out if you’re right,” Logan told her. “Divers have done a sweep of the loch near where he was found. His head hasn’t turned up yet. They’re going to keep at it, but at this point, I’m not feeling very hopeful.”

  “Well, much as I’d love to see your wee face light up if I pulled out his missing severed head now, I’m afraid I can’t help you with that,” Shona said. “I do have a couple of things that might be of interest, though.”

  “Anything would be a help at this stage,” Logan told her. “What’ve you got?”

  She beckoned him up to the head end—or neck end, technically—and he reluctantly plodded around the table to join her. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, but the smell of death was more pungent here, more insistent as it forced its way up his nostrils and flooded his lungs.

  “What does that look like to you?” Shona asked, pointing to a purple splodge where the victim’s shoulder met his neck.

  “A bruise?”

  “That’s what I thought when I first saw it,” Shona admitted. “But it’s not. I mean, it is, but it’s not.”

  Logan blinked, not following. “It is, but it’s not?”

  “It’s a hickey,” Shona said. “A love bite.”

  Logan frowned. “A nookie badge? Is that still a thing? People don’t still do that, do they? Suck on each other’s necks?” He seemed genuinely horrified by the idea, even with his face half-hidden by the mask. “I mean, horny teenagers, maybe, but he’s in his mid-twenties. You grow out of that shite by then, don’t you?”

  “Hey, I’m not here to judge, just to report the facts,” Shona said, skilfully avoiding the question. “Someone gave him a love bite. Two, in fact. One on the neck, one on the inner thigh, about three inches south of his testicles.”

  “Classy. He was sexually active, then,” Logan surmised.

  “Either that, or he’s got one hell of a slapdash hoovering technique,” Shona said. “They’re both recent, I’d say. A few days at most.”

  Logan nodded. “That’s useful. Thanks. Are those the two things you said you’d found?”

  “No. I counted them both as one. The other thing is much more interesting,” Shona said. “Come and take a look at this.”

  She led him over to a neighbouring table, where a sealed plastic tub contained something gelatinous and horrifying.

  “Christ,” Logan muttered. “Tell me that’s not your lunch.”

  “No. Actually, it’s his. Stomach contents,” Shona told him. “Nothing too unusual, really. He eats a lot of fibre, so he probably kept pretty regular. He’d likely have gone on to lead quite a long, healthy life, if it wasn’t for the whole inconvenience of being murdered and having his head cut off.”

  “Aye, that puts a cramp in your style, right enough,” Logan said. “So, what am I looking at?”

  “What I want to show you isn’t actually in there anymore, I just wanted to gross you out a bit,” Shona said with a smirk. She produced a small plastic bag. Something metallic nestled down at one corner.

  Logan studied the bag and its contents, the lines of his forehead furrowing into a series of parallel letter Vs. “This was in his stomach?”

  “Yep.”

  Logan held her gaze for a moment, like she might be about to tell him why it had been there. But she couldn’t tell him that, of course. How could she? Like him, she had absolutely no idea.

  He looked over at the headless body on the table, then back to the metal item in the bag.

  It was a key. A small silver key, like the sort of thing that would fit the lock of a window or a filing cabinet.

  “Aye, you’re right,” Logan muttered, holding the bag up to the light. “This is much more interesting.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Ross Lyndsay sat at one end of an L-shaped couch, nursing the mug of tea that Sinead had made for him and staring blankly down at the patch of carpet between his feet.

  “Dead?” he said, for about the fifth or sixth time now. “Like… dead dead? Proper, actual dead dead?”

  “I’m afraid so, Mr Lyndsay,” Sinead confirmed. Again.

  She was sitting towards the middle of the couch, while Hamza perched at the far end, like they were scared the whole thing might tip over if they didn’t evenly distribute their weight.

  “Can you tell us when you last saw Fergus?” Hamza asked. It was the second time he’d asked the question. In hindsight, he probably should’ve waited for Ross to stop crying before he’d asked the first time.

  “What? Oh. Aye. Yesterday. Morning. Before we left for school.”

  “You both work at the school?” Sinead asked.

  “Yes. No. He’s a teacher.”

  “At the local school?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. At the secondary school down in Fort William. Lochaber High.”

  Sinead’s mouth formed a little circle of surprise at the mention of her old secondary. “Oh. Right. What did he teach?”

  “PE.”

  “Was he quite new, then?” Sinead asked, having mentally run through all the PE staff who’d been teaching when she’d been there, and drawn a blank at anyone named Mr Forsyth.

  Ross sniffed. His eyes were ringed with red from his initial reaction to the news, and the way his bottom lip was wobbling suggested they weren’t past the crying phase yet.

  “Yes. Two years. Or… I’m not sure. Longer, probably. Time goes so fast, doesn’t it?”

  Sinead just smiled sadly in reply to his question. “We’ll check with the school,” she said. “So, you last saw him yesterday morning?”

  A nod in response. A brief raising of the eyes to meet hers.

  “How did he seem?”

  “Fine. No different to usual, really.”

  “Not stressed, or worried about anything?”

  “Not that he let on to me, no,” Ross said. “We just sort of passed each other by, really. Quick hello when he was coming out of the bathroom and I was going in, then he said he’d see me later as he was heading out the door. He leaves much earlier than me. Got further to go.”

  “Aye. Quite a trek from here to LHS and back every day,” Sinead said. “Couldn’t he find somewhere closer?”

  “Not when he first started. Rental market down there is in a right state,” Ross explained. “And he landed a part-time job up here at the hotel in the evenings, so when he saw I had a room for rent, he jumped at it. Been here ever since. He has a motorbike, so he can make the trip pretty quickly.”

  “What does he do at the hotel?” Hamza asked.

  “Bar, mostly. Sometimes through in the kitchen with me, if we’re stretched. Two or three nights a week, just. Bit of pocket money, he always said.” Ross sagged back into the couch. The cushions almost devoured his diminutive frame. “What happened to him? Can I ask that? Are you allowed to say?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t say too much at this stage, Mr Lyndsay, no,” Sinead told him. “Does he have any family you know of? Next of kin?”

  Ross shook his head. “He never mentioned anyone. No one alive, anyway. I think his parents are dead. I know his mum is. She died shortly before he moved up. I think his dad died when he was much younger.”

  “Do you have an old address for him?” Hamza asked.

  Another shake of the head. “No, I—Oh. Wait. I got him to fill in an application form thing before he moved in.” He held his mug in one raised hand and used the other to shuffle himself forward until his feet reached the floor. “You’ve got to keep it official, haven’t you? Got to do the paperwork. Judge Rinder says that on the telly. And he’s a judge, so I suppose he should know.”

  Ross took a drink of his tea, then set the mug down on a coaster on the coffee table. “Hang o
n, it’s all in a box file in my bedroom. Won’t be a minute.”

  The detectives shifted their legs to let him pass, then listened to the pitter-patter of his little feet as he walked along the hall and into a room at the far end.

  Hamza turned to Sinead, and she could guess what he was going to ask before he opened his mouth. “Is he a dwarf?” the DS whispered. “I mean, he doesn’t look like a dwarf—he’s in proportion, and everything—but… What height do you have to be under to be considered a dwarf?”

  “I don’t know. Five feet?” Sinead guessed.

  There was a faint thump from along the hall. Like a cupboard door was being closed.

  “Is he less than five feet?” Hamza wondered. He brought out his phone and tapped the screen. “I’m going to Google it.”

  “How will Google know how tall he is? It’s clever, but I don’t think it’s that clever.”

  “I’m Googling how short you need to be before you’re considered… Four foot ten,” he said, turning the screen to show Sinead, in case she was thinking of doubting him. “You’re a dwarf if you’re under four foot ten. He’s under four foot ten, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know,” Sinead replied. She looked out into the hallway and along the corridor.

  “I bet he is. How can we measure him?” Hamza asked.

  “You’re a Detective Sergeant in the police,” Sinead reminded him. “You can’t go around measuring dwarfs.”

  “No, but you could.”

  Sinead tried to subdue a half-laugh. “Sorry, you’ve got the wrong DC with you. I’m sure Tyler would be right up for it, but you’re shit out of luck with me, Sarge.”

  “Dammit. You’re no fun,” Hamza tutted. “And don’t call me ‘Sarge.’”

  “Is that an order?” Sinead asked. She knew how much Hamza’s promotion still bothered him, and how uncomfortable it made him when his higher rank was pointed out. Tyler had turned it into an art form, and the rest of the team contributed as and when they could.