The Reborn

by Lin Anderson

  But you couldn’t get away from the fact that he was a murderer. Like similar killers Magnus had interviewed, on first acquaintance Coulter appeared friendly, solicitous, even charismatic, especially during his work on the doll. None of that meant he related in any way to Magnus’s understanding of the world.

  When Coulter had finished tidying his workbench, they returned to the interview room and sat down again, this time with a cup of coffee each. Coulter seemed to have something in particular he wanted to say, and while Magnus waited for him to get to the point, he observed the other man’s body language. The intensity of his stare had lessened, but the buzz was still there, together with an underlying eagerness which was currently being suppressed. It could be that it was nothing more than self-importance. There had certainly been an air of showing off in the workroom and Magnus suspected Coulter had rather enjoyed his reaction to the doll. But that was natural enough. People who didn’t mind spiders often took delight in the discomfort of those who were frightened by them. Magnus didn’t care if he shared a room with a spider but he didn’t think he would like to share it with a baby doll. Not one as realistic as Coulter’s. A sudden memory of that life-like face brought another wave of revulsion.

  There was a greasy shine now to Coulter’s skin. The room was warm, but Magnus didn’t think that was the reason. It was excitement that was making the man sweat.

  Coulter spoke quietly, as though he didn’t want his minders to hear. ‘Women write to me in here. Lots of them.’ He shifted slightly in the seat. ‘More now since I started making the dolls.’

  This phenomenon was well documented, particularly among inmates on America’s Death Row. Psychopaths were known to have an uncanny ability to recognise and use the kind of woman who had a powerful need to help or mother others. Such ‘nurturing’ women tended to look for the goodness in people while minimising their faults. Magnus wondered how those who corresponded with Coulter managed to reason away a child murder.

  Coulter resumed his intent stare. ‘One of them, Caroline, suggested I get in touch with you about my diary.’

  ‘Why me?’ Magnus knew his response had been too swift.

  Coulter suppressed a smile. ‘She read about you in the papers.’

  Coulter was waiting for him to ask for more information, relishing his interest. Magnus decided not to indulge him. If he was going to work with this man, then he must be the one in charge. Instead, he decided to indicate the interview was at an end.

  ‘Maybe we can talk about this the next time we meet.’

  He was rewarded by a flicker of annoyance crossing Coulter’s face, then he was all smiles and enthusiasm again.

  ‘I’ll look forward to that.’

  Touché.

  ‘You understand that our next interview will last much longer?’

  ‘Once I finish Jacob, the one I showed you, then I have to start on Melanie, but I should be able to fit you in.’

  Magnus kept his face expressionless. It wouldn’t do to remind Coulter that it was he who had requested this meeting, not Magnus.

  ‘Good.’

  They shook hands, then the minders escorted Coulter from the room.

  Magnus waited, assuming someone would come to collect him. The smell of Coulter’s spicy cologne still hung in the air. It mingled with other scents that the man had carried on his clothes. Paint, varnish, a faint odour of plastic. Magnus longed for Dr Shan and her flowery fragrance to arrive and dispel the memory of Coulter and his doll.

  In truth, he was perplexed by the interview and his response to it. His mind was already analysing this, putting it down to an abhorrence of Coulter’s work on the Reborn.

  But it wasn’t that, not entirely. It was more about the true nature of the man. Psychopaths were routinely branded as ‘evil’ by the policemen who pursued them and the victims that survived an encounter with one. Magnus thought ‘evil’ was less about something present, more about the absence of something. The absence, in essence, of a common humanity.

  Had he been out-manoeuvred, giving Coulter what he had wanted? The inmate had succeeded in generating a meeting with him. He had displayed his new skills to great advantage and shown that it wasn’t a short term commitment. He had even orchestrated what they would discuss the next time they met. Magnus was pondering this when the door opened and Dr Shan appeared, her face a little flushed.

  He rose to greet her as she murmured her apologies at leaving him waiting.

  ‘Please don’t concern yourself. I am aware I’m probably disrupting your schedule.’

  She ushered him out and they were back in the corridor. The earlier scent was still discernible, pleasant and soothing. It prompted Magnus to ask, ‘I wondered if you would be able to spare ten minutes to talk about Mr Coulter?’

  She continued walking alongside him, but Magnus had detected a start as he’d made his request. He also suspected the glance at her watch was just for show. She wasn’t contemplating whether she had the time, but whether she had the inclination.

  ‘If you would like to come to my office, we can talk there.’

  She opened the door on a small but elegantly furnished space. On the wall behind the desk was a print of what looked like a Buddhist woodcut. Dr Shan saw him glance in that direction but said nothing, merely waving him to a seat across the desk from her. The flush had left her cheeks. She looked calm and contained.

  ‘How did the interview go?’

  Magnus decided to be honest. ‘Outwardly well, although I have the feeling I did what he wanted.’

  A smile played at the corners of her lips. ‘Mr Coulter can be very persuasive. On my first interview with him, I realised he knew more about me by the end than I knew about him.’

  Magnus admired her frankness. Exchanging weaknesses had broken the ice.

  ‘He says he corresponds with someone called Caroline.’

  ‘He receives a lot of letters, mostly I believe from women.’

  ‘So you don’t know this Caroline?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You were aware Coulter was keeping a diary?’

  ‘He wrote a lot when he first came in, but showed it to no one.’

  ‘You weren’t curious?’

  ‘Many inmates write their thoughts down. Most of what they write is nonsense linked to their illness.’

  ‘Is Coulter mentally ill?’

  ‘His mental state has responded to medication.’

  ‘He’s got better?’

  ‘He functions well, works hard at his dolls and is no trouble.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘There are no buts.’

  Magnus didn’t believe her.

  ‘Would you like to see the diary after I’ve studied it?’

  ‘We would have to ask Mr Coulter’s permission for that.’

  The barrier was back in place and Magnus wasn’t sure why. Dr Shan rose, clearly intending to terminate the interview. Magnus took his cue from her.

  ‘Thank you again for your help.’

  She gave a little nod, then led him to the door.

  As he drove away, the brooding presence of the building stayed with him until it eventually disappeared from his rear view mirror. Once it was out of sight, he pulled into a lay-by and got out of the car. The wind buffeted him, snatching at his hair and clothes. Magnus breathed in the moorland air, replacing the memory of Coulter’s smell. The sky grew darker and more threatening as he climbed back in the car. Had he had started on a journey he would live to regret?

  5

  The footprint had been a long shot, so long that Rhona had never divulged her attempts at retrieving it to McNab. The chances of lifting anything at all from the trousers worn by the prisoner Bill was accused of attacking had been very slim. If she did succeed, there was no guarantee there would be sufficient in the pattern or deposit for a match. And what if the match had been Bill’s footwear, not McNab’s? Would she have submitted it to the investigating officer, thereby supplying even more evidence against Bill?
>
  She had tried to work on the principle that either man could be lying, Bill to cover up for McNab or McNab to protect his superior officer. The victim of the assault, known as the Gravedigger, had a vested interest in implicating Bill, which is what he had done.

  The Gravedigger’s clothes had been removed and bagged after the alleged assault. There had been no blood, only bruising, the result of a well aimed kick to the testicles. Despite the awkwardness of the situation, the duty officer had quietly insisted that both policemen give up their shoes. And thank God he had.

  At first glance the trousers had shown no evidence of the kick, but an electrostatic image using an aluminium sheet had lifted dust marks invisible to the human eye. The pattern route had been singularly unsuccessful, the partial print an inconclusive match to either man’s shoes. It was her analysis of the dust particles that had pointed to the truth.

  McNab had been in the back of the Gravedigger’s van. Bill had not. McNab had kicked aside rubbish to get at what lay beneath, and he had deposited some of that rubbish on the Gravedigger’s crotch. Microscopic, but without doubt a match. DI Wilson had not kicked the Gravedigger, however much he might have wanted to. McNab had told the truth all along.

  A rush of emotion swept over her. McNab had been desperate to prove that his boss wasn’t guilty of assault. So desperate that many believed he had lied to keep the DI out of trouble, even to the point of ruining his own career.

  There were no shadows in the pristine glare of the laboratory, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t sense McNab’s presence. She glanced up at the door, remembering the way he would always knock before entering her domain; his studied look, the way his mouth would turn up at the corner as he observed her at work. She remembered the last time he’d been here. It was the morning after she’d used him to fill the frightened loneliness of her night. He had replaced bad dreams and memories with something gentle and loving. The next day when he’d turned up here, she had been curt, extinguishing the thinly disguised glimmer of hope. She had told him as far as she was concerned it had never happened. ‘Whatever you want,’ had been his reply, but she had felt his hurt.

  She shook her head to dispel such thoughts and slipped the results back in the folder. She couldn’t bring McNab back to life, but she had done her best to prove his story true. She glanced at the clock. There would be no word back from the court for another hour at least, and she had a post-mortem to attend.

  The victim’s body was regarded as a scene which must be as thoroughly investigated as the locus of the crime. The attending team in Scotland consisted of two pathologists, the investigating officer, on occasion the Procurator Fiscal, and herself.

  When Rhona arrived, DI Slater was already kitted up and waiting to go in. His eyes above the mask regarded her coolly. Slater was used to post-mortems and she had no doubt he would be unfazed by the gruesome nature of this death. For some reason that irritated her. You had to have a certain amount of detachment in this job, if only to survive, but Slater’s attitude smacked of cold disinterest. She had seen it in the last case they’d worked on together. His preoccupation with nailing a high profile Russian gangster with kudos attached had seriously endangered the life of a child. McNab had been the real detective then. Like a terrier he had dug away at the decade-old evidence, never giving up, even when Slater had ordered him to. For Slater, McNab had been a nuisance, despite the eventual proof that the DS’s intuition had been right all along.

  All of which illustrated Slater’s real problem. He didn’t listen, regardless of the quality of the team he had around him.

  Slater appeared to be contemplating a remark, no doubt about the imminent court case, then apparently thought better of it. Rhona busied herself donning the suit and mask. As far as she was concerned, they had nothing to say to one another until the strategy meeting. She certainly wasn’t planning on mentioning the submission of her forensic evidence in support of Bill.

  Dr Sissons acknowledged their entry with a nod. His corroborator today was Dr Sylvia Barnes. Rhona had met her before and they exchanged smiles through the masks. Sylvia was in her thirties, married to an engineer, with young children. Rhona and Sean had had dinner at their family home in Newton Mearns. It had been a pleasant evening, if a little domestic for her taste. It was around the time Sean had fancied himself as a father, particularly when fuelled by whisky. Rhona had feared that freshly bathed and sweet-smelling youngsters coming to say their goodnights to the assembled dinner party would only serve to encourage him. He hadn’t brought the subject up in the taxi on the way back to the flat, but she’d known it was on his mind.

  The other two men were the PF and a SOCO to record the post-mortem via photographs and video. The purpose of the exercise was to establish how the victim had died. A decision on suicide, accident, murder or natural causes was the normal outcome. In many cases, this one included, it seemed a foregone conclusion, but that didn’t matter, the procedure was the same.

  Sissons began sampling the body. Blood, hair (body and head) and swabs from all orifices. Then it was time for the hands. The marks on the palms had not gone unnoticed. Now they were up for discussion. The SOCO took further photographs, while the pathologist verbally recorded their existence. Rhona waited to see if anyone realised what the marks might be, before she asked for a mirror and held it up in front of the right hand.

  ‘It says “daisy”,’ exclaimed Slater.

  Rhona moved the mirror to the left hand. ‘This one says “chain”. The words are in mirror writing. I haven’t processed the material used to write them but I’d hazard a guess and say it was probably a make-up pencil such as kohl.’

  ‘You think this was done by her assailant?’ Slater said.

  ‘It’s not smudged, so she couldn’t have used her hands after the words were written.’

  ‘Daisy chain. Is anyone else thinking what I’m thinking?’ Slater said.

  ‘What exactly are you thinking?’ Sissons’s voice was clipped.

  ‘Daisy chaining. You know. Group sex?’

  Just hearing Slater say ‘sex’ made Rhona shudder. She tried to dispel the image of him indulging in group sex, or any kind of sex for that matter.

  ‘I checked out the term on the internet. It’s quite common. Used often for florists and organisations that involve children. Although DI Slater’s right, it does have strong sexual connotations in some contexts. The mirror writing aspect is even more interesting. Research suggests it’s an inherited ability which very few people have. Leonardo Da Vinci wrote many of his notes that way and it got him into trouble with the Church, because of its satanic associations. And pacts with the devil were traditionally written backwards.’

  ‘You’re suggesting the death has satanic overtones?’ Slater said.

  ‘I’m just telling you what I found.’

  While the scientific officer took finger and handprints, Rhona revealed she’d retrieved coloured fibres or hairs from under a fingernail.

  ‘So which were they, fibres or hairs?’ asked Slater.

  ‘When I’ve had time to examine them, I’ll tell you.’

  She turned her attention to the scientific officer, who was now taking a footprint since Kira had been found with one shoe missing. Rhona was struck by how small the girl’s feet were. Sissons had recorded her height as a little over five feet, but her feet were tiny even for someone that size. She had measured the shoe picked up in the maze as 22 centimetres, which meant Kira wore a 2.5 in British sizing.

  ‘We already know the baby was only a week shy of full term,’ said Rhona.

  Sissons nodded and spoke into the microphone. ‘No bruising on the front of the body, apart from a small pressure mark round the mouth consistent with a mask. Blood tests should reveal whether chloroform was ingested.’

  ‘Would you say her attacker knew what they were doing?’ asked Slater.

  ‘It’s a classical incision. Not the preferred method now, but effective. Yes, I’d say they knew, or made a very good gues
s.’

  Sissons lifted the dark mass of the placenta and weighed it. ‘502 grammes, 21 centimetres long, 2.23 centimetres thick.’ He moved on to the umbilical cord. ‘57 centimetres in length. The end neatly cut.’

  ‘And was the baby likely to be alive when it was born?’ Rhona asked.

  ‘A full term baby would have a strong chance of survival, even under these circumstances.’

  Sissons rolled the body over.

  ‘Is that a tattoo?’ Rhona pointed to a mark at the base of the spine.

  Sissons pulled the overhead light closer. ‘It’s a flower.’

  It was a flower, around two centimetres in diameter, yellow-centred with a cluster of white ray florets, some tipped with red.

  ‘Bellis perennis. An eye of day,’ Rhona said.

  ‘What?’ Slater said.

  ‘A day’s eye, or daisy. So called because it heralds the day.’

  ‘So we have a daisy tattoo and the words “daisy chain” in mirror writing on the hands,’ Slater said.

  The external findings having been recorded, Sissons began to open up the body. The stomach contents, removed and weighed, would end up with Rhona at the lab. At first glance, the meal resembled burger and chips, favourite food of the masses.

  ‘Her boyfriend said she went to buy candyfloss,’ Slater said.

  ‘I don’t see any evidence of that, but Dr MacLeod will confirm.’

  ‘If he’s lying about it, he could be lying about other things.’

  ‘Did he admit to being the father of the child?’ Rhona asked.

  Slater shook his head. ‘He said it wasn’t his, but he didn’t care. Can we confirm this without a baby?’

  ‘I took blood from the umbilical cord,’ replied Rhona. ‘We can use it in a paternity test.’

  ‘So we can tell?’ Slater repeated.

  ‘Yes.’

  The time spent on a post-mortem depended on the pathologist. Each had their own way of working and their own speed. Sissons was neither too fast nor too slow. Despite this, Rhona could sense Slater’s desperation to get away. She had caught a strong smell of cigarette smoke in the changing room. Chances were he just needed a fag. At one point she wondered if Sissons had picked up on this and was deliberately slowing down the proceedings.