by Lin Anderson
McNab graciously accepted her dismissal. She got the feeling that, like her, he was going home to an empty flat.
6
Rhona turned on the shower and stepped beneath the jet. A stream of sooty black water streaked her body. She tipped up her face and rinsed out her mouth. This must be what firemen felt like all the time, she thought – blackened inside and out.
Tom the kitten was mewing just outside the cubicle. She could see his silhouette through the glass. She had fed him as soon as she’d arrived home, so it was company he was after.
A shower, food, drink and a seat by the fire was what Rhona herself craved. Company she could do without, although she would make an exception for Tom.
Dried off and wearing a dressing gown and slippers, Rhona opened the freezer compartment. She was down to two ready meals. Chicken and vegetables or vegetables and chicken. She stuck the plastic container in the microwave and checked in the fridge for wine. An opened bottle of white stood in the door.
Rhona poured a glass and headed for the sitting room. The central heating had come on some time earlier. The room wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm either. Rhona shut the curtains and lit the gas fire, watching the flames lick at the coals. She rooted about on the sofa, found the remote and switched on the TV, flicking through channels for a news update. There was plenty on the storm, but nothing about the skip fire.
A ping from the microwave sent her back to the kitchen. She heaped the hot food on to a plate and took it back to the fireside. Tom curled up on her lap as soon as she sat down, so Rhona held the plate above his purring body and ate with a fork.
She would have to write up her notes after the meal. She usually liked to do it in the incident tent. It was well lit and nobody interrupted her there. Chrissy thought the practice weird – sitting writing next to a dead body – but Rhona found it strangely peaceful. There had been no opportunity to do that in the skip.
The flat settled into silence, with only the faint hiss of the gas fire. She gently transferred Tom to a cushion and began her notes.
She clicked through the series of digital photographs she’d taken for her own use. To an untrained eye, the sequence of images looked like the work of a twisted mind. Grotesque pictures of discrete parts of the body, burned and broken. The gaping neck, the claw-like hands. Rhona studied the neck images first, then moved to the hands. The lower part of the body was virtually unmarked, protected perhaps by layers of cardboard.
Rhona switched to video mode and ran through the clip she’d taken of each hand. She paused then replayed. A characteristic feature of bodies exposed to intense heat is heat-stiffening, the pugilistic attitude caused by coagulation of the muscles, giving the impression of a boxer.
Death by fire was not a popular suicide method – too slow and painful. Dousing yourself with petrol was faster but no less agonising. Homicide by fire was also unusual, but using fire to disguise a death wasn’t.
Rhona went back to the photographs taken of the neck region. She downloaded them to her laptop and magnified them. Now she could make out the hyoid bone amid the burnt muscle and flesh. There was what looked like a fracture on the left-hand side of the horseshoe shape. Rhona flipped through the other images, looking for confirmation. Another told the same story. The hyoid was the only bone in the skeleton that didn’t articulate with another bone. It was supported by muscle only. For the bone to break would take intense pressure, such as that applied by a ligature. Maybe the soldier hadn’t died accidentally after all.
The final photograph she’d taken was of the upper body. Here the clothes had been burned away, leaving raw skin exposed. On one shoulder was what looked like the remains of a tattoo. Rhona magnified the image. It wasn’t the usual girl’s name or motto. If she were to take a guess, she would have said it looked like a rose.
Rhona forced herself awake and lay frozen, her heart hammering, bile filling her mouth. This was what sleep had become. The smothering fear, the taste of his coated tongue, the weight of his body pressing down on her, preventing her from breathing.
She stared into thick darkness, knowing she should have left on the light, that it was inevitable that this would happen.
‘I am alone. I am safe.’ Rhona repeated the mantra, waiting for her body to respond to the whispered words. Eventually her semi-paralytic state began to ease. She sat up and reached for the light switch.
The room sprang into life in front of her. Rhona took her time, absorbing its comforting familiarity before swinging her legs out of bed and heading for the shower.
She switched on the water and stepped under before it had time to warm up, gasping as the icy needles hit her head and shoulders. She reached for the nail brush and began to scrub her arms and upper chest methodically. Her skin reddened in angry protest at the onslaught, but the pain brought a form of absolution. Her heart began to slow. Her chest loosened its tight grip on her lungs and she was able to breathe more easily.
The water was warmer now. Rhona took the soap and smothered her body in lather, breathing in the strong scent, replacing that other smell. She knew that the scrubbing and washing were becoming obsessional, but it was the only thing that worked.
The final stage of the ritual was the mouthwash. Rhona poured a capful and took it into her mouth, holding it there until her tongue burned. Only then did she creep back into bed and huddle beneath the duvet.
Her mobile woke her at seven. It was McNab.
‘OK to pick you up?’
Rhona had fallen asleep at around four, which felt like five minutes ago.
‘What?’ She struggled to get her brain working.
‘The deposition site. The skull?’
‘It’s not even light yet.’
‘The snow’s melted but there’s more forecast. I’d rather get going while the ground’s clear.’
‘OK. Give me an hour.’
‘You don’t need that long. You don’t even shave.’
‘Who says?’
They compromised on forty-five minutes. McNab was there in forty. Rhona was on her second cup of coffee when the buzzer sounded.
‘I’ll be right down.’
‘I’m on a yellow line.’
‘You’re OK until eight thirty.’
Rhona grabbed her camera and forensic case and hurried downstairs. She could sense McNab’s agitation as she slipped into the passenger seat beside him.
‘I planned to spend today in the lab. All the stuff from the skip fire …’
He cut her off. ‘Chrissy can do that.’
‘Is Bill coming down?’
‘He’s been told to stay at the station,’ McNab said sharply.
Which probably meant the super was planning to talk to him. Rhona decided to return to the original subject. She was aware how concerned McNab was but nothing they said here could help the DI anyway. She waited until McNab had drawn into the traffic then asked him about the skull.
‘The kid said she found it in a pile of brushwood. The area is a managed forest, a mix of natural and planted trees. Mostly pine but some birch and larch. They trim back and stack the offcuts together to rot. There was a pile of the stuff next to her.’
His jaw was set. Rhona had a feeling there was something he wasn’t telling her.
‘Old photographs of the area would help,’ she said. ‘If it’s managed woodland there would probably be some available from around the time they started to plant. Did the skull have mud inside?’
‘Is that important?’
‘It might indicate if it had been moved.’
McNab gave her a funny look.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The kid kept saying them. Like there was more than one. She said she heard them calling her.’
‘Heard them?’
‘She was frightened and her mother said she had a vivid imagination.’ McNab sounded as though he was trying to convince himself. ‘But there was a strange noise.’
‘It was blowing a gale,’ Rhona said, then relen
ted when she saw him scowl. ‘What kind of noise?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It just sounded weird.’
They had left the city and were passing through moorland, patches of it still white with snow. Completely exposed, it must have been a difficult road to negotiate in a storm. Even now in daylight it looked desolate. Last night it must have seemed like the end of the world.
The wood was a welcome relief. Stark grey skeletons of silver birch stood among more mature evergreens. A steep bank on the left-hand side dropped to the forest floor. On the right the trees climbed towards an escarpment. A mile in, Rhona saw R2S’s Mobile Response Unit parked by the side of the road.
‘The cavalry have arrived,’ said McNab.
Rhona supervised the sectioning of the site into metre squares while McNab worked out a way to protect it from the elements.
The MRU had the camera set up to take a 360-degree spherical image of the area. The result would be fed into software that would dynamically integrate all crime scene information – maps of the area, forensic notes, post-mortem findings, DNA and fingerprint results. McNab and his team would have twenty-four-hour access to the material via phone or PDA. Results on DNA or fingerprints would be texted to him if or when they were identified.
Despite the high-tech equipment, this would be a slow, laborious job. A body left above ground could be scattered over a wide area. Wild animals tended to attack the soft tissue first, especially for winter food – fingers, toes, cheeks and lips. Once defleshed, the skeleton was liable to be broken up. Larger animals went after the marrow from the long bones and smaller creatures would drag bits down holes.
An initial search of the area under the tree had revealed nothing. Rhona was now concentrating on the pile of branches where Emma claimed she’d found the skull.
The brushwood had definitely been there for a considerable amount of time. It was partly rotten and woven together with dark green moss and pale lichen. There was an opening near the right-hand side, as if someone or something had disturbed it. Rhona called Roy over and asked for a 3D recording before she started to dismantle it.
Roy Hunter was a former DCI who’d discovered that golf and sailing weren’t enough to occupy him in his retirement. A keen interest in computers had resulted in the creation of Return 2 Scene, the kind of investigative software only a serious police professional could have developed. He was also an old friend of Rhona’s, having been in charge of forensic support services for a decade.
‘How come you look younger every time we meet?’ Rhona laughed.
‘There is life after retirement.’
‘But you’re still working.’
‘Yeah, but I’m my own boss.’
‘Maybe I should try that?’
‘I can get you plenty of work if you do.’
Rhona acknowledged Roy’s offer with a smile, then knelt by the rotting branches. ‘The kid says she found the skull in here. I need a full recording before I take it apart.’
‘No problem.’
Rhona stood aside while the camera captured the structure from all angles. When she was satisfied they had enough footage, she called McNab over.
‘The tent will have to be low to get under the tree,’ he said.
‘I can cope.’
Once the tent was up, Rhona set to work. Inside the blue cocoon she felt at ease. On jobs like this time passed by unnoticed. Patience was essential. If there were remains, it was important they weren’t disturbed.
In the confined space, shielded from the elements, Rhona could smell the pungent aromas of wet wood, earth and rotting vegetation. It was a pleasant scent with nothing sinister about it, even though this place could turn out to be someone’s grave.
Lying alongside it, Rhona directed her torch into the hole. The structure appeared to be supported by the crumbling remains of a thicker log. Below lay the detritus left by decay. Among it, the concentrated beam picked out what looked like fragments of bone.
Rhona began to grid the structure. When taken apart and recorded correctly, the heap would reveal a great deal about what had happened in this wood since the body had been dumped here. Each layer would tell its own story. Mosses, grass seeds and species of tree would indicate how the mound had been constructed over time. It might also reveal traces of the person who had dumped the body in the first place.
She carefully began to remove branches, taking before and after photographs from all angles. Rhona liked this sort of work. She loved the quiet, concentrated attention to detail. It was like opening a multi-wrapped present, each layer as interesting and enticing as the last.
The only sound in the tent was her breath against the mask. The wind had dropped, and in the shelter of the trees there was no movement of air.
She was at the lower layers now. More heavily rotted, their underlying sides thick with moss, they crumbled under her touch, forcing wood ants to abandon their honeycomb of passages to run over her latex gloves.
Rhona switched to trowelling, sieving each portion of wood mulch for smaller items before bagging it for further investigation in the lab.
Looking at the emerging collection of bones, Rhona was in no doubt that they formed part of a small human skeleton. She began ticking off each bone on the skeleton recording sheet, already knowing it was incomplete, unsurprisingly given its relatively exposed position. When she had completed her check, she knelt in a moment in contemplative silence before she called for McNab.
He entered the tent and stood next to her, his tall frame bent under the low roof.
‘A child?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘How long do you think it’s been there?’
Rhona shook her head. ‘I’ll have to take a look at the vegetation cover before I hazard a guess. Above ground like this a child’s skeleton would deteriorate quickly.’
‘A private estate apparently passed ownership of the wood to the local council twelve years ago, to be used as amenity woodland.’
‘That could help with the time frame.’
‘You’re sure there’s only one?’
Rhona showed McNab the recording sheet. ‘We’re missing a few bones, but there are no duplicates.’
A sudden breeze plucked at the tent, rippling the plastic. Rhona heard a faint humming noise amid the creak of branches overhead.
‘That’s it,’ McNab said animatedly. ‘That’s the sound I heard last night.’
They ducked outside. The wind was coming in gusts, swaying the upper branches of the circling pines. Rhona could hear a high-pitched whine.
‘D’you hear it?’ asked McNab.
The sound rose and split into something resembling a musical chord. It was eerily compelling. Rhona looked up, searching the branches for whatever was making the increasingly familiar sound. She had definitely heard something like it before.
Then she remembered. When she was a child on Skye, a New Age enthusiast, escaping from city life, had come to live near by. She’d been fascinated by a large wooden structure he’d built in his back garden. It had been designed like a tunnel. Standing inside, listening to its music, was weird and unsettling, yet at the same time magical.
‘I think it’s a wind harp.’
McNab looked perplexed.
‘A structure that resonates in the wind to make a kind of music.’
Now that she knew what she was looking for, it was easier to spot.
‘Up there,’ she told McNab.
The tree was an ancient pine that had survived from some earlier forest. In its uppermost branches was a wooden construction, smaller than the one Rhona’s neighbour had made. Paler in colour than the bark, it was narrow with holes at various positions.
‘Who put that there?’
‘Maybe the local council, as part of the woodland experience. Maybe just someone who likes wind harps.’
As the wind lifted, the sound rose to pulsate around them. ‘I think Emma probably followed that sound,’ said Rhona.
McNab looked r
elieved that the girl’s story might have a logical explanation, which surprised Rhona. She hadn’t taken McNab for the superstitious kind. They had worked together on a voodoo case and McNab had openly ridiculed the notion of witchcraft. Rhona suspected that finding a lost child in this wood nursing a skull would have spooked anyone, even him.
‘I’d check with the council. See if the wind harp’s theirs,’ Rhona suggested. ‘If it is, they’ll have a record of its installation. Might help again with our time frame.’
Rhona returned to the relative silence of the tent. Now the skeleton was exposed and recorded, she could lift it and transport it to the lab. After that she would concentrate on excavating below the remains until she reached the undisturbed layers. Rhona set to work.
7
‘Is there anyone who could keep an eye on you?’
‘I’ve got good neighbours.’ Claire didn’t mention the fact that the nearest was a mile and a half away. ‘But I’m not sure how we’ll get home.’
‘You could wait for an ambulance, but that might take a while.’ Dr Spence looked apologetic.
‘It’s OK. We’ll manage.’
‘I’ll let your local GP know. He’ll want a look at that head wound in a couple of days.’
Free of the consultant, Claire checked her wallet for the emergency breakdown number. Thank God someone had thought to remove her handbag from the wreck and send it in the ambulance with her. Claire had a suspicion it had been her rescuer. She silently vowed never to talk disparagingly about ‘white van man’ again.
Her mobile proved useless, either damaged by the crash or out of battery, so Claire asked the nurse whether she could use the ward phone.
The emergency number rang for a long time, and Claire was glad she wasn’t on a cold lonely road in the middle of a storm. When a woman finally responded, Claire explained the situation. The woman tutted sympathetically.
‘Our garden shed blew down. It was a terrible night.’
Claire gave her the whereabouts of the car.
‘We’ll pick it up and supply a replacement.’
If the woman had been in the room, Claire would have kissed her.
‘Can someone bring the car to the hospital? My daughter isn’t well enough for me to come to you.’