Final Cut

by Lin Anderson

  The knife point had finally broken the skin. Claire watched as a trickle of blood ran over her wrist, then released the blade and threw it into the sink.

  She would not go back there. She would not walk through that black tunnel again. She had not been to blame. She swallowed the rest of the wine in the glass, then washed the knife and put it back in the drawer. The wound on her wrist was barely visible.

  Claire set about making a salad. They would eat the meal in front of the television. She didn’t want to sit opposite her daughter at the kitchen table and worry about what Emma was thinking.

  When the news came on, Claire tried to switch channels, but Emma protested loudly enough for Claire to relent. There was very little on the remains. Just that they had been confirmed as human and were those of a child. No gender had been established. Forensic experts were studying material taken from the site to try to establish how long the body had lain there.

  The next story involved a soldier gone AWOL and the possibility a body found in a burned-out skip might be that of Private Fergus Morrison. The police were looking for any information relating to the incident at a civic dump on Sunday evening.

  Claire switched channels, looking for anything that didn’t involve violence or death.

  ‘Can I go upstairs now?’ Emma gave her a pointed look.

  ‘It’s warmer down here. Why don’t you put on a DVD.’

  The girl was staring at her again.

  ‘I’d rather go upstairs.’

  Claire decided to tell her about the woman on the phone.

  ‘She’s coming to see me?’

  ‘She wants you to walk through the woods with her, in case it helps you remember anything more.’

  Emma’s face lit up. ‘Will Michael be there?’

  ‘Probably.’

  The girl stood for a moment, a small smile playing on her lips, then regarded her mother. ‘Would you like to watch Pirates of the Caribbean with me?’

  ‘I’d love to.’ Claire tried to keep the relief from her voice. ‘I’ll clear up and come straight through.’

  As she rinsed the dishes and stacked them, she watched the reflection of her daughter in the darkness of the window. Not for the first time, she wondered what her relationship with Nick had done to Emma. She couldn’t take that time back, no matter how much she wanted to. It was over now and they would both have to live with the consequences.

  She refilled her wineglass, then corked the bottle.

  ‘Hurry up, Mummy.’

  Claire checked that the back door was locked, then did the same at the front. They were miles from anywhere, she reminded herself. No one knew they were here. No one that mattered.

  Claire entered the warmth of the sitting room and nestled down on the couch beside her precious daughter.

  17

  He got lucky on the third phone call. The scrapyard did have a Peugeot Estate, blue, just in.

  ‘Went off the road and hit a tree, back’s smashed, but it’s got some nice pieces on it.’

  He thanked the guy and said he’d be round in an hour.

  ‘No problem, mate, but if someone strips it before you arrive, it’s not my fault.’

  He bit back a sharp reply and rang off. He could feel his temples throb as the blood rushed to his head. This had to be the one. It wasn’t the nearest salvage yard to the crash, but it was close enough.

  He took his time getting ready, ignoring the warning from the idiot on the phone. Stripping the car of its hubcaps and badge was not the purpose of his visit.

  He chose a black waterproof hooded jacket with multiple pockets, a hat and a pair of leather gloves. With the hat pulled down and the hood up, there wouldn’t be much of his face to see. On the way to the front door, he lifted the route map from the printer. He entered the workshop and headed for the small room at the back where he picked up evidence bags and a couple of pairs of latex gloves.

  Outside, the wind cut through him like a knife.

  He checked in the boot of the car for the toolbox and selected a couple of screwdrivers. He wanted to look the part. He slid into the driver’s seat. The distant hills were frosted with white, but the sky was clear of the promised snow.

  He switched on the radio and flicked through for news bulletins, but there was nothing more on the human remains story. He reminded himself that a child’s bones lying that long in the open would be fragmented. They wouldn’t even be able to tell whether it was a boy or a girl. He prided himself on knowing these things, although even he was amazed at what had developed in the last few years. That was the problem. The measures he had taken to protect himself then might not be enough to shield him now.

  The street outside the salvage yard was lined with cars. He drove past and went looking for a space farther on. After spotting a CCTV camera, he ignored the parking on the main street and drove round until he found a space in front of a row of tenements.

  It took ten minutes to walk back to the yard. He hung around outside then followed another two men on their way in. He made a point of not asking for the location of the blue Peugeot. Better to find it for himself. He followed a younger bloke who eventually veered off towards a black Fiat Punto with fancy hubcaps, just short of what looked like the Peugeot.

  The man on the phone had been right, the car was a mess. He checked the number plate first, making a note of it. The back was completely bashed in, the roof dented where it had flipped over. He pulled open the driver’s door and manoeuvred himself inside, then replaced the leather gloves with the latex ones. This was the moment he loved. It would have been even better had he been in a position to wear a forensic suit. He’d considered passing himself off as a SOCO who’d come for another look at the car, but had decided against drawing attention to himself. As far as the yard were concerned, he was just another punter looking for cheap rip-offs from banged-up cars.

  He sat for a moment breathing in the scent of the car’s interior. It smelled of female with no hint of cigarette smoke. That pleased him. When he got up close to her he didn’t want her stale breath taking the enjoyment away.

  A wave of pleasure rippled through him when he spotted dried blood above the windscreen. So she’d been hurt. He checked for more, finding what looked like splashes on the dashboard and the door, but not enough to suggest the bitch had been seriously injured.

  He swivelled round to inspect the back and spotted the child booster seat for the first time. For a moment the breath left his body. When he’d seen the startled face in the windscreen, there had been no one in the passenger seat, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been a kid in the back.

  He ran his eyes over the seat, chastising himself for not bringing a kit with him to test properly for blood. There was a darkened spot on the side wing. He hesitated for a moment, then rubbed his latex finger across the stain and licked it, tasting the crusty metallic flavour.

  There had been someone else in the car when it went off the road. A child. His heart sped up to match his rising excitement. So there were two of them to deal with. He contemplated the seat. It was the type made for older children, say five to ten.

  He felt around under the seat and found a plastic hair clip in the shape of a flower with a few strands of white-blonde hair attached. He sniffed the clasp, catching the scent of shampoo. He took an evidence bag from his pocket and slipped the clasp and hair strands inside. The bitch had a daughter. This was getting better all the time.

  He began to go systematically through the various compartments, dashboard first, then door pockets. The car hadn’t been cleaned for a while. He pulled out a newspaper dated a month earlier from under the seat and two empty crisp bags, cheese-and-onion flavour. The glove compartment held crumpled tissues. He extracted these and dropped them into an evidence bag. Below was a lipstick called Pink Spice, a brush bound around with medium-length brown hairs and a map of the Glasgow area. He put the make-up and hairbrush in separate bags.

  At the very bottom of the glove compartment was the instruction
book for the car. Two phone numbers were written on the front page. He made a note of both.

  He slid over to the passenger seat and directed his search under it, where he found half a packet of Loveheart sweets and a Tesco receipt for £63.24. He ran his eye down the list of groceries, which included a bottle of decent red wine. She’d paid the bill with a debit card and had amassed 346 points.

  His last find was a pair of well-worn black slip-on shoes with a small bow. He eye-measured the shoe size against his own and decided she was probably around a UK six. He extracted a larger bag from his pocket, put the shoes inside and popped the sweets in with the crisp packets. The receipt he put in his wallet.

  Through the windscreen he spotted the young guy approaching carrying a pair of hubcaps from the Fiat Punto. He slipped on the leather gloves and busied himself with one of the screwdrivers. His concern was unnecessary. The guy passed him by without a second glance.

  He waited for a moment before pocketing the leather gloves, then began systematically going through every compartment and door pocket one more time, just in case. He was running his hand along the underside of the driver’s seat when he felt a piece of paper jammed beneath the metal frame.

  He eased it free and pulled it out, his heart beating wildly.

  Bingo.

  The crushed Christmas card envelope was addressed to a Mrs C. Watson.

  He allowed himself a smile.

  He had found the bitch.

  18

  The thing you noticed first about Ivan Solonik were his hands. Disproportionally large for his squat, broad-chested body, they seemed to possess a life of their own.

  Solonik’s hands were what worried Brogan, that and his tiny brain. Brogan would be the first to admit that in most circumstances the pea-brain didn’t matter. It was the hands that counted. Stories abounded about those hands and what Solonik could do with them. Snap a neck like a dry twig. Gouge out your eyes with those thick, blunt-ended fingers. Beat your kidneys to a pulp.

  Brogan believed Solonik’s hands capable of doing all those things and more. His own men, born and brought up in the less salubrious areas of the city, possessed many skills suited to Brogan’s line of work. The Glasgow underworld was a good training ground, but couldn’t compare to being a member of a Russian mafia gang.

  The hands hung at Solonik’s side like haunches of red ham. Brogan had witnessed them punching a head until the skull cracked and splintered, then snapping the neck just to make sure. He could hear the sound even now in his own head. Jesus, nothing could survive those hands.

  Brogan hadn’t wanted Solonik around, but the pea-brain had been part of the deal. He was there to keep an eye on Brogan, make sure the ‘partnership’ went smoothly. Prokhorov’s words, not Brogan’s. Brogan wondered once again whether he had got in above his head. But hey, this was the new world. If you didn’t cooperate with The Organisation you didn’t do business.

  Brogan tried to focus his attention on the latest shipment details laid out on his desk, but Solonik’s presence made it difficult. The guy had this quality of silence. He could stand next to you like a statue for hours on end. You couldn’t hear him breathe. Christ, the bastard didn’t even fart. Brogan wanted to tell Solonik to take an hour off, go eat, fuck one of the girls, but he didn’t speak any Russian.

  He made an eating gesture at Solonik, then a sexual one, the same in any language. Solonik just stared through him. Brogan gave up and poured himself a drink from the open bottle on his desk. Vodka. Sixty per cent proof. One small and powerful compensation for having Solonik around.

  Brogan ran his eyes over the list of munitions. It was just like old times in Northern Ireland before peace broke out and put him out of business. Assault rifles, grenades, missile launchers, automatic rifles. Just one small part of the burgeoning Russian–Scottish enterprise. Weapons, prostitution, drugs, extortion, gambling – the money was rolling in. Developing ways to launder it was the real challenge. It was easier now for the police to confiscate the proceeds of crime. The drug barons kept their bank accounts empty and no money stashed under the bed. They invested it instead: property, expensive restaurants, chic nightclubs. The nouveaux riches of the Merchant City liked to spend their money and they needed places like the Poker Club to spend it in. Glasgow was the new Dublin, upwardly mobile, looking for fun.

  To keep control of the business, Brogan needed munitions. With the Russians moving in, the knife was no longer the weapon of choice. Brogan had set up a nice little business to supply his troops courtesy of Her Majesty’s forces. A couple of disgruntled soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Scotland, pissed off at being shafted by the government, had decided to stash away a nest egg for their retirement, if they reached it alive. In the mess that was the current supply chain in the British Army, it was easy to remove some weapons from use and send them north of the border.

  He poured another shot of vodka. Solonik’s massive bulk shifted almost imperceptibly. Was it a warning gesture to indicate he was watching Brogan’s alcohol consumption? Brogan swallowed the shot and rose from his seat, indicating he was going for a piss. Solonik lumbered out of his way.

  Brogan closed the cubicle door behind him. This was the only place he could escape Solonik’s beady eye. Christ, even when he was fucking, the man mountain stood outside the door.

  ‘For your protection,’ Prokhorov had told him. ‘People want me dead. You work with me, so they want you dead too.’

  Brogan didn’t buy that. Solonik wasn’t his bodyguard, he was his minder, making sure he didn’t get too big for his Glasgow boots.

  His piss hit the pan in a cloud of steam. He imagined it hitting the big Russian’s face after he’d stuck a knife through his kidneys.

  Solonik was in trouble. He just didn’t know it yet. Brogan pulled the tabloid newspaper cutting from his inside pocket. AWOL soldier burned to death in skip. The tabloids always got things wrong.

  With the inside information he had, it wasn’t hard to figure out why. Someone had found the body at the dump and used it to try to cover their own disappearance. Clever, but not foolproof. Still, if it worked it meant Solonik was off the hook for the killing and Brogan didn’t want that. He wanted that hook right in the bastard’s gullet. He wanted Solonik reined in and disposed of, off his back for good.

  He just hadn’t decided how to go about it – yet.

  19

  Rhona glanced at the clock. McNab had left the lab two hours ago. She swivelled her head, trying to relieve the tension in the back of her neck. If Sean had been here, he would have massaged her shoulders to help her relax. But he wasn’t here. Rhona tested her reaction to that, much as she had been doing for months, and decided she liked being on her own – most of the time.

  The routine of sieving soil could be therapeutic. A bit like gardening, she thought. Her father had been a keen gardener. As a child she’d taken the well-tended garden for granted, assuming its beauty would be there for ever. But nothing lasted for ever. Her father’s garden in Skye was grassed over now, a victim of her neglect.

  She lifted another bag of soil, noting the details on the label which indicated the grid location and depth of the sample. She emptied the material into the sieve and began to agitate it. She had returned to this job on McNab’s departure. The discovery of human remains was a cold case that could last for months or even years. The skip fire should take precedence, yet talking to McNab and then to Emma’s mother had served to make this case feel more immediate.

  The initial sieving of soil normally identified larger items, but in this case there had been none in the top level. No bottle tops, ring-pulls or the other debris you found in more urban settings. Worm action often resulted in the redistribution of items in the soil, so the depth of an object didn’t necessarily indicate when an item had been deposited.

  The finer soil had percolated through. Rhona examined the remnants that lay on the fine mesh, spreading it out with her latex-covered finger. There was a fragment of glass, so small as to
be almost invisible. She extracted it and took it over to a high-powered microscope.

  Under magnification she could make out the orange-red colour and the splinter-like shape. As trace evidence went, glass could be useful. Perpetrators of crimes, particularly burglary, didn’t realise that they carried microscopic particles of the glass they’d shattered on their clothes and in their hair.

  An analysis of the chemical content and refractive index of the glass could give an indication of what it had been used for. Coloured glass tended to be more identifiable than ordinary glass owing to the mineral content that produced its colour. Glass manufacturers each had their own glass recipe, just as paint manufacturers created their own unique paint.

  Rhona’s stomach was reminding her just how long it had been since she’d eaten the borscht. She decided to finally call it a day and go home. The prospect of another microwave ready-made meal didn’t appeal, so she bought a pizza on the way.

  Tom met her at the door, winding himself round her legs, nearly upending her and the precious cardboard box. She quickly fed him, feeling guilty at how long she’d kept him waiting. She would have to buy one of those bowls with a timer, set to release food at regular intervals.

  Rhona walked through the flat, putting on lights and turning up the heating. This was the moment in her day when living alone didn’t appeal as much. She allowed herself to remember how it had been when Sean was here – the scent of cooking when she’d opened the front door, the sound of a human voice calling out to her – then recalled how often she’d welcomed the realisation that Sean had left for work and the flat was empty.

  ‘There’s no pleasing you,’ she muttered to herself. She shoved the pizza in the oven to keep it warm while she showered and changed.

  Eating alone at the kitchen table had become something she’d avoided since Sean had left. These days she preferred to eat in the sitting room with the TV for company.

  She fetched her notes for next day’s court appearance and read them while she ate. It seemed an open-and-shut case. Mary had heard a noise in her hall and gone to investigate. Her attacker, a young man high on drugs and alcohol, had beaten her to death. His defence was that he had stumbled into the wrong flat and in the darkened hall had been attacked by the flat’s occupant. He’d hit her only in self-defence. Not a bad attempt at getting off with murder. He wasn’t denying that he’d entered the flat. He was just denying that he’d attacked Mary on purpose. The problem lay in his assertion that the hall had been in darkness throughout, preventing him from realising how badly hurt the occupant was.