‘Crawford—’ Before Monica could say any more he stopped abruptly in front of her and stepped to the side. The slope that the path had been following suddenly fell away to the left. Overhanging them was a cliff face, dug into the hillside.
‘I think it was a quarry,’ he said, pointing to a sight that would have been impossible to miss anyway. They were standing level with the quarry floor. The entire space, at least a hundred feet in width, was filled with rows of wrecked vehicles. Sometimes stacked two or three in height. Monica took in the piles of cars. Some looked new, others had been degraded by rust and vegetation to a point where they were almost unrecognisable.
‘Looks like it’s been used as a dump for the garage for a while,’ he said. ‘But look.’ He pointed again, to one of the stacks, right in front of them. A blue car, the front end smashed almost flat, the result of a serious impact. ‘Sebastian Sinclair was last seen driving a blue BMW M4. The plates are gone. We’ll need to get someone in to move it so we can check out the registration on the chassis.’
Monica nodded, understanding his excitement now because this felt like more than coincidence. She squeezed through the trees to get closer to the car. There were deep, fresh marks in the turf behind the vehicle as if it had only recently been pushed into its resting place. She found the torch on her phone and held it through the hole where the passenger-side window should have been. Careful not to cut her face on the fragments of glass as she leaned in. In the footwell there was a small object. At first she thought it was a marker pen, then realised it was a stick of mascara. She stepped back and pulled on a plastic glove then leaned back in. Just under the seat was a touring map of northern Scotland.
Mascara and a tourist map, not the first objects you’d expect to find in Sebastian Sinclair’s car, Monica thought with a hint of disappointment. Maybe the car belonged to someone else and their neat connection between Sebastian Sinclair and this garage wasn’t so neat after all?
‘Monica.’ She heard Crawford’s voice again, coming from a little further across the quarry. He’d got bored waiting for her and wandered off for another look around the densely packed vehicles. ‘Boss!’ His voice was louder this time and she caught the urgency.
She extricated her top half from the car and glanced around for him, the gloomy day now turning prematurely dark. Finally she saw him. Crawford had climbed up onto a vehicle and was gesturing at something.
She walked quickly over to him, pulled herself up onto the bonnet of an ancient white van so rusted it felt like her foot might well pop through the metal panel, then stepped up onto the roof of the crushed Vauxhall Astra that Crawford was standing on.
She felt the creak of the thin metal as it warped under their shared weight.
‘What is …’ But the answer was obvious. There beneath them, partially hidden by a wrecked Audi, was a second blue BMW. The plates were hidden by the car’s position, wedged between vehicles to the front and back. Not that it mattered this time though because as Monica tilted her head to see what Crawford was pointing at she could read the words printed along the side of the vehicle in the familiar purple font: SINCLAIR ENTERPRISES.
CHAPTER 46
An hour later Monica watched the forensics team working to set up their industrial lights in the cramped area around the second BMW as the evening turned to murky night. The smell of woodsmoke drifted in the damp air from nearby Little Arklow. Monica walked over to where Gemma Gunn, the head of the team, was changing into a white forensic suit.
Gunn said, ‘Looks like someone’s been busy,’ her overly loud voice echoing off the quarry walls as she nodded at the stacks of vehicles. For a moment Monica imagined each one of the cars was linked to a murder or disappearance, but the notion was fanciful. There hadn’t been that many murders in the Highlands in the last twenty years in total. It was odd though. In that dank quarry it somehow felt like those rusting vehicles all carried the promise of death. Gunn finished pulling the suit up over her athletic body and stood. Exuding a sense of vigorousness and control.
‘What’s your gut sense about the place?’ Monica asked, to get the sinister feeling about the stacks of cars out of her head as much as anything. Gunn glanced at her, blonde hair tied back in a tight ponytail, an expression of surprise bordering on disgust smeared across her regular features.
‘We haven’t even looked inside the car yet.’ She sounded appalled at Monica’s departure from logical thinking. And in a way her response was reassuring. Clearly the rationally minded head of the forensics team hadn’t picked up on the quarry’s atmosphere in the same way Monica had. Maybe to her way of thinking it was nothing more than a hole in the ground with some old cars in it.
‘Well, let me know just as soon as you find anything.’
Gunn nodded in response, probably resisting the urge to reply, Well, what else would I do?
‘DI Kennedy.’
Monica turned and walked over to where Fisher was standing at the edge of the cordon, feeling the soft ground shift under her feet. As if she might be walking over decades of forgotten things buried deep in the earth.
‘There’s something in the garage,’ the young detective said as Monica drew close. The widening of his eyes behind his glasses, the tone of his voice, rendered the rest of his sentence obsolete. He continued anyway though. ‘We think … well, we think it’s human.’
Fisher pushed the side door into the garage open. The workshop space was illuminated by strip lights attached to the roof’s beams. Monica barely noticed them though. She was staring down at the concrete floor of the garage. Crawford, wearing a forensic suit like the one she had just watched Gunn pull on, was covering his mouth and nose with his hand. In front of him was a plastic groundsheet. Eight feet square. It was a light turquoise colour at the edges, its centre dark with blood and gore.
Monica walked over the oily floor of the garage, feeling her own forensic bootees peel off the concrete with each step. The smell was overpowering, a sickening butcher’s-shop stink of cut flesh. The deeper stench of purification and decay.
‘It looks like it’s dried, been here a while,’ Crawford said as Monica came to stand beside him. She took in the sprays of blood over the plastic. The tiny scraps of flesh. Her mind went back to the remains of Sebastian Sinclair’s body, Dr Dolohov’s intent face. Someone cut him up while he was still alive.
‘It could be where they were dismembered.’ Fisher’s voice echoed in the open space. Monica nodded. First the car linking Sinclair to this place, now this bloodbath.
‘Sinclair drowned,’ Monica said, staring at the blood on the sheet. ‘Whoever did this kept him alive after he was tortured.’ Above the groundsheet a long chain hung from one of the beams. At one time it must have served some purpose in the garage; she could easily imagine what use it had recently been put to and couldn’t stop her mind from picturing the scene. A man hanging from the chain, maybe one of the victims watching while the other was tortured. The pleading and the screams then the stink of burning as the wounds were cauterised. For a moment Monica wished she was anywhere but here, doing anything but this. How the hell did this become your life? You could have just stayed away. You could still be in London. You could have left the force and retrained, gone to university to study classics finally, like you should have done twenty-five years ago …
Monica tried hard to ignore these unhelpful thoughts and glanced over to Crawford, who was looking at something on the concrete floor beside the groundsheet. She stepped closer, careful to keep her feet well away from the gore. In the harsh light from the overhead strips she quickly saw what he was looking at. Beside the groundsheet a mixed selection of tools was laid out in a careful row.
‘We need to track down the man who bought the garage, Francis MacGregor. We need to do it now,’ Monica said, remembering the man’s last conviction was for breaking someone’s legs with a motorcycle.
‘DC Khan’s already on it,’ Fisher replied, his voice still shaky.
Monica surveyed the
scene again. The garage was a mess – piles of greasy vehicle parts, several cars in bits – and what kind of killer would leave a victim’s car barely hidden in a scrapyard they owned? Leave such unashamed evidence of the dismembering of a body in the open for anyone to find? Someone disorganised, Monica thought. Either someone in their own world who assumed the police were so stupid they wouldn’t find the victim’s car even though it had been concealed in the most cursory way, or someone who barely cared.
‘Whoever did this is extremely dangerous, impulsive and disorganised.’ As she was saying it her eyes fell again on the carefully laid out row of tools beside the plastic sheet.
It was a frightening assortment. A small hacksaw, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, a blowtorch, some other tools that weren’t familiar to her. A random collection, but laid out precisely with a uniform gap of about six inches between each one that contrasted sharply with pretty much everything else about the scene.
Monica stepped past Crawford for a closer look, and crouched forward to inspect the tools.
‘What is it?’ Crawford crouched alongside her.
‘These look like they’ve been cleaned, like they’ve been washed,’ Monica said under her breath. ‘Why would someone clean the tools off and lay them out like this but leave that?’ She nodded to the gory groundsheet.
‘Maybe he was disturbed before he could clean the rest up?’
Monica turned the idea over in her head. It was a convenient explanation but felt wrong. ‘It’s like using the tools is the most important part of it for him …’
‘So maybe something went wrong with the sale of the garage. MacGregor lures Sinclair and Gall here. Gets his revenge then tries to dispose of the bodies? It’s not far to the river from here.’
It made some kind of sense. Although Francis MacGregor was supposed to be a reformed businessman now. The garage looked like it was worth nothing, all the way out here in this dead-end glen, but he’d paid two hundred thousand for it. There had to be a reason.
The first members of the forensics team entered the garage, resigned to the long night ahead of them. Monica’s eyes dropped to the groundsheet again, but her mind drifted outside to those stacks of cars. The BMWs. The stick of mascara and the touring map, abandoned in the first one. Why were the plates missing? None of the other cars had had their plates removed, as far as she remembered.
‘Fisher,’ she shouted to the younger detective as he was turning to go, ‘can you make sure we get the number from the chassis on the first BMW? Get a name for whoever owns it.’
CHAPTER 47
It was late when Monica finally made it back to the flat. Her impulse was to ignore the couch and crawl straight into bed, under her warm blankets, but the idea of the filth and gore from the garage still clinging to her skin and hair was enough to send her to the shower. She washed her hair and body three times in an old post-crime-scene ritual. Then stuffed her black trousers and black shirt in the washing machine. When she’d dried herself Monica pulled on a pair of jeans and a fisherman’s jumper she’d bought from a charity shop in Fort William on one of those tense day trips with her mum, Lucy and the hypercritical Auntie May.
She stood and looked around the combined kitchen/living room of the flat. Took in the cosy blonde carpet, the warm lights and the sofa by the window, the photos of Lucy and her mum. One of her dad, tacked on the board by the kitchen island. Lucy’s latest painting, unsurprisingly of a cat, stuck to the fridge by a magnet. Her mum was staying over at Monica’s flat again to look after Lucy, but had already been in bed when Monica arrived home just before midnight.
Monica sniffed at the pan of soup her mum had left on the stove. Broccoli. Spotted the pre-crumbled Stilton cheese in a little bowl covered in cling film on the counter. She ladled the soup into a bowl, heated it for two minutes in the microwave (hoping all the time that her mum wouldn’t hear and come through to remonstrate with her for ‘ruining the flavour’ by heating it this way) and emptied the bowl of cheese over the top of it.
She ate it sitting on the sofa, appreciating its warmth after the soul-deep cold of the scrapyard and the garage. Glanced around the flat again and wondered which was the better indicator of what life really was? This place of security or the horror at the garage? Monica wondered, not for the first time, why it always felt like she was seeing reality stripped back to its core in those dark places? In murderers’ lairs and killers’ dump sites? Was it simply that the primal fear of death was closer there? Or did these places reveal something true and deep about the fabric of the universe? Something waiting beneath the surface in every moment of tenderness? Maybe that says more about you than anything?
‘That’s a question for another day, for never,’ Monica whispered as she finished her soup and reached for another random record from her dad’s collection. Something to take her mind off the grim day. She held the sleeve up to the light. Serge Gainsbourg stared back at her, looking disreputable, bizarrely surrounded by photographs of assorted primates.
‘Must be one of Mum’s,’ Monica murmured as she slid the vinyl from its sleeve and laid it on the turntable. Serge’s voice came on singing in French, joined after a minute or so by the breathy sighs of a woman in the early stages of orgasm.
Monica lay back on the sofa and tried hard to feel some vague erotic connection to the sounds. Instead she pictured her dad’s smirking hard face. A French poof and a trollop. She could almost hear his voice. How did one of Mum’s records end up mixed in with his? He was normally so particular. As she considered this little mystery, Monica couldn’t help her mind drifting back to Lucy’s matter-of-fact description of her dead grandfather. His black teeth and blue skin. The fact she knew his nickname: Long John. Monica glanced at the door to her daughter’s bedroom. Almost expecting to see her standing there in a trance again.
Thankfully there was no sign of her, and finally Monica drifted off down into a deep sleep. The flat was silent, save for the crackle of the needle on the vinyl. Skipping on Long John Kennedy’s old record player.
CHAPTER 48
When Marcus finally left Annabelle alone she stared for hours at the ceiling through a haze of opioid confusion. Feeling a relentless dull throbbing from what was left of her leg, something told her she had to look at it, to check it was really gone. She couldn’t make herself though, and instead she listened out for the other person she had heard screaming down the corridor.
‘Scott?! Is that you?’ Her voice echoed back at her in the confined space. There was no reply and for a second the idea flickered through her mind: Maybe Scott is actually another patient, and you’re in a mental hospital? Maybe you’ve gone insane. This was a terrifying thought. And how would she ever know? Annabelle squeezed her hands into tight balls and stared at the grimy ceiling. Shadows danced across it from the stuttering candle by the bed. Fearfully she ran back over things: the drive to Stirling, the selfie, the drive to Inverness, opening the gate to the glen, then the crash. It seemed to hang together consistently. To make sense. Your leg, the voice in her head said. If you were really in a mental hospital they wouldn’t have cut your leg off.
But maybe she had imagined her leg being taken too? Maybe that was part of the delusion.
Annabelle pushed herself up on the pillows and pulled the blanket back. Her right leg was gone from the knee down. Where her calf and ankle should have been there was only the grey of the sheet. She felt the hair stand up all over her back. The stump was dressed in white bandages. She reached down and undid the safety pins holding the bandages in place. After laying them aside on the table she began to unwind the dressings, because she had to see what was left of her leg. She had to see what they’d done to her. It took a minute to remove the bandages, rolling them carefully so she could put them back on later. After the last one came off there was a layer of padding, taped over the wound. Slowly she peeled it back. The end of her leg stopped about an inch above where her knee used to be. It looked as if a flap of her skin had been folded over the wound and
stitched in place with ugly black thread. A wave of nausea rose from her stomach, followed by a swaying dizziness as the room seemed to tilt and shift. Prickles of heat stood out across her skin and she retched. She clenched her eyes tight shut, feeling her stomach spasm violently.
But she had to look, to check it was clean. Finally she opened her eyes. By the flickering light of the candle she could see the injury, the amputation, was red and swollen, but there didn’t seem to be any pus. Gingerly she pressed a finger onto her folded skin, close to the stitches. The skin moved slightly and pain flickered up her leg. But it was more of an ache than the raw agony of the broken leg.
The remains of her leg began to blur as the tears welled up. He took your leg, cut it off. What will he take next? The thought made Annabelle want to curl up on the bed, to hide somehow. Because she knew without doubt that if she wasn’t crazy then Marcus and the Doctor clearly were.
They were never going to let her leave this place.
CHAPTER 49
Monica accepted the cup of coffee from Crawford in the Inverness Incident Room. She needed the caffeine that morning. She’d woken at 5 a.m. still on the couch, her neck cricked again. Unable to get back to sleep. The bloody sprays from the garage, the stacks of rusting cars adding fresh colour to her regular nightmares.
‘Where are we up to with locating Francis MacGregor?’ she asked as Khan and Fisher joined her and Crawford. The team was completely focused on apprehending MacGregor now. With his previous convictions and his connection to Sebastian Sinclair and the garage, he was their first solid suspect, and clearly potentially extremely dangerous.
‘Like I said, I’d never heard of him until yesterday,’ Crawford replied. ‘But it turns out he used to have a big reputation. Hard to pin anything on him though.’ He was leaning back in a chair, arms folded tight across his narrow chest, dark circles standing out under his green eyes as if he’d been out talking to people all night to obtain this information. ‘He owns properties across the north, but he doesn’t keep all of them in his name. He used to be in a biker gang.’
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