A Song for the Dying

by Stuart MacBride

  I slammed my hand on the dashboard. ‘Bus!’

  ‘Eeek!’ She stamped on the brakes, wrenched the wheel to the right, nearly battering into a taxi coming the other way. We screeched to a halt in the middle of the road.

  An old woman with a tartan shopping trolley stopped on the pavement to gape, her Westie terrier barking at the car – tail stiff and upright.

  The taxi driver wound down his window and belted out a mouthful of expletives, before sticking up two fingers and heading off.

  Alice puffed out a breath. ‘Right. Let’s try that again.’ She eased past the bus and back onto the left side of the road. ‘Sorry.’

  Huntly gave my shoulder another squeeze. ‘Women drivers, eh?’

  ‘If you don’t get your hand off me right now, I’m going to tear your fingers off and ram them down your throat till you choke.’

  He let go, licked his lips, then settled back onto his seat. ‘I was only joking.’

  ‘And no more talking either.’

  Silence.

  Go on, say something. Anything.

  But he didn’t. Not as thick as he looked after all.

  12

  A ribbon of blue-and-white ‘POLICE’ tape twisted in the wind, growling like a finger dragged across the teeth of a comb. Scrubland surrounded the deposition site on three sides, a patch of wood reaching up like a dark green wall behind it. The sky was a solid swathe of granite. The long grass whipping in a frigid wind.

  I turned my back on the gusts and jammed a finger in my ear. ‘No, not… Look, all I want is access to the Inside Man letters. How hard can it be?’

  A loud sigh came down the phone. ‘Seriously? Come down here and take a look; it’s like a bring-and-buy sale for cardboard boxes down here. You know that bit at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? That.’ Another sigh. ‘Did you check with the Major Investigation Teams?’

  ‘Come off it, Williamson, who do you think put me on to you? They haven’t seen them.’

  One of Oldcastle’s collection of dented and scarred patrol cars blocked the path down to the scene, a pair of uniforms guarding the place by sitting on their backsides inside, out of the wind.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’m not Santa. I can’t just magic up a set of letters if I’ve no clue where the damn things are.’

  ‘So go ask Simpson. He’ll know.’

  ‘Look, I’m telling you there’s—’

  ‘Hold on.’ I pressed the phone against my chest and rapped on the driver’s window.

  The guy behind the wheel puffed out his cheeks, then buzzed the window down. He didn’t look old enough to vote, never mind arrest anyone – with a threadbare moustache and a scabby pluke on his forehead. Bored eyes and a droopy mouth. Crumbs and flakes of pastry all down the front of his stab-proof vest. He took another bite out of whatever was wrapped in the paper bag from Greggs, talking with his mouth full. ‘Sorry, mate, this bit’s shut. Gotta go walk somewhere else.’

  I leaned on the roof. Stared down at him. ‘First off, Constable, I am not your “mate”.’

  He obviously recognized the tone of voice from previous bollockings, because he sat bolt upright in his seat and dropped the paper bag into the footwell. A blush erupted across his face, flushing his cheeks, making the tips of his ears glow. ‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Hill, sir, erm … Ronald. I didn’t—’

  ‘Second: I don’t care how long you’ve been sitting here, you’re a bloody police officer, so try to look like one. You’re a disgrace. Third,’ I pointed at Alice and Huntly, ‘get your arse out of this car and show these people the deposition scene. Now, Constable.’

  ‘Yes, sir, sorry, sir.’ He scrambled out of the car, ramming his peaked cap down on his head. ‘This way, and—’

  ‘Check their bloody identification first!’

  Alice looked over her shoulder. ‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’

  I turned. Constable Hill was standing to attention with his back to us, guarding the path down to the deposition scene as if his life depended on it.

  ‘Might have done.’ I might not have been a police officer any more, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have fun putting the fear of God into lazy PCs.

  The Scenes Examination Branch had laid out a common access path, marked off with more blue-and-white tape, the jaundiced grass crisp with frost and trampled flat. The path curled around the scene, looping back on itself towards an inner cordon of yellow-and-black tape: ‘CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS’. A handful of triangular yellow flags punctuated the undergrowth, all of them marked with a letter and number.

  Huntly stood, chest out, shoulders back, nose swinging left to right as if he was scenting the place. ‘I see…’ And then he was off, working his way along the trampled path. Sniffing as he went.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets. ‘They’re having difficulty locating the original Inside Man letters. Apparently the archives are a mess. No one knows what’s in what box. Sure you can’t make do with the photocopies Jacobson gave you?’

  She curled her top lip. ‘They’ve been copied so many times they’re barely legible. I need to see the originals. I want to feel the ink on the page, see the weight he’s put behind the words, the scratch of the pen, I want to touch something he has. Something that didn’t end up dead or damaged.’ She turned, her eyes following Huntly as he ducked under the inner cordon. ‘Did you get anything off them eight years ago?’

  ‘We ran every test we could on the letters and the envelopes, but there was nothing. All six were postmarked Oldcastle. The only fingerprints we could lift belonged to the journalist he sent them to. All that’s left is the words.’

  For a moment, it looked as if she was about to say something. But she dug into her leather satchel instead and came out with a manila folder and a carrier-bag. She jiggled the folder. ‘Photos.’ Then held up the bag. ‘And this is your investigation kit. Dr Constantine made one for everyone.’

  I took the bag. Rummaged through the contents. A decent-looking camera – small but high-res, large memory card. Five or six pairs of blue nitrile gloves in individual sterile packages. A handful of evidence bags. A ruler. A notepad. A sheet of instructions. And a smartphone. I pulled it out, turned it over in my hands. ‘Let me guess: it’s all monitored and GPS tracked so they know where I am and what I’m up to?’

  Alice just looked at me. Then, ‘No, it’s a phone. It’s for making calls and uploading stuff to the LIRU server, see there’s a slot in the side that’ll take the camera’s memory card? They’ve got the ankle monitor if they need to find you.’

  Good point. I distributed the investigation kit between my pockets.

  Huntly’s voice brayed out from the other side of the crime-scene tape. ‘I do love a good deposition scene. But this isn’t one of them. I mean look at this, honestly.’ He swept his arms up and out. ‘Everyone and their rancid mother’s picked the place clean, leaving dirty big footprints everywhere. And why, oh why, oh why, didn’t they put down a walkway? It’s all compromised. How am I supposed to work like this?’ He turned around, doing a slow one-eighty, left the cordoned-off area, then stomped and crackled away into the woodland.

  So much for Jacobson’s hand-picked, decades of experience, top of their game, experts.

  I ducked under the tape marking off the access path and scrunched through the knee-high grass towards the inner cordon. Stopped. Looked back to where Alice was standing with her arms wrapped around herself. ‘You coming?’

  ‘Aren’t we supposed to stick to the authorized path?’

  ‘You heard Huntly. Operation Tigerbalm have tromped all over it with their size elevens. There’s nothing left to compromise.’ I went back to wading through the frosty grass. Paused at the line of tape. Opened the folder and pulled out the photos.

  They were the same ones Jacobson had given me in the Range Rover, the colours a lot more vibrant in the daylight. />
  It took a little back and forth, but eventually I found where the photographer must have stood to take the first couple of shots. I stood in the same place, holding the pictures out.

  Claire Young’s head lay pointing back towards the path we’d started on, her skin pale and veined like marble.

  ‘She died somewhere else…’

  Alice hadn’t moved, still hiding behind the blue-and-white line. ‘What?’

  ‘I said, she didn’t… Will you get your backside over here?’

  I pointed as Alice picked her way across to the deposition scene. ‘There’s not enough blood. He slit her open, stitched a doll inside, and sewed her up again. Ground should be saturated with it. And the positioning’s wrong too.’

  ‘But we know the Inside Man has an operating room, it was on the DVD and—’

  ‘Supposed to be keeping an open mind, remember? And Unsub-Fifteen didn’t drag her here from the car park either, he carried her. Otherwise there’d be drag marks on the path.’ I planted my feet apart and hefted an imaginary Claire Young’s dead body up onto my shoulder. ‘So: you’ve got her in a fireman’s lift. You stagger down the path, till you think you’ve gone far enough that no one will see you from the car park. You don’t dump her at the side of the path, do you? No, you strike out at ninety degrees, put some distance between you and the path. Then you dump her.’ I mimed it, tipping the body off my shoulder and onto the grass. ‘Her head would be pointing that way, towards the woods, not away from them.’

  ‘Well … maybe he turned around and then dumped her body?’

  Possible.

  Then again, we’d already established that Professor Huntly couldn’t be as daft as he looked.

  He was still crashing about out there, breaking branches and singing what sounded like opera to himself.

  Alice picked at her satchel. ‘Ash, the big car chase… You ended up all covered in glass and blood and you broke your wrist and your ribs – I looked it up in the case file – but it doesn’t say why the Inside Man wasn’t all bashed up in the crash.’

  ‘Luck? Angle of collision? Not having a moron like O’Neil behind the wheel? How should I know?’ I put the photos back in the folder. ‘Listen, once we’ve dropped Rain Man back at the Postman’s Head, I need to run a little errand.’

  Alice took a sudden interest in the path. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Nothing important. Just need to pop in on an old friend.’

  ‘Right…’

  ‘You can stay in the car if you like, I probably won’t be long.’

  ‘Ash, do you think we could talk about what happened with you and Mrs Kerrigan, I mean I know you’re not—’

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about. What happened, happened; there’s nothing I can do to bring Parker back.’

  ‘Ash, it’s perfectly normal to—’

  ‘She had him shot twice in the head, then framed me for it. What’s normal about that?’

  Nothing.

  Silence.

  And then Huntly was back, stumbling out of the woods a good twenty yards further down than where he’d gone in. ‘Behold!’ He held a small digital camera aloft. ‘The Mighty Bernard Huntly has returned.’

  Oh, lucky us.

  He turned back towards the woods. Then froze. Looked over his shoulder at me. ‘Well, don’t just stand there – come, witness my brilliance.’

  ‘Gah…’ Alice stumbled, staggered forwards a few paces and thumped into a tree. ‘This is stupid.’

  The forest floor was rutted, littered with roots and fallen branches. Dark with rotting pine needles and the brittle bones of dying ferns. Heady with the smell of earth and decay. Cold enough to make our breath fog as we picked our way deeper into the woods.

  Huntly kept going, ducking under the jagged thicket of branches. ‘On the contrary, it’s infinitely sensible.’

  She lowered her voice to a mutter. ‘Infinitely stupid, more like.’ Then back to full volume again. ‘There’s no way the killer came this way – there’s no path. How would you carry a body through all this? It’d get snagged in the branches, you’d drop it, you’d leave a big trail of snapped stuff and my hair keeps getting caught on these horrible twigs. Gahh!’

  Huntly smiled back at her. ‘You are, of course, perfectly correct. We’re wading through the thicket here precisely because Unsub-Fifteen didn’t. There’s a track, ten foot to our right, that we’re walking parallel to. I don’t want either of you treading in any evidence.’

  He shoved his way into a clump of broom and disappeared. The gap snapped closed again, dark green tendrils shivering behind him, seedpods rattling and angry.

  Alice stopped. Stared at the bushes. Then stared at me. ‘I’m not a violent person. But if I look the other way, can you break his legs for me?’

  I hauled a handful of broom back, making a gap. ‘Put your hood up, it’ll be fine.’

  She did. Sighed. Then lowered her head and pushed her way into the bushes, setting the rattling going again.

  Three, two, one. The branches snatched at my hair and shoulders, as I clambered in after her, ducking and weaving through the thicket, following the sound of swearing.

  More rattling, and the bush opened out at the bottom of a ditch. Damp earth squelched beneath my feet, slippery as I scrambled up and onto a grass verge.

  A road stretched away left and right, disappearing into the woods. Ten or twelve yards from where I’d emerged was a bus shelter, alien and battered beneath the reaching claws of more pine trees. Graffiti tattooed the phone box next to it – a sickly, twisted thing with a buckled door and half the Perspex missing. Snakes of soot curled up the remaining panes, the plastic warped and pitted by heat.

  Huntly stood in the middle of the road, hands on his hips, a grin stretching his stupid little moustache wide. ‘Well? What did I tell you?’

  Alice pulled a burr of pine needles from her hair. ‘… just washed it this morning…’

  I stopped, twenty feet from the bus shelter. ‘So you’re saying the killer took the bus here, hauled the dead girl over his shoulder, and stomped off into the woods? Do dead bodies have to pay full fare, or do they count as luggage?’

  A sigh. ‘You may mock, but what about this…?’ He made his way around to the back of the bus shelter, giving the side a wide berth, and pointed. ‘See?’

  I followed, placing my feet in his footsteps, minimizing disturbance to the scene. A single smear of red-brown ran for six inches along the shelter’s bottom edge, just above the grass.

  ‘See? How much would you like to wager that it’s a DNA match with our victim?’ He moved over to the left, peering at a flattened patch in the scrubland. The grass was stained and darkened. ‘She probably died here. There’s not enough for a full bleed-out, but I imagine a lot of it would have clotted inside the body cavity by the time she got here. Hence the relative cleanliness.’

  Alice hadn’t moved from the roadside. ‘Why bother though?’ She curled an arm around herself, the other hand playing with her hair again. ‘I mean he could’ve just left her there, behind the bus shelter, why pick her up again and carry her all the way through the woods to the bit of waste ground where she was found, doesn’t that seem like a bit of a waste of time?’

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a pair of gloves from Dr Constantine’s investigation kit. Tore open the sterile packaging, and snapped them on. Scuffed through the weeds and grass to the far side of the flattened area – taking the long way around to avoid treading on any evidence. ‘Have you got a photo of this?’

  Huntly sniffed. ‘Of what?’

  ‘Syringe.’ It lay in a clump of dockens, lined with frost, its yellow cap about a foot away.

  ‘Ah…’ He followed the path I’d made, his digital camera at the ready. ‘Say cheese.’

  Alice still hadn’t moved. ‘Unsub-Fifteen tried to save her. He got Claire all the way out here, then he takes the cry for help he made her record and goes to call an ambulance, b
ut she crashes. She’s not breathing. So he gives her … maybe something like adrenaline? Tries to start her heart again. He doesn’t want them to die, he wants us to get to them in time, like Laura Strachan, Marie Jordan, and Ruth Laughlin. Claire was meant to live. This was a failure.’

  Huntly took another couple of shots. ‘And he didn’t want us to connect her body with this place, in case he’d left something of himself behind. So he moved the remains.’ The digital camera went back into Huntly’s pocket. ‘Of course, he didn’t reckon on tangling with someone of my calibre. They never do.’ He grinned. ‘Here’s a fun fact for you: one of the ambulance men who saved Laura Strachan, himself went on to become the last ever victim of another serial killer: the Nightmare Man. Personally, if I lived in Oldcastle, I’d move.’

  Damp grass scuffed around my ankles as I made for the telephone box. The door squealed as I dragged it open. A new-car stench of burnt plastic slumped against me, underpinned with a bleachy tang. The phone itself looked reasonably intact, under all the black-marker swearwords and cocks scratched into the metal. I picked the handset up and held it so the mouthpiece was nowhere near my lips. The dialling tone burred in my ear.

  Still working. I punched in 1471, looking for the last number dialled, but the LCD display came up ‘— BARRED NUMBER —’ The handset went back into its cradle then I stepped out into the unburnt air again. Pulled out my new official phone and powered it up. It’d been pre-programmed with a half-dozen numbers, ‘~ THE BOSS!’ sitting at the top of the list, above ‘ALICE’, ‘BERNARD’, ‘HAMISH’, ‘SHEILA’, and ‘X – DOMINO’S PIZZA’. My finger hovered over the first entry. Of course, by rights it should be Control, not Jacobson getting the first call. Then again, Control couldn’t send me back to prison.

  And there was no way I was risking that. Not when I was so close…

  The phone rang for a bit, then Jacobson picked up, listened while I filled him in. Then, ‘Excellent. Bernard might be a pain in the arse, but he’s worth it. Get as many photos as you can, then call Ness – get her to send out a Scenes Examination Branch team. I want that scene cordoned off and picked over with an electron microscope. Tell them Bernard’s in charge, and if they give him any grief I’ll have them. OK?’