by James Oswald
McLean focused on her face first, searching the features to see if he recognised her. It was very unlikely, of course, but not unheard of. Difficult to tell with the way the crows had pecked at her eyes and other creatures had gnawed at her lips, her hands and feet. It was quite possible that she had simply sat down and died, but she hardly seemed dressed for a walk on the hill.
A noise behind him distracted McLean and he turned to see the tent flap push open. Angus Cadwallader stepped inside.
‘Good Morning, Tony.’ He looked from McLean to the dead body. ‘Well, as good as it can be. What have we got here?’
‘Looks like she strayed from the path. Sat down to catch her breath and just died. Could do with knowing how long she’s been here.’
‘All in good time, Tony. Let me have a look at her first.’
‘Of course. I’ll get out of your way.’ He shuffled around the corpse, back towards the entrance to the SOC tent, looking down as he did so to avoid treading on something that would get him shouted at later on. And that was when he noticed the dead woman’s feet.
‘Christ on a stick, where’s her shoes? She didn’t walk up here barefoot, surely?’
Cadwallader bent forward, peering closer. ‘Can’t see anything, but there’s been a lot of animal damage. More blood than I’d have expected too.’ He reached for one of the dead woman’s hands. They sat as if they had been folded neatly in her lap, but all that remained of them was a red meaty mess. It pulled away from her with a horrible tearing sound that made McLean glad he’d missed breakfast.
‘No. I don’t like the look of this at all.’
‘What the fuck are you doing here, McLean?’
As greetings went, it lacked subtlety, but then Detective Inspector Carter had never been the sharpest pencil in the box. McLean had been expecting some kind of hostility from the man, and he wasn’t disappointed.
‘And a very good morning to you too.’
‘Don’t fuck me around, McLean. This is my crime scene. I’m SIO here.’
‘If that’s so, then why did you leave the scene without handing over responsibility to another officer? Who’s Crime Scene Manager? Why is there no one more senior than a constable here? Why has no one been assigned duties? Did you think a crime scene just ran itself? Have you never heard of procedure?’
Carter blanched, but only for a short instant. ‘Hah. The great Detective Inspector McLean quoting procedure at me. Why are you even here?’
McLean pinched the bridge of his nose like he’d seen Ritchie do when she was dealing with someone unreasonable, usually him. It didn’t help much, but it stopped him from punching a colleague.
‘Miss Prendergast.’ He hooked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the forensics tent. ‘Her name came up in a cold case. I was going to speak to her, found you were already here. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to take your precious case from you. Just wanted to find out if there were suspicious circumstances. Anything that might tie in to what I’m investigating, really.’
Carter sniffed, his expression one of a man unconvinced. Either that or a man with gut-ache, it was hard to tell the difference sometimes. He said nothing for a while, the thoughts churning slowly across his face.
‘So what do you reckon then? Suspicious, or just an old biddy gone senile?’ From the way he said it, McLean could tell how Carter had already made up his mind.
‘You’ve seen her, I take it?’
‘Aye. Not the prettiest of sights straight after breakfast.’
‘Then you’ll know it’s not straightforward. Could be a tragic accident; that’d be the easiest answer. I guess you’ll have to see what the pathologist has to say, eh?’
As if on cue, a commotion at the tent turned into two forensic technicians with a stretcher, bringing the body out. Cadwallader followed behind them, more sombre than McLean was used to seeing him. The pathologist eyed Carter with ill-disguised contempt, then addressed McLean instead.
‘There’s something very odd about this, Tony.’
‘Odd? How so?’ Carter asked. Cadwallader gave a tiny flick of his head, like a teacher reluctantly acknowledging the presence of a tiresome pupil.
‘Well, there’s where we found her for one thing. Not an easy place to get to. She’s been dead at least a couple of days, too, but I won’t be able to give you a better indication until I’ve got her back to the mortuary. Then there’s the lack of shoes. She really does seem to have walked here barefoot. Unless someone brought her, of course.’
‘You reckon that’s a possibility?’ Carter’s face had grown very dark, his brow creased in a deep frown. This was clearly not going the way he had hoped.
‘Probably not, given the way we found her. If someone had just dumped her in the bushes she’d be lying down. And there’s abrasions to the front of her legs that suggest walking through these whins. I’ll have a look at what’s left of the soles of her feet when we do the post-mortem, but there’s really not much. Anyway, that’s not the main thing bothering me.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘No. It’s the animal damage. There’s too much blood. The ground around her feet’s covered in it, and her lap’s been soaked too, though it’s mostly dried out now. I’m going to hazard a guess right here and suggest she bled to death.’
‘You mean …?’ This time it was McLean’s turn to frown.
‘Yes, Tony. She walked up here, sat down and didn’t move a muscle as something ate her hands and feet.’
45
It took a long time to extricate themselves from the crime scene. DI Carter might have been even more useless than a chocolate teapot, but he was cunning where it came to passing the buck, or the workload. It hadn’t taken him long at all to figure out that the reason McLean and MacBride were at the scene, the need to talk to Miss Prendergast about her missing uncle, was no longer relevant. In Carter’s eyes, that meant MacBride was available to manage the scene for him. McLean almost told the detective sergeant to take on the job – at least that way it would be done properly – but he knew better than to drop MacBride in it like that. In the end he’d used the threat of Duguid’s wrath to persuade Carter he needed to find someone else.
‘Thanks for that, sir. I really didn’t want to get stuck with the blame for everything that’s going wrong up there.’ MacBride drove perhaps a little more swiftly than was wise or legal away from Miss Prendergast’s house after they had retrieved the car. McLean said nothing, keen as anyone to put as much distance as he could between himself and the impending disaster. Working at the SCU, he hadn’t really noticed just how bad a mistake Carter’s promotion had been; seeing it up close and personal had been something of a surprise.
‘What’s the sweepstake on how long he’ll last?’
MacBride glanced sideways for an instant. ‘I’ve a tenner on him being demoted by the end of the month. You want in?’
‘I think that would be very unprofessional of me.’ McLean checked his watch, then noticed the clock on the dashboard right in front of him. ‘I would like you to drop me off at the mortuary, though. Think I might have a chat with Angus about Miss Prendergast and the Pentland Mummy.’
MacBride smiled. ‘And you’d rather not be at the station when Brooks finds out where we were this morning?’
‘Something like that. You might want to keep a low profile too. I’m sure Dagwood could find something for you to do down in the basement until your shift ends. Oh, and put me down for next Tuesday, if no one else has got it already. A tenner, is it?’
The air-conditioned chill of the mortuary was a welcome relief from the muggy heat of the city outside. Less welcome was the smell of death, o
nly slightly masked by the chlorine stench of floor cleaner. It normally didn’t bother McLean, he hardly noticed it any more, but today it clung to him like a latex bodysuit. A lingering scent that haunted him with its familiarity.
He half expected to find Cadwallader examining the dead Miss Eileen Prendergast, but the examination theatre was empty of cadavers for a change, the pathologist in his little office typing up notes.
‘Tony, what brings you down to my lair? Not our poor old lady, I hope. I’ve not had a chance to get started on her yet.’ Cadwallader greeted him with his customary wide smile. He was dressed in green scrubs, only slightly stained at the front from whichever poor dead soul had most recently revealed their innermost secrets to him.
‘Given we only found her this morning, I’d be surprised if you had. And anyway, that’s not my case, so the less I have to do with it the better.’
‘Not your case? But I thought …’ Cadwallader gave him a confused frown. ‘The crime scene.’
‘No doubt I’ll be getting a bollocking from Brooks later on, but the investigation is Carter’s to cock up. I was there because I wanted to talk to Miss Prendergast, only she upped and died before I could.’
‘Oh yes?’ Cadwallader raised a greying eyebrow. ‘What did you want to talk to her about?’
‘Her uncle, Daniel Calton. We think he might be the Pentland Mummy.’
Cadwallader frowned. ‘The Pentland Mummy? Bloody hell, there’s a case I’ve not thought about in a while.’
‘Please tell me you’ve still got a tissue sample. Too much to think you’d have the body itself.’
‘Should be on the system. You have a case number? Since we never put a name to the poor fellow?’ The pathologist tapped at his keyboard, peering over the top of his half-moon spectacles at the screen. McLean looked around the tiny room as he pulled out his notebook, noticing what was missing for the first time.
‘Tracy not here?’
‘Off on a training course. I am, of course, bereft.’ Cadwallader made a sad face as McLean located the reference number and read it out.
‘You could have just emailed this, or given us a call, you know. Not that it isn’t always a delight to receive living visitors.’
‘I couldn’t really face going back to the station. Not right now. It was easier when I was at HQ with the SCU team. Play one angry boss off against the other.’
‘Ah yes. Ever the diplomat.’ Cadwallader turned his attention back to the screen, pushing his spectacles up his nose the better to see. ‘Here we are. Before even my time, this one. Oh yes. One of your grandmother’s. Now there was a pathologist.’ He tapped at the keyboard a bit more, clicked the mouse. ‘Yes, I thought so. DNA profile’s been done already, which should save us a bit of time. I’ll get a sample of poor Miss Prendergast sent off for testing once we’ve done her PM, then we’ll see where that leaves us. Don’t suppose it’ll shed much light on how he ended up the way he did, but at least we’ll have a name, eh?’
‘I think that’s about as much as we can expect this far on. It still counts as a result.’
‘Fingers crossed then.’ Cadwallader pushed his chair away from his desk, stood up. ‘Oh, there was something I was going to tell you. Not sure if Tracy emailed it before she went on her course. Your man Smith, with the interesting sexual appetites.’
‘What about him?’ McLean shivered at the image that formed in his mind: the dead man hanging from his flex, the sound of the plug being removed from his nether regions.
‘The swabs we took from his … member? Thought he’d been using his own saliva as lubricant? Turns out it wasn’t his.’
‘Wasn’t his? Someone else was … Someone else was with him when he died?’
‘Looks very possible. And not just anyone. Initial tests suggest it was probably the same person who did for your friend the priapic salesman. Eric Parker.’
‘Why can nothing ever be straightforward with you, McLean? You’re a bloody menace, you know?’
It had taken the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon to get the Eric Parker case reopened and merged with the investigation into John Smith’s demise. DS MacBride was working his usual magic setting up the major incident enquiry room, and sometime around lunch Detective Superintendent Brooks must have heard the bad news. Not bad enough to interrupt his eating, but plenty to put him in a foul mood.
‘I’m sure we all wish things were simpler than they appear to be, sir. Not quite sure how it’s my fault, though.’
‘Oh man up, McLean. You’re SIO, of course it’s your bloody fault. Now what are you going to do about catching this mysterious woman who can kill a man just by sucking his dick?’
McLean bit back the retort he wanted to give, counted to a silent ten before answering. ‘We’re reviewing the Parker case, sir. Checking for anything we might have missed. Looking for any links between him and Smith. Not sure if it’s going to help, mind you. There’s nothing obvious between them.’
‘Apart from the fact they both died with a hard-on?’
‘We’re looking at the sex worker angle, yes, sir.’ McLean pinched the bridge of his nose. It didn’t make the idiot go away, sadly.
‘Is that it?’
Christ, it was like dealing with a bloody toddler. ‘It’s early days. Only got the message from forensics this morning connecting the two cases. DS Ritchie’s on her way over to coordinate the SCU side of things. I’ve got a meeting with Clarice Saunders lined up for …’ McLean checked his watch. ‘About half an hour’s time.’
‘What the fuck are you talking to her for? Bloody busybody.’
‘Believe it or not, she’s our best contact for a lot of the sex workers in the city, sir. Most of them won’t help us, but they’ll talk to her. It’s a long shot, I’ll admit, but we need to see if there’s anyone turned up recently. Maybe come down from Perth or Inverness.’
‘How d’you figure that?’
‘Parker was a salesman. His last stop was Perth. Chances are he gave this woman a lift and she paid him back with favours rather than cash. If she’s turned up in Smith’s flat helping him fulfil his odd fetishes, then she’s started working in the city, and not exactly as a secretary.’
‘So just how is she killing them, this femme fatale?’
McLean stared at the detective superintendent for a moment, looking for a sign on his pudgy face that he was taking the piss. There was nothing but a slight tomato stain to one side of his chin where the canteen lasagne had missed his mouth.
‘I don’t think she’s killing them at all, sir. Why would you even think she was?’
‘Well, why are you looking for her then?’
Really? ‘Because she was with both men shortly before they died, sir. Possibly when they died. And then she fled the scene.’ McLean tried to stop himself from sounding like he was explaining something to a child. ‘We still don’t have direct evidence that either Parker or Smith died anything other than accidentally, but there is a link between them and it’s this woman. We have to investigate that.’
Brooks scowled as the room bustled with busyness around him, IT technicians bringing in computers and uniform constables getting in the way while they waited to be told what to do. ‘Just keep an eye on the budget, OK? We’re not made of money, you know.’
46
If McLean had thought that time and familiarity might have softened Clarice Saunders’ attitude towards the police, then meeting her again in interview room two certainly disabused him of the idea. She was prickly to the point of offensiveness, despite the presence of Acting Detective Inspector Ritchie.
‘What makes you think I’d share information like that, even if
I had it?’ she answered in immediate response to his query about whether any new faces had come to her notice in the past few weeks. ‘And don’t tell me you’re not interested in arresting them, just talking,’ she added. ‘If I had a pound for every time one of you lot has told me that, I wouldn’t have to go begging to the council for funding.’
‘I’m really only interested in arresting someone if they’ve broken the law, Miss Saunders. Not sure that’s the case here.’
‘Aye? Well what about Stacey Craig then? She didn’t last long after you lot picked her up, did she?’
‘Stacey Craig?’ McLean took a while to understand the connection. ‘You mean when she was picked up in Leith?’
‘I mean the reason she was down in Leith in the first place. You lot running around shutting down all the safe places for people like her to work.’
‘We have to obey the law. Even if sometimes it’s not the best answer. And I do feel sorry for what happened to Stacey. But that’s not why we’re here today. Two men have died and we’ve reason to believe a sex worker has fled the scene of both deaths. I’d very much like to talk to her about that.’
‘Arrest her, you mean. Throw her in jail when it’s the men you should be locking up.’
McLean took a deep breath, let it out slowly. ‘I can hardly lock them up; they’re both dead. And there’s no suggestion of foul play here, just a common factor that needs to be investigated. She didn’t kill these men. I’m fairly certain of that.’
‘Only fairly certain?’ Saunders made a face. ‘I’m fairly certain I know what you’ll do to this poor woman if you find her.’
‘I get the feeling you’re not going to help us find her, Miss Saunders,’ Ritchie said.
‘I will ask around. But if she’s new on the scene, chances are she’ll not be looking for the sort of services I provide. At least not yet.’