Close to the Bone lm-8

by Stuart MacBride

  She clutches the BLT to her breast and ducks, slipping to the side and away. Glances back at the end of the chiller cabinet to watch it sniffing the sacrificial offerings.

  Right, past the little forests in the little pots. Then more plastic statues, these ones wearing dresses and cardigans.

  Exit. Exit. EXIT.

  A hand on her shoulder makes her squeal.

  She spins around, and a puzzled face stares back at her: skin like midnight, hair like dark curly wool.

  ‘Sorry, miss, but I think you forgot to pay for that.’

  Rowan looks down at the sandwich. The paper container is crushed against her chest, the shards of dead pig sticking out between the bread, like blades. Then back up at that kind face with the beautiful eyes and the halo of gold. ‘Someone’s following me.’

  The angel in the security guard’s uniform looks over his shoulder. ‘What does he look like? ’

  ‘A man, with jeans and a leather jacket and his hair all over the place. .’ She points back towards the food section. It’s a lie, but the truth would only hurt him, the beasts are too powerful. Rowan digs in her pocket and comes out with a crisp five-pound note, presses it into the angel’s hand. ‘Please, don’t let him know I was here.’

  The angel nods, then turns towards the tills. ‘I’ll get your change.’

  And as soon as he’s two steps away she’s out the door, running.

  Logan pushed through the double doors into the cutting room. The little speakers mounted to the tiny stereo unit were droning out Jim Morrison’s tone-deaf call for an infant to set fire to him. Not exactly appropriate.

  Dr Graham was perched on a stool, hunkered over the cutting table at the far end of the room, fiddling with what looked like a box filled with blue rubbery lumps. A skull sat on a white plastic tray beside her, next to a pile of books opened to display thick blocks of graphs, figures, and tables.

  Logan turned the music down. ‘All on your own? ’

  Dr Graham looked up at him. ‘Miss Dalrymple let me in. Hope that’s OK? Wanted to get cracking.’

  She took a Stanley knife down one corner of the box and peeled off the cardboard like the skin of an orange, exposing the blue rubbery flesh below. ‘Moment of truth. .’ Dr Graham dug her fingers into the blue stuff and pulled — ripping it away to reveal a yellowy-white skull. Then held it up and scrubbed at it with the palm of her hand. ‘Perfect.’

  ‘This our victim? ’

  She placed the cleaned skull on a little plinth, slotting it onto a rod set into the base. ‘Resin cast. Dr McAllister wouldn’t let me use the real one for the facial reconstruction. It’s a bit of extra work, but on the plus side it no longer counts as human remains, so we can forget all that rubbish about having to be supervised by a “registered medical practitioner with five years’ experience”. . As if I’m going to take a can opener to someone’s skull, or use it as a football.’

  Logan leaned against the cold stainless-steel surface. ‘So what’s the diagnosis? ’

  ‘Well, he’s definitely dead.’ She grinned. Then cleared her throat. ‘Sorry. I’ve mapped out the tissue depth and cut the markers, so all I need to do is apply them and I can get on with the real work. .’ A little crease appeared between her eyebrows. ‘You didn’t put ice on that, did you.’

  ‘Didn’t have any. And fish fingers didn’t work.’

  ‘No, probably not.’ She pulled over a small metal tray, laid out with discs of pale rubber, as if she’d cut them off the end of pencils — each one marked with a number in black ink. ‘You know, with bones we can tell almost everything about a person: what they ate, where they lived, where they lived before that, height, weight, sex, ethnicity. .’ A dab of glue went on the end of a disc, then she fixed it right in the middle of the skull’s forehead.

  ‘What happened to Dr Dempsey? ’

  ‘Sulking. Threatening legal action.’

  ‘You hit him first? ’

  A shrug. Marker number one was joined by two and three. ‘He pushed me.’

  Logan nodded up at the shiny black globe hanging from the ceiling over the central cutting table, like a store security camera. ‘Tell him it’s all on film.’

  ‘Your victim was male, Caucasian.’ Four, five, and six followed the ridge of the eyebrows. ‘To be honest, he’s been spoiling for a fight for years, ever since I got sent to Iraq instead of him. Said he should be the one digging bodies out of mass graves, not me. .’ She sat back and tilted her head to one side. ‘Blue, brown, or green? ’

  Shrug. ‘Blue? ’

  ‘Brown’s more neutral.’ Dr Graham dipped into her massive handbag and pulled out a wooden box, a little bigger than a pencil case. When she opened it, three pairs of glass eyes stared back at Logan. She plucked the brown eyes from the box, then fiddled around with rubber batons and glue until they were staring out from the skull instead. ‘There we go, much better.’

  Seriously? It looked like something out of a cheap horror film.

  ‘Can’t you just do all this on computers? ’

  ‘What, like they do on the telly? ’ Markers seven to ten were longer, sticking out of the upper and lower jaws. ‘Facial reconstruction’s half science, half art. You have to really know bones. How’s a computer ever going to do that? ’

  ‘Go on then.’ Logan went into his jacket pocket, pulled out the junior soup starter kit that had been left on his doorstep, and dumped it on the cutting table. The bones rattled against the stainless steel. ‘What can you get from a bunch of chicken bones and some manky herbs? ’

  She peered at them, then added the next couple of markers to the skull. ‘They’re not chicken bones, they’re phalanges. Finger bones. Human.’ A smile. ‘Do I pass the test? ’

  ‘Finger bones? ’

  A sigh. ‘OK, we’ll do it properly. .’ She pulled an A4 lined notepad from beneath one of the books, flipped over to a clean sheet, then stuck her left hand flat down on it and drew around the palm and fingers with a pencil. Then untied the bundle. ‘This one,’ she held up one of the little bones, ‘is a proximal phalanx from the middle finger.’ She placed it on her wobbly outline of a hand in the right place. ‘This one’s an intermediate. . Might be from the index — going by the growth on the distal articular surface — but it’s impossible to tell for sure without having all the other bones for comparison.’ It went on the drawn hand. ‘And lucky number three is a proximal from the thumb.’

  ‘They’re human? ’

  ‘Yup.’ She lowered the last bone into place. Then picked it up again. ‘I don’t know who cleaned them for you, but they seriously need to go on a training course. Boiling bones damages the joints, look,’ she wiggled the end at Logan, ‘see how it’s all pitted and porous? ’

  It looked like a pale Crunchie bar with all the chocolate sucked off. She shook her head. ‘Very amateurish.’

  Oh God. ‘Boiled? ’

  ‘Yup — there’s much more efficient and less damaging ways to clean skeletal remains: boiling breaks down the cortical bone, that’s why you can see that cancellous bone underneath. If you haven’t got Dermestid beetles to clean the remains, then simmering’s the way to go — long and slow, like you’re making stock.’ She put it down again. ‘I don’t know who you’re using, but they should be ashamed of themselves.’ Another marker went on the skull.

  ‘Boiled. .’ Something cold slithered its way down Logan’s spine.

  She picked up the last marker in the set, then frowned at him. ‘Are you all right? You’ve gone all pale.’

  ‘When? When were they boiled? ’

  Dr Graham backed off a pace. ‘Look, I identified them, didn’t I? Can’t you just tell your bosses I’m not faking it here? I really do know what I’m talking. .’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Did Dempsey put you up to this? Is he the halfwit who ruined them? ’

  ‘Was someone eating them? ’

  ‘Because if he did, you shouldn’t touch him with a bargepole. He’s a bitter, twisted old sod and I’m doing a good job here!�
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  The cutting table was cool beneath his fist. ‘Was someone eating the meat off those bloody fingers or not? ’

  She pulled her chin in. Then picked up the bone again, held it up to her nose and sniffed. ‘You smell that? Bleach: that’s why it’s so chalky and crumbly. Who’d eat something they’d boiled in bleach? ’

  Oh thank God. .

  Dr Graham picked all the bones up and held them in the palm of her hand. ‘It wasn’t a test? ’ They made a dry sandpaper sound as she rolled them back and forward. ‘Seriously? ’

  ‘Someone’s been leaving them outside my house.’

  ‘Phalanges? ’ She put them back on the paper hand. ‘My life coach told me Aberdeen was weird. .’ She cleared her throat, then dug a ruler from her stack of books and measured each of the bones in turn. ‘You can estimate height and sex from phalanges, but it’s unreliable. And I mean seriously unreliable. I wouldn’t even put it in writing.’

  Logan licked his lips. ‘Thought they were chicken bones.’

  ‘You have to promise not to quote me on this, but best guess: these belong to a woman, about five-two, five-four, something like that. There’s a touch of arthritis, so she might be in her fifties, possibly sixties? They’ve been boiled, so you can whistle for DNA, but you could try stable isotope signature analysis? ’

  ‘Human fingers.’

  ‘There’s a professor I know in Dundee who does pro bono work for police cases. I can give him a call if you like? ’

  ‘I’ve been chucking them into the bushes. .’

  Rowan shifts sideways on the wooden bench, making enough room for the woman with the shopping bags to puff down beside her. Pregnant. Taking the weight off her swollen ankles. A tight coil of green and blue spirals out from her tummy, making a question mark in the air that shimmers with antici-pation.

  St Nicholas Kirk graveyard basks in the warm morning, the ancient granite headstones turning their crumbling lichened faces to the sun. The church building gnaws at the sky with jagged dark-grey teeth, dirty stained-window eyes glowering out at the dead and the living alike.

  A comforting place.

  The Kirk is my mother and father. It is my rod and my staff. My shield and my sword. What I do in its service lights a fire in God’s name.

  Rowan forces down another mouthful of Blood, Ligature, and Tallow, sitting on the bench with her ankles crossed beneath her, curling around her sandwich, shoulders hunched. Newly dyed hair hangs over her face, hiding her eyes.

  No one recognizes her as a redhead.

  The broodmother unbuttons the top of her shirt and flaps the collar, trying to force cool air in over her swollen udders. ‘Ungh. . This heat!’ Then she pulls a rumpled newspaper from one of her carrier bags and uses it as a makeshift fan. ‘Ahh, that’s better.’

  She has no idea what’s growing inside her. .

  Another mouthful — forcing it down. Should have bought some water.

  ‘You know, Steve says I always moan when it’s too cold, but dear God I can’t wait for it to rain.’

  Rowan just nods.

  The broodmother dumps the newspaper on the bench between them, then pulls out a plastic bottle of apple juice. Cracks the seal and drinks deep. It smells like sunshine. ‘Pfffffff. . Can’t believe it’s this hot. We went on honeymoon to Kenya and it wasn’t this hot.’

  Between them, the headline shouts in big black letters: ‘“I COULDN’T LET HIM SUFFER” ~ BRAVE GUY TELLS OF NECKLACING VICTIM’S HORROR’ and a photograph of an ugly young man in a hospital bed.

  The woman sighs. ‘Horrible, isn’t it? How could anyone do something so. . horrible? ’

  A shrug, then Rowan rubs at the scars on her left wrist. Like thin shiny worms wriggling beneath her fingertips. ‘Maybe he deserved it? ’

  ‘No one could ever deserve that.’ The blue and green swirl trembled. ‘Oooh. . junior’s on the move again. Tell you: I feel like that bloke out of Alien. Only he was lucky — he didn’t have a little monster’s foot in his bladder.’

  If only she knew.

  Broodmother looks out at the sea of deathstones. ‘I was here when they had that service for Alison and Jenny McGregor, did you see it? Got Robbie Williams’s autograph. .’

  A man walks in through the ornate pillared frontage that screens the graveyard off from Union Street. He’s here. The man has a mobile phone pressed to his ear, a bag from Primark in his other hand. And an aura like a house fire — black and orange and red tongues of smoke trailing in his wake, caressing the tombs.

  ‘Of course, that was before Steve. And now look at me.’

  The wide path from the main street to the church is made up of paving slabs and ancient headstones, worn almost smooth by generations of feet. The living trampling on the dead. She can almost hear them groaning as he marches past the bench.

  ‘I tell you, they say giving birth’s the greatest thing you can ever do, but it’s the bit before that’s a pain in the- Oh, are you off? ’

  Rowan marches after him, staying far enough back to not be touched by his filthy stench: the cracking lines like burning blood. The beasts are too powerful and so was the woman with the aura of black, but a witch. . Now that’s something different.

  The Kirk is my mother and father. It is my rod and my staff. My shield and my sword. What I do in its service lights a fire in God’s name.

  13

  ‘It’s not my fault, OK? ’ Logan grabbed his jacket off the hook by the filing cabinet in his office. ‘Not like I ordered them off the bloody internet.’

  Steel blocked the doorway. ‘How could you no’ know they were human? ’

  ‘Yes, because you’re such an expert on anthropology. Who leaves actual finger bones on someone’s doorstep? ’ He picked up the phone on his desk, punched in the number for the CID main office. ‘Who’s this: Guthrie? ’

  Little sod sounded half asleep. ‘Yes, Guv? ’

  ‘I need you to go through the missing persons reports. Looking for someone between forty-five and sixty-five, right-handed, with arthritis. Five-one to five-six.’

  ‘Aye, right.’ Steel had a dig at the underside of her left boob, one side of her face all creased up. ‘Like that’s no’ going to throw up a million hits.’ Dig, dig, dig. ‘Think my boobs are getting bigger? ’

  ‘Male or female? ’

  ‘Probably female, but check both just in case.’ Logan put the phone down on the grumbled complaints.

  ‘I think they’re getting bigger. .’ She squidged them together, making a crevasse of wrinkly cleavage. ‘Look.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about your mate the scumbag journalist? He got his fingers lopped off, maybe he’s sending you the bits as a wee gift? ’

  ‘I need a search warrant for Reuben’s house. And he’s got a workshop, or a lockup or something, out in the countryside — we need to search that too. He’s killed someone, maybe a rival dealer, that’s where he’s getting the bones from.’

  ‘You’re no’ right in the head. When did you last hear of a little old lady drug dealer? ’

  Logan hauled open the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and pulled out a bundle of empty evidence bags, held together with an elastic band. ‘There was that one in Torry last year with the cannabis farm in her garage. And the granny selling coke in Northfield. And the bunch of pensioners running that meth lab in Huntly.’

  Steel scowled at him. ‘They were retired chemistry teachers, it doesn’t count.’

  The drawer clanged shut again. ‘Reuben’s the only-’

  ‘God’s sake, you’re obsessed. Why would Reuben boil the bones clean? Why no’ just send you the fingers? ’

  ‘Well, who else would it be? ’

  A face appeared over Steel’s shoulder. DS Chalmers, glasses perched on the end of her nose. ‘Guv? Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got activity on Anthony Chung’s bank account. Debit card was used to withdraw two hundred and sixty pounds this morning from the Clydesdale Bank cash machines outside Marks and Spencer on Union
Street.’

  Steel turned around. ‘Believe it or no’, Sergeant, we do actually know where Markies is.’ She squidged her boobs together again. ‘Do these look bigger to you? ’

  A blush rushed up Chalmers’s cheeks. She stared at Logan. ‘Guv? ’

  ‘Pull the security camera footage from the machine. Then go through the CCTV tapes — find out where he came from and where he went.’

  She scribbled it all down in her notebook. ‘They’re still in Aberdeen: only a matter of time before we find them.’

  Steel let go, and her breasts sagged and separated again. ‘Unless someone’s chibbed him and nicked his cards.’ She pointed at Logan. ‘You, Bone Boy, when did you find the last lot? ’

  ‘This morning, in a box on the top step.’

  ‘Then it’s no’ Reuben, is it? He’s been banged up in here since six last night.’

  ‘So he got someone else to deliver it for him. It’s a threat. He wants. .’ A frown. What? What on earth would Reuben get out of it? ‘OK, I haven’t got a clue what he wants, but you don’t send someone finger bones for fun.’

  ‘See if you’re right, and this is some OAP drug dealer from Manchester, or Birmingham, or Christ knows where, I’m going to sodding kill you. How are we supposed to solve that? ’

  Logan pocketed his phone and his keys. ‘Chalmers — when you’re done with the CCTV, go dig up a list of Agnes Garfield and Anthony Chung’s friends so we can start interviewing them.’

  ‘Yes, Guv.’

  ‘And get me someone in uniform with their head screwed on the right way round: search trained. I’m going out.’

  Even with her police-issue boots on, PC Sim barely made it past Logan’s shoulder. Her dark-brown hair was swept back and imprisoned in a tight bun, just under the rim of her bowler. That and the glasses made it look as if she was trying to get her head to go faster. She wrinkled her nose. ‘You live here? ’

  Logan hefted a roll of blue-and-white ‘POLICE’ tape out of the pool car’s boot. ‘What’s wrong with here? ’