Human Face

by Aline Templeton

  She was very much on edge. This was going to be something of a test case for the Serious Rural Crime Squad – the first murder to have to be dealt with from such a distance. Certainly, the team she was bringing up with her was better equipped and much more experienced than any local constabulary could have hoped to be, and they would be in direct computer contact with forensic expertise. High priority too – the chief constable was very keen that his cost-cutting brainchild should work; the media would certainly be onto this in a flash. So – no pressure, then.

  Borthwick was feeling uncomfortably exposed. She’d read the situation here wrongly to begin with and to leave Kelso Strang, a newly qualified SIO who was still in a vulnerable emotional state, in charge of what would inevitably be a high-profile investigation could be a costly mistake. She’d cleared her desk at record speed and been first to board the chopper.

  It landed neatly on the upper lawn in front of the house and as she climbed down a uniformed sergeant came towards her, a big, burly man.

  ‘Sergeant Buchanan, ma’am.’ Then he gestured towards the group she had seen from the air standing on the patio beside the house, which included three or four uniforms and a woman holding a gun. ‘The vet’s taken care of the dog that wouldn’t let us in, but everyone’s been kept out since, as instructed.’

  ‘Thanks, Sergeant. That’s excellent.’ She pointed to the group of three men and a woman that had emerged from the helicopter. ‘I’ve brought the SOCOs with me. I imagine DI Strang will be keen to deploy them as soon as possible.’

  Borthwick made to go towards the house but Buchanan said uneasily, ‘I’m afraid there’s a complication, ma’am. Miss Lacey – that’s the lady who’s been accused of killing Mr Carnegie. She’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ Her eyebrows shot up. ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Well, we think – Mr Carnegie’s Mercedes has gone, you see, and DI Strang has called in to say that it’s crashed on a bridge and it’s blocking the road round from Balnasheil.’

  ‘Is she injured?’

  ‘He doesn’t think so. But she seems to have gone up the mountain—’

  ‘Up the mountain?’ Borthwick gave an incredulous look in that direction. The sun was shining brightly now, and the outline of the ridge was showing as an ominous shape in the mist. ‘Whatever for?’

  The sergeant gave a sort of helpless shrug. ‘Anyway, mountain rescue is on its way with a trained dog so we’re hoping they can find her before she harms herself. It’s no place to be on a day like this.’

  ‘I can well imagine,’ she said. This was certainly an unwelcome complication. ‘So where is DI Strang now?’

  ‘He’s going to show them where she’s gone. He’ll maybe be a wee while, if they’ve a problem finding her and bringing her down. She’s not just a very’ – he hesitated, choosing his words – ‘athletic kind of lady.’

  ‘I see. Well, we’d better get on with things at this end as best we can.’

  The SOCOs, together with a pathologist and a photographer, were unloading equipment as she walked over to the patio. It wasn’t Strang’s fault, of course it wasn’t. He could hardly wander off and leave a murder suspect stranded halfway up a mountain, but her own anxieties made her feel a certain unreasonable irritation that Strang had allowed himself to get embroiled in this. It was lucky she’d decided to come herself immediately and that the investigation wouldn’t have to be held up right at the start. Delays cost money.

  The smell assaulted her as she approached, that unmistakable sickly waft on the air that you didn’t forget no matter how many years you’d spent behind a desk. One window in the French doors had been knocked out and she could see the body of the dog lying across the threshold, a Dobermann Pinscher. It had been a handsome animal, lean and well-muscled, its black and chestnut coat smooth and glossy.

  Poor creature! It wasn’t to know that it was doing the wrong thing by guarding its fallen master. At least it had been killed with a clean shot to the head.

  The vet was hovering, waiting to speak to her. She was a fresh-faced woman, not much more than thirty, and she was looking distressed. ‘Do you want me to stay or can I go now? I’ve got patients waiting for me.’

  ‘Yes, by all means. We know where to find you, presumably.’ As the woman turned to go, Borthwick said sympathetically, ‘Sorry you’ve had to do that – a nasty thing to ask of a vet.’

  She grimaced. ‘You could say. If I had my way I’d shoot the people who train them like that, not the poor dogs.’

  It wouldn’t really do to give wholehearted agreement to this when you were a chief superintendent, so Borthwick only made a sympathetic noise as she peered through the glass. The desk where the man’s body lay was to the left but, craning her neck, she could see that it was a gruesome spectacle – a severed artery, judging by the amount of blood.

  One of the SOCOs came over to her. ‘We’ve got everything out of the chopper now and the pilot needs to get back, ma’am. He’s asking if you’ll be wanting him to pick you up later.’

  Borthwick hesitated. ‘Hard to say, at the moment, until you can tell me what the situation is. I’ll call in later.’

  There was nothing she could do here now except get in the way. In a house this size there must be somewhere they could set up; perhaps Buchanan had seen to that already. As she turned round to ask him she realised that there was a man waiting to speak to her and she looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘Can I introduce myself, ma’am? I’m DC Daniel Tennant, from the Met. I think my bosses may have spoken to you.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Borthwick said coolly. Police Scotland hadn’t taken kindly to finding that London had installed an undercover officer to spy on Adam Carnegie without having the courtesy to mention it.

  ‘I’m happy to be of any assistance that I can,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a fair bit of useful CID experience and I’m sure they would agree if you wanted to co-opt me to this investigation.’

  Borthwick suddenly became aware that there was a young uniformed constable who seemed to be jiggling about behind Tennant’s back, trying to catch her eye. She was quite short, pale-skinned and brown-eyed, with hennaed hair that was almost pink scraped back in a scrubby ponytail under her cap, and now Borthwick had noticed her she mouthed something urgently.

  Tennant, unaware, was looking at her expectantly, but she said only, ‘I appreciate the offer, but we have a team in place now. I can understand that there are investigations the Met may want to undertake but I’m afraid that will have to take second place.’

  Over his shoulder she saw the antsy PC relax, then edge away. Tennant said petulantly, ‘I think that’s a pity, ma’am, because—’

  She cut him short. ‘Sorry – excuse me. Sergeant Buchanan! Is there a room we can use?’

  As she walked into the house with him she said, ‘Tell me, who was the young policewoman who seemed to be trying to warn me about Tennant?’

  Buchanan smiled. ‘That’s Livvy Murray, ma’am. With the local force, but doesn’t much like it. She’s from Glasgow and she’s got a mouth on her but she’s not daft. She’s sort of taken a scunner to Tennant – he’s that wee bit superior, maybe, and she’s prickly. She’s insisting he has to be a suspect because he’d some sort of relationship with this female that disappeared, Eva Havel.’

  ‘Yes, I know all about her. And could PC Murray have a point?’

  Buchanan looked doubtful. ‘In theory, maybe. But the eyewitnesses saw Lacey coming out covered with blood, having been attacked by the dog, and taking off like that does look like an admission of guilt.’

  ‘I suppose so. We’ll just have to hope we get her back in a condition to be questioned. Now, find us coffee and then you can talk me through it.’

  The dog was a neat black-and-white Border collie with sharp bright eyes that darted about, assessing its surroundings, while constantly checking its master’s face for instructions.

  ‘Looks an intelligent animal,’ DI Strang said to the owner, a middle-aged man with a weathe
r-beaten complexion, who smiled proudly.

  ‘Oh aye, he’s clever lad, Moss,’ he said. ‘Loves a callout. Not exactly a tracker, mebbe, but he’ll ken fine if someone’s been past and it’s hardly going to be busy up there the day, is it?’

  There were three in the team, all men in heavy anoraks wearing serious climbing boots and carrying emergency gear.

  ‘No,’ Strang agreed. ‘To be honest, I don’t think Beatrice – that’s her name – can be far away. She’s a lady of – how can I put this? – a certain girth, but she thinks she’s in trouble and may well be hiding. If she’s just cowering somewhere we should get her quite quickly but I can’t see her coping with this terrain. She’s carrying an injury and I’m afraid she may be a bit confused so I’m worried about what might happen to her if she’s moving about. I think she was probably trying to cross the burn higher up, so we could follow that line to start with.’

  ‘You’re coming up, sir?’ The team leader gave a doubtful look at Strang’s footwear.

  ‘You lead on and I’ll follow. Don’t worry – I won’t do something stupid and lumber you with someone else to bring down.’

  ‘Och, not a bit – we’ll just leave you lying there,’ the man said jovially. ‘Anyway, the wind’s picking up. We’ll have better visibility any time now. Right, lads, off we go. Moss!’

  At the first sign of movement the collie had started racing round them, tail wagging so hard it was almost moving in a circle, giving joyous barks. As the men climbed over the low wall on the inside of the bridge it streaked up the side of the burn, low to the ground.

  Strang followed. There was indeed a swirling wind, capriciously clearing the mist in patches, then letting it surge back, but it was definitely thinning now and the sun was tinting the grey with a sullen ochre.

  The men ahead were moving with that steady, swinging mountaineer’s gait and though he’d done a bit of hillwalking himself he was left behind, following the sound of their steps and voices, and the occasional excited whining of the dog.

  She must have been asleep, or something, because Beatrice couldn’t think how she’d got here. She was slumped against a rock, as if she’d fallen, and she felt hot and very, very cold at the same time. It hurt to breathe, as well. She crossed her arms to try to hold herself together and a terrible spasm of pain shot through her. Her right arm seemed clumsy, huge; she looked at it, bewildered.

  Rosamond. She suddenly remembered Rosamond. Something terrible had happened to her; she’d gone to get her but the ground just dropped away. She’d almost fallen herself – that was right. She could see the edge from here; the mist wasn’t nearly so thick now. She must have crawled back, sat down and fallen asleep.

  But she remembered something else too, the great menacing thing that was coming after her and the terror that possessed her before convulsed her again. She daren’t look round, she daren’t—

  And there was something else, too, something that had wakened her – and now she heard it again. A dog, barking. She knew what was going to happen next.

  Somehow she got herself up, though every single bit of her hurt and her head was swimming so that she felt sick. What was she to do? If she hid, maybe the monster and the dog would pass without seeing her. It was her only hope. She shrank into a cleft in the rock.

  But They weren’t passing. They were coming closer and closer; she could hear Them talking, hear the terrible, eager whining of the dog and she backed away, back and back, the way she had come, towards the place where Rosamond had fallen.

  Strang had somehow missed the line the others were taking. He could hear them above him now and he stopped to try to get his bearings.

  He was only about twenty feet above the road and the mist was lifting every minute. He was standing at the foot of a small rock face, perhaps fifteen feet high, and it sounded as if the mountain rescue team was above it. He was turning to retrace his steps when he saw a flash of white at the bottom and went across to investigate.

  There was a doll lying there, a doll whose lacy clothes were stiff with mud and whose delicate face had been smashed in on one side. It lay against the rock that had done the damage, one eye missing and the other eye open, its blank blue gaze directed up to the clearing sky.

  He paused, frowning. What would a doll be doing in a place like this? It was muddy, certainly, but it didn’t show any sign of having been exposed to the elements for any length of time. Could it have anything to do with Beatrice? The mist had swirled back again round here and he couldn’t see all the way along below the bluff; could she have fallen with the doll and be lying somewhere further along?

  He heard the dog giving a couple of excited barks, suggesting that it thought they were closing in. With a hollow feeling in his stomach, he walked on.

  ‘Do you think I could have a word with her, Sarge?’

  PC Livvy Murray had been hanging around outside the upstairs sitting room where DCS Borthwick was establishing an incident room, waiting for Sergeant Buchanan to come out.

  He looked down at her, amused. ‘You can always try. She hasn’t bitten anyone yet.’

  ‘Maybe you could just introduce me. Just, you know, say I don’t want to interrupt her or anything—?’

  ‘It’s not like you to be backward in coming forward. What’s happened to the gallus Glasgow spirit?’

  She pulled a face at him. ‘I know, but I’m needing to get to her before Strang tells her I’m rubbish. I’m not wanting just to be shoved aside but I’m not wanting her to think I’m just being pushy or anything.’

  ‘How on earth could anyone imagine that?’ he said with heavy sarcasm, but he was grinning as he opened the door again. ‘Would it be convenient for you to have a word with PC Murray, ma’am?’

  Borthwick looked up from the laptop she was working on at the dining table brought up from downstairs to act as a desk. ‘Yes, fine,’ she said, and turned to wave Murray to one of the upright chairs placed in front of it.

  It had been plain that Murray had been trying to tell her something while she’d been talking to Tennant, and then had slipped away; it had been quite a bold action for a humble PC and she was curious.

  ‘What was it all about, Constable?’ she said with her usual directness.

  Murray coloured. ‘I just wanted you to know DC Tennant shouldn’t be involved in this, that was all. But you told him he couldn’t, so that was all right.’

  ‘You see him as a possible suspect?’

  ‘It’s logical, ma’am. We don’t have a time of death yet and Miss Lacey could just have gone in and found him.’

  She could even be right, at that. ‘So – you’re accusing DC Tennant?’

  ‘I’m not accusing anybody. It’s just he went radge about us not pulling out all the stops when Eva Havel disappeared and I think she was his girlfriend. That’s a motive.’

  This wasn’t the time to play guessing games. Borthwick said repressively, ‘I think we’ll just follow the normal investigative procedure of establishing the facts before we indulge in theories. Thank you, Constable—’

  ‘There’s something else,’ Murray said hastily. ‘Marek Kaczka – he’s the sort of handyman, and he heard a car coming up the drive last night, and then leaving again not long after.’

  Borthwick pricked up her ears. ‘Oh? Have you reported that?’

  ‘I haven’t seen DI Strang. I’m not sure who else is working on it so I thought I should report directly to you. There’s another thing too. I did an interview with Murdo John Macdonald – he’s the barman at the hotel. He’s married to Vicky, who’s the housekeeper here, but I got him to admit to me that he’d been in love with another girl who disappeared. Still is, if you ask me, so if he thinks Adam Carnegie killed her too—’

  Borthwick cut her short. The girl was obviously trying to get her piece said before she was dismissed; it sounded as if she had in fact come up with useful information but she hadn’t time at the moment to indulge a PC whose experience of investigations had obviously been derived f
rom too many crime series on TV. Still, she was always on the lookout for talent and there was no need to discourage her.

  ‘All right, Constable. Speculating is pointless at the moment. Record whatever information you have and see that DI Strang gets it in an easily digestible form and then we can take it from there.’

  She could see Murray trying not to look too gauchely pleased. ‘Thank you, ma’am. Does – does that mean I’m to be working on the case?’

  ‘In a very junior capacity,’ she said dryly. ‘Just do what you’re told. You’re not Sarah Lund.’

  Murray said demurely, ‘No, ma’am. Haven’t the sweater for it. Thank you, ma’am.’

  When she had gone, Borthwick smiled to herself and when Buchanan came back in she said, ‘PC Murray – bit of a live wire?’

  Buchanan groaned. ‘Goes off like a firecracker. Needs to be sat on sometimes.’

  ‘She seems to have come up with some useful stuff, though. Find her a slot where she doesn’t get too discouraged but she can’t do too much harm.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Buchanan was saying when the door opened and one of the SOCOs in his white suit came in.

  ‘Thought I’d give you a snapshot of the preliminary stuff, ma’am. Carnegie’s throat was cut – severed carotid artery on the right-hand side. The doc won’t be specific but time of death is certainly a lot earlier than first thing this morning.’

  PC Murray had been right about that, anyway. ‘Surely he can do better than that?’ Borthwick pressed.

  ‘Could be yesterday evening. He did say it wasn’t likely to be after 2 a.m. but he’s still doing tests. The other thing is that the weapon is a kitchen knife that’s lying on the desk just beside him. We’ve printed him and we’ve just dusted the knife for prints. As far as we can tell, they’re all his.’