Snow Storm

by Robert Parker

  “But.”

  “I know. You explained it all in great detail last night. I don’t expect you’ll remember, but, well, I felt I owed you something of an explanation at least. You may not be able to see the bigger picture but you do have the consolation of knowing it wasn’t entirely your own fault and really there was nothing you could have done.”

  He struggled, pulling at his restraints trying to get free, knowing it was a futile gesture. Instinct drove him to it even though he knew there was no way out.

  “And so to business I’m afraid. This shouldn’t hurt as such and I’m reliably informed it should at least be quick.”

  “You can’t,” he shouted, feeling the anger and rise now. “You know they’ll come for you.”

  “Oh quite. In fact I would go so far as to say I’m counting on that.”

  He felt the tightening round his neck, slowly at first and then all at once. He kicked with legs that wouldn’t move and screamed with a voice that wasn’t there.

  ********************

  The county buildings were cold. The draft drove a constant circulation of damp December air round the ancient stairs and upwards, permeating the building as a whole. They were in the function room next to the kitchen on the first floor, where the mock châteaux’s high windows looked out over the town’s festively lit gardens and the Mercat Cross.

  This particular meeting of the community council had been convened for over an hour and they had so far only managed to wrangle over the placement of double yellow lines down one of the side streets. One faction’s opinion was that they were needed as sometimes it was an outright struggle to get past something parked in the lane and this could cause delays.

  “Delays in what?” someone had asked. This was Wigtown after all. If you wanted to be in a hurry you’d picked the wrong place to live. There were choruses of approval from others at this.

  Why was it, someone else asked, that certain residents of the town wished to stay so firmly in the dark ages? It was all very well having the scenery and living in a remote corner, but why did it have to come at the cost of progress?

  Eventually the matter was drawn to a close or some kind of stalemate and the meeting moved on to the latest applications for planning consents to build wind turbines and the evil inefficient overrated view polluters or environmental saviours they were, depending on the various stand points.

  After they had ploughed through this and most had lost the will to live, the man in the pin striped suit was introduced, though the nature of his visit had been a subject many pondered during the preceding discussions, owing to the fact that his carefully thought out getup had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

  He was announced as Giles Herriot-Watt of the law firm Farquhar and Donaldson in Edinburgh and duly stood to address the room.

  “Good evening,” he began, in an accent that seemed stuck somewhere between Edinburgh, the Home Counties and San Francisco. “I represent a company called Brentwood which as many of you may be aware, has recently made a significant commitment to investing in this area in purchasing the industrial complex at Baldoon.”

  There were nods of approval round the room. This being a small town in a sparsely populated area, everyone knew the land round Baldoon had transferred hands recently and there had been a fair bit of discussion of it around the town, mainly from farmers worried about the cost of the feed they bought there sky rocketing along with every other overhead. There were even rumours about a factory and the jobs it might bring to the area.

  “And to that end,” the suit continued “as a gesture of good will and a sign of my clients long term commitment to their partnership with this area I have been asked to set up a scholarship fund for the town, helping gifted students to cope with the high cost of uprooting themselves to study in areas where, let’s face it, the cost of living may be somewhat prohibitive.”

  Another chorus of nods from the heads in the room followed by a slow growing round of applause.

  “My clients have also asked to remind everyone that it is imperative they retain a modicum of privacy in their operations at Baldoon. Some of the development work being undertaken in the complex is of a sensitive nature and as such could be prone to acts of industrial espionage. This is a matter my clients take very seriously and as such they are willing to offer a reward to anyone reporting any information relating to such activities.”

  This time the nods were more confused and disjointed, as was the round of applause.

  With that he thanked them for their time and made a sharp exit.

  Tongues were not long in starting to wag.

  ********************

  Burke was woken by the phone at around five, having been battered yet again by the other half’s restless feet. He’d tried to relax as much as possible, continuing his way through a Battle Star Galactica box-set – the original 1978 series not the new version, which despite the hype, he hadn’t yet found time to digest. He couldn’t see how they could top the original, with Lorne Green post Bonanza and Dirk Benedict before The A-team. They’d even cheekily put a Cylon Robot in the opening sequence to The A-team for Benedict to shoot a look of vague recognition at.

  Rachel didn’t approve of this particular fetish. She continued looking at Baby Gap online, save for the odd troubled glance over the top of her specs. She later explained that she’d been watching him as he took turns at smoking his e-fag and practising shuffling cards in ever more elaborate fashions. She wished he would learn how to relax.

  He told her not to worry as he picked up a copy of a John Belushi biography in an effort to read himself into rapid eye movement.

  Sleep eventually did find him and he drifted into a dream where a plague swept through the city turning everyone it touched into zombies. There was a cure, a pill you could take but it was only available in a hospital that looked suspiciously like the security queue at Edinburgh airport. He waited for what seemed like forever driven mad by the screams of a small child behind but when he looked there was no one there. After a wait that seemed unending he arrived at a security gate and tried to go through but froze as a strangely familiar bell went off.

  He woke with a start when he realised it was the phone ringing and dived across the bed as Rachel rolled over threatening to wake up. The first instinct on being phoned at this time was to wonder if someone had died. In this case they had.

  “What the absolute fuck?” he asked in an outraged half-whisper before apologising to the despatcher on the end of the phone while she fumbled around wondering whether to respond to this particular question or not.

  He set the espresso machine off to make a triple while he staggered around trying to wedge himself into a pair of ever tightening jeans and narrowly missed smacking his head on one of the thick posts at the foot of the bed. He wondered if it was inappropriate, wearing a Thundercats t-shirt, albeit under a hooded top and a three quarter length jacket.

  The body had been found by revellers staggering home around an hour ago, left out in the open on waste ground.

  Western harbour had been built in the early 2000s in an effort to cash in on Leith’s up and coming status as the new place to be and develop the waterfront by ramming it full of glass and concrete. Unfortunately it seemed Leith was still up and coming and many of the flats were starting to look less than the stylish contemporary living spaces the estate agents liked to brand them.

  A recession and stalling recovery meant there was plenty of waste ground in the area and a surplus of now cheap accommodation readily available to whoever.

  Dr Brown had the honour of being on call again this morning and looked like he was somewhere else.

  The body lay face down on the broken concrete. From what Burke could see he was black, twenty-five to thirty-ish, tall, well-built and recently the victim of a fairly brutal strangling. The neck had a deep open wound running round its full circumference. Blood had congealed as it ran down the victim’s hooded top but notably not onto the concrete.

  �
�As you can no doubt see he’s been moved some time after death,” the Doctor said, confirming Burke’s suspicion. “Not that they’ve been overly concerned about hiding him.”

  “I’m starting to think bodies are like buses,” Burke said, trying to get a closer look at the face. “That’s a fairly serious cut.”

  “My guess would be some form of garrotte,” the Doctor replied. “Something like cheese wire.”

  “Must’ve stung a bit.”

  “Possibly not that much depending on how quickly they severed the carotid artery. More likely he bled to death than suffocated.”

  “Happy days. Any idea as to the time of death?”

  “Not more than three hours. A bit fresher than yesterday’s effort.”

  “You can say that again. Busy couple of days for you.”

  “Well it is the funeral season.”

  He made his way back to Gayfield Square, placed his head on folded arms and fell into unconsciousness for a solid hour.

  The cold woke him. He made another coffee and turned on his PC. He googled garrotting and was immediately given the dictionary definition along with a Wikipedia page dedicated to the subject and a series of black ink illustrations in the images section, their period indicating it was not exactly a popular pastime of late. Wikipedia seemed to think it was primarily an assassination weapon although it had been favoured by the Spaniards as an execution method for around seven hundred years or so. The Inquisition naturally featured in many of the illustrations.

  He found himself wondering about mechanics of it all; how it was possible to do that sort of damage to a neck without inadvertently severing a couple of your own fingers using cheese wire? You would probably have to wear gloves. Maybe that pointed to something professional. He knew from experience it was possible to slice up your fingers just trying to snap a piece of thread, though truth be told he knew from experience it was possible to do many seemingly innocuous things and injure yourself through sheer pathological clumsiness, like the time he’d stepped off a boat, forgetting it hadn’t yet docked and got up close and personal with the Irish Sea.

  He couldn’t find links to any particular organised crime persuasion that liked to use this method of dispatch but found a BBC news article about a study finding strangling was not usually linked to organised crime. No joy. He knocked his head slowly on the desk and then something caught his eye. He looked up to see a concerned looking DC Jones looking at him. She was back.

  “You ok boss?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he replied, unsure if you should invent some kind of reason or justification for effectively drumming your head of a desk -trying to get the circulation going on a cold morning maybe- and drawing a blank. “You?”

  “Good thanks, yeah,” she replied dumping a bag of what seemed to be everything on the floor and arranging an array of Danish pastries on her desk. She should really be fat he thought before remembering that people had said the same about him five years ago. They never appreciated their metabolic rate, the youth of the day.

  He watched out of the corner of his eye as she rearranged her desk, trying to marshal the brightly coloured picture frames and stationary into some kind of order before her day officially began, like some kind of modern superstition or maybe just a slight case of OCD. He himself had never been able to find a happy organisational medium and tended to go through phases at both ends of the spectrum, though as he grew longer in the tooth he suspected the slobby chaotic end of the spectrum was starting to look more like home.

  She was young and keen, still having the idea she could make a difference, not yet at the stage where she would become jaded. That came with time, along with the cynicism and the sensation of swimming through treacle.

  Slowly the office began to fill up and he felt like a little normality had resumed. The routine of this place, if nothing else, was a kind of constant, as much as it could be in this job.

  He’d arranged a briefing for nine thirty regarding yesterday’s bag of fun and would at least enjoy seeing their faces on breaking this latest development. Not that he had any reason to suspect they were connected.

  He commandeered a copy of The Metro in an effort to check the latest which was of course not a lot. Snow was still predicted and a debate raged as to whether this time the authorities were prepared. Ah the excitement. Why was it that these days he seemed to find everything the media said like some kind of Chinese water torture? It was always the same thing; over and over, repeat, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

  He wanted a break. Or did he? He wasn’t sure he knew what he wanted anymore.

  They convened in a meeting room, the temperature of which was always the subject of a debate but which was a welcome relief from the dose of the shivers he seemed to have acquired.

  Things started well enough, though there wasn’t a lot to go on the team were keen to get their teeth into this one.

  It seemed no one had seen anything of the bag prior to the discovery of its decomposing contents.

  “Any joy with CCTV?”

  “None boss,” DC Quinn replied in his thick Glaswegian accent. “There are obviously cameras on the roads either side and at the schools and HQ but none that actually focus on what’s happening on the street itself.”

  “Any way we could spot if anything took longer than expected from one end to the other?” Burke asked, knowing as he did that there was an additional problem.

  “I’d wondered that myself,” Quinn answered. “Problem is there’s a lot of parking there so there’s a potential for everything to be mis-timed. Someone parks for a bit, someone else dithers looking for a spot, that kind of thing.”

  “Joggers? Cyclists?”

  “Plenty but no-one with a sports bag like that, although most of them had rucksacks, commuters running to work that kind of thing.”

  “Ok. Go back through it. Check for anything that takes a bit longer. Possibly something that comes in out of sequence if you see what I mean, a car maybe comes in in front of another and exits behind it, anything we can go on.”

  Quinn started to scratch his nose either in nervousness or -more likely Burke thought- frustration as his cheeks turned slightly pink and he stared at his diary.

  “Ok, the witness?”

  “Nervous wreck boss, understandably,” DS McKay piped up, his voice a couple of octaves lower, doubtless from another night spent sinking a few. His eyes were heavily hooded under a mass of wrinkled bare scalp. “Seemed a harmless enough laddie, works as an accountant in Canonmills, walks through the park every morning to get there. He spotted it on Friday morning as you know and only checked it yesterday out of misguided curiosity.”

  “Could have been worse though,” snorted DC Campbell from the other side of the table. “Could have been a kid that found it. Should be strung up, the bastards that did it.”

  So Campbell was back too.

  “Possibly,” McKay carried on as Campbell folded his arms and shook his head in over hammed moral outrage. “Anyway getting back to the facts boss, he really didn’t have anything useful to add.”

  He then told them about the latest addition to their case load. A couple of them already knew. News travelled fast in the station. Murder still carried some currency despite the public perception of the crime levels sky rocketing in the city.

  He put this out there and left it hanging, gauging their different reactions, letting them run with it.

  Some thought nothing of it. “Coincidence” McKay said. “Sometimes you just get a rash of these things.”

  “It’s a revenge killing boss,” Campbell announced. “You know yourself, these flats are full of immigrants, Eastern Europeans. One of theirs gets popped or in this case carved up and they decide to take matters into their own hands. It’s like the wild west down there.”

  DC Jones snorted and shook her head.

  “What?” Campbell asked.

  “Been reading a bit too much Daily Mail again?”

  “I’m only telling it like it is down there
. It’s all very well you telling me what I can and can’t say just cos you’ve done a degree in under water basket weaving for lesbians but this is a murder investigation.” Campbell replied, folding his arms and staring at the table in an instant sulk.

  “Ok, that’s the theory from the far right,” Burke interjected in an effort to dissolve the tension and get the discussion back on topic. “Any of you lily livered lefties want to throw something into the mix?”

  They didn’t. McKay and Quinn looked particularly puzzled. More fool him to put them on the spot.

  “In which case I vote we proceed as normal and treat these as two separate investigations and as mine is the casting vote, well, you get the picture. That said, as DC Campbell is so intent on chasing up his crack pipe theory…” He timed this so they would laugh. “I’ll indulge him in it for the rest of the morning. He can find out anything he can about garrottes and try to avoid going down the line of the Spanish Inquisition, much as I know he’d love it to be a Catholic conspiracy.” They laughed again at this and even Campbell grudgingly smiled, though Quinn and McKay still looked confused.

  “Any other business? Well, back to the grindstone I guess.”

  3

  As the fourth generation to take the reins at the family firm, an old Etonian and recipient of The Law Award for Legal Personality of the Year 1992, Rupert James Farquhar the third always felt he knew a thing or two about duty. Responsibility for one’s position, the good name of the family and the firm was a heavy burden but one he and his forefathers had borne stoically through two world wars, a depression and a slow but steady erosion of the older better ways. Time was one knew one’s place in the world and accepted it with the good grace God or whoever ran the bigger picture intended.

  But times were changing. His son for instance did not inhabit the same world much less share the same values or even the traditional family Christian name.