Dying Light

by Stuart MacBride

  Half past one on the dot and the morgue at Force Headquarters was getting crowded. In addition to Isobel, her assistant Brian, DI Steel and Logan, the Deputy Procurator Fiscal was here with her boss, and the corroborating pathologist – Doc Fraser, an IB photographer, the detective chief superintendent in charge of CID, the Deputy and Assistant Chief Constables. It was like a who’s who of Aberdeen law enforcement, all of them worried about the possibility of another serial killer preying on the city. Knowing it would turn into a political nightmare as soon as the media found out. Even God himself had turned up; the Chief Constable being given pride of place at the head of the table. Logan wondered if he’d be saying grace before Isobel started carving.

  Logan could almost smell the anticipation in the room as Isobel began her external examination of the body on the slab. According to her instructions the Identification Bureau techies, who’d picked over the body for trace evidence under her assistant’s watchful eye, had positioned the victim exactly as she’d been on the forest floor: lying on her side, legs scissored out on the shiny, stainless steel surface, one arm up over her head. The thick purple line of pooled blood marked horizontal with spirit-level accuracy. They’d removed the blue plastic freezer bag from her head, exposing her battered face and bloodshot, bulging eyes. As if she was staring indignantly at the people gathered around the dissecting table. Something about the tableau made Logan shiver. This wasn’t like a normal post mortem, where the body was laid out on its back, all washed clean and clinically dead. Somehow, with the body arranged as it had been discovered, it was as if they were all voyeurs at the last, intimate moment of the victim’s existence. As if this was part of the killer’s performance. The final scene for this bruised and brutalized actor. Logan shivered again. PC Steve was right: he really was turning into a morbid bastard.

  Three hours later Isobel’s audience was pale, quiet and slightly shaky, standing in an otherwise empty briefing room on the second floor. A passing uniform had been dispatched to fetch coffee, not the plastic crap from the vending machine, but proper coffee reserved for high-powered meetings and special occasions. The Chief Constable reckoned they all needed it, and Logan wasn’t about to disagree.

  Isobel was in the corner with Doc Fraser, a modest smile on her face as he complimented her on a first-rate post mortem. Very thorough. Very revealing. Someone behind Logan muttered, ‘Jesus, did she have tae peel the poor cow’s face off?’ Up at the front of the room, the Chief Constable finished saying something to the Procurator Fiscal and they both laughed. The new deputy fiscal managed a dutiful smile, but she was still green about the gills. When the laughter had subsided the DCC ping-ping-pinged a spoon off the side of his china cup and everyone fell silent. It was time to post mortem the post mortem. Isobel walked them through the sequence of events as she saw them, illustrating the salient points on the whiteboard with diagrams of fractured skull and ribs and limbs. Like some demonic game of Pictionary.

  ‘Cause of death was asphyxiation,’ she said, drawing a red circle about the head of the body she’d drawn on the board, ‘partly due to the plastic bag secured over the victim’s head and partially due to pneumothorax: the right lung punctured by the ends of the fourth and fifth ribs. Her ribcage filled with air and collapsed the lung. Cyanosis would have been rapid and fatal.’ Then Steel asked the question they were all dying to know: was this the same MO as the one used on Rosie Williams? Had the same man killed them both? Isobel’s smile was condescending. ‘Well, Inspector, I’m sure you’re aware that there is a great deal of supposition involved in—’

  But Steel wasn’t having any of it. ‘Just yes or no.’

  Isobel stiffened. ‘Possibly. That’s all I can say at this point.’

  The inspector wasn’t impressed. ‘Possibly?’

  ‘Well obviously the first victim didn’t have a bag over her head… I’d have to go over the post mortem notes—’

  DI Steel waved a hand in Isobel’s general direction, cutting her off. ‘Then I suggest you go do that, right now. We need to know if we’re looking for one deranged maniac or two.’ When Isobel didn’t move she added, ‘Unless you’ve got something more important to do, that is?’

  Bristling, Isobel placed her china cup down on the nearest table, nodded at the Chief Constable, grabbed Brian, and swept from the room, promising to have a report on the inspector’s desk within the hour. There was a moment’s silence, everyone looking from DI Steel, to the doors closing in Isobel’s wake, and back to the inspector again. Steel smiled grimly. ‘I’m not taking any chances with this,’ she told the assembled great and good. ‘There are lives at stake.’

  And then the questions started: Inspector, what do you plan to do? What will we tell the press? How many men do you need? DI Steel kept a straight face, but Logan could see she was doing a victory lap inside. She was back.

  14

  The press conference was held at five thirty, set up in a rush so there would be time to get it on the Six O’Clock News. The Chief Constable, his deputy, DI Steel and an attractive blonde woman from the press office faced the media from behind a row of flat-pack tables draped with the Grampian Police logo. Steel had somehow managed to tame her feral hair; that and the newish suit made her look like a competent and determined police officer, rather than her usual cross between a tramp and a startled Cairn Terrier. Logan stood at the back of the conference room, behind the sea of cameras and journalists, as the Chief Constable told the world they’d found the body of a woman in the Tyrebagger Woods… Isobel had been true to her word – her report was on DI Steel’s desk in under an hour. There were only small differences between the two killings, this was probably the work of the same man.

  As soon as the CC’s statement was finished every hand in the place shot up: ‘Is this the work of a serial killer?’ ‘Have you any suspects?’ ‘What about the man already in custody?’ ‘Have you identified the victim yet?’ ‘Why have you put DI Steel in charge of the investigation?’

  The Chief Constable leaned forward and told the assembled crowd, ‘Inspector Steel has my complete confidence.’

  ‘Sarah Thornburn, Sky News. After the inspector’s performance on the Gerald Cleaver trial, is that wise?’

  Logan could see DI Steel bristling, but she managed to keep her mouth shut as the CC once more told everyone what a solid, dependable and experienced officer she was and how she had his complete confidence. Absolute and complete confidence. Logan grimaced: that was what Prime Ministers always said when someone high up in the government was caught with their hand in the till, or someone else’s knickers. Right before they were, regrettably, let go. There were more questions, but Logan wasn’t really listening. Instead he let his eyes drift over the assembled journalists and pundits, looking for a wee Glaswegian in an expensive suit… Colin Miller was sitting between a chisel-jawed woman from BBC News and a saggy man from the Daily Record, scribbling away furiously into a palmtop computer, not bothering to stick his hand up and ask questions. As soon as the CC stood, indicating that the press conference was at an end, Miller was out of there.

  Logan caught up to him in the car park. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘you not speaking to me any more?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Miller looked up, saw Logan and started walking again. ‘Got things tae do…’ He fumbled in his trouser pocket and pulled out his car keys.

  Logan frowned. ‘You all right?’

  Miller marched straight up to his fancy-looking dark grey Mercedes. ‘Don’t have time for this…’

  Logan grabbed his shoulder. ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘Me? What’s got into me? Well, let’s have a fuckin’ think about that one shall we? Every fuckin’ thing! OK? I’ve had enough!’ He wrenched the car door open and threw himself in behind the wheel. ‘Every fuckin’ bastard in the whole fuckin’…’ The engine growled into life and he slammed the door, twisted the wheel and put his foot down. Logan stood in the car park, watching as the car screeched to a halt at the junction before roaring off into
the traffic, disappearing in the mist. ‘Something I said?’

  Tuesday morning started at quarter past seven with the flat’s phone blaring out its electronic warble – on and on and on… Logan peeled open an eye, grumbled and curled back up under the duvet. The answering machine could take care of it. Today he was supposed to be starting on the back shift. Three days of working from two in the afternoon through till midnight. Technically he should have started yesterday, but after putting in a full day with the search team, DI Steel had given him time off for good behaviour. So today he was going to stay in bed until Jackie came home, share a bit of breakfast and invite her back to bed for some under-the-duvet fun. He smiled and wriggled deeper beneath the covers as the answering machine in the lounge dealt with the call.

  Maybe he and Jackie could – an explosion of electronic bleeps, whistles and buzzing as Logan’s mobile went mad. ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ He poked a hand out of the tiny cave he’d made with the duvet, fumbled about blindly on the bedside cabinet, grabbed the phone and dragged it into the warmth with him. ‘What?’

  ‘Where the hell are you?’

  Logan groaned: it was DI Steel. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Yes. Where the hell are you?’

  ‘In bed! I’m—’

  ‘In bed?’ The inspector put on a sleazy voice. ‘What you wearing?’

  ‘A frown. I’m on the back shift today, you said—’

  ‘Stop buggering about. We’ve got a serial killer out there knocking off tarts – get your backside in gear!’

  Logan closed his eyes and counted to ten while the inspector banged on about a sense of duty and how shift patterns were for the weak. ‘OK, OK!’ he said at last. ‘I’m coming in. Give me half an hour.’ He hung up, swore, sprawled out on the bed limbs akimbo, scowled at the blind, swore some more, got up, stubbed his toe on one of Jackie’s boots, swore, and limped his way off into the bathroom for a shower.

  When he finally made it into Force HQ DI Steel’s briefing was in full swing. There were a lot more people here than usual – the Screw-Up Squad had been supplemented with some real police officers for a change. Unlike the normal rambling shambles, everyone was in ordered rows, uniform and CID sitting to attention as the inspector took them through the events of the last twenty-four hours. The handbag discovered at the scene was covered with fingerprints, but they all belonged to the newly identified victim: Michelle Wood. That was the woman whose face had been peeled off yesterday, so Isobel could get a good look at the damage to the underlying musculature and bones. Logan shuddered at the memory. What with that and the arson victims last week he was spoilt for choice when it came to nightmares.

  He tuned back in just as DI Steel was setting up the various teams and doling out their assignments. She wrapped the briefing up and sent them on their way with a rousing chorus of ‘We are not at home to Mr Fuck-Up!’

  When there was no one left except Logan, she cracked open a window and sparked up a cigarette with trembling hands, inhaling like a suffocating man. She closed her eyes, sighed happily then lurched into a rattling cough. ‘Jesus, I’ve been bursting for a fag!’ She took another deep drag, shuddering in pleasure as the nicotine and smoke filled her lungs. When she breathed out it hung around her head like her own private fog bank. ‘You see the papers?’ she asked. Logan said no, so she dug a copy of that morning’s P&J from the bin and tossed it over. SHORE LANE STALKER STRIKES AGAIN! right across the front page, BY COLIN MILLER. It wasn’t his best work. ‘I suppose,’ she said as Logan read, ‘I’d better go tell Michelle’s dad she’s dead…’ Sigh. ‘You know, you wouldn’t think it to see her on the slab, but she was a pretty girl when she was little. Before spots and boys and underaged drinking. I brought her in about a dozen times when she was younger: shoplifting. Baby clothes, food, shoes, booze, stuff like that…’ her voice trailed off. ‘Arrested her all those times and I didn’t even recognize her, not with her face all smashed up like that. Only ID’d her this morning when the prints on the handbag came back… She was only twenty-four. Poor wee bitch.’

  ‘She been on the game long?’

  The inspector shook her head. ‘Not that I can tell. No arrests for soliciting on her record. Not even a warning.’

  Logan didn’t say anything, but he couldn’t help thinking of the woman he’d spoken to down the docks: the one with the PVC raincoat, black lace bustier and all the bruises. The minute she realized he was a policeman she’d offered him a bribe, or a free ride on the venereal express. Maybe there was a reason Michelle Wood hadn’t received so much as a caution. Maybe one of Aberdeen’s fine, upstanding boys in blue had been getting freebies.

  ‘Right.’ Steel dropped her cigarette butt and ground it into the carpet with a scuffed shoe. ‘While I’m gone I want you to make sure everything’s up and running properly. I don’t trust any of these bastards to get it right.’

  Logan was surprised. ‘You don’t want me to come with you?’

  She shook her head. ‘Her dad’s going to have enough to deal with without a house full of bloody policemen.’

  Logan was on his way down to the incident room when a familiar, hawk-nosed, ginger-haired bastard stuck his head out into the corridor and asked for a moment of his time. Inspector Napier smiled like a scar as Logan settled uncomfortably into the rickety plastic chair in front of the desk. ‘So, Sergeant McRae.’ The inspector leaned back in his seat and smiled his post-surgery smile again. ‘I take it you are familiar with the nature of the case now being headed up by DI Steel?’ Logan carefully admitted that he was, wondering where this was going. ‘Well,’ said Napier, ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you the importance of a quick and decisive result. One that will stand up in court. You see,’ he picked up a silver pen, slowly twisting it back and forth in his fingers, ‘I know that you have… “friends” in the media. These people will try to protect you should things go wrong.’ The smile became colder. ‘It might be wise for you to ensure that they do not use Inspector Steel as a scapegoat.’ Significant pause. ‘In the interests of teamwork.’

  An uncomfortable silence filled the space between them.

  ‘What if it’s her fault?’

  Napier waved a hand, as if shooing a troublesome fly. ‘Are you aware of the fable about the fox and the chicken? The chicken burns down the farmer’s barn and blames the fox. The farmer shoots the fox and then eats the chicken…’ He pointed the silver pen at Logan’s chest making it clear who the poultry was in this scenario. The inspector’s chilly, unsettling smile disappeared. ‘I will supply the sage and onion.’

  15

  Their new incident room – courtesy of the Chief Constable the minute this became a serial case – was huge, the walls covered with maps of Aberdeen and scribbled-on whiteboards. The middle of the room was taken up with phones and computers, the monitors flickering in the overhead light as uniformed officers took calls and entered the details into HOLMES. There was already a huge stack of automatically generated actions waiting for him, so Logan pulled up a chair and started working his way through the lot; sorting them into two piles he called ‘To Do’ and ‘Bollocks’. The system’s greatest strength was that it would churn its way through endless reams of data, automatically picking out connections and patterns. Its greatest weakness was that it frequently didn’t have a sodding clue what it was doing. He was just finishing when DI Steel finally got back from speaking to Michelle Wood’s father.

  ‘How did it go?’

  The inspector shrugged and started flicking half-heartedly through Logan’s pile of ‘Bollocks’, turfing them one after the other into the bin. ‘How do you think it went? Telling some poor bastard his daughter’s been battered to death by a psycho, and her naked body was abandoned in the fucking woods for three days before someone fell over it in the fog… oh and by the way, your little girl was fucking strangers for money.’ She sighed and ran a hand over her face. ‘Sorry, been a shitty week.’ Logan handed her the ‘To Do’ pile and she whittled that one dow
n too; there weren’t many actions left by the time she was finished. She palmed them off on the admin officer, telling him to get them cleared by the end of the day.

  ‘Right,’ she said as the man grumbled away to get the personnel organized. ‘Plan of action?’

  ‘Well, what do you want to do about Jamie McKinnon?’

  ‘Leave him where he is, we’ve still got plenty tying him to Rosie’s murder.’ Steel pulled out a packet of king-size cigarettes and started fiddling with the silver paper insert. ‘If we get someone else in the frame for both tarts we’ll do McKinnon for the fast-food jobs instead. But if anyone asks, we’re dealing with the killings like they’re part of the same pattern.’

  ‘OK.’ Logan grabbed a magic marker and started drawing up a rough map of the docks on one of the whiteboards. ‘Rosie Williams was found here…’ He drew a blue circle on Shore Lane. ‘Do we know if Michelle Wood worked the docks?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘If she did, then we’ve got a hunting ground. We put in some surveillance: unmarked cars…’ He picked up a green pen and started putting ‘X’es where a rusty Vauxhall could be parked without attracting too much attention.

  ‘What bloody good are unmarked cars going to do us?’ asked Steel, corkscrewing a finger into her ear. ‘Dirty bastards pick up women down there the whole time. How’re we going to spot our man: pull them all over and ask?’ She dropped her voice an octave and put on a broad east London accent. ‘“Excuse me, sir,’ ave you picked up this tart wiv the intention of beatin’ ’er to death, or just givin’ ’er a serious knobbin’?”’ She smiled pityingly at him. ‘Good plan: I can see that working.’

  Logan scowled at her. ‘if you’ll let me finish. We get a couple of WPCs done up as bait and they do the rounds. If someone tries to take them anywhere we’ve got them wired for sound: the unmarked cars follow and we catch the guy in the act. What do you think?’

  Steel wrinkled her nose and took a good look at Logan’s crude diagram. ‘Don’t think it stands a chance in hell, but what have we got to lose?’ she said at last. ‘Go pick yourself out a couple of WPCs. Remember, this bloke did Rosie Williams and Michelle Wood so he can’t be all that fussy. I want a couple of pugglers.’ Logan said he’d see what he could do.