Perfect Kill

by Helen Fields

  ‘There isn’t anything,’ he said blankly.

  ‘Yes there is. Everyone has something. For me it’s liberty. I think about it constantly, even when I’m not conscious of it. An hour later, I’ll realise I was reliving a walk on some beach, step by step. For the governor, it’s time with his daughters. When you’re in his office, he barely looks at you. He stares at the photo of him with them, loses track mid-conversation, sometimes calls people by their names by mistake.’

  ‘Do I?’ the governor asked softly.

  ‘Think about it. It’s important,’ Giorgia told Callanach.

  He hesitated, threw a half glance in Jean-Paul’s direction before he could stop himself.

  ‘Being believed,’ he said.

  Giorgia took in a sharp breath.

  ‘I wish I could ask why, but your colleague has decided I’m wasting time, so here you go. People will do anything, sacrifice anything, to get the one thing that means the most to them. It makes them vulnerable. More than anything else, it makes them stupid. Why did your victim’s hair smell of myrrh?’

  ‘We don’t know that yet,’ he said.

  She nodded her head.

  ‘Historically it’s been used for embalming,’ Jean-Paul offered.

  ‘Was your victim embalmed?’ she replied.

  ‘Um, no, but …’ Jean-Paul said quietly.

  ‘Then it wasn’t being used for its embalming qualities. The myrrh is what you need to figure out. There’s more than one type of doctor in the world, Luc. Some of us use tried and tested medicine. Others operate with smoke and mirrors, myrrh and myth.’ She dropped his hands, although her touch remained icy on his palms. ‘I’m ready to go back to my cell now,’ she told the governor. He gave her a slight dip of his head and knocked once on the door for the guard to open up.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ava had taken the opportunity to leave the station, arriving at the farm in Roslin at the same moment Detective Constable John Swift exited Lively’s car, misplaced his footing in the mud, and fell flat on his face in a combination of wet earth and animal excrement. She winced, decided against offering him a hand up given the state he was in and the likelihood that she too might end up on the ground, and waited for her sergeant to deliver the inevitable stinging verbal assault. The farmer saved Lively the trouble.

  ‘Is he some sort of clown you bring along to lighten the atmosphere when human bodies are discovered?’ the farmer asked. Ava didn’t engage. ‘This way then. Wee Bobo there can follow the footprints when he’s got himself upright. The other lot are already getting set up.’ He pointed to the scene examiners’ vehicle parked next to a distant barn.

  Lively walked at Ava’s side.

  ‘I like him already,’ Lively motioned at the farmer who was striding off across the field.

  ‘Maybe you were separated at birth,’ Ava muttered.

  They arrived at the pig enclosures to be handed clean suits by the forensics team. Ava and Lively slipped theirs on easily as DC Swift struggled to pull one over his muddy clothes.

  ‘Not to judge, ma’am, but how did the inappropriately named Constable Swift find his way into MIT? Did he get lost on the way to the bogs and just forget to leave again?’

  ‘Give him time, Sergeant. He might be a diamond in the rough.’

  ‘Oh aye, he’ll be the genius who solves this entire case just as soon as he’s learned how to walk. What’re you doing here, anyway, if you don’t mind my asking? Bit premature, isn’t it?’

  ‘Human bones in pig pens? There’s only ever one explanation for that.’ She climbed a fence and trod carefully, keeping to the hard mats the examining team had put through the mud to minimise disruption to the scene.

  ‘We don’t even know if the bones are human yet. I’m not sure the farmer is qualified to be making that assessment, unless he’s angling for a job at the mortuary.’

  ‘Farmers may not see many human bones but they see plenty from animals. Makes sense to me that these stood out.’

  ‘A tenner says you’ve overthought it and we’re wasting our time.’ Lively held out his hand for Ava to shake.

  ‘I’d happily just pay you a tenner to scrub your nails more thoroughly,’ Ava smiled. ‘Put your gloves on, and help DC Swift into his suit. I’m not sure he ever learned how to do zips.’

  ‘Definitely human,’ a forensics officer said, walking up and holding out a section of skull for them to view.

  ‘Damn it,’ Ava said. ‘How long’s it been here?’

  ‘Not sure exactly but at least two, possibly three, bodies were dumped here. Come with me.’

  They trod along the plastic matting to the edge of one pig pen where yellow flags poked their waving heads from the muck.

  ‘This skull section was found here. You can see there’s another section of skull still in situ. We want to excise the surrounding mud to see if there’s human tissue which would help us get a more precise time on the bodies’ arrival.’

  ‘How do you know the bones aren’t all from the same individual?’ Swift piped up from behind them.

  ‘Well,’ the scene examiner said slowly. ‘As you can see, the skull section in my hand has the right eye socket still intact. Compare it with the skull section sticking out of the ground, and you’ll note that one has both eye sockets still intact, so unless our victim had three eyes …’

  ‘Moving on,’ Ava said quietly, talking over Lively who was swearing under his breath and shaking his head. ‘You said you think there might be a third body?’

  ‘Next pen over,’ she pointed. ‘We can’t go in there yet as we want to preserve the scene first, both to understand the pigs’ movements and to protect whatever trace evidence there might be in the mud. We’re about to cover it with a tent before the rain starts again. The bone was spotted from beyond the fence at the other side. There’s no skull, but we’ve seen what we believe to be part of a clavicle. It’s small and thin, more likely to belong to a female or a child, but that’s preliminary. And there’s something else. Follow me back out. There’s a better view from the far side of the pens.’

  They retraced their steps, Ava grabbing Lively’s hand as he reached out to slap Swift round the back of the head, before traipsing in increasingly deep mud to stand at a fence where a variety of farmyard machinery had been dumped in front of another pig pen.

  ‘Stand up on the lowest fence rung,’ the forensics officer instructed them.

  ‘Carefully,’ Lively instructed Swift.

  The better view showed several more yellow flags over a wide area, just under a wooden fence where a considerable disturbance had been made in the mud, creating a large dip.

  ‘When we arrived, the farmer had moved the pigs out of the pen we were just in, but what drew our attention was the behaviour of the pigs in the pen you can see from here. There were several of them gathered around the dip in the mud, pushing their snouts up against the fence, clearly fighting each other to get to whatever was this side. We investigated and found the bone next to what appears to be a section of trachea up to the larynx. It’s fairly distinctive.’

  ‘You think they pushed it under the fence while they were consuming the remainder of the body?’ Ava asked.

  ‘That’s the theory. In the other pen, the boards go right down into the earth. Here, because there’s the machinery area to keep the pigs in, the fence has a gap at the bottom. No doubt at all that they’d already have consumed that trachea if they’d had the opportunity.’

  ‘Can smell food a metre down, my girls,’ the farmer declared from behind them.

  ‘Any idea how long it would have taken them to consume a whole human?’ Ava asked him.

  ‘Am I no’ a suspect then?’ the farmer asked her.

  ‘You’ll have to make a statement, of course, and we’ll need the names of everyone who works here or has access to the area, any suspicious vehicles or people on your land, but I doubt you’d have called us in if this was your handiwork.’

  ‘Bloody right. And there’s be
en no one suspicious I’ve seen, or they’d have ended up on the pointy end of my shotgun,’ the farmer told them. ‘There were three sows in each pen. An average body would be gone in less than half a day. A full day if it was a really big man.’

  ‘Tested that, have you?’ Lively asked.

  ‘If I didn’t know what quantity of food my pigs consumed daily after twenty years’ farming, I wouldn’t be much good at my job now, would I?’

  ‘Do they eat anything then?’ Swift asked.

  ‘The sections of skull are left over because that’s the hardest part for the pigs to bite through, just because of the shape. Left long enough, even the skulls would have gone, with the pigs working on the edge of the skull until it cracked and fell apart. We’re sifting the mud in each pen now for teeth. Those don’t break down in the pigs’ stomachs so they’ll give us a good baseline for when the bodies were dumped. If they’ve already expelled the teeth, the bodies would have been consumed more than thirty-six hours ago, which is the average adult sow’s metabolic rate. Given the full day it takes to consume a human, you could roughly time the bodies to have been brought here about two and a half days ago. And yes,’ she directed at Swift, ‘pigs are the ultimate body disposal system. Human DNA is no longer recognisable after it’s been through a pig’s stomach. We’re lucky we got the trachea, or the chance of getting any positive identification would have been virtually nil. They eat the soft bits first,’ the scene examiner added.

  ‘So all the future pig shit needs to be checked to see when they pass the teeth?’ Lively asked.

  ‘That’s your problem,’ the farmer announced.

  ‘Each pig is in a separate indoor pen. We’ll check each one on a daily basis until we’re confident that all the teeth have been gathered. We don’t want them outside until we give you the all-clear, so the teeth won’t be affected by any uncontrollable elements,’ the examiner explained.

  ‘Well, guess I won’t need to feed them for a day or so,’ the farmer said, nodding as he left them to it.

  ‘You’d think he didn’t care at all,’ Swift commented as the farmer disappeared around the side of the barn.

  ‘He raises, feeds, then kills animals for a living,’ Lively said. ‘Circle of life and all that. I’m guessing he’s not a sentimentalist.’

  ‘You were definitely separated at birth,’ Ava said. ‘What’ll happen to the bone fragments now?’

  ‘They’ll be delivered to a forensic anthropologist. I’ll email you the details. You can talk to them directly for their findings. The trachea will go to the deputy pathologist for inspection. Samples will be taken and we’ll keep our fingers crossed for a DNA match.’

  ‘Constable, go after the farmer and take his statement, please,’ Ava said. Swift looked happy to be leaving the conversation as the scene examination officer excused herself to rejoin her team. ‘The bodies are piling up. Something’s not right.’

  Lively nodded. ‘Malcolm Reilly in France. Three unidentified here. It’s a lot, but it’s not unknown. These three might have been dead for a year or more.’

  ‘We’ve also got Gene Oldman in Wester Hailes,’ Ava reminded him.

  ‘Gene Oldman pissed the wrong person off, and I suspect the queue to do that might have gone round the block. Whoever shot him in his own kitchen and didn’t even bother covering his body isn’t the same person who went to these lengths to get rid of evidence. The sudden influx of bodies is a coincidence. These things don’t space themselves out considerately over the year.’

  Ava turned away from the pig pens, looking across the hills at the view. It was breath-taking. Roslin had become a tourist hub for Rosslyn Chapel, but that wasn’t all the area had to offer. There wasn’t another building in sight from where she stood.

  ‘Not that many pig farms around here,’ she noted. ‘Most Scottish pig farming happens further north. Nice secluded farm too. Not overlooked. Pig pens and the barns are a good distance from the farmhouse. Clever.’

  ‘Bugger to get the bodies here though,’ Lively noted.

  ‘Not if they cut them up first, which would have made consumption easier. There’s enough information about it on the internet that it wouldn’t take a criminal mastermind to figure it out.’

  ‘Messy though, and risky. How could they be sure the farmer wouldn’t have disturbed them, or found the bodies before they could be eaten?’

  ‘If it were me, I’d have been watching the farmer first,’ Ava said. ‘Check what time the lights go off in the farmhouse at night. Move the bodies in immediately it gets dark. Give the pigs maximum overnight consumption time. If they were armed, they might not have been too bothered about the farmer’s shotgun. There must have been more than one person getting three bodies into the pens. I’d have kept one man back to keep an eye on the farmer’s door, make sure he didn’t get suspicious from the noise of the pigs, then had maybe two others, three even, dumping the bodies out here. Gets dark early at the moment. They’d have had in the region of twelve hours’ dark or dusk to get it done. Chop up the bodies into small enough chunks and streamline the process. That’s what I’d have done.’

  ‘Should I be worried about you?’ Lively asked.

  ‘Too much time on my hands,’ Ava said as she turned to head back into the city. She couldn’t be late. Natasha was waiting for her at the hospital.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Elenuta sat quietly on the kitchen floor, eating her lunch. It was Pot Noodles again, cheap and easy to store, and they seemed never to degrade no matter how out of date they were, which was safer than the questionable meat Finlay occasionally turned up with. Last time four of the women in the flat had been sick for days after eating what they’d been told was pork. The smell of it had put Elenuta off, and her refusal to eat it had meant all other meal options had been taken off the table for the day. It had been a lucky call. Most days she was so hungry she took whatever she could get.

  The process of eating was part muscle memory, part fakery right now. As hard as she’d tried to ignore Finlay’s laptop after he’d done what he wanted to her then fallen asleep, she’d sneaked back over to it. She’d noticed the email icon at the bottom of the screen while she’d been watching with Finlay earlier. She’d checked over her shoulder but Finlay was still dribbling in his sleep. Clicking twice on the tiny envelope symbol, she’d tried to recall any email address she knew. Her parents, her best friend, even businesses she’d connected with in the past.

  ‘Enter Password’, the screen had demanded.

  Elenuta’s heart had sank. She’d tried the internet search symbol, imagining finding any website with a chat function where she could ask for help. Same result. Only the video gallery and a few stupid games were accessible. Absolutely fucking typical. Access to a laptop and all she could do with it was watch more of the same horrors she was living through. Still, someone had to bear witness. With the volume switched off so as not to wake the sleeping monster, she’d watched the remainder of the race, and for every conscious minute since, she’d wished she hadn’t.

  The girl had died, as Elenuta had known she would, her back to the wall, pinned by the tattooed man who’d roared his self-approval, banging his chest as he’d let her fall to the floor, stomping around like some triumphant hero. Then the drone camera had swapped over to highlight the race’s former winner. Reality TV in its most extreme form of evolution, she thought. The woman heard a noise in the corridor behind her, whipping her head round, freezing, eyelids stretched as high as they would rise. Then she was off again, sprinting forwards, racing away from her pursuer, looking much fitter than anyone living in Finlay’s care had a right to. She rounded a corner, one hand pushed out against the far wall for balance, looking lithe and strong.

  That was when she ran full force into the race’s largest champion, knees still bleeding from his earlier encounter. She was a head taller than him, and obviously fitter, but she was no match for his bulk or his rage. Her own forward momentum worked against her, as he grabbed one of her arms an
d her body twisted, falling sideways to the floor, her head hitting the concrete with a crack that Elenuta could imagine in surround sound even if the volume was off. The woman tried to get back up but staggered, flat on her face as the big man climbed on top of her, already pulling off his shorts. Elenuta looked away, steeled herself, watched again. After everything she’d been through – the violence, imprisonment and daily sexual assaults – the terrible, sickening truth was that seeing another woman raped had become just a day in the life. Hours of hearing the women in rooms either side of her crying, screaming, calling out, had desensitised her. She simply had to wait for the scene to end. When he’d finished using her, he grabbed his previously discarded trousers and stuffed them into her mouth, pinching her nose. She fought hard, thrashed for more minutes than Elenuta realised it took a person to die from suffocation, and eventually lost consciousness. Still he didn’t move, just continued to lie on top of her. Perhaps, Elenuta thought, he realised how he would look to everyone watching through drone vision, his now placid penis flopping pathetically as he retrieved his trousers and put them back on. Or maybe he was prolonging the moment, his one great triumph over the female gender, revenge for every real or perceived slight, every rejection, sating not only his sexual desires but bringing every hate-filled thought bursting into glorious technicolour. Whoever was directing the action finally grew bored. The scene shifted again.

  The screen now split fifty-fifty, and two women could be seen. The one who had previously armed herself with the glass was taking stock, standing still, listening – no doubt – to the silence following the previous winner’s death. With each scream, Elenuta realised, there would come a guilt-feast of relief and delight that another woman had been caught, and that you were still alive to fight or run. Another woman, just like you, who you might have shared a room or a flat with, who might have tried to distract an angry guard or client to spare you from another fist. That woman’s death had just increased your own chance of survival. Good luck sleeping with that in your head.