Written in Bone

by Simon Beckett

  Simon Beckett

  than ever, with only a ghost of a lost prettiness remaining in her puffy features. Her smile was a grudging thing to start with, but it faded altogether when she saw who her customer was.

  ‘Do you have any padlocks?’ I asked.

  She jerked her chin towards a shelf on the back wall, where there was a selection of ironmongery stacked haphazardly in boxes.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  She didn’t reply. I felt her gaze on me as I sifted through the boxes of bolts, screws and nails, hostile and resentful. But I found what I was looking for: a heavy-duty padlock, and a spool of chain.

  ‘I’ll take a metre of this, too, please.’

  ‘The cutters are there as well.’

  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to cut the chain one-handed, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of asking for help. I hunted around before eventually finding a pair of bolt cutters on another shelf, next to an old wooden yardstick. I measured out the chain, then cut it by bracing one handle of the cutters on my thigh. Putting everything back as I’d found it, I took the length of chain and the padlock over to the counter.

  ‘And I’ll take this as well,’ I said, selecting a large bar of chocolate from the display.

  She rang the items into the till in silence, watching as I took a note from my wallet.

  ‘I’m not changing that.’

  The till drawer was open, revealing a selection of coins and smaller notes. She stared back at me, defiantly. I put my wallet back and rummaged in my pocket. She watched me count out the money, then banged it into the till. I was owed change, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. I picked up my buys and headed for the door.

  ‘Think a bar of chocolate will get your feet under that table, do you?’

  ‘What?’ I asked, not quite believing I’d heard right. But she only stared at me sourly. I went out, resisting the temptation to slam the door.

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  Still fuming, I debated going straight back to the clinic with the chain. But Brody had been adamant I should get something to eat first. I knew he was right, and somehow I didn’t think anyone would try anything as long as the old DI was standing guard. The walk back to the hotel did me good. Windy as it was, at least the rain was holding off, and the air was cold and fresh. By the time I’d reached the side street leading to the hotel my temper had started to subside. Light shone welcomingly from the windows, and the smell of fresh bread and burning peat greeted me when I stepped inside. The grandfather clock clunked majestically as I went down the hallway to find Ellen. The bar was untended, but there were low voices coming from the kitchen.

  Ellen’s and a man’s.

  When I knocked on the door the voices stopped. ‘Just a minute,’

  Ellen called out.

  After a few moments she opened the door. The yeasty scent of warm bread enveloped me.

  ‘Sorry. Just getting the loaves out of the oven.’

  She was alone. Whoever she ’d been talking to must have left through the back door. Ellen busied herself turning out the bread from the tins, but not before I’d seen that she ’d been crying.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine.’ But she kept her back to me as she spoke. I hesitated, then held up the chocolate bar. ‘I brought this for Anna. Hope you don’t mind her having sweets.’

  She smiled, sniffing away the last of her tears. ‘No, that’s very good of you.’

  ‘Look, are you . . . ?’

  ‘I’m fine. Really.’ She gave me another smile, stronger this time. I came away. I didn’t know her well enough to do anything else. But I couldn’t help but wonder who Ellen’s visitor had been, and why she should want to keep his identity a secret. Or what he ’d done to make her cry.

  CH APTER 14

  I FELT BETTER after a hot shower and a change of clothes. I’d already worn everything I’d packed for the trip to the Grampians, and I made a note to ask Ellen if there was anything I could do about my laundry. My shoulder still hurt, but the shower had helped, and the two ibuprofen I’d taken were starting to kick in as I went downstairs to get something to eat. Outside the bar, though, I stopped, reluctant to go in. I’d felt like an outsider even before this, but now the extent of my isolation suddenly hit home. Even though I’d already been sure that the woman’s killer must still be on the island, might even be someone I’d met, it hadn’t seemed to have any direct bearing on me personally. I was there to do a job. Now, though, someone had crept into the community centre to spy on me, and I’d no idea who, or why.

  Somehow it seemed that a line had been crossed. Don’t start getting paranoid. And remember what Brody said: until the support teams get here, the best defence is not to let on what we know.

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  I pushed open the door to the bar. At least the weather seemed to have thinned out some of the customers. Guthrie and Karen Tait were nowhere to be seen, I was relieved to see, and only one of the domino players had turned out. He sat forlornly at their table, the box of dominoes waiting in front of him.

  But Kinross was there, staring silently into his pint while his son hunched self-consciously on a bar stool next to him. Fraser was there too, sitting at a table by himself as he attacked a plate piled with sausages and mashed vegetables. He obviously hadn’t wasted any time in getting back once Duncan had relieved him at the camper van. A glass of whisky stood next to his plate, announcing that he considered himself off duty, and from the flush on his face I doubted it was his first.

  ‘Christ, I’m starving,’ he said, shovelling up a forkful of potato as I sat down at his table. There were flecks of food in his moustache.

  ‘First I’ve had to eat all day. No joke being out in that camper van this bloody weather, I can tell you.’

  He hadn’t seemed so bothered when it had been Duncan out there, I thought wryly. ‘Did Duncan tell you we had an intruder?’ I said, keeping my voice down.

  ‘Aye.’ He waved his fork dismissively. ‘Bloody kids, probably.’

  ‘Brody’s not convinced that ’s all it was.’

  ‘I wouldn’t pay too much attention to what he says,’ he snorted, giving me a glimpse of semi-masticated sausage. ‘Duncan says you think the dead woman was a whore from Stornoway. That right?’

  I glanced around to make sure no one could hear. ‘I don’t know where she ’s from. But I think she was probably a prostitute, yes.’

  ‘And a junkie, by the sound of it.’ He washed down his food with a gulp of whisky. ‘You ask me she ’ll have come out here to service the contractors, and one of them got too rough. No great mystery about it.’

  ‘There weren’t any contractors out here four or five weeks ago when she was killed.’

  ‘Aye, well, all due respect, but I can’t see how anyone can say for sure when that was, not from the bits and pieces that ’re left. Cold 140

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  weather like this, they could have been lying out there for months.’

  He wagged his knife at me. ‘You mark my words, whoever killed her’ll be back on either Lewis or the mainland by now.’

  I revised my estimate of how many whiskies Fraser might have had. But I wasn’t going to argue. He ’d made up his mind, and nothing inconvenient like the facts was going to change it. Still, I didn’t feel like listening to any more of his opinions, and I was considering asking Ellen for some sandwiches to take away with me when the peat slab in the hearth flared from a sudden blast of cold air. A moment later Guthrie stamped into the bar, filling the doorway with his bulk. I knew straight away that something was wrong. He glared at where Fraser and I were sitting before going to whisper to Kinross. The ferry captain’s expression darkened as he turned to stare at us. Then, as his son watched apprehensively, he and Guthrie came over to our table.

  Engrossed in his food, Fraser didn’t notice until they were standing over us. He looked up irritably.

  �
�Aye?’ he snapped, still chewing.

  Kinross regarded him in the same way he might something unsavoury and useless caught in a net. ‘What do you need a padlock for?’

  I kicked myself for not anticipating this. Given our presence at the clinic, it wouldn’t take much guessing where the lock was for. And I should have realized that Cameron might not be alone in objecting to our being there. Fraser frowned. ‘Padlock? What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘I bought one earlier,’ I told him. ‘For the community centre.’

  For a moment he looked aggrieved at not being told sooner, but the lure of food and whisky overcame it. He gestured towards me as he went back to his meal.

  ‘There you go. So now you know.’

  Guthrie folded his beefy arms on the shelf of his stomach. He wasn’t drunk this time, but he wasn’t happy, either.

  ‘And who says you can shut us out of our own fucking community centre?’

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  Fraser lowered his knife and fork and glowered at him. ‘I do. We had an intruder in there earlier, so now we ’re locking it. Any objection?’

  ‘Aye, you’re dead right we have,’ Guthrie rumbled, lowering his arms threateningly. Long and heavily muscled, they gave him the look of an ape as they hung at his side. ‘That’s our fucking centre.’

  ‘So write a letter of complaint,’ Fraser retorted. ‘It’s being used on police business. Which means it’s off limits until we say so.’

  Kinross’s eyes glittered over his dark beard. ‘Perhaps you didn’t hear. That ’s our community centre, not yours. And if you think you can come here and lock us out of our own buildings, then you need to think again.’

  I broke in before things got out of hand. ‘Nobody wants to lock anyone out, but it won’t be for long. And we did check first with Grace Strachan.’

  I offered a silent apology to Grace for invoking her name, but it had the effect I’d hoped. Kinross and Guthrie glanced at each other, uncertainty replacing the belligerence of a moment ago. Kinross rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Well, if Mrs Strachan said it was OK . . .’

  Thank God for that. But my relief was premature. Perhaps it was the whisky, or perhaps he felt his authority had already been undermined enough by Brody. But for whatever reason Fraser decided to have the last word.

  ‘You can consider this a warning,’ he growled, levelling a fat finger at Kinross. ‘This is a murder inquiry now, and if you try to interfere again then believe me, you’ll wish you’d stayed on your bloody ferry!’

  The entire bar had fallen quiet. Everyone in the room was staring at us. I tried to keep the dismay off my face. You bloody idiot! Kinross looked startled. ‘A murder inquiry? Since when?’

  Belatedly, Fraser realized what he ’d done. ‘That ’s none of your business,’ he blustered. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish my supper. This conversation’s over.’

  He bent over his plate again, but couldn’t stop the flush climbing 142

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  up the back of his neck. Kinross looked down at him, biting his lip in thought. He jerked his head at Guthrie.

  ‘Come on, Sean.’

  They moved back to the bar. I stared at Fraser, but he busied himself with his food and refused to meet my eye. Finally, he gave me a sullen glare.

  ‘What? They’ll know soon enough when SOC get out here. There ’s no harm done.’

  I was too angry to say anything. The one thing we ’d hoped to keep quiet, and now Fraser had needlessly blurted it out. I stood up, not wanting to stay in his company any longer.

  ‘I’d better go and relieve Brody,’ I said, and went to ask Ellen to make me some sandwiches.

  Brody was still sitting in the hall where I’d left him, guarding the door to the clinic. When I went in he sat forward, poised on the edge of his seat, but relaxed when he saw it was me.

  ‘You’ve not been long,’ he said, getting to his feet and stretching.

  ‘I thought I’d eat down here.’

  I’d brought my laptop with me from the hotel. I set it down and took the padlock and chain from my coat pocket. I handed him the spare key.

  ‘Here. You might as well have this.’

  He gave me a questioning look as he took it. ‘Shouldn’t you give the spare to Fraser?’

  ‘Not after what he ’s just done.’

  Brody’s mouth tightened as I described what had just happened in the hotel bar.

  ‘Bloody fool. That ’s just what we didn’t need.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Look, do you want me to stick around for a while? So long as I give Bess her evening walk some time, I’ve nothing else to do.’

  I didn’t think he was aware of the loneliness his words implied.

  ‘I’ll be fine. You might as well go and get something to eat.’

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  ‘You sure?’

  I told him I was. I appreciated the offer, but I needed to work. And I could do that better without any distractions. When he ’d gone I wrapped the chain through the handles of the community centre ’s double doors, then slid the hasp of the padlock through the links and snapped it shut.

  Satisfied that the hall was as secure as I could make it, I sat in the chair that Brody had stationed by the clinic door and ate the sandwiches Ellen had made. She ’d also given me a Thermos of black coffee, and when I’d eaten I sipped at the scalding liquid, listening to the wind booming outside.

  The old building creaked like a ship’s timbers in a high sea. The sound was oddly restful, and the food had made me drowsy. My eyelids began to close, but my head jerked back up as a sudden gust of wind rattled the windows. The overhead light dimmed and buzzed indecisively before brightening to life once more. Time to make a start.

  The skull and jawbone were as I’d left them. Plugging my laptop into a wall socket, I switched it on. Its battery was fully charged, but that wouldn’t last long if the power failed. Better to use the island ’s main electricity while I could, and trust that the laptop’s surgeprotection would hold out against it from the fluctuating supply. Once the laptop had booted up, I opened the missing persons files that Wallace had sent. This was the first time I’d had a real chance to look at them. There were five in all: young women between eighteen and thirty who’d disappeared from the Western Isles or the west coast of Scotland in the last few months. Chances were that they had simply run away, and would turn up at some point in Glasgow, Edinburgh or London, drawn to the chimera of a big city. But not all of them.

  Each file contained a detailed physical description and a jpeg photograph of a missing woman. Two of the photographs were useless, with the subject in one closed-mouthed, and the other a full-body shot that was too low-resolution for me to work with. But a quick 144

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  glance at the descriptions that accompanied them made it unnecessary anyway. One was black, while the other was too short to be the young woman whose skeleton I’d measured in the cottage. The other three, though, all matched the physical profile of the dead woman. Their photographs showed them as not much more than girls, caught before whatever event had either caused them to walk away from their lives, or ended them. My laptop had a sophisticated digital imaging program, and I used it to enlarge the mouth of the first picture, zooming in until the screen was filled with a giant, anonymous smile. When it was as large and sharp as I could make it, I began to compare it to those of the skeletal grin. Unlike fingerprints, which need a minimum number of matching features, a single tooth can be enough to provide a positive ID. Sometimes a distinctive shape, a certain break, is all it takes to reveal an entire identity.

  That was what I was hoping for now. The teeth I’d replaced in the skull were crooked and chipped. If none of the women in the photographs showed similar dental flaws, then it would at least rule them out as possible candidates. But if I was lucky enough to find a match, then I might be able to put a name to the anonymous victim. From the start
I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. The photographs were only snapshots, hardly intended for the grim purpose I had in mind. Even magnified and cleaned up, the images were grainy and unclear. And the poor condition of the teeth I’d laboriously fitted back into the skull didn’t help. If the victim was one of these young women, the photograph had been taken before her drug addiction had eroded them away.

  After a couple of hours poring over the images, I felt as though I’d had sand rubbed into my eyes. I poured myself another coffee, rubbing the kinks from my neck. I felt tired and dispirited. Even though I’d known it was a long shot, I’d hoped to find something. Wearily, I went back to the original images of the three young women. One in particular drew me, though I couldn’t have said why. It had been taken on a street, with the young woman standing in front of a shop window. Her face was attractive but hard, with a wariness

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  around the eyes and mouth even though she was smiling. If she was a victim, she wouldn’t have been a passive one, I thought. I studied her photograph more closely. Only the incisors and the upper canines were revealed by her smile. They were every bit as crooked as those I’d replaced in the skull, but none of their characteristics matched. The dead woman’s upper left incisor had a distinctive V-shaped chip in it, yet the one on my screen was unmarked. Give it up. You’re wasting your time.

  But there was still something about the picture I couldn’t put my finger on. And then I saw it.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got to be joking,’ I said out loud. I clicked on a simple command. The young woman on my screen vanished and then reappeared, subtly altered. Behind her, the incomplete shop sign could now be made out: Stornoway Store & Newsag. But it wasn’t what it said that was important, so much as the fact that it was no longer back to front.

  The photograph had been the wrong way round.

  It was the sort of simple slip-up that usually didn’t matter. But at some point, either when it had been scanned from a negative or transferred to the missing persons database, the picture had been inverted. Right for left, left for right.