Written in Bone

by Simon Beckett

  It had been after six before I’d got back to the hotel. Still dark, but there was no point in going to bed. I sat on the hard chair, listening to the moaning of the gale until I heard sounds of movement downstairs and knew Ellen was up. Feeling more tired than I could ever remember, I plunged my head into cold water in an effort to wake myself up, then knocked on Fraser’s door and went down to the kitchen. Ellen insisted on cooking a full breakfast—a steaming plateful of eggs, bacon, toast, and sweet, scalding tea. I hadn’t felt hungry, but when it came I ate ravenously, feeling energy slowly seep back into my limbs. Fraser came downstairs after a few minutes and sat opposite me, his face pouchy from lack of sleep. But at least this morning he was sober.

  ‘Radio’s still out,’ he grunted, without being asked. I’d not expected otherwise. I was long past optimism or disappointment. Now all I wanted to do was see this through. Dawn had broken, and light was seeping into the sky as we drove back down to the boatyard. It was another filthy day. Waves pounded the shingle and cliffs, flinging sheets of spray high into the air to be carried inland. Kinross’s ferry was still moored in the harbour, bucking violently on the angry sea. At least its owner wouldn’t be taking it anywhere this morning, no matter how badly he might want to. Beyond it, white-tops crashed against the pinnacle of Stac Ross, foaming against each other as though frustrated by their failure to smash its dark rock.

  And over it all, the wind ruled. Far from dying down, the storm had gained in intensity. Elemental in its savagery, it buffeted the Range Rover, flinging the rain against the windscreen in such torrents that the wipers struggled to clear the glass. When we climbed out of the car it harried us over to the boatyard. The ashes and skeletal spars of the burned fishing boat stood like a remnant of a Viking funeral, a stark reminder of the night’s events.

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  Inside the workshop, Brody was sitting in an old car seat. The crowbar was laid across his lap as he faced the door, coat collar turned up against the chill. Behind him, Maggie ’s tarpaulin-shrouded body looked childlike and pathetic on the concrete floor. He smiled wanly when Fraser and I went in. ‘Morning.’

  He seemed to have aged overnight. His face was haggard, the flesh more tightly stretched over the bones; new lines were etched in the skin round his eyes and mouth. A frost of silver stubble clung to his chin.

  ‘Any problems?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it’s been quiet enough.’

  He stood up, joints cracking as he stretched. He gave a little sigh of appreciation as he took a bite from the bacon sandwich Ellen had sent for him. I poured him a mug of tea from the Thermos flask she ’d also packed while I told him what we ’d learned from Maggie ’s grandmother.

  ‘If Maggie took the car that should make it easier to find where she went. Assuming it hasn’t been moved,’ he said when I’d finished. Neatly dusting crumbs from his fingers and mouth, he drained his tea and stood up. ‘Right, let ’s take a look at the cliff.’

  ‘What about . . . about that?’ Fraser asked, jerking his head uneasily at the body. ‘Shouldn’t one of us keep an eye on it? In case Kinross decides to do anything.’

  ‘Are you volunteering?’ Brody asked. He smiled thinly at the reluctance on Fraser’s face. ‘Don’t worry. I found a padlock in one of the drawers. We can lock the doors, and I can’t see Kinross—or anyone else—risking anything in broad daylight anyway.’

  ‘I don’t mind staying,’ I offered.

  Brody shook his head. ‘You’re the only forensic expert we ’ve got. If there ’s any evidence up there, I’d like you to see it.’

  ‘That sort of thing isn’t really my field.’

  ‘It ’s more yours than mine or Fraser’s,’ he said. There was no arguing with that.

  Brody hurried home to check on his dog while Fraser and I secured the doors with the oil-smeared padlock. The metallic snick 258

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  brought an unwelcome flashback of being trapped in the burning community centre. I was glad when Brody returned a few minutes later, and we could set off for the foot of the cliffs. At their closest point, they lay only thirty or forty yards from the boatyard, but the rain battered us relentlessly as we crossed the open ground.

  ‘Christ on a bicycle!’ Fraser exclaimed, hunching against it. The cliffs themselves afforded some protection once we reached them. A strip of shingle ran along their base, broken with jagged outcrops of rock. Leaning into the wind, we made our way along it, treading carefully as we scanned the rain-slick pebbles. After a few yards Brody stopped. ‘Here.’

  He pointed to a rock protruding from the shingle. It had been sluiced almost clean by the rain, but a smear of something dark clung to it. I crouched down for a better look. It was a clot of bloodied tissue, veined and torn. The shingle around it was disturbed, a depression that could have been left by the impact of something heavy. What might have been drag marks ran from it towards the boatyard, disappearing where the shingle gave way to firmer ground. I’d brought more freezer bags from the hotel to use as stand-ins for evidence bags. Taking one from my pocket, I used the blade of my penknife to scrape up a sample of bloody tissue. If the rain kept up it would have washed most of the blood away by the time the police got here, and the gulls would have scavenged what was left. Brody was looking up at the top of the cliff, about a hundred feet above us. ‘The steps are further along, but there ’s no point all three of us climbing up.’ He turned to Fraser. ‘Makes more sense for you to take the car and meet us at the top.’

  ‘Aye, you’re right,’ Fraser hurriedly agreed.

  Giving him the plastic bag to take back to the Range Rover, Brody and I crunched along the shingle to the steps. They were cut into the cliff face, steep and winding. There was an old handrail, but it didn’t inspire confidence.

  Wiping the rain from his face, Brody regarded them, then looked at my sling. ‘Sure you’re up to it?’

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  I nodded. I wasn’t going to back out now.

  We started up. Brody went first, leaving me to follow at my own pace. The steps were slippery with rain. Seabirds huddled against the cliff, feathers ruffling in the wind. The higher we climbed, the more exposed to it we became. It shrieked and flailed at us, as though wilfully trying to fling us off. We were only a few yards from the top when Brody’s foot slipped on a broken step. He skidded back into me, knocking me out against the handrail. I felt the rusted metal give under my weight, and for a moment looked directly down into the open drop. Then Brody grabbed me by the scruff of my coat and hauled me back to safety.

  ‘Sorry,’ he panted, letting go. ‘You OK?’

  I nodded, not trusting my voice. My pulse was still racing as I started after him again. But as I did, I noticed something on the rock face a few yards away.

  ‘Brody,’ I called.

  When he turned I pointed to where another dark smear tufted a bulging outcrop on the cliff face. It was too far out of reach for me to get a sample, but I could guess how it got there. This was where Maggie ’s body had struck the rock on its way down.

  We reached the top of the cliff a few minutes after that. Emerging on to it, we were hit by the full force of the gale. It tore at our coats, filling them like kites and threatening to fling us back over the edge.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Brody exclaimed, bracing himself against it. Below us, Runa’s harbour was revealed as a shallow horseshoe of churning water, hemmed in by cliffs. The view was vertiginous, windlashed grey sea and sky blurring together on an indistinct horizon. One or two lone gulls braved the wind, their plaintive caws coming to us as they futilely tried to ride the currents before being swept away. Inland, the brooding slopes of Beinn Tuiridh looked in the distance, while a hundred yards away Bodach Runa, the island’s standing stone, rose from the turf like a crooked finger. Other than that, all there was to see was the treeless moor, grass flattened by the wind. There was nothing to suggest that Maggie, or anyone else, had ever been up
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  The rain slashed against us like buckshot as we made our way to the spot where Maggie must have fallen from. I was beginning to think we were wasting our time when Brody pointed.

  ‘Over there.’

  A couple of yards in front of us the ground had been disturbed. The turf was flattened and torn, and when I looked more closely I could see gouts of viscous black clotting the grass. Even after all the rain, there was a lot of it.

  ‘This is where she was killed,’ Brody said, wiping rain from his face as he bent down to examine it. ‘The amount of blood that ’s here, she must have practically bled out.’

  He stood up, scanning the ground around us.

  ‘There ’s more over there. And there.’

  The patches were smaller than the one by the cliff ’s edge, already almost washed away. They formed a trail of blood that led away from the drop. Or, more likely, towards it.

  ‘She was running away,’ I said. ‘She was already injured before she got to the edge.’

  ‘Could have been trying to reach the steps. Or just running blindly.’ He gave me a look. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘About what Mary Tait said?’ I nodded. They ran off. After all the noise. Perhaps the people she ’d seen hadn’t just run off. Perhaps one of them had been chasing the other.

  But where had they come from?

  Brody looked round the empty cliff top, shaking his head in frustration. ‘Where the hell’s her car? It ’s got to be around here somewhere.’

  But I’d been considering the windswept cliff top myself. ‘Remember when you asked Mary where she ’d got the coat? What did she say, exactly?’

  Brody gave me a puzzled look. ‘That a man gave it to her. Why?’

  ‘No, she didn’t say a man. She said the man.’

  ‘So?’

  I pointed at the standing stone, now no more than fifty yards away. ‘You told me Bodach Runa meant the Old Man of Runa.

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  Perhaps that ’s the man she meant. Mary had a torch. She could have got up here using the steps, the same as us.’

  Brody stared off at the standing stone, thinking it through. ‘Let ’s take a look, shall we?’

  The police Range Rover was visible perhaps a quarter of a mile away, snaking its way towards us as we set off for the stone. The road dipped out of sight occasionally, but Bodach Runa itself was hard to miss. Fraser would be able to see where we were heading and meet us there.

  Brody walked at a fast pace across the uneven terrain. Shivering from the cold and rain, the ache already beginning to make its presence felt again in my shoulder, I was hard pushed to keep up with him. The ground rose up in a ridge between us and the standing stone, so that we could only see its upper half. But as we drew nearer I could make out something in a dip behind it. Gradually, the roof of a car came into view.

  Maggie ’s old Mini.

  It was parked in a hollow just beyond the stone. A couple of sheep huddled against it out of the wind, adding to the car’s air of abandonment. They bolted as Brody and I slithered down the grassy bank towards it. The sound of a car engine came from an overgrown track that ran from the hollow, and a few moments later the Range Rover came bumping into view.

  Fraser parked at the end of the track and climbed out. ‘That hers?’

  ‘Aye,’ Brody told him. ‘That ’s Maggie ’s.’

  Both doors hung open, swinging slightly as the wind pushed them back against their hinges. The front seats were soaked from the rain, but it wasn’t water alone that darkened them. Splashes and smears of blood dappled the dashboard and windscreen as though flung there by a mad artist.

  ‘Jesus,’ Fraser breathed.

  We approached a little closer but still stayed well back, so as not to contaminate the ground around the car. Brody peered through the open driver’s door at the blood-spattered interior.

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  scramble away out of the passenger door. What do you think, a knife or axe?’

  It seemed unreal, discussing what weapon had been used to kill Maggie, when only the evening before I’d sat next to her in this same car. But sentiment wasn’t going to catch her killer.

  ‘Knife, I’d say. Not enough room to swing an axe, not without leaving marks on the inside of the car.’

  I looked around the hollow. At night, beyond the arcs of a car’s headlights, it would have been impenetrably dark. Dark enough for Mary Tait to watch, unobserved. And to hear.

  I imagined there would have been a lot to listen to. Fraser was looking behind the car. ‘There ’s more tyre tracks back here. Don’t look like the Mini’s.’

  Brody clicked his tongue, exasperated. I knew he was thinking that either rain or sheep’s hoofs would have churned the tracks into mud by the time SOC got here to take casts. But there was nothing we could do about it.

  ‘She told her grandmother she was meeting someone. Looks like this was where. Mary must have been up here already, and close enough nearby to hear the commotion.’ He frowned, staring at the car. ‘I still can’t see how she came by the coat. It wasn’t damaged or bloodstained, but how come Maggie wasn’t wearing it on a night like that?’

  ‘Perhaps she took it off for Kinross,’ Fraser suggested. ‘Along with a few other things, if you get my drift. No other reason for them to be up here. Then they had a lovers’ tiff, or whatever, and Kinross lost his rag.’

  ‘This was no lovers’ tiff !’ Brody snapped. ‘Maggie was an ambitious young woman; she ’d have set her sights higher than a ferry captain. And until we can prove it was Kinross she met last night, I’d try not to jump to conclusions.’

  Fraser coloured up at the rebuke. But something he ’d said had sparked my own train of thought.

  ‘He ’s probably right about Maggie taking off her coat,’ I said. I told them about the car heater being stuck on full. ‘Both times Maggie

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  gave me a lift she put it on the back seat. That’d explain why there was no blood on it.’

  Brody was trying to see into the back of the car. ‘Could be. There ’s hardly any spatter back there. If the car doors were left open when Maggie tried to get away, Mary could have just walked up and looked inside. Even if she noticed the blood in the front I doubt she ’d realize what it was.’

  Still keeping his distance from the Mini, he began to circle it. When he got to the other side he stopped.

  ‘Over here.’

  Fraser and I went round to see what he ’d found. Maggie ’s shoulder bag was lying on the ground below the passenger door, its contents spilled on the muddy grass. Scraps of wind-blown tissue and paper littered the ground around it, snagged by grass stalks and turned to pulp by the rain.

  Lying amongst the make-up and other artefacts of Maggie ’s life, its muddied pages fluttering like trapped moths, was a ring-bound notebook.

  ‘Let me have a plastic bag,’ Brody said to me.

  ‘You sure about this?’ Fraser said uncertainly. Brody opened the bag I’d given him. ‘Maggie was a reporter. Crime scene or not, if she made a note of who she was meeting, it ’s not going to survive long out here.’

  Treading carefully, he went to the car and crouched down by the open passenger door. Taking a pen from his pocket, he slid it into the notebook’s ring binding. Then he carefully lifted the book and slipped it into the bag. Even from where I stood I could see that the pages were disintegrating, the writing on them reduced to an illegible colourwash of ink.

  Brody’s mouth compressed with disappointment. ‘Well, whatever was in it, it ’s not much use any more.’

  He started to get up again, then stopped.

  ‘There ’s something under the car.’ There was a new excitement in his voice. ‘Looks like her dictaphone.’

  I thought about all the times I’d seen Maggie brandishing
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  recorder. Like many modern journalists, she ’d relied on it more than a notepad and pen. So if she ’d kept some sort of record while she ’d been on the island, it didn’t have to be a written one. Brody could barely contain his impatience as I peeled off another plastic bag. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell Wallace this was my decision,’ he said, giving Fraser a shrewd glance.

  Fro once the police sergeant didn’t argue. Evidence as potentially important—and vulnerable—as this could hardly be left until SOC arrived. Putting his hand into the plastic bag, Brody reached under the car sill and picked up the dictaphone. Then, retracing his steps to where Fraser and I waited, he reversed the bag so the muddied recorder was enclosed in it.

  He held it up so we could get a better look. The voice recorder was digital, a Sony model similar to the one I’d lost in the fire.

  ‘Wonder how long the batteries last on these things?’ Brody mused.

  ‘Long enough,’ I told him. ‘It’s still recording.’

  ‘What?’ He stared at it. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘It started when you spoke. Must be voice activated.’

  He studied the recorder’s LCD display. ‘So this could have been running when Maggie was killed?’

  ‘Unless it was turned on accidentally when it was knocked out of the car, then yes.’

  The wind wailed around us as we all considered that. Brody rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, staring at the small silver machine in the plastic bag. I knew, even before he spoke, what he was going to say next.

  ‘How do I play it?’

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  THE DICTAPHONE HISSED into silence after the last recording had finished. None of us spoke. The memory of what we ’d just heard was still resonating, as devastating as a shell burst. Brody clicked off the machine, then stared into space, motionless as a statue.

  I wanted to say something to him, but I’d no idea what. The police Range Rover rocked in the wind, rain beating a tattoo on its roof. We ’d retreated back to its warmth to play Maggie ’s dictaphone. Each of the recordings she ’d made were stored in its memory as a separate file, which in turn were arranged into folders. There were four folders in all, one titled Work, two blank and empty. The fourth was headed simply Diary.