Quintin Jardine: Death's Door

‘If there are such things as angels,’ the big detective whispered, ‘that’s what they look like.’

Detective Inspector Stevie Steele said nothing. He was not given to pondering spiritual concepts, and especially not when he was standing at a crime scene.

He glanced at the head of CID: not so long ago, such a remark would have taken him by surprise, but over the past few months he had come to know Detective Chief Superintendent Mario McGuire much better, through close contact on the job, and through small things that his new wife, Maggie, had let slip about her first husband. It was his Italian blood, Steele supposed, from which the closet romantic within him flowed, just as the Irish strain that he had inherited from his father marked him out as uncompromising, and on occasion fearsome.

Steele looked at the girl. ‘ Girl? ’ he pondered silently. ‘ Maybe that’s all she is, maybe not. People always look younger when they’re dead .’

She lay on her back on the yellow sand, her face serene, framed by blonde hair, her pale lips set in what might almost have been a smile. She wore open-toed sandals, bare-legged; her arms were by her side, palms down and her long white dress was spread out, fan-like. Her eyes were open and gazed up at the clear blue afternoon sky. May was only just into its second week, but the weather was more than comfortably warm: summer often comes early in Scotland, although it can leave just as suddenly as it arrives.

‘She looks almost transparent, doesn’t she?’ said McGuire, absent-mindedly, still musing somewhere.

‘Has anyone touched her?’ Steele asked.

‘The local doctor’s certified death, but that’s all. The officers who were first on the scene had more sense than to disturb anything. They reported directly to Graham Leggatt, as the divisional CID commander, and he called me; all strictly by the book when it comes to a suspicious death. The locals’ first thought was that it was an overdose, some poor sad kid finding a quiet spot to end it all. That’s happened out here before and, of course, we’ve heard it elsewhere too. But when Graham described the scene, I thought I’d better take a look for myself, and that you should see it too. You agree with me, do you, that it’s just like the other one?’

The detective inspector nodded. ‘Absolutely. The way the body’s arranged, the fact that it’s a female, the age group, it all matches. She’s dressed differently, and her hair colour is different, but otherwise it’s identical.’ He glanced around. ‘Has the area been disturbed at all?’

‘I’m assured that it hasn’t; not since she was found, at any rate.’

‘Well, that knocks the supposition of suicide on the head. There’s no sort of paraphernalia around, no pill containers, no syringe, no booze bottles, no blades.’

‘And no blood, just like the South Queensferry murder. It looks as if she died instantly.’

‘You reckon she might have been killed somewhere else and brought here?’ asked Steele.

‘That’s a possibility, I suppose, but look around you, look at the sand: it’s unremarkably flat around the body. If she’d been dragged, it would show. If somebody had carried her here, surely his feet would have dug deep under the weight, and we’d still see the tracks. There’s been no wind to smooth them over; at least, that’s what the local officers told me. It just looks as if she was walking on the beach when someone came up behind her and. . whap!’

‘Yeah. That’s what we reckon in the other one too, but we’ve never been able to say for sure.’

‘No: because it’s still unsolved.’

The inspector winced. ‘We’ve done everything we can, boss. But every lead we’ve followed has wound up taking us precisely nowhere.’

‘Hey, I’m not knocking your investigation, Stevie,’ McGuire assured him, ‘just stating a fact. You couldn’t have been more thorough; whoever shot Stacey Gavin was either very clever, or very bloody lucky. Normally I would expect the latter, but if this is a repeat performance, Christ, it looks ominous.’

‘Might it be a copycat?’

‘How? You know as well as I do that all our press statements were cleared through Neil McIlhenney, and the crime scene was never described in any of them. No, we begin with the assumption that it’s. .’

The head of CID stopped in mid-sentence. ‘No, we don’t. If our deputy chief constable was here he’d kick my arse. . and an arse-kicking by Bob Skinner is something to be avoided. We begin by following proper procedure. Let’s allow the doc in for a more thorough examination, and an estimate of time of death.’ He turned and lifted the flap of the enclosing screen that had been erected all around the body, holding it up for his colleague as they stepped out on to the beach.

Aidan Brown, the pathologist, was waiting a few yards away, clad in the same crime-scene tunic as the detectives. He was a tall man, in his mid-thirties: he had been on the scene for a few years and was known to both of them. ‘Sorry to keep you, Doc,’ said McGuire, as he approached. ‘I wanted to let DI Steele see things exactly as they were found. You can go in now and take a look at the body.’

‘I suppose you want my thoughts on cause of death, as well as time?’ His accent was light, Irish.

The head of CID nodded. ‘I do, but I suggest that you begin by taking a look at the base of her skull.’

The medical examiner frowned. ‘Have you. .?’

‘We didn’t lay a finger on her. There’s a tenner on it if you fancy a bet on the cause, though.’

Brown chuckled. ‘That’ll be the day. I’m a scientist, man: I don’t indulge in such frivolities.’

‘You mean you’re a tight bastard.’

‘It’s in our Irish blood, Mario,’ the pathologist shot back. ‘You should know that.’

Steele glanced at them: McGuire had switched from tender to hard-boiled mode in a few minutes. Yet he knew that it was forced, the copper’s defence mechanism against the realities of the job. Not for the first time, he found himself wondering about his unborn child, his and Maggie’s: a daughter, as they knew already. How would her personality be moulded. . blessed or cursed. . with two police officers for parents?

‘How’s Mags?’

The question, thrown from out of nowhere as he watched Brown move off towards the tented area, took the inspector completely off-guard. ‘She’s fine,’ he replied, a little abruptly. ‘How’s Paula?’ At once he regretted his impetuosity. McGuire’s new partner, Paula Viareggio, had been, briefly, a figure in his past, but that was not something the two men had ever discussed.

But the big man simply shrugged. ‘She’s good. Busy as ever; maybe busier, now that the family business is a public limited company. She’s got more legal stuff to look after, and she spends more time talking to the accountants.’

Silence fell between them for a few seconds, until McGuire broke it awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry, Stevie,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I’m prying, please. But Maggie and I were. . Shit, you know what I mean. Her being pregnant, it’s so. .’

‘Unexpected?’

‘Well, yeah. Tell me if I’m wrong, tell me the two of you planned it, but I’d guess it came as a hell of a surprise to you both. If that’s so, it hasn’t exactly happened at the best time for her career.’

Steele looked out to sea. They stood in the middle of a wide bay, bitten out of the coastline by nature and defined by a semicircle of sand dunes, which formed a natural bridge to the bents above. The tide was at its highest and the water was millpond-calm, so flat that the sound of the engines of a distant tanker carried all the way to shore. ‘You’re not wrong, Mario,’ he replied. ‘And I hear what you’re saying about timing. But does she want a career any longer, assuming that everything goes all right with the baby? That’s the question you really should be asking.’