Quintin Jardine - Funeral Note

The chief constable nodded. ‘I know the one. Jesus, I don’t like this. Unknown man, a casualty of something. His colleagues can’t dispose of his body properly, so they give it to us for safe keeping, more or less. Which probably means they’re still here. But why?’

‘Surely, sir,’ Jack said, ‘they must assume that we’ll identify him, given our resources. The body’s unmarked; we can mock up a lifelike image for the media, and if that fails, there must be a likeness of him on record, somewhere. We can do a national database search, and put a name on him, eventually.’

‘On the contrary,’ Skinner retorted. ‘It’s just as well I’m not a betting man, or I’d lay you long odds against any of that working and I’d cover any stake you laid down. I didn’t see his hands, but I know his fingertips haven’t been sliced off.’

‘How do you know for sure?’

‘Because they left us his fucking head as well,’ he snapped, ‘lifelike image and all. The man is not on any database, Jack, not prints, not image, not DNA: not any database that we can access, at any rate.’

‘Are you suggesting he’s foreign?’ Becky Stallings asked.

‘I’m suggesting nothing. I’m telling you that as far as we’re concerned the guy we’ve just had carted off to the morgue is a non-person.’

‘So where do we start looking?’ She sounded impatient. It struck me that her tone might be pushing her luck.

The chief raised his eyebrows, peering down at her. ‘Am I wearing a white pointy hat and bejewelled robes?’ She stared at him. ‘Am I infallible? No, I’m not; I know this because I’ve met the real Pope. You do all the routine things, photographic databases, fingerprint comparisons, DNA too, when we get a profile. You do them because I might be wrong. But after you find that I’m not, you fall back on the only asset we’ve got: the body itself. You ever been to the mortuary, Sauce?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.

‘Good, in that case, you won’t need directions there. I want you to attend the post-mortem tomorrow morning.’

‘On my own, sir?’

He frowned at me. ‘You don’t expect me to come with you, do you?’

I gulped, not knowing quite what to read into that, but having enough smarts to keep my mouth shut.

‘Sit in with Dr Grace,’ he continued, ‘and learn from her. Before she begins, I want you to update her on the discussion we’ve had here and to explain to her that we’re looking for any way of identifying her patient, however unlikely it may be. Joe Hutchinson’s the best in the business, but he’s got nothing left to teach Sarah. If there are any pointers there, she’ll find them.’

As he spoke I saw DCS McGuire’s forehead gather into a frown. So did the chief. ‘Question, Mario?’

‘No, boss, not really. I’m just wondering about only one officer attending. Might we not need corroboration for the court at some stage?’

‘I don’t see why. There’ll be two pathologists present. Plus, the way things are, we don’t have any evidence that a crime’s been committed. We couldn’t even do anyone for concealing a death, since they’ve gone out of their way to make sure that we know about it. ’

‘What about the media?’ Becky asked. ‘Do you want me to draft something for the press office?’

‘Hell, no!’ he exclaimed. ‘To tell them what? That someone can’t afford the price of a funeral, so they’ve handed the deceased over to us.’

‘Maybe that’s all it is.’

I didn’t realise that I’d voiced my thought, until four heads turned and eight eyes focused on me.

Then the chief laughed, so loud that a couple of SOCOs looked across, wondering what the joke was. ‘Maybe it is, Sauce. Maybe it is. And you know what? If that’s so I will never have been so happy to have made a fool of myself.’

Silly me, thinking for one moment that I could operate as a consultant criminal pathologist in Edinburgh without ever crossing the path of the chief constable, especially when he’s Bob Skinner. I should have known it had to happen, but I hoped it wouldn’t. . or so I told myself.

I knew there would be talk when I made my decision to move back to Scotland from the US. But hell, I should never have gone in the first place. When Bob offloaded me for that fucking witch of a politician, I should have stayed put and fought my corner.

But I didn’t; instead I made nice. When he made his speech about us having fallen out of love, I agreed, and when he said that we should do what was best for our children, well, I could hardly disagree with that one either. Had I known that he was planning to move the witch, Aileen de Marco, into our bed first chance he got, it might have been different.

Okay, our marriage wasn’t perfect; we’d both played away games, but in that respect, the score was Bob three, Sarah two, and maybe he’d been involved in other matches that I still don’t know about, so he wasn’t standing on any high moral ground, not ever.

Looking back, I can see that he sandbagged me when I was at my weakest. I’d lost my parents, and I was still in shock over that, yet he’d left me alone in the USA to take care of the estate and everything, when he could have taken time out at no cost to his precious career. Then someone else died, someone I’d been close with in my younger days and had gotten close with again, someone who’d been filling the void that Bob had left. I might have stayed with him, but it all came to an end.

My husband played Mr Magnanimous then. It was as if my affair had never happened. Sure, he said something about the score between us being even, but the truth was that his great big macho ego made him blank it out. We went back to Scotland, for the new beginning we announced, to establish a stable base for our kids, me full of good intentions, Bob full of. .

Some would call it bullshit, but I’ll be generous and call it the same crusading zeal that had always led him to put his job over me and over our family: apart from Alexis, that is, my former stepdaughter. From the age of around five, he brought her up alone. He had one significant relationship in that time, with another cop, a classy lady called Alison Higgins, but, as he put it when he told me about her, she was as ambitious as him, so it didn’t last. It wasn’t till I came along, after Alex had left home and gone to university, that he had any meaningful time for anyone else.

I have nothing against Alex, far from it; she never did a thing to undermine me, and we get on perfectly well even now, but she and her long-dead mother are the true loves of his life, even if he doesn’t know it. And she is her father’s daughter, in every respect. She’s as precociously outstanding in her profession, the law, as he was in his, and like him she will go to the top, wherever she decides that might be. But like him also, she sets it above everything else in her life, so anyone with whom she becomes involved, and there have been a few already, had better accept that it leaves her incapable of ever focusing fully on a personal relationship. Of all people, Andy Martin should have known that when they got engaged, given that he’s been Bob’s protege from way back, but he didn’t, and that thing crashed and burned. Mind you, from what I hear, he’s come back for seconds.

When I came back myself, from America that first time, weakened, insecure, and diminished, Alex was perfectly nice to me. She loves her young brother, James Andrew, and being his mother always gave me brownie points with her. There being about twenty years between them in age, Jazz may be the closest thing to a kid of her own that she will ever have: sad but true. But when the witch came along, and Bob decided that our marriage had indeed gone stale and the time had come for a nice amicable separation, that was it for Alex and me. No conflict, but no contest either. We never fell out, but I am damn sure that behind the scenes she was part of the team that advised her father on a split deal that worked out very well for him.