Tony Black - Truth Lies Bleeding

There always was, thought Brennan. ‘Go on.’

‘The body’s been tampered with.’

Brennan tucked his chin onto his chest, peered from beneath raised eyelids. ‘Sexually?’

‘No, least, we don’t think so… It’s been mutilated, badly mutilated.’ Brennan could see the DC found it difficult. He watched him rub his hands together. Now he talked to his palms. ‘The girl’s been sawn up.’

‘What do you mean?’

A deep breath, slowly exhaled. ‘Her limbs were removed… The legs, below the knee, were severed and bagged.’ He looked into Brennan’s face. ‘We don’t have the arms.’

‘The girl’s arms are missing?’

The DC nodded. ‘They were removed… crudely.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

Brennan turned for the car. ‘He didn’t do her much good.’ He yanked open the passenger’s door, got inside and slammed it shut, lowered the window. McGuire stood still as Brennan barked at him, ‘Get the incident room set up — we’re in the big room.’

‘What about Lauder’s shooting?’

‘Fuck Lauder!.. I want statements from those girls by the time I get back and have the lab primed for an all-nighter. Okay?’

‘Yeah, yeah… Anything else?’

‘Yes. Get a list together of every missing teenage girl in the country… And you report everything that comes in to me first, not the Chief Super. Got that?’

McGuire nodded, but looked unsure; scratched his open palm.

‘Stevie, everything… No matter what she tells you. Got that?’

‘Yeah… Got it, sir.’

‘Good. If you remember this is my investigation, Stevie, then we’ll get on just fine.’

Brennan slapped the dash.

The squad car pulled out, sirens blaring.

Brennan wondered what was changing faster, the city of Edinburgh, or him within it. As the squad car pulled out of Fettes he grimaced at the queues of traffic clogging up the roads. Medieval cities were never meant for the motor car, but he could remember when getting about the place was a far simpler affair. One-way streets had sprung up everywhere, making every route a circuitous one. Add in the bus lanes, the persistent road works and the full-scale gutting that the recent tram installation had wrought, and driving had become a slow and effective means of torture.

‘Get out the fucking way,’ mouthed the uniform at the wheel.

Brennan twisted his neck — it was enough.

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Would you prefer to be driving a taxi, son?’

A stall, some lip-biting. ‘No, sir…’

Brennan laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I’m just tugging your chain. These yuppies in their Stockbridge tractors boil my piss too.’

The uniform looked relieved. ‘It’s the school-run mums.’

‘Yummy-fucking-mummies… Making their way back home after a latte in Morningside! Bless them, probably busy day ahead. Watching Cash in the Attic and polishing those blond-wood floorboards.’

The constable tapped at the wheel, making an overly showy point of approval. It made Brennan wince. He knew why too: the six months’ enforced psych leave had left him with an intimate knowledge of the daytime television schedules. His forays into DIY had been less successful — his father had always said he didn’t know which end of a hammer to pick up. Andy wasn’t much better. Neither were chips off the old block, but at least his younger brother had kept the family firm going for a while. It wasn’t his fault there was nothing left to show of it. Andy couldn’t be blamed for that. Could Brennan, though? He sometimes wondered; he knew his father did.

Brennan had a lot to think about right now. These times came and went. He knew they were cyclical. When Sophie was born he’d gone through a similar phase: thinking, evaluating. Life suddenly had more import, a lot that had went before was meaningless. Fifteen years later it was the other way around; nothing seemed to matter. What had changed? Was it him; was it the world? He dredged up some long-distilled lines from a philosopher about the ages of man, and viewing life and experience differently with maturity. What seemed valuable, important, was rendered worthless with the passage of time. He almost laughed at the vacuity of his younger self. But was he any better now? Experience was the name a man gave to his mistakes. Someone had said that too.

‘Take the bus lane.’ Brennan pointed at the windscreen. The harshness of his voice surprised him. There was a lot in there, inside him, that he found surprising now.

‘Yes, sir.’

The police Astra sped past the lines of traffic. A young woman on the street put her hands up to her ears. Brennan knew the older ones didn’t bother — their hearing had atrophied to the stage where the sirens didn’t bother them… It was another one of those observations that the job afforded you. Very few were worth noting.

The driver was too quick into the Crewe Toll roundabout. Brennan felt some movement on the back tyres as the car spun onto Ferry Road. He felt himself automatically gripping the door handle, his right foot pumping an imaginary brake pedal. ‘Try and get us there in one piece, eh.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘And stop apologising. You’re far too free with your apologies… Don’t mind me, I’m a full-time prick. I point out everyone’s flaws in this job.’

The main artery road was stocked with ancient figures: they were the occupants of Peter Howson paintings. Huge-knuckled working men; hard drinkers and working girls. Smokers puffed freely, flicked dowps into the gutter. Every one of them shook their head at the sight of the speeding police car. They were filth round here. The fun-stoppers. The Rozzers. No one welcomed them; there was no red-carpet treatment coming their way down this end of town. It didn’t bother Brennan. He’d long since lost the need to be liked — in any way — and certainly not for being a police officer. There had been a time, at the deathly dull dinner parties his wife used to hold for her circle, where spouses had tried to intellectualise their view of the police for him. ‘I wouldn’t like to live in a society without police,’ one pot-bellied middle manager had remarked, ‘for all the same reasons I wouldn’t like to live in Somalia.’

Brennan remembered the remark, and the smirk the tosser had topped the statement with; it was glib bullshit. The lot of it was glib bullshit. It was a job. A necessary evil.

The scene darkened down Pennywell Road. Ginger kids, barely school age, with the arse hanging out of their trousers shot the V-sign. A few tried to spit in the car’s direction. Brennan had known stones to be thrown; he was unfazed. There were middle-aged women in baffies and housecoats stood on the road, leaning over gardens and jabbering. They’d obviously clocked the police activity; the talk would be of drugs raids, whose man was being taken in, how the force victimised them. Each syllable of the schemie’s chat would be punctuated by puffs on Superkings; the sight of them was as regular as the street furniture. As harrowing as the bust couch or the rusting scooters in the overgrown gardens. Brennan could have painted the scene from memory. He knew there were liberal thinkers — what Wullie called the Guardian — reading classes — who would gasp and deride the deprivation, but not him. This was a breeding ground for crime, a dumping ground for the dispossessed and the dafties. It was a dangerous place; no question.

Brennan shook his head, sighed, ‘Another poor lassie’s met her end. How many’s that?’

The constable shrugged, looked like he was wondering who the DI was speaking to.

Brennan looked ahead through the windscreen, to the point on the road where the Scenes of Crime Officers had set up. The title of an old song played to him, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’… He thanked Christ his daughter was being raised on the other side of town — no child here had a chance.