Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

Callum pulled up the flap and ducked inside, his blue Tyvek suit rustling and crinkling.

Inside, a small diesel generator growled away in the corner, hooked up to a handful of high-powered work lights on stands. They glared down on a pit in the middle of the tent, five-foot deep and roughly rectangular. All the soil was piled up to one side, a couple of Smurfs on their knees in the hole, trowelling more into a black bucket.

McAdams stood at the head of it, staring into the depths, the hood of his SOC suit thrown back, arms folded. Face pale and shiny.

‘That was Watt.’ Callum stopped at the opposite end of the trench. ‘The ecclesiastical trust must’ve pulled an all-nighter, because a list of every property they own just arrived in his inbox. All six-hundred-odd of them. They’ve got some marked as unoccupied, but given they were clueless about here ...’ A shrug.

McAdams didn’t look up. ‘Have you ever contemplated your own mortality, Callum?’

‘He’s doing some spreadsheet thing so he can combine their list with the data we got from the council tax people. At least then we’ll know what’s officially sitting empty. But again: the trust were paying full whack for an abandoned building, so who knows?’

‘Ever stood at the edge of a grave and thought, “This will be mine soon. Maybe not this one, but one just like it”?’

‘We’re going to need a whole heap of bodies on it — visit every single property the trust owns and see what we can see.’

‘“For what is man, but doomed to die? / And here within the earth to slumber, / Till naught but bone remains of him, / The merest breath of gods gone by.”’

‘That’s cheery. Pam Ayres again?’

‘Stephen P. Dundas, you ignorant spud.’ He squatted down and tossed a little clump of dirt at one of the Smurfs. ‘Well?’

‘Ow!’ The Smurf turned, clutching its head with a purple gloved hand. ‘What the hell was that for?’

‘Have — you — found — anything — yet?’

‘Looks like female remains.’ He pointed at twin lines of pale grey, just protruding above the black earth. ‘That’s a forearm, radius and ulna. Going by the scarring, she broke her wrist at least six times. See how it’s a bit zig-zaggy? That’s because it wasn’t treated, just left to heal on its own.’

McAdams grunted. Nodded. ‘Any buttons or zips? Bits of clothing?’

‘No. If she was wearing anything when she went into the ground, must’ve been all natural fibres. It’s long gone.’

‘Same as all the others then.’ McAdams stood. Dusted off his hands as he marched out of the tent. ‘Seven female bodies, one male. All the women went in naked, but there are buttons and zips in with the man’s remains. The women’s bones are covered in scars, but not his. What does that tell you?’

Callum closed the tent flap. ‘He was a rush job.’

‘Show your working.’

‘They’re all in deep graves, five-foot down at least. Far as we can tell, he was about two, that’s probably why the badgers got at him. The women were prepared for burial — stripped, probably washed. He was just tipped in, fully clothed.’

‘I’ll buy that.’ McAdams unzipped his SOC suit and stood with his arms spread wide, steam rising from his chest. ‘I want X-rays of all the skulls — see if we can get a match off dental records. And get them to run stable isotope analysis too. How long have they been buried here, how long were they kept here before that, where did they come from? Then we go through every missing persons’ report till we find a match. I’d put money on the male remains being Jeffries, but let’s widen the net a bit, just in case.’

‘Sarge.’

‘Urgh...’ He let his arms drop and turned, staring out at the SOC tents. ‘Seven women. Can you imagine what it must’ve been like for them?’ McAdams shook his head. ‘I don’t think they were prepared for burial: those chains in the basement have been there a long, long time. They were shackled down there. Naked in the dark. Beaten, raped, and brutalised for months. Maybe even years.’

A depressing thought, but probably right.

‘And then, when he was bored with them, he didn’t bother stopping: he kept on going and beat them to death. Then buried them in his back garden, and went out to get a new one. Because that’s what women are to him: disposable.’

‘Sounds lovely, doesn’t he?’ Callum kicked at a little knot of brambles, still clinging on to the muddy ground. ‘You think maybe Monaghan grew up here? That’s why he turned out the way he did?’

‘Who knows? Maybe it was always in him? Or maybe you just can’t live through something like that and not come out broken.’ A frown. ‘Suppose it doesn’t matter in the end.’ McAdams pulled out his phone. ‘I’ll tell Mother, you go get the car warmed up.’

Major Incident Room Two buzzed with the low murmur of voices. A dozen officers sat at the desks, half in uniform, half plainclothes, all staring towards the front of the room as Watt pointed his wee remote at the projector on the ceiling. The screen behind him filled with a spreadsheet — all bars and colour-coded bits and numbers and addresses.

‘This is every property N.E.T.H. own within a fifteen-mile radius of Oldcastle. I’ve ranked each by distance from where Ashlee and Abby Gossard were abducted, where the grey Peugeot Bipper appears on the CCTV system, and where it disappears off again.’

McAdams leaned over and whispered in Callum’s ear — breath sticky and sour. ‘Because colouring it up like a rainbow is going to sodding help.’

‘As you can see here,’ Watt poked a button on the remote and a little red dot shone onto the screen, ‘I’ve cross-referenced the dataset with council tax records. Everything marked with a grey arrow is currently registered as vacant.’

‘I bet he was touching himself when he put that together. Never seen anyone so turned on by spreadsheets before.’

Mother stood and held up two bits of paper, stapled together. ‘Pair up. Each team of two takes one of these. You visit every property on your list and you look for anywhere that could be used as a smokehouse. That includes big sheds, by the way.’ She stuck her list back on the pile and handed everything to the nearest uniform. ‘Best estimates are that it takes at least a week to cold smoke a whole human being. The neighbours are going to notice something like that. Ask them.’

The uniform took one of the stapled lists and passed the rest on.

‘If you see anything, and I don’t care how tenuous or irrelevant it seems — if it makes your spidey-sense tingle, you call it in. Understood?’

Everyone nodded.

‘Ashlee Gossard is thirteen years old. There’s a chance she’s still alive, but it’s getting smaller every minute. You can save her.’ Mother gave them all a big smile, then pointed at the door. ‘Now get out there and make me proud.’

Callum, Dotty, Watt, and McAdams stayed where they were till everyone had filed out.

Soon as the door closed behind the last two-person team, Mother slumped back into her chair and rubbed at her face. ‘Urgh... Someone tell me it’s all going to be OK.’

McAdams picked up one of the remaining lists. ‘How many properties are we looking at?’

‘Tell me we’re not just clutching at ghosts here.’

‘Northeast Ecclesiastical Trust Holdings Limited own six hundred and twenty-four properties all over Scotland: from a block of flats in Kirkcaldy to a B-and-B in Cromarty, via a chip shop in Oban.’ Watt wheeched his laser pointer across the screen again. ‘I’ve marked commercial properties with a skull-and-crossbones. Fifty-two of them, in total.’

A grunt from McAdams. ‘Assuming Monaghan had access to their list of properties at some point. Assuming he’s been smoking them locally and not off up the coast in Buckie or Fraserburgh. Assuming he hasn’t just built himself a DIY smoker somewhere deep inside Moncuir Wood, or the Swinney, or Holburn Forest. Assuming. Assuming. Assuming.’