Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

‘Sure you will.’ Callum turned in place, facing her as she circled.

‘Break his little bitch legs too.’

A seven-year-old girl, with blonde ringlets. And the worst thing was: she probably meant it.

‘You don’t have to be like him, Willow. You can be so much better than that. Hell: put your mind to it and you can be anything you want.’

‘You’re a nutjob, Piggy.’ She pedalled away a couple of feet, then dug into her pocket and came out with a small blue bag — the kind dog-walkers used to collect moist, soft, stinking presents — and chucked it to him.

Please don’t let it be warm, please don’t let it be warm...

It wasn’t. And what was inside wasn’t cold and squidgy either, it was a thin, flat rectangle.

Callum opened the bag, and there it was: one tatty leather wallet, the lining dangling loose from one side like a Labrador’s tongue. A smile pulled at his face, but when he looked up Willow was already fading into the distance, pedalling for all she was worth.

He took a deep breath and bellowed it out anyway: ‘THANK YOU!’

Then the car horn blared from the roadside behind him. Franklin, being her usual patient charming self.

Right.

He puffed out a breath and slipped the poo-bag in his pocket.

Time to visit the dead.

‘Thanks. Thanks a lot. And now I’m late.’ Franklin sat in the passenger seat, arms crossed, scowling.

‘It’s only just gone half ten.’ Callum swung the pool car around the roundabout and into a shabby industrial estate. Past boarded-up business units with empty car parks and rusty chain-link fencing speckled with ancient carrier bags — their colours bleached and brittle. Through puddles the size of lochans, sending arcs of spray up onto the pavements. Windscreen wipers thumping back-and-forth across the glass. ‘It’s like going to the pictures: first fifteen minutes is all adverts and trailers.’

‘I happen to like the trailers.’

Yeah, she would.

Left, past a garage selling shiny four-by-four flatbed trucks, and down to the end of the road.

A thick line of green bushes — at least twelve foot tall — stretched out from either side of a big automatic gate topped with razor wire. An intercom unit sat in front of the gate, mounted on top of a big concrete bollard. Callum pulled up beside it and wound down his window. Pressed the button.

Its speaker crackled and popped, then hissed something unintelligible at him. So he stuck his thumb on the button again and held it there till the gates squealed and rumbled their way open.

The pool car rocked its way over a speed bump and into the compound.

If the architect was going for warm and welcoming when he designed Oldcastle’s overflow mortuary he’d done a sodding rotten job of it. The building looked like something out of a Cold War thriller — a concrete bunker with tiny windows along its length. A Transit van sat outside the loading bay, down the far end, two men in grey overalls manhandling a plain gunmetal coffin onto a gurney.

It wasn’t the only vehicle there — a handful of manky pool cars had been abandoned as close to the mortuary’s front doors as possible. Because clearly police officers weren’t waterproof.

Callum parked on the periphery of the clump. ‘There you go: five minutes. They’ll still be going on about switching off your mobile phone and getting a drink and a snack from the lobby.’

‘You’re an idiot.’ She climbed out into the rain and slammed the door behind her.

‘So people keep telling me.’ He locked the car and followed her inside.

They’d decorated since last time, the smell of fresh paint fighting against several plug-in air fresheners and the dirty-bowel-like stench of decay. All the posters were new too — motivational landscapes and quotes about peace and forgiveness. As if that was going to do any good to the poor sods who had to come all the way out here to identify their dead child’s body. The wee stainless-steel reception desk hadn’t changed, and nor had the big dusty rubber plant in the corner. Its thick waxy leaves like slabs of green liver, aerial roots searching the walls for sustenance.

A little old man lounged behind the desk, tongue poking out of the side of his mouth as he wrestled with the Castle News and Post crossword. The effort must have been quite something, because his wrinkles were even more tortured than normal, his hair a mixture of silver and cigarette-tar yellow.

Callum went over and had a look. Poked the newspaper. ‘Three across, “Decapitated”.’

The old man glanced up, showing off a pair of dark, glittering eyes. ‘It doesn’t fit.’

‘It does if you spell “Robespierre” properly, Dougal. Three Es, two Rs and an I.’

‘Oh.’ He made the correction, then put the paper to one side. Grinned at Franklin with a big grey wall of perfectly straight false teeth. ‘Well, well, well, when DS McAdams called to say you were coming over he didn’t tell me you were such a beauty.’

She bared her teeth back at him, but it wasn’t a smile. ‘Where’s the post mortem?’

‘Ah, straight to business.’ Dougal winked. ‘I like that in a woman.’

‘Do you also like a punch in the throat?’

‘I wouldn’t say no to a little light spanking. But maybe I should just show you through to the cutting room?’

‘Maybe you should.’

Dougal stepped out from behind the reception desk and led the way through a pair of double doors and into a long corridor with doors opening off either side. ‘We’ve got a full house this morning. Yesterday must’ve been buy-one-get-one-free on dead bodies.’ The door at the end opened on an aisle between two sets of refrigeration units — big rectangles of stainless steel, each one covered in a grid of metal hatches. Four high, eight wide. Each hatch was about the same size as an oven door, only they didn’t contain Christmas dinner.

Well, hopefully not anyway.

One of the hatches lay wide open so the two guys from the loading bay could wrestle a body bag out of the gunmetal-grey coffin and onto a sliding drawer. The contents all bendy and awkward.

Dougal waved as they passed. ‘Let’s not drop the guests, guys.’

A nod. ‘Dougie.’

‘Bodies, bodies, and more bodies.’ He glanced back over his shoulder at Callum. ‘It’s the same every time you lot go digging about in the tip. Think you’d have more sense.’

At the end of the block, Franklin stopped. Stood there on the damp grey floor with her mouth hanging open. Staring. ‘Holy mother of hell...’

From here, the full size of the room became apparent. A mini warehouse, with row after row after row of refrigerated units in it.

She gave a low whistle. ‘How many bodies have you got here?’

‘One hundred and twelve.’ Dougal stuck out his chest, sounding every inch the proud father. ‘But we’ve got space for three hundred and sixty, including the freezers. A seven-three-seven falls out of the sky at Oldcastle airport? We can take every single passenger, a full bendy bus, plus two football teams as well.’

And what a fun weekend that would be.

Callum followed the pair of them into the visitor’s changing room, with its rows of lockers, racks of blue wellington boots, boxes of gloves and other assorted paraphernalia. Slipped off his shoes and stuck them in a locker. Helped himself to a pair of size-nine wellies. ‘Who’s doing the mummies?’

‘The mummy?’ Dougal scrunched up his wrinkles, then peered at a clipboard hanging on a hook by the door marked ‘DISSECTING ROOM ~ SAFETY EQUIPMENT MUST BE WORN BEYOND THIS POINT’.

‘Mummies. Two of them.’ Callum pulled a plastic apron from the roll by the door and unfurled it. Slipped it over his head and tied the ties. ‘Came in yesterday?’