Stuart MacBride - A Song for the Dying

‘Name?’

‘Hill, sir, erm … Ronald. I didn’t-’

‘Second: I don’t care how long you’ve been sitting here, you’re a bloody police officer, so try to look like one. You’re a disgrace. Third,’ I pointed at Alice and Huntly, ‘get your arse out of this car and show these people the deposition scene. Now , Constable.’

‘Yes, sir, sorry, sir.’ He scrambled out of the car, ramming his peaked cap down on his head. ‘This way, and-’

‘Check their bloody identification first!’

Alice looked over her shoulder. ‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’

I turned. Constable Hill was standing to attention with his back to us, guarding the path down to the deposition scene as if his life depended on it.

‘Might have done.’ I might not have been a police officer any more, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have fun putting the fear of God into lazy PCs.

The Scenes Examination Branch had laid out a common access path, marked off with more blue-and-white tape, the jaundiced grass crisp with frost and trampled flat. The path curled around the scene, looping back on itself towards an inner cordon of yellow-and-black tape: ‘CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS’. A handful of triangular yellow flags punctuated the undergrowth, all of them marked with a letter and number.

Huntly stood, chest out, shoulders back, nose swinging left to right as if he was scenting the place. ‘I see…’ And then he was off, working his way along the trampled path. Sniffing as he went.

I stuck my hands in my pockets. ‘They’re having difficulty locating the original Inside Man letters. Apparently the archives are a mess. No one knows what’s in what box. Sure you can’t make do with the photocopies Jacobson gave you?’

She curled her top lip. ‘They’ve been copied so many times they’re barely legible. I need to see the originals. I want to feel the ink on the page, see the weight he’s put behind the words, the scratch of the pen, I want to touch something he has. Something that didn’t end up dead or damaged.’ She turned, her eyes following Huntly as he ducked under the inner cordon. ‘Did you get anything off them eight years ago?’

‘We ran every test we could on the letters and the envelopes, but there was nothing. All six were postmarked Oldcastle. The only fingerprints we could lift belonged to the journalist he sent them to. All that’s left is the words.’

For a moment, it looked as if she was about to say something. But she dug into her leather satchel instead and came out with a manila folder and a carrier-bag. She jiggled the folder. ‘Photos.’ Then held up the bag. ‘And this is your investigation kit. Dr Constantine made one for everyone.’

I took the bag. Rummaged through the contents. A decent-looking camera — small but high-res, large memory card. Five or six pairs of blue nitrile gloves in individual sterile packages. A handful of evidence bags. A ruler. A notepad. A sheet of instructions. And a smartphone. I pulled it out, turned it over in my hands. ‘Let me guess: it’s all monitored and GPS tracked so they know where I am and what I’m up to?’

Alice just looked at me. Then, ‘No, it’s a phone. It’s for making calls and uploading stuff to the LIRU server, see there’s a slot in the side that’ll take the camera’s memory card? They’ve got the ankle monitor if they need to find you.’

Good point. I distributed the investigation kit between my pockets.

Huntly’s voice brayed out from the other side of the crime-scene tape. ‘I do love a good deposition scene. But this isn’t one of them. I mean look at this, honestly.’ He swept his arms up and out. ‘Everyone and their rancid mother’s picked the place clean, leaving dirty big footprints everywhere. And why, oh why, oh why , didn’t they put down a walkway? It’s all compromised. How am I supposed to work like this?’ He turned around, doing a slow one-eighty, left the cordoned-off area, then stomped and crackled away into the woodland.

So much for Jacobson’s hand-picked, decades of experience, top of their game, experts.

I ducked under the tape marking off the access path and scrunched through the knee-high grass towards the inner cordon. Stopped. Looked back to where Alice was standing with her arms wrapped around herself. ‘You coming?’

‘Aren’t we supposed to stick to the authorized path?’

‘You heard Huntly. Operation Tigerbalm have tromped all over it with their size elevens. There’s nothing left to compromise.’ I went back to wading through the frosty grass. Paused at the line of tape. Opened the folder and pulled out the photos.

They were the same ones Jacobson had given me in the Range Rover, the colours a lot more vibrant in the daylight.

It took a little back and forth, but eventually I found where the photographer must have stood to take the first couple of shots. I stood in the same place, holding the pictures out.

Claire Young’s head lay pointing back towards the path we’d started on, her skin pale and veined like marble.

‘She died somewhere else…’

Alice hadn’t moved, still hiding behind the blue-and-white line. ‘What?’

‘I said, she didn’t… Will you get your backside over here?’

I pointed as Alice picked her way across to the deposition scene. ‘There’s not enough blood. He slit her open, stitched a doll inside, and sewed her up again. Ground should be saturated with it. And the positioning’s wrong too.’

‘But we know the Inside Man has an operating room, it was on the DVD and-’

‘Supposed to be keeping an open mind, remember? And Unsub-Fifteen didn’t drag her here from the car park either, he carried her. Otherwise there’d be drag marks on the path.’ I planted my feet apart and hefted an imaginary Claire Young’s dead body up onto my shoulder. ‘So: you’ve got her in a fireman’s lift. You stagger down the path, till you think you’ve gone far enough that no one will see you from the car park. You don’t dump her at the side of the path, do you? No, you strike out at ninety degrees, put some distance between you and the path. Then you dump her.’ I mimed it, tipping the body off my shoulder and onto the grass. ‘Her head would be pointing that way, towards the woods, not away from them.’

‘Well … maybe he turned around and then dumped her body?’

Possible.

Then again, we’d already established that Professor Huntly couldn’t be as daft as he looked.

He was still crashing about out there, breaking branches and singing what sounded like opera to himself.

Alice picked at her satchel. ‘Ash, the big car chase… You ended up all covered in glass and blood and you broke your wrist and your ribs — I looked it up in the case file — but it doesn’t say why the Inside Man wasn’t all bashed up in the crash.’

‘Luck? Angle of collision? Not having a moron like O’Neil behind the wheel? How should I know?’ I put the photos back in the folder. ‘Listen, once we’ve dropped Rain Man back at the Postman’s Head, I need to run a little errand.’

Alice took a sudden interest in the path. ‘Oh.’

‘Nothing important. Just need to pop in on an old friend.’

‘Right…’

‘You can stay in the car if you like, I probably won’t be long.’

‘Ash, do you think we could talk about what happened with you and Mrs Kerrigan, I mean I know you’re not-’

‘There’s nothing to talk about. What happened, happened; there’s nothing I can do to bring Parker back.’

‘Ash, it’s perfectly normal to-’

‘She had him shot twice in the head, then framed me for it. What’s normal about that?’

Nothing.

Silence.

And then Huntly was back, stumbling out of the woods a good twenty yards further down than where he’d gone in. ‘Behold!’ He held a small digital camera aloft. ‘The Mighty Bernard Huntly has returned.’