Stuart MacBride - A Song for the Dying

Oh, lucky us.

He turned back towards the woods. Then froze. Looked over his shoulder at me. ‘Well, don’t just stand there — come, witness my brilliance.’

‘Gah…’ Alice stumbled, staggered forwards a few paces and thumped into a tree. ‘This is stupid.’

The forest floor was rutted, littered with roots and fallen branches. Dark with rotting pine needles and the brittle bones of dying ferns. Heady with the smell of earth and decay. Cold enough to make our breath fog as we picked our way deeper into the woods.

Huntly kept going, ducking under the jagged thicket of branches. ‘On the contrary, it’s infinitely sensible.’

She lowered her voice to a mutter. ‘Infinitely stupid, more like.’ Then back to full volume again. ‘There’s no way the killer came this way — there’s no path. How would you carry a body through all this? It’d get snagged in the branches, you’d drop it, you’d leave a big trail of snapped stuff and my hair keeps getting caught on these horrible twigs. Gahh!’

Huntly smiled back at her. ‘You are, of course, perfectly correct. We’re wading through the thicket here precisely because Unsub-Fifteen didn’t. There’s a track, ten foot to our right, that we’re walking parallel to. I don’t want either of you treading in any evidence.’

He shoved his way into a clump of broom and disappeared. The gap snapped closed again, dark green tendrils shivering behind him, seedpods rattling and angry.

Alice stopped. Stared at the bushes. Then stared at me. ‘I’m not a violent person. But if I look the other way, can you break his legs for me?’

I hauled a handful of broom back, making a gap. ‘Put your hood up, it’ll be fine.’

She did. Sighed. Then lowered her head and pushed her way into the bushes, setting the rattling going again.

Three, two, one. The branches snatched at my hair and shoulders, as I clambered in after her, ducking and weaving through the thicket, following the sound of swearing.

More rattling, and the bush opened out at the bottom of a ditch. Damp earth squelched beneath my feet, slippery as I scrambled up and onto a grass verge.

A road stretched away left and right, disappearing into the woods. Ten or twelve yards from where I’d emerged was a bus shelter, alien and battered beneath the reaching claws of more pine trees. Graffiti tattooed the phone box next to it — a sickly, twisted thing with a buckled door and half the Perspex missing. Snakes of soot curled up the remaining panes, the plastic warped and pitted by heat.

Huntly stood in the middle of the road, hands on his hips, a grin stretching his stupid little moustache wide. ‘Well? What did I tell you?’

Alice pulled a burr of pine needles from her hair. ‘… just washed it this morning…’

I stopped, twenty feet from the bus shelter. ‘So you’re saying the killer took the bus here, hauled the dead girl over his shoulder, and stomped off into the woods? Do dead bodies have to pay full fare, or do they count as luggage?’

A sigh. ‘You may mock, but what about this…?’ He made his way around to the back of the bus shelter, giving the side a wide berth, and pointed. ‘See?’

I followed, placing my feet in his footsteps, minimizing disturbance to the scene. A single smear of red-brown ran for six inches along the shelter’s bottom edge, just above the grass.

‘See? How much would you like to wager that it’s a DNA match with our victim?’ He moved over to the left, peering at a flattened patch in the scrubland. The grass was stained and darkened. ‘She probably died here. There’s not enough for a full bleed-out, but I imagine a lot of it would have clotted inside the body cavity by the time she got here. Hence the relative cleanliness.’

Alice hadn’t moved from the roadside. ‘Why bother though?’ She curled an arm around herself, the other hand playing with her hair again. ‘I mean he could’ve just left her there, behind the bus shelter, why pick her up again and carry her all the way through the woods to the bit of waste ground where she was found, doesn’t that seem like a bit of a waste of time?’

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a pair of gloves from Dr Constantine’s investigation kit. Tore open the sterile packaging, and snapped them on. Scuffed through the weeds and grass to the far side of the flattened area — taking the long way around to avoid treading on any evidence. ‘Have you got a photo of this?’

Huntly sniffed. ‘Of what?’

‘Syringe.’ It lay in a clump of dockens, lined with frost, its yellow cap about a foot away.

‘Ah…’ He followed the path I’d made, his digital camera at the ready. ‘Say cheese.’

Alice still hadn’t moved. ‘Unsub-Fifteen tried to save her. He got Claire all the way out here, then he takes the cry for help he made her record and goes to call an ambulance, but she crashes. She’s not breathing. So he gives her … maybe something like adrenaline? Tries to start her heart again. He doesn’t want them to die, he wants us to get to them in time, like Laura Strachan, Marie Jordan, and Ruth Laughlin. Claire was meant to live. This was a failure.’

Huntly took another couple of shots. ‘And he didn’t want us to connect her body with this place, in case he’d left something of himself behind. So he moved the remains.’ The digital camera went back into Huntly’s pocket. ‘Of course, he didn’t reckon on tangling with someone of my calibre. They never do.’ He grinned. ‘Here’s a fun fact for you: one of the ambulance men who saved Laura Strachan, himself went on to become the last ever victim of another serial killer: the Nightmare Man. Personally, if I lived in Oldcastle, I’d move.’

Damp grass scuffed around my ankles as I made for the telephone box. The door squealed as I dragged it open. A new-car stench of burnt plastic slumped against me, underpinned with a bleachy tang. The phone itself looked reasonably intact, under all the black-marker swearwords and cocks scratched into the metal. I picked the handset up and held it so the mouthpiece was nowhere near my lips. The dialling tone burred in my ear.

Still working. I punched in 1471, looking for the last number dialled, but the LCD display came up ‘- BARRED NUMBER — ’ The handset went back into its cradle then I stepped out into the unburnt air again. Pulled out my new official phone and powered it up. It’d been pre-programmed with a half-dozen numbers, ‘~ THE BOSS!’ sitting at the top of the list, above ‘ALICE’, ‘BERNARD’, ‘HAMISH’, ‘SHEILA’, and ‘X — DOMINO’S PIZZA’. My finger hovered over the first entry. Of course, by rights it should be Control, not Jacobson getting the first call. Then again, Control couldn’t send me back to prison.

And there was no way I was risking that. Not when I was so close…

The phone rang for a bit, then Jacobson picked up, listened while I filled him in. Then, ‘ Excellent. Bernard might be a pain in the arse, but he’s worth it. Get as many photos as you can, then call Ness — get her to send out a Scenes Examination Branch team. I want that scene cordoned off and picked over with an electron microscope. Tell them Bernard’s in charge, and if they give him any grief I’ll have them. OK? ’

Alice looked back over her shoulder as I pulled into Slater Crescent. ‘Are you sure it’s OK to leave Professor Huntly there, I mean what if he upsets all the-’

‘He’s a grown man.’ And besides, maybe getting punched on the nose by one of the Scenes Examination Branch would take the edge off him a bit. If we were lucky.

The Suzuki jerked and juddered as my right foot slipped off the accelerator. Bloody idiot. Oh, no I’ll drive this time. It’s been far too long. Need the practice…