Stuart MacBride - A Song for the Dying

The view from the lay-by wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been: out across a ditch, then a couple of fields, a garden centre, a static caravan park, a patch of woodland, ending at the sprawling boundary of Shortstaine. From here, the suburb was a soulless swathe of gingerbread houses crammed into twisting cul-de-sacs. Eight years ago, it was all fields.

‘Yeah… Uh-huh… I’ll ask.’ She put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Bear wants to know where we are.’

I lifted my left shoe from the footwell and jiggled it. The ankle monitor shoogled against my skin. ‘Thought that was the point of the GPS.’

Alice’s face turned down at the edges. ‘But he’s-’

‘Tara McNab.’ I sooked my plastic fork clean and pointed it at the bins by the side of the lay-by, overflowing with McDonald’s bags and empty drink cans. ‘The Inside Man’s second victim was found right there. Flat on her back, staring up at the dawn.’

‘Ah…’ Back to the phone. ‘We’re revisiting the deposition sites from the original investigation… Yes… No, I haven’t met with Dr Docherty yet…’

A tangent of beetroot clipped off beneath the fork, got skewered, then loaded up with mushy grey potato and a lump of meat. Say what you like about Bad Bill’s grubby van, hairy arms, and collection of tattoos, he made a mean stovie. Lots of meat, sod-all gristle, and comforting as a lover’s embrace. I chewed around the words, ‘Ask him what’s happened with Sabir.’

‘Yes … I know, but we’ve been… No, Chief Superintendent Jacobson…’

Chief Superintendent Jacobson . Sounded as if she’d lost her ‘call me Bear’ privileges.

‘Has he got those numbers from Sabir yet?’

‘What?… No… Em, Ash wants to know if you’ve heard anything back from Detective Sergeant Akhtar?… Right…’

The carton squealed as I scraped the last morsels up with the fork. ‘And while you’re at it, when do we get our muscle?’

‘Yes, I understand that, Chief Super-… No, it’s… Yes. Soon as we can. Now, about getting someone to come with us to Mr McFee’s house, is… Ah, right, yes…’

‘Well?’ The last dobs of mushy potato gravy got wiped up on a fingertip.

‘No, I understand… Yes.’

I scrunched the carton up and opened the car door. ‘Tell him to get his finger out, we’re supposed to be catching a killer here.’

‘What? Yes… It’s…’

At least the drizzle had stopped. I climbed out and limped between the puddled potholes to the bins. Jammed the polystyrene container in with the shells of dead Happy Meals.

Was it raining that night — when we found Tara’s body? Difficult to remember. Probably. All of us standing around in our white SOC suits, caught in the spotlights’ glow like ghosts at a party for the dead. The guest of honour laid out, with blood thick and dark on the front of her nightdress…

Tara McNab’s mother never got over the death of her little girl. She went on the drink. Started hanging about outside Force Headquarters with a thermos full of tea and a placard with ‘POLICE INCOMPETENCE ~ CAN’T CATCH MY DAUGHTER’S KILLER!’ on it in big black letters. Three weeks later she jumped off Dundas Bridge.

Couldn’t really blame her.

The worst thing about losing your child was having to go on living every day. Everything else was a bloody cakewalk compared to that.

‘Ash?’

I blinked. Turned.

Alice was half out of the car, clutching the satchel to her lap with one hand, holding her phone out in the other. ‘Detective Superintendent Jacobson wants to talk to you.’

I hobbled back and took the mobile. ‘What’s the result on the phone box?’

‘ Why the hell are you sodding about at old body-dump sites? It’s- ’

‘Dr Fred Docherty is an idiot. We’re putting together an independent profile: the Inside Man picked these deposition sites for a reason, Alice needs to see them if she’s going to work out what it is.’

‘ I’m not happy she’s- ’

‘And while we’re on the subject, I want to limit her exposure to Docherty. He’s got an agenda to push — that’s why his profile for Unsub-Fifteen’s pretty much identical to the one he came up with eight years ago. He’s not interested in the truth, he’s interested in being right.’

An eighteen-wheeler thundered past the lay-by, tyres kicking up a mist of dirty spray.

‘ I see. ’

‘If Professor Huntly’s about, get him to put a fire under the lab for those samples from Wishart Avenue. Probably a waste of time checking if Castle Hill Infirmary did rape kits on the original survivors, but you never know.’

Silence.

‘Jacobson?’

‘ Normally I’m the one who gives the orders round- ’

‘Sorry if you’ve got sore toes, but we’re looking for someone who’s killed five women, mutilated three, and right now Jessica McFee’s out there waiting to be slit open like an Arbroath Smokie. We don’t have time to sod about with niceties. We’re doing our jobs, and I need you to make sure everyone else is doing theirs.’

Laying it on a bit thick, but what the hell. Look at me, I’m a team player.

Don’t send me back to prison.

‘ All right, but I’ll be expecting results .’ He hung up.

I switched the phone off and handed it back to Alice. Climbed into the car and pulled on my seatbelt.

She picked the photocopied letter from her lap and held it up. Some of the blurred spidery words were circled with red biro. She pointed at a line she’d highlighted in yellow. ‘Does that say “fusillade”, or “forward”?’

It was little more than a squiggle of grainy grey. ‘Looks like … maybe “funwarde”? Thought these were transcribed years ago. It’ll be in the case file.’

‘Always go to the source material. It’s not just about the words, it’s how they fit together on the page — what happens on the lines above and below.’ Alice squinted at the paper for a bit. ‘Maybe that’s a “T” not an “F”. “Terrified”?’

‘Next time we’re at FHQ we’ll go see Simpson. The man’s like a cadaver dog — if the original letters are in the archives, he’ll find them.’

Another eighteen-wheeler thundered past.

She started the car, then sent the windscreen wipers groaning through the dirty spray covering the glass. ‘I’m supposed to go discuss the profile with Dr Docherty.’

‘Screw him. We’re going to take a look at where Doreen Appleton was dumped.’

The jagged sea of brambles, where we’d found Doreen Appleton eight years ago, wasn’t there any more. An electricity substation stood in its place, secured behind a chain-link fence with bright yellow ‘DANGER OF DEATH’ notices.

Bit late for that.

Alice peered out through the windscreen. ‘Do you think we could arrange for Ruth to meet Laura Strachan? I think it’d be good for her.’

‘Don’t see why not. Have to find Laura first though — she’s gone to ground somewhere, ducking the media.’

‘Ash?’

‘What?’

‘If Doreen was his first victim, why didn’t we come here first?’

‘Because I didn’t want to eat my lunch looking at a substation.’

‘Oh…’ She started the car again.

Holly Drummond’s ditch was still there, running along a winding country road leading northeast from the Wynd. The regular Edwardian terraces glowed like rows of sandstone teeth, small private parks glimmering green in the afternoon light.

From here, standing at the side of the road, Oldcastle was laid out like a 3D map. Blackwall Hill to the left, rising up in a mound of grey housing developments and trendy shops. Kingsmeath beyond it, with its tombstone tower blocks and crumbling council housing. Then across Kings River to Logansferry: industrial estates, the big glass-roofed train station, and abandoned riverside developments. Castle Hill in the middle: twisting Victorian streets curled around the blade of granite where the ruins sulked. Part of Shortstaine just visible behind it. Then Cowskillin to the right: all seventies houses and an abandoned football stadium. And back across the river to Castleview, the spire of St Bartholomew’s Episcopal Cathedral rising like a rusted nail from the surrounding streets, catching the last rays of a dying sun.