Alex Gray - Never Somewhere Else

The Procurator Fiscal stood, hands thrust into his Burberry pockets, watching the proceedings with interest. Lorimer had a lot of time for Iain MacKenzie. He might be only in his early thirties, but he had already gained a reputation for being a tough customer who did not suffer fools gladly. The pathologist rose to her feet and stripped off a pair of thin surgical gloves. An earlier drizzle had soaked her blonde hair, plastering tendrils of fringe to a tanned forehead.

Lorimer grinned at her.

‘Haven’t seen you for a while, Rosie.’

‘Oh, I’ve been away in Rwanda.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘What a rotten job to come back to!’ she exclaimed, looking up at the drizzly clouds.

Lorimer chuckled. Rosie Fergusson loved her work, but wasn’t crazy about the great Scottish outdoors.

‘Working for Her Majesty, I presume?’ Lorimer asked.

The Sunday supplements had run various articles about the aftermath of the Rwandan massacres. Rosie’s name had been mentioned more than once.

‘Yeah. You know how it is,’ the pathologist rolled her eyes, making light of her position as advisor to the Government in matters of forensic science.

‘Not really. Care to enlighten me?’

Rosie twisted round and looked at him shrewdly. For a moment she seemed to consider then shook her head. ‘You don’t want to know. Believe me.’

Remembering the photographs of mass graves that had illustrated the articles, Lorimer found it hard to imagine this pretty young woman sifting through the debris of such appalling human tragedy. Rosie rarely betrayed any emotion about her job. Instead, she usually adopted a flippant attitude that was one of the tools of survival in her profession.

‘Let’s have a look before you bag him up.’

Lorimer stepped closer to the body, which was under a plastic tent protecting it from the elements.

‘The van was found first thing this morning,’ Iain MacKenzie told him. ‘A postman spotted it on his way to Strathblane. Sensible fellow didn’t touch a thing but got the local police sergeant out of his bed straight away.’

Lorimer gazed down at the charred body of the victim. His arms had been tied behind his back and the ankles were twisted together, suggesting that they too had been bound.

‘He wouldn’t usually look like this,’ said Rosie, following Lorimer’s gaze. ‘If his limbs had been free, the whole body would have been curled into a pugilistic attitude.’

Lorimer nodded. He had seen burned corpses before and remembered the aggressive fists bunched against the onset of death.

‘Time of death?’

Rosie shrugged. ‘Hard to say. Within the last twelve hours certainly. Probably some time after midnight.’

Lorimer tried to picture the scene. A conflagration bursting out in the middle of nowhere against a darkened sky. Who might have seen it? They were not too far off the beaten track. Anyone passing along could have seen a light from the blazing ambulance on the low-lying moorland. These days, however, most folk wanted to keep their noses out of any trouble, especially on a cold February night.

‘Fire started with petrol, I suppose?’

‘Yes, petrol all right. He must have had it in the ambulance, driven here and then …’ The Fiscal shrugged. ‘What we don’t know is if there was an accomplice. How did he get away? There are no tyre marks on the ground to indicate a second vehicle, but if somebody had arranged to pick him up?’

He left the question dangling tantalisingly for Lorimer, whose task it would be to figure out this piece of the puzzle. Somehow Lorimer could not envisage a second person there. Suddenly he wished that he had asked Solly to come along.

Iain MacKenzie strolled across to where the burned-out ambulance stood. Lorimer matched his stride, careful to walk by the plastic flags and leave the grassy area undisturbed for the officers still about their business. The young Fiscal stared at the wreckage.

‘Our man has tried to get rid of the evidence,’ he began, nodding towards the blackened hole inside the old ambulance. ‘Thinks he’s covered his tracks’ — he paused, glancing over his shoulder — ‘and disposed of our chum over there.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to see what forensics can find, if anything,’ replied Lorimer.

He tried to keep a growing excitement out of his voice but saw that he had failed when Iain MacKenzie’s eyes gleamed in a conspiratorial smile. The Fiscal would be glad to see that his Chief Inspector had the bit between his teeth again. There had been little enough to go on in this case.

‘Going after Alison Girdley was his first mistake. Let’s hope this one is his last.’

Lorimer nodded in agreement, his mind already racing ahead to the immediate procedure of the day: the Fiscal would have given instructions to the pathologists and the police forensic team. The two men turned in time to see the body being bagged ready for its journey to the city mortuary. Iain MacKenzie looked at his watch.

‘Rosie will be doing the PM in a couple of hours. I need to be in the office for a bit. See you there about midday?’

‘Fine. Who’s on with Rosie?’

‘She didn’t say.’

The blonde pathologist would have had an early start after the Fiscal’s telephone call. Before leaving, however, another call was necessary to alert her partner. The double doctor system on this side of the border was a legal condition ensuring the highest possible veracity in criminal pathology work. One of them would lead the post-mortem examination, the other act as observer and note-taker.

‘God, I hate this weather!’ Rosie Fergusson gave a shudder as the two men returned to her side. ‘Give me Africa any day.’

Lorimer looked in fascination at the burnt corpse lying on the steel table. It was a difficult leap for the imagination to make. Only yesterday this had been a living, breathing human being.

Lorimer never forgot the feeling he had experienced the first time he had witnessed a murder PM. It had been strange how unreal a dead body looked. The bloodless skin gave the corpse the appearance of a dummy, not a real person at all. Seeing that first victim had crystallised all Lorimer’s thoughts about murder. The very lifelessness of the corpse had spelt out clearly to him how terribly evil it was to commit such a deed. To take away forever that vital spark which changed a meaningless husk into a man. Lorimer wasn’t an adherent of any particular religion but he did believe in the sanctity of life. What took place during a murder was the robbery of that treasured animus within a person. To Lorimer it was the ultimate violation, and while the police as a body were often reckoned to be hardened to such feelings, it was sometimes that very respect for life that made some men and women join in the first place.

Rosie was cutting into the thoracic area now, watched by Dan, her colleague on today’s rota. She scooped out the dark red lungs with expertise born of much practice. Lorimer and the Fiscal were on the other side of the viewing screen but could communicate easily with the pathologists through the intercom. The body lay just under the window, its organs glistening in display. The pathologist’s hair was tied back as she investigated the intricacies of the body on the table. The blue t-shirt and trousers topped by an emerald plastic apron gave her the air of a fishwife, especially when she moved around the table to reveal the yellow wellies which were a compulsory part of the pathologist’s garb. Dan and she conversed quietly, occasionally being interrupted by questions from the intercom.

‘Was he dead before the fire?’ Lorimer wanted to know.

‘No. This chap was alive and probably conscious when the fire began. There are sufficient soot deposits in the air passages to show this.’