Stuart MacBride - Close to the Bone

‘ Might not have any choice .’ And Samantha was gone.

Logan stuck the phone in his pocket and climbed out. ‘What? ’

‘Where the hell have you been? ’

‘Dr Graham wants to do a facial reconstruction on the skeleton too.’

‘Aye, I’ll bet she does. I’m no’ made of money.’ Steel hauled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one off her battered Zippo. ‘The Weegie buggers get here at two. I need a suspect, Laz.’

He locked the car and made for the steps down to the mortuary. ‘How about Agnes Garfield: your missing teenager.’

Steel clumped along behind him. ‘She’s only a kid.’

‘She’s eighteen, obsessed with this Witchfire book, psychotic, and off her medication.’

Empty crisp packets, cigarette butts, and plastic fizzy-juice bottles were piled up in little drifts on the stairs. Logan picked his way through them then punched his ID into the keypad. ‘The Kintore body was lying in the middle of a magic circle identical to the one witch-finders use in the book. All the cuts — that was Agnes looking for the Devil’s mark, that’s in the book too. There was a knot of bones outside the back door, like the ones outside my house: they’re in the book. Of course it’s her.’

Inside, the hum and roar of the extractor fans made the ceiling tiles rattle.

Logan stuck his head into the staff room, but it was empty. The pathologists’ office too. The red light was on above the cutting-room door: probably still working on the poor sod who’d ended up tried for witchcraft on a kitchen floor in an abandoned house.

Steel slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You know what this means, don’t you? If you’d no’ farted about and actually done something about finding her, none of this would’ve happened! She’d be banged up in the loony bin, and those poor sods would still be alive.’

‘Think I don’t know that? ’ He pushed through the door into the viewing area — a small room with two seats and a heavy red velvet curtain down one wall. He pulled at the cord behind it and they creaked open.

Dr Graham was on the other side of the glass, where the bodies were normally displayed, hunched over her clay-covered skull, tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth. She looked up and smiled at them. Then turned the reconstructed head around and held it up.

Steel squinted at it. Took a step forward until her nose was pressed up against the glass. ‘Does he look familiar to you? ’

‘Who the hell are you? ’ Steel picked up the reconstructed head, turning it back and forth while the kettle boiled.

The staff room was just cold enough to be uncomfortable. Half-size lockers took up most of one wall, each of them decor-ated with stickers and bits cut out of newspapers. The one with the ‘SHEILA DALRYMPLE’ nameplate was covered in My Little Pony stickers and unicorns and teddy bears in tutus. A lime-green Post-it note glared out from the saccharine montage, with ‘STOP STEALING MY BLOODY JAFFA CAKES!!!!!’ scrawled across it in angry letters. A faint whiff of ruptured bowel and rotting meat oozed in through the gap under the staff-room door that led out onto the ‘dirty areas’, the parts of the mortuary members of the public weren’t allowed to see. The places where the bodies were loaded, stored, and dissected.

Logan dumped teabags into mugs. ‘Maybe he’s one of Agnes Garfield’s teachers? Or a friend of the family? ’

Steel held the head out at arm’s length. Closed one eye. ‘Looks a bit like Burns from accounting. .’ She swapped eyes. ‘Who the hell are you? Why do I know you? ’

Dr Graham fetched the milk from the little fridge. ‘What about the skeleton, would you like me to get cracking on that one too? If I can get a cast of the skull on the go by lunchtime I could start in on the tissue depth markers by five-ish? ’

‘You’ve no’ proved this one’s any good yet. .’ More squinting. ‘There’s something missing.’

‘Well, it’s not an exact science, there’s lots of interpretation involved. You can’t just push a button and hey-presto it’s perfect, we have to make assumptions. Like, there’s no way to tell if the subject has a moustache, or tattoos, or a beard, or warts, or a-’

‘Beard!’ Steel put the reconstruction down on the coffee table, amongst the copies of Hello! and Heat . Severed head meets celebrity cellulite. ‘Give it a beard. Big bushy one and a ratty ’tache.’

‘Erm. . OK.’ She scuttled out of the room.

Steel sniffed. ‘Still no’ convinced this isn’t just a big steaming pile of useless.’

Logan plonked a mug of tea down in front of her. ‘We need to up the hunt for Agnes Garfield. I’ve got, “Have you seen this girl?” posters up all over the place, but they’re sod-all use now she’s dyed her hair and changed her appearance. Have to get the papers involved, TV too; release that footage from the cash-machine security camera.’

‘Still don’t see it.’

Clunk, and Dr Graham was back with an armful of cotton wadding. She sank into one of the chairs, knocking a stack of gossip mags off the coffee table and onto the floor. ‘Oops.’ She picked up the head and fiddled the wadding around the jaw, pressing it into the clay. ‘It’s the stuff they use to pack the heads after they’ve removed the brain. .’ Some more fiddling. A bit of a trim with a pair of scissors. Then she nodded and held the head up again. With the red-brown clay skin, and the grey wadding beard, he looked like a sunburned Santa Claus. ‘How’s that? ’

A slow smile unfurled across Steel’s face. ‘The very dab. .’ She pointed. ‘Laz, look who it is.’

Logan stared at it. ‘Who? ’

‘God’s sake. Do you no’ read any of the memos I send out? ’

‘Of course I-’

‘It’s Roy Forman.’ A pause. ‘Fusty Forman? The Hardgate Hobo? Come on, you must’ve seen him, lurching about with that ratty AFC bobble hat on, shouting “Arseholes!” at the seagulls? ’ Steel sighed. ‘He was in the Gordon Highlanders, till they invalided him out with PTSD.’

Dr Graham lowered the head to the tabletop. ‘You knew him.’

‘Arrested him. . God knows how many times. His patrol copped a roadside bomb in Iraq — aye, no’ the sequel, the first time round — came home blind in one eye with all his mates dead. Crawled inside a bottle and never left.’

Logan frowned at the head. ‘So what was he doing out in Thainstone with a burning tyre around his neck? Think he did something to Agnes? Harassed her, or something? ’

Steel sat back and smiled. ‘I remember this one time, I did Fusty Forman for peeing in some shop doorway, absolutely goat-buggeringly hammered, he was. And soon as I get him back to the station, there’s Finnie shouting the odds about. .’ She cleared her throat. ‘Well, let’s call it a misunderstanding over whether it was OK to claim three lap-dances and a bottle of tequila on expenses or not. And Finnie’s mid-rant, when Fusty leans over and barfs chunks all over him. I mean all over him.’ The smile turned into a grin. ‘Bits in his hair and all down his front and everything. So Finnie lurches off, all stinking of sick, and Fusty gives us this big wink. Says he did it on purpose, ’cos Finnie was being a dick to his favourite copper.’

She sat there in silence, looking at the head, the grin fading from her face. ‘Poor old sod.’

‘ Nooo. . ’ On the other end of the phone, Rennie sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. ‘ Do you have any idea what time it is? ’

‘Quarter past eleven.’

‘ I was asleep! ’

‘Hey, you’re the one who moaned because you weren’t told about us solving the jewellery heist.’