Stuart MacBride - Close to the Bone

Tears roll down his pale face.

Make the darkness fear you.

Rowan walks over to him, takes a deep breath, the scent of sweat and oranges and burning fill her head. Then she grabs a handful of his hair and drags him over to the Ring Knot. He kicks and screams the whole way until she taps him on the side of the head with the hammer — just hard enough to make him sag and groan.

Then she unties him and fixes him to the stakes. Spread out like a frog in a science lab, waiting for the lesson to begin.

She closes her eyes. Hangs her head. ‘ Miserere mei Deus secundum magnam. ’

Have mercy upon me, oh God, according to your loving kindness.

The rancid stench of a partial-decomp post mortem oozed out of the cutting room like an unplugged fridge full of raw meat left in the sun. Tuneless whistling joined the smell as Miss Dalrymple — in wellies and a thick rubber apron — hosed the tiled floor, chasing smears of blood down the drain.

Logan tried the viewing room.

Dr Graham was hunched over another resin skull, measuring it with callipers, then consulting a long table of figures. She looked up as he closed the door. Her smile was full of teeth. ‘Just working out the tissue depth markers.’

‘What does “SIA” mean? ’

‘Ah, right.’ She hopped down off her stool and rummaged through a stack of paper. ‘Stable Isotope Analysis. Got the results back from Dundee on that segment of thighbone we sent them. The one from your rooftop skeleton? ’ She handed him a wodge of paper streaked grey down one side where the mortuary printer’s innards were eating themselves.

The report started out with social niceties — how nice it was to hear from Dr Graham again, and maybe they could go out for a drink next time she was in town — then descended into an almost indecipherable wodge of technical speak and wiggly-lined graphs.

Logan frowned at it for a bit. .

Nope. Not a clue.

He passed it back. ‘Any chance of the short version? ’

‘Well, the fourteen-C isotope analysis bomb-curve dating puts time of death between thirty and thirty-five years ago. Your victim wasn’t recent.’

Thirty-five years ago? Agnes Garfield wasn’t even born then.

‘The thirteen-C and one-eighty stable isotopic composition in conjunction with the eighty-seven-S-R slash eighty-six-S-R isotope ratio and strontium-’

‘The short version, Doctor.’

Pink bloomed on her cheeks. ‘Sorry. To get strontium and one-eighty levels like this your victim had to live north of a line drawn between Montrose and Helensburgh. The thirteen-C data points to a Central European diet, so she wasn’t from the States.’

Dr Graham took a sip from a bottle of water, sitting next to her collection of glass eyeballs. ‘The analysis says your victim probably came from the north-east of Scotland — basically, draw a lumpy circle containing Kintore, Torphins, Coldstone, Craik, Ardlair, Insch and Inverurie. She spent most of her life in there. Apparently the only other place that’d match the strontium and one-eighty is the backwoods of Sutherland and Ross and Cromartyshire.’

Dr Graham flipped over to the last page. ‘One more thing — there’s a disjoint between the thirteen-C and the fifteen-N isotopes. Elevated fifteen-N means she was suffering from a long-term illness. Which explains the pitting on the skull. .’ Dr Graham picked up the cast and ran a finger around the eye socket. ‘See the marks? ’

‘And you’re positive she died thirty-five years ago? ’

‘Stable Isotope Analysis doesn’t lie.’

‘Sod.’

She hugged the skull. ‘But doesn’t that-’

‘If it’s less than fifty years we’ve got to treat it as a suspicious death. If it’d been more than fifty years we could have written it off as archaeological, because whoever killed her would probably be dead by now anyway. She’d be someone else’s problem and I wouldn’t have another sodding murder on my hands.’

Logan drummed his fingers on the viewing-room table.

Where the hell would Agnes Garfield get her hands on a murder victim from thirty-five years ago?

Dr Graham cleared her throat. ‘Look, I don’t want to seem greedy, but Miss Dalrymple tells me you’ve got a badly decomposed body that needs identifying? ’

‘Hmm? ’ He glanced back towards the cutting room. ‘Steel won’t let me authorize another facial reconstruction, I already asked.’

‘Well. . We could maybe try for the basics. Do you know if they did any X-rays? I’m here anyway.’

Worth a shot. Especially as it looked as if everything else was a washout.

He was back two minutes later with a bulky brown cardboard folder. ‘You’re in luck, they did the head and chest before they cut him open.’

Dr Graham dipped into the folder and came out with an X-ray of the skull from straight ahead, and one taken side on. She held them both up against the viewing-room window. The light from the room beyond was just bright enough to make the bones shine. ‘Can you hold these for me? ’

Logan did and she leaned in close, peering, squinting, poking at the film with a finger. The upper and lower jaw were a mess of cracks and shattered teeth — just a couple of molars hanging on at the back, one cheekbone broken into three separate bits.

Then she nodded and stepped back. ‘You see how the nasal aperture is quite narrow? And the zygomatic bones are wide and prominent? ’

No idea.

She had another squint at the X-ray, scratching at the image where the battered nose met the bone. ‘Shame we can’t get a good look at the nasal sill. . But if you add in the interocular distance, short nasal spine, and the rounded palate, it means you’re probably looking at an Oriental male. And given the openness of the sutures and the fact he’s got three wisdom teeth at full occlusion, we can guesstimate an age of somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five. Probably. Give or take.’

Dr Graham shrugged. ‘If you can talk them into letting me deflesh the skull, it’d help. Or if you can find me the missing teeth. .? ’

An Oriental male, early twenties, lying tortured in the middle of a Ring Knot from Witchfire . Someone who knew Agnes Garfield well enough to go there with her. Someone probably too stoned to put up much of a fight. Maybe someone who’d been screwing around behind her back?

Someone like Anthony Chung.

PC Sim curled her top lip. ‘Grave robbing? Seriously? ’

Logan handed her the stable isotope analysis. ‘She had to get the remains from somewhere. Either she’s stumbled on a shallow grave, or she’s gone mining for bodies in the local cemetery.’

‘Urgh. . Grave robbing.’

‘Look for females from the north-east, between sixty and seventy years old, died up to forty years ago. And they had syphilis.’

Sim scanned the report. ‘You know what, Guv? I’m guessing there’s not going to be enough bodies missing to muddy the issue.’

He pointed down the corridor towards the main CID office. ‘Less sarcasm, more looking for dead old ladies.’

She rolled her eyes, then turned and ambled away and through the double doors, arms swinging at her sides like a grumpy wind-up toy.

No bloody respect, that was the problem with officers today.

Still, at least they were getting somewhere for a change. Almost. .

He unlocked the door to his office, opened it, then froze.

Crap.

Steel was sitting behind his desk, with her feet up, fake cigarette glowing between her bared teeth. ‘Make it good.’

Slam the door. Slam the door right now and RUN!

Logan licked his lips. ‘How’s the review meeting going? ’

‘HOW THE GOAT-BUGGERING HELL DO YOU THINK? ’ Spittle flew in the grey light. ‘I told you-’