Peter May - The Blackhouse

‘About bloody time!’ A twinkle in his green eyes betrayed the outward appearance he liked to give of bad-tempered eccentricity. It was an image he cultivated as an excuse for the rudeness that was almost expected of him now. ‘How the hell are you?’ He held out a hand to shake Fin’s. ‘Same killer, is it?’

‘That’s what you’re here to tell us.’

‘Godforsaken bloody place! You’d think if there was anywhere in the world you could get fresh fish this would be it. I ordered plaice in the hotel last night. Aye, and it was fresh alright. Fresh out the fucking freezer and into the deep-fat fryer. Christ, I can get that in my own house!’ He looked at Gunn and leaned over the table to pull the folder from under his arm. ‘Is that the report and the photographs?’

‘Aye.’ Gunn held out his hand. ‘DS George Gunn.’ But the professor had already turned away to look at the report and lay out the photographs. Gunn withdrew his hand self-consciously.

‘You’ll find head covers, shoe covers, goggles, masks and gowns in the pathologist’s room across the hall.’

‘You want us to put them on?’ Gunn said. Perhaps, Fin thought, he hadn’t been at a post-mortem in a while.

‘No.’ Professor Wilson wheeled around. ‘I want you to gather them into a little pile and set them on fire.’ He glared. ‘Of course I want you to put the fucking things on. Unless you want to catch AIDS or whatever viral particles might be lurking in the bone dust that’ll fill the air when we take the oscillating saw around the victim’s skull. Alternatively, you can stand out there.’ He waved a hand towards the large window that opened on to the corridor beyond. ‘But you’ll not be able to hear a fucking thing I say.’

‘Jesus,’ Gunn said, as they pulled on their protective clothing in the pathologist’s room. ‘And I thought the CIO was bad.’

Fin laughed, and almost stopped dead at the sound of it. It was the second time he had laughed today, and he hadn’t laughed in such a long time. Becoming aware of it, whatever he had thought amusing was quickly choked off by a tidal wave of returning emotion. He took a moment to recover himself. ‘Angus is okay. His bark’s worse than his bite.’

‘I’d be frightened I caught rabies if he bit me.’ Gunn was still reeling from the sharp edge of the pathologist’s tongue.

When they went back into the mortuary room, the professor had spread photographs across almost every available space. He was examining the victim’s clothes on the table. The stainless steel was covered by a large sheet of white butcher’s paper to collect any stray fibres or dried particles of vomit that detached themselves from the material. The victim had been wearing a zip-up fleece over a white cotton shirt and blue denim jeans. Big, dirty-white misshapen running shoes sat on the end of the table. The pathologist had slipped on his protective gloves and was holding a square magnifying glass in his left hand and picking delicately at the dried vomit on the dark blue fleece with a pair of tweezers. ‘You didn’t tell me the victim was my namesake.’

‘They never called him Angus,’ Fin said. ‘Everyone knew him as Angel. You could send him a letter addressed to Angel, Ness, Isle of Lewis, from anywhere in the world and it would get to him.’

DS Gunn was shocked. ‘I didn’t know you knew him, Mr Macleod.’

‘I was at school with him. His younger brother was in my class.’

‘Angel …’ Professor Wilson was still focusing on his tweezers. ‘Does he have wings?’

‘The nickname was ironic.’

‘Ah. Maybe that explains why someone wanted to kill him.’

‘Maybe it does.’

‘Gotcha, you little bugger!’ The professor straightened up and held his tweezers up to the light, with what looked like a small white bead pinched delicately between its prongs.

‘What is it?’ Gunn said.

‘It’s a ghost.’ He looked at them, grinning. ‘Of a pill. One of these extended-release pills. The shell is full of micropores that let the medicine leak out slowly. This one’s empty. But these pill casings can sometimes survive in the stomach for hours after they’ve served their purpose. We see them all the time.’

‘Is there any significance in it for us?’ Fin said.

‘Maybe. Maybe not. But if this really is the killer’s vomit, then it could tell us something about him that we wouldn’t otherwise have known. Whatever medicine this contained may or may not show up on a tox screen, but we’ll still know what it was he was taking.’

‘How?’

The professor held up his magnifying glass to the tiny shell. ‘You can’t really see it with this, but stick it under a dissecting scope and we’ll almost certainly find numbers or letters etched on the surface, even a drug company symbol. We can check the markings against those listed in drug books to identify the medication. It might take a little time, but we’ll get there.’ He dropped the ghost pill carefully into a plastic evidence bag and sealed it. ‘You see, we’re clever bastards these days.’

‘What about DNA?’ Fin looked at the dried lumps of undigested food stuck to the fabric of the fleece, and could not begin to guess what they were. It seemed that no matter what you ate, it nearly always came back up looking like diced carrots in porridge. ‘Will you be able to get any out of that lot?’

‘Oh, I imagine so. We’re sure to find mouth mucosa cells in the saliva. We’ll get DNA from the nuclei of any of the cells lining the mouth, or the oesophagus, or the stomach itself. They slough off all the time, and will certainly be part of the vomitus.’

‘Will it take long?’ Gunn said.

‘If we get the specimen to the DNA lab some time this afternoon. Extraction, amplification … we should have a result by late tomorrow morning.’ The professor put a finger to his lips. ‘But don’t tell anyone, otherwise everyone’ll want their results that fast.’

Fin said, ‘The CIO says he’s going to take anything up to two hundred DNA samples to run past whatever you extract from this lot.’

‘Ah.’ Professor Wilson smiled, and his beard bristled. ‘That’ll take a little longer. And, besides, we have not yet established that this isn’t the victim’s own vomitus.’

Two white-coated assistants wearing large yellow rubber gloves wheeled the body in from the six-shelved refrigerator across the hall and transferred it to the autopsy table. Angel Macritchie was a big man. Bigger than Fin remembered him, and probably fifty pounds heavier than when he had last seen him. He would not have disgraced the front row of a rugby scrum. The thick black hair he had inherited from his father was a good deal thinner now, more silver than black. His skin was a pale putty grey in death. The lips that taunted, and the fists that damaged, were slack and powerless now to inflict the emotional and physical pain that they had dispensed with such ease through all those childhood years.

Fin looked at him, trying to remain dispassionate, but even Angel’s dead presence made him tense, and knotted his stomach so that he felt physically sick. He let his eyes wander to the dreadful opening across his abdomen. Inflated loops of shiny small intestine, pink tan in colour, had burst through the opening in the abdominal wall, held by a sheet of fat that Fin knew, from the Edinburgh post-mortem, was called the mesentery. There also seemed to be a balloon of large bowel pushing through. Dried blood and body fluid streaked his thighs. His tiny, flaccid penis looked like a dried fig. Fin turned to see DI Gunn standing towards the back of the room, almost pressed against the window. He was very pale.

Professor Wilson drew blood from the femoral veins at the top of the legs, and vitreous fluid from the eyes. Fin always found it hard to watch a needle entering an eyeball. There was something peculiarly vulnerable about the eyes.