Simon Beckett - Written in Bone

‘That’s OK. It’s just better not to have many people around,’ I said.

‘No, I appreciate that. But if there is anything I can do to help, then please let me know. Anything at all.’ He gave the dog’s collar an affectionate shake. ‘Come on, Oscar, you bad lad.’

Brody watched him lead the dog back to the car, his expression stern and unforgiving.

Duncan began to stammer an apology. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t sure what I should…’

‘No need to apologise. Shouldn’t have lost my temper like that.’ Brody took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket, clearly still rattled.

The kettle had started to boil in the camper van. I waited till Duncan had gone back inside to make the tea, then turned to Brody.

‘You don’t like Strachan much, do you?’

Brody smiled. ‘That obvious, is it?’ He took a cigarette from the packet and regarded it with distaste. ‘Filthy habit. I gave up when I retired. But I seem to have started again.’

‘What have you got against him?’

He lit the cigarette and took a long drag, exhaling the smoke as if he resented it. ‘I don’t approve of his sort. Privileged types who think because they’ve got money they can do as they like. He didn’t even earn it himself, he inherited it. His family made their fortune in gold mining out in South Africa during apartheid. You think they were so keen to share it with their workers over there?’

‘You can’t blame him for what his family did.’

‘Perhaps not. But he’s too cocksure of himself for my liking. You saw how he was in the bar last night, buying everyone drinks, turning his charm on for Karen Tait. A wife like that, and he’s still got a roving eye.’

I remembered what Fraser had told me about Brody’s own wife leaving him, and wondered if his dislike of Strachan was coloured with envy. ‘What about what he’s done for the island? From what I’ve heard, Runa was going the same way as St Kilda before he came here.’

Brody said nothing for a moment. His border collie had come to look out of the camper-van door, back legs stiff with arthritis. He stroked its head.

‘There’s a story about St Kilda that always makes me wonder if what happened there wasn’t for the best anyway. Before the islanders left, they killed their dogs. All of them. But only two were killed by lethal injections. The rest had stones tied round their necks and were thrown into the harbour. Their own dogs.’

He shook his head.

‘Never could fathom why anyone would do something like that. But I expect they must have had a reason. I was a policeman long enough to know that whatever people do, there’s always a reason. And one way or another it’s usually self-interest.’

‘You can’t think that Runa would have been better off abandoned?’

‘No, I suppose not. Strachan’s made people here more comfortable, I’ll grant him that. Better houses, better roads. You won’t find anyone has a bad word to say about him.’ He shrugged. ‘I just don’t believe in something for nothing. There’s always a price to pay.’

I wonder if he wasn’t being overly cynical. Strachan was helping the island, not exploiting it. And Brody wouldn’t be the first policeman I’d met who’d become so hardened by exposure to the darker face of humanity that he was unable to see there was also a brighter side.

Then again, he might just be a more astute judge of human character than I was. A man I’d once mistakenly regarded as a friend had told me I was better at understanding the dead than the living, and perhaps he’d been right. At least the dead don’t lie or betray.

Only keep their secrets, unless you know how to decipher them.

‘I ought to get on,’ I said.

The cottage didn’t look any more prepossessing by daylight. Darkness had at least hidden the full extent of its ruin and squalor. Its roof was swaybacked and gaping in places, the cracked windows thick with decades of grime. Behind it rose the imposing bulk of Beinn Tuiridh, now visible as a misshapen tumble of rocks smeared with dirty traces of snow.

A corridor of incident tape had been run from the front door into the room where the burned remains lay. The ceiling above them looked on the verge of collapse, although as yet no rain had leaked on to the ash and bones themselves. In the murky light that filtered through the window, they looked even more pathetic than I remembered.

I stood back and considered them, struck once again by the gruesome incongruity of the unburned hand and feet. Still, gruesome or not, the decomposing soft tissue was an unexpected bonus for a fire death. It would allow me to analyse the volatile fatty acids to establish a time since death, as well as providing fingerprints and DNA to help identify the unknown woman.

Since this wasn’t a crime scene-as Wallace had been at pains to point out-there was no real reason for me to grid out the remains. That was usually done to record the position of any evidence that was found. But I did it anyway. The stone floor prevented me from hammering pegs into the ground, but I carried drilled wooden blocks for that purpose.

Arranging them in a square around the body, I placed a peg in each one. By the time I’d finished stringing a grid of nylon cord between them my hands were numb and frozen in the thin latex gloves. Rubbing them to get some feeling back, I used a trowel and fine brush to begin clearing away the covering layer of talc-like ash.

Gradually, what was left of the carbonised skeleton was laid bare.

Our lives, and sometimes deaths, are stories written in bone. It provides a telltale record of injuries, neglect or abuse. But in order to find what was written here, first I had to be able to see it. It was a slow, painstaking business. Working on one square of the grid at a time, I carefully removed and sifted the ash, plotting the location of bone fragments and anything else I found on to graph paper before sealing everything in evidence bags. Time passed without my noticing. Thoughts of the cold, of Jenny, of everything, all vanished. The world narrowed down to the pile of ash and desiccated bones, so that I was startled when I heard someone clearing his throat behind me.

I looked up to see Duncan standing in the doorway. He held up a mug of steaming tea.

‘Thought you could use this.’

I checked my watch and saw it was nearly three o’clock. I’d worked right through lunchtime without realizing. I straightened, wincing as my back muscles protested.

‘Thanks,’ I said, stripping off my gloves as I went over.

‘Sergeant Fraser’s just called in, wanting to know how you were getting on.’

Fraser had put in a brief appearance earlier, but hadn’t stayed long, claiming he needed to carry on interviewing the locals. After he’d gone, Brody wondered aloud how many of his conversations would take place in the hotel bar. I thought it might be quite a few, though I didn’t say as much.

‘Slowly,’ I told Duncan, gratefully letting the hot mug warm my frozen hands.

He lingered in the doorway, looking at the remains. ‘How much longer do you reckon it’ll take?’

‘Hard to say. There’s a lot of ash to sift through. But I’ll probably be done by tomorrow morning at the latest.’

‘So have you, you know…found anything so far?’

He seemed genuinely interested. By right I should report to Wallace first, but I didn’t see any harm in telling Duncan some of what I’d learned.

‘Well, I can confirm it’s definitely a woman, under thirty, white and about five feet six or seven.’

He stared at the charred bones. ‘Seriously?’

I indicated the hips, now cleaned of the covering of ash. ‘If the body’s female you can often tell the age from the pelvis. In a teenager or adolescent the pubic bone is almost corrugated. As a woman gets older it starts to flatten out and then erode. This one is pretty smooth, so she was no teenager, but not old enough for any real wear and tear. Which puts her in her late twenties, thirty at the most.’