Simon Beckett - Written in Bone

Fraser frowned. ‘Padlock? What the hell are you talking about?’

‘I bought one earlier,’ I told him. ‘For the community centre.’

For a moment he looked aggrieved at not being told sooner, but the lure of food and whisky overcame it. He gestured towards me as he went back to his meal.

‘There you go. So now you know.’

Guthrie folded his beefy arms on the shelf of his stomach. He wasn’t drunk this time, but he wasn’t happy, either.

‘And who says you can shut us out of our own fucking community centre?’

Fraser lowered his knife and fork and glowered at him. ‘I do. We had an intruder in there earlier, so now we’re locking it. Any objection?’

‘Aye, you’re dead right we have,’ Guthrie rumbled, lowering his arms threateningly. Long and heavily muscled, they gave him the look of an ape as they hung at his side. ‘That’s our fucking centre.’

‘So write a letter of complaint,’ Fraser retorted. ‘It’s being used on police business. Which means it’s off limits until we say so.’

Kinross’s eyes glittered over his dark beard. ‘Perhaps you didn’t hear. That’s our community centre, not yours. And if you think you can come here and lock us out of our own buildings, then you need to think again.’

I broke in before things got out of hand. ‘Nobody wants to lock anyone out, but it won’t be for long. And we did check first with Grace Strachan.’

I offered a silent apology to Grace for invoking her name, but it had the effect I’d hoped. Kinross and Guthrie glanced at each other, uncertainty replacing the belligerence of a moment ago.

Kinross rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Well, if Mrs Strachan said it was OK…’

Thank God for that. But my relief was premature. Perhaps it was the whisky, or perhaps he felt his authority had already been undermined enough by Brody. But for whatever reason Fraser decided to have the last word.

‘You can consider this a warning,’ he growled, levelling a fat finger at Kinross. ‘This is a murder inquiry now, and if you try to interfere again then believe me, you’ll wish you’d stayed on your bloody ferry!’

The entire bar had fallen quiet. Everyone in the room was staring at us. I tried to keep the dismay off my face. You bloody idiot!

Kinross looked startled. ‘A murder inquiry? Since when?’

Belatedly, Fraser realized what he’d done. ‘That’s none of your business,’ he blustered. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish my supper. This conversation’s over.’

He bent over his plate again, but couldn’t stop the flush climbing up the back of his neck. Kinross looked down at him, biting his lip in thought. He jerked his head at Guthrie.

‘Come on, Sean.’

They moved back to the bar. I stared at Fraser, but he busied himself with his food and refused to meet my eye. Finally, he gave me a sullen glare.

‘What? They’ll know soon enough when SOC get out here. There’s no harm done.’

I was too angry to say anything. The one thing we’d hoped to keep quiet, and now Fraser had needlessly blurted it out. I stood up, not wanting to stay in his company any longer.

‘I’d better go and relieve Brody,’ I said, and went to ask Ellen to make me some sandwiches.

Brody was still sitting in the hall where I’d left him, guarding the door to the clinic. When I went in he sat forward, poised on the edge of his seat, but relaxed when he saw it was me.

‘You’ve not been long,’ he said, getting to his feet and stretching.

‘I thought I’d eat down here.’

I’d brought my laptop with me from the hotel. I set it down and took the padlock and chain from my coat pocket. I handed him the spare key.

‘Here. You might as well have this.’

He gave me a questioning look as he took it. ‘Shouldn’t you give the spare to Fraser?’

‘Not after what he’s just done.’

Brody’s mouth tightened as I described what had just happened in the hotel bar.

‘Bloody fool. That’s just what we didn’t need.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Look, do you want me to stick around for a while? So long as I give Bess her evening walk some time, I’ve nothing else to do.’

I didn’t think he was aware of the loneliness his words implied. ‘I’ll be fine. You might as well go and get something to eat.’

‘You sure?’

I told him I was. I appreciated the offer, but I needed to work. And I could do that better without any distractions.

When he’d gone I wrapped the chain through the handles of the community centre’s double doors, then slid the hasp of the padlock through the links and snapped it shut.

Satisfied that the hall was as secure as I could make it, I sat in the chair that Brody had stationed by the clinic door and ate the sandwiches Ellen had made. She’d also given me a Thermos of black coffee, and when I’d eaten I sipped at the scalding liquid, listening to the wind booming outside.

The old building creaked like a ship’s timbers in a high sea. The sound was oddly restful, and the food had made me drowsy. My eyelids began to close, but my head jerked back up as a sudden gust of wind rattled the windows. The overhead light dimmed and buzzed indecisively before brightening to life once more. Time to make a start.

The skull and jawbone were as I’d left them. Plugging my laptop into a wall socket, I switched it on. Its battery was fully charged, but that wouldn’t last long if the power failed. Better to use the island’s main electricity while I could, and trust that the laptop’s surge-protection would hold out against it from the fluctuating supply.

Once the laptop had booted up, I opened the missing persons files that Wallace had sent. This was the first time I’d had a real chance to look at them. There were five in all: young women between eighteen and thirty who’d disappeared from the Western Isles or the west coast of Scotland in the last few months. Chances were that they had simply run away, and would turn up at some point in Glasgow, Edinburgh or London, drawn to the chimera of a big city.

But not all of them.

Each file contained a detailed physical description and a jpeg photograph of a missing woman. Two of the photographs were useless, with the subject in one closed-mouthed, and the other a full-body shot that was too low-resolution for me to work with. But a quick glance at the descriptions that accompanied them made it unnecessary anyway. One was black, while the other was too short to be the young woman whose skeleton I’d measured in the cottage.

The other three, though, all matched the physical profile of the dead woman. Their photographs showed them as not much more than girls, caught before whatever event had either caused them to walk away from their lives, or ended them. My laptop had a sophisticated digital imaging program, and I used it to enlarge the mouth of the first picture, zooming in until the screen was filled with a giant, anonymous smile. When it was as large and sharp as I could make it, I began to compare it to those of the skeletal grin.

Unlike fingerprints, which need a minimum number of matching features, a single tooth can be enough to provide a positive ID. Sometimes a distinctive shape, a certain break, is all it takes to reveal an entire identity.

That was what I was hoping for now. The teeth I’d replaced in the skull were crooked and chipped. If none of the women in the photographs showed similar dental flaws, then it would at least rule them out as possible candidates. But if I was lucky enough to find a match, then I might be able to put a name to the anonymous victim.

From the start I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. The photographs were only snapshots, hardly intended for the grim purpose I had in mind. Even magnified and cleaned up, the images were grainy and unclear. And the poor condition of the teeth I’d laboriously fitted back into the skull didn’t help. If the victim was one of these young women, the photograph had been taken before her drug addiction had eroded them away.