Simon Beckett - Written in Bone

The rain slashed against us like buckshot as we made our way to the spot where Maggie must have fallen from. I was beginning to think we were wasting our time when Brody pointed.

‘Over there.’

A couple of yards in front of us the ground had been disturbed. The turf was flattened and torn, and when I looked more closely I could see gouts of viscous black clotting the grass.

Even after all the rain, there was a lot of it.

‘This is where she was killed,’ Brody said, wiping rain from his face as he bent down to examine it. ‘The amount of blood that’s here, she must have practically bled out.’

He stood up, scanning the ground around us.

‘There’s more over there. And there.’

The patches were smaller than the one by the cliff ’s edge, already almost washed away. They formed a trail of blood that led away from the drop. Or, more likely, towards it.

‘She was running away,’ I said. ‘She was already injured before she got to the edge.’

‘Could have been trying to reach the steps. Or just running blindly.’ He gave me a look. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘About what Mary Tait said?’ I nodded. They ran off. After all the noise. Perhaps the people she’d seen hadn’t just run off. Perhaps one of them had been chasing the other.

But where had they come from?

Brody looked round the empty cliff top, shaking his head in frustration. ‘Where the hell’s her car? It’s got to be around here somewhere.’

But I’d been considering the windswept cliff top myself. ‘Remember when you asked Mary where she’d got the coat? What did she say, exactly?’

Brody gave me a puzzled look. ‘That a man gave it to her. Why?’

‘No, she didn’t say a man. She said the man.’

‘So?’

I pointed at the standing stone, now no more than fifty yards away. ‘You told me Bodach Runa meant the Old Man of Runa. Perhaps that’s the man she meant. Mary had a torch. She could have got up here using the steps, the same as us.’

Brody stared off at the standing stone, thinking it through. ‘Let’s take a look, shall we?’

The police Range Rover was visible perhaps a quarter of a mile away, snaking its way towards us as we set off for the stone. The road dipped out of sight occasionally, but Bodach Runa itself was hard to miss. Fraser would be able to see where we were heading and meet us there.

Brody walked at a fast pace across the uneven terrain. Shivering from the cold and rain, the ache already beginning to make its presence felt again in my shoulder, I was hard pushed to keep up with him. The ground rose up in a ridge between us and the standing stone, so that we could only see its upper half. But as we drew nearer I could make out something in a dip behind it. Gradually, the roof of a car came into view.

Maggie’s old Mini.

It was parked in a hollow just beyond the stone. A couple of sheep huddled against it out of the wind, adding to the car’s air of abandonment. They bolted as Brody and I slithered down the grassy bank towards it. The sound of a car engine came from an overgrown track that ran from the hollow, and a few moments later the Range Rover came bumping into view.

Fraser parked at the end of the track and climbed out. ‘That hers?’

‘Aye,’ Brody told him. ‘That’s Maggie’s.’

Both doors hung open, swinging slightly as the wind pushed them back against their hinges. The front seats were soaked from the rain, but it wasn’t water alone that darkened them. Splashes and smears of blood dappled the dashboard and windscreen as though flung there by a mad artist.

‘Jesus,’ Fraser breathed.

We approached a little closer but still stayed well back, so as not to contaminate the ground around the car. Brody peered through the open driver’s door at the blood-spattered interior.

‘Looks like she was attacked through her side and managed to scramble away out of the passenger door. What do you think, a knife or axe?’

It seemed unreal, discussing what weapon had been used to kill Maggie, when only the evening before I’d sat next to her in this same car. But sentiment wasn’t going to catch her killer.

‘Knife, I’d say. Not enough room to swing an axe, not without leaving marks on the inside of the car.’

I looked around the hollow. At night, beyond the arcs of a car’s headlights, it would have been impenetrably dark. Dark enough for Mary Tait to watch, unobserved. And to hear.

I imagined there would have been a lot to listen to.

Fraser was looking behind the car. ‘There’s more tyre tracks back here. Don’t look like the Mini’s.’

Brody clicked his tongue, exasperated. I knew he was thinking that either rain or sheep’s hoofs would have churned the tracks into mud by the time SOC got here to take casts. But there was nothing we could do about it.

‘She told her grandmother she was meeting someone. Looks like this was where. Mary must have been up here already, and close enough nearby to hear the commotion.’ He frowned, staring at the car. ‘I still can’t see how she came by the coat. It wasn’t damaged or bloodstained, but how come Maggie wasn’t wearing it on a night like that?’

‘Perhaps she took it off for Kinross,’ Fraser suggested. ‘Along with a few other things, if you get my drift. No other reason for them to be up here. Then they had a lovers’ tiff, or whatever, and Kinross lost his rag.’

‘This was no lovers’ tiff!’ Brody snapped. ‘Maggie was an ambitious young woman; she’d have set her sights higher than a ferry captain. And until we can prove it was Kinross she met last night, I’d try not to jump to conclusions.’

Fraser coloured up at the rebuke. But something he’d said had sparked my own train of thought.

‘He’s probably right about Maggie taking off her coat,’ I said. I told them about the car heater being stuck on full. ‘Both times Maggie gave me a lift she put it on the back seat. That’d explain why there was no blood on it.’

Brody was trying to see into the back of the car. ‘Could be. There’s hardly any spatter back there. If the car doors were left open when Maggie tried to get away, Mary could have just walked up and looked inside. Even if she noticed the blood in the front I doubt she’d realize what it was.’

Still keeping his distance from the Mini, he began to circle it. When he got to the other side he stopped.

‘Over here.’

Fraser and I went round to see what he’d found. Maggie’s shoulder bag was lying on the ground below the passenger door, its contents spilled on the muddy grass. Scraps of wind-blown tissue and paper littered the ground around it, snagged by grass stalks and turned to pulp by the rain.

Lying amongst the make-up and other artefacts of Maggie’s life, its muddied pages fluttering like trapped moths, was a ring-bound notebook.

‘Let me have a plastic bag,’ Brody said to me.

‘You sure about this?’ Fraser said uncertainly.

Brody opened the bag I’d given him. ‘Maggie was a reporter. Crime scene or not, if she made a note of who she was meeting, it’s not going to survive long out here.’

Treading carefully, he went to the car and crouched down by the open passenger door. Taking a pen from his pocket, he slid it into the notebook’s ring binding. Then he carefully lifted the book and slipped it into the bag. Even from where I stood I could see that the pages were disintegrating, the writing on them reduced to an illegible colourwash of ink.

Brody’s mouth compressed with disappointment. ‘Well, whatever was in it, it’s not much use any more.’

He started to get up again, then stopped.

‘There’s something under the car.’ There was a new excitement in his voice. ‘Looks like her dictaphone.’