Стюарт Макбрайд - The Coffinmaker’s Garden

‘ASH, DID YOU HEAR ME? GET OUT OF THERE!’

A hissing click, and the picture changed to a solid blue with ‘HDMI1’ in the top left corner.

Mother poked the remote and turned the TV off, plunging the room into darkness. ‘Comments? Questions? Suggestions?’

‘Leah MacNeil is dead, isn’t she?’ DC Elliot got up and hauled back the curtains, sending up a whoomph of dust — it glowed in the sunlight that spilled through the grubby glass.

A sniff from Watt. ‘Of course she’s dead. She disappears, Friday the ninth, Gordon Smith waltzes off into the wild-blue-yonder one week later. Whatever’s left of her will have washed out to sea by now.’

‘It’s all a disaster...’ Mother levered herself out of her seat and slumped over to the window. Shoulders hunched as she stared out, across the road at Helen MacNeil’s caravan. Then turned to face the new line of fencing, separating the world from what was left of Smith’s house. ‘There’s bodies over there. Evidence. And we can’t get anywhere near it.’

‘Well, how about this?’ Dotty wheeled herself over to join Mother. Craning her neck to look over the sill. ‘They won’t let us put an SOC team in Gordon Smith’s garden, in case the whole thing gets washed away, so what if there was some way to have SOC officers in there, but keep them safe too?’

Another sniff. ‘No way anyone would be daft enough to take that risk.’ Watt stood, one hand straying to that bald scarred patch at the back of his head. ‘Even if you managed to come up with a solution, by the time you’d done a risk assessment, got volunteers organised, set everything up, and put them to work, the garden would be gone.’

‘Well, that’s hardly the attitude, is it?’

‘All I’m saying is: it’s not doable. You couldn’t follow any evidentiary procedures at all, there wouldn’t be time. Best case scenario: they leap over there, dig like crazy and drag back everything they can before disaster strikes. How’s that going to stand up in court?’

‘What if...’ Dotty squeaked her chair from side to side. ‘We could get everyone a harness and someone holds onto the other end, ready to pull them back if something happens?’

That got her a laugh. ‘And if you’re too slow? They die. No one’s going to let you do that.’

‘OK, well, what if we got, like, a big crane?’ She stuck her arm out, palm down, fingers dangling as she mimed it. ‘You could lower a bunch of people suspended from a frame, so if the ground goes, they can’t fall anywhere.’

‘It’s blowing a gale out there! Might as well make a wind chime out of their battered bleeding corpses.’

He was a prick, but he had a point.

Mother raised an eyebrow in my direction. ‘I notice you’re keeping very quiet.’

‘Yup.’

‘Ooh!’ Dotty dumped her mimed crane. ‘If we can’t get anyone to go into the basement, how about we use a drone instead?’

Watt covered his face with a hand, speaking with the slow clear deliberation of someone explaining why you don’t stick fireworks up your brother’s bum to a particularly thick four-year-old. ‘It’s — too — windy.’

‘Oh.’ She stuck her nose in the air. ‘At least I’m trying!’

DC Elliot shrugged. ‘Sorry, I’ve got nothing.’

‘So, that’s it: we’re doomed,’ Mother sagged back against the windowsill. ‘Without the remains, how are we supposed to identify Smith’s victims?’

Ah well. Suppose I might as well play nice.

‘Actually,’ my empty coffee cup clunked down on the desk, ‘I might know someone who can help you with that...’

Sabir made a sound like a deflating beach ball. ‘Yer not asking much, are yez?’

I leaned against the wall and shrugged. ‘Well, if you think it’s too difficult...?’

The master bedroom had been stripped bare, like the lounge, but this time they’d even taken the curtains. A large brown stain reached out from the far corner, across the ceiling, spreading down the wall, and finishing up in a patch of twisted floorboards — blackened with mould.

‘You see, I’ve been telling everyone what a computer genius you are, but if you think this one’s too hard for you, I completely understand.’

‘Ash, yer a total—’

‘Won’t make me think any less of you, if this is way beyond your skill level.’

Outside, the TV crews were getting ready for the lunchtime bulletins. Reporters bracing themselves against the battering wind, scarves and hair flying out like an eighties rock video. Cameramen lurching about as they tried to frame their microphone-wielding idiot, Gordon Smith’s house, the headland, and the Mobile Incident Unit, all in the one shot. While at the same time cutting every other channel’s camera crew from the scene.

‘Is this reverse-psychology bullshit supposed to werk on me, like? Cos if it is, I’ve got some bad news for yez.’

‘Come on, Sabir! It’ll only take you a couple of minutes. And I can give you a cost code too.’

‘Really?’

‘All I want you to do is run the Polaroids in the footage against every misper database in the UK, going back fifty-six years. Piece of cake.’

A sharp intake of breath. ‘Fifty-six years ? Are you off your haggis-munching—’

‘No, you’re right, Sabir, better make it sixty.’

‘Yez never said nothing about fifty-six years! Half the bloody records probably ain’t even been digitised, never mind put online. Yez’re off yer head if you think—’

‘Unless, of course, it’s beyond even your immense talents?’

Silence.

The BBC lot were getting into a stushie with the Channel 4 brigade: the reporters banging their chests together like elephant seals while the camera crew tried to look the other way.

‘Well?’

‘All right, all right. I can run the ferst set, but you’ve got bugger-all chance with the second. No way you’ll get an image match with people bein’ tortured. Facial recognition’s good, but there’s limits.’

‘Couldn’t you clean them up? Digitally alter them so they look normal?’

‘Oh yeah, and then I’ll climb aboard me flying unicorn and go—’

‘Look, if you can’t—’

‘This isn’t CSI Oldcastle ! I can only do what’s actually bloody possible in the real werld. And you better gerra cost code for me, Ash, cos if you don’t—’

‘Thanks, Sabir, you’re a star.’ Then hung up, before he could change his mind. According to my phone, there were eight missed calls from ‘DR MCFRUITLOOP’ and about a dozen text messages. Well tough, Alice could bloody well stew.

Back in the living room, the curtains were shut again, that lonely lightbulb casting hard shadows on the bare walls. DC Elliot was fishing about inside a big lumpy printer, scowling at the mechanisms as she poked. Swearing under her breath while Watt pinned up a blurry still from the video I’d taken in Gordon Smith’s basement. It was the young man in the beer garden, toasting whoever was taking the picture. Smith, presumably. Or his wife.

Maybe they took turns picking victims and killing them?

The photo was one of three — the young woman on one leg, and the other young woman on the beach.

‘Where’s DI Malcolmson?’

‘Hmmm?’ Elliot looked up from her rummaging. ‘Sorry, yes: she’s off shouting at someone, I think.’

Watt stepped back to admire his handiwork. ‘Some moron from the Glasgow Tribune tried to sneak through the fence. Have you still not got that printer working, Amanda?’

‘It’s not my fault it jams on every other page, is it?’ She hauled a crumpled sheet of ink-smeared paper from the machine’s innards, and clunked the lid shut again. ‘Try it now.’