Funeral Note
Page 5
I know when Detective Sergeant McGurk is kidding me, and he wasn’t. I felt my eyes narrow. ‘Are you saying that you’d have handled it differently?’ I asked him.
‘No. I’d have done exactly the same as you, and that’s why I’m pleased I wasn’t there, or it would have been me that called the DI and blew the whistle that’s going to call time on the career of two fellow cops, and maybe three. Face it, lad, you will not be the most popular boy in the force when this gets out. The bosses will love you, sure. You might even get the DS vacancy that was earmarked for Montell, with Ray Wilding moving up. But Varley and Alice are liked in the job, especially Alice, so don’t be surprised if you ain’t, for a while at least.’
I’d worked that out for myself, from the very first moment I’d realised that the caller to the pub almost certainly had been a cop, but Becky Stallings, good gaffer that she is, had promised that she’d keep my name out of it. I told him so.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘And do you think Montell’s going to keep your name out of it too?’
‘Why shouldn’t he?’
Jack stretched to his considerable height and rolled his eyes. ‘Figure it out,’ he drawled.
I didn’t. ‘Okay, he works with Alice. But she let him down. So why should he take it out on me?’
He laid a big rugby lock forward’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Let me lay out a scenario. Suppose a guy has this girlfriend, pillow-talk is exchanged, and she gets him into professional trouble. What’s he going to do? Sign up for her firing squad? No, once she’s finished crying on his shoulder he’s going to give her a big hug and tell her everything’s all right. You, of all people, should know that.’
He was getting personal. A few months ago I’d put myself into a very similar situation with a girlfriend. With another chief constable, it might have been career-ending; indeed Bob Skinner can be such a grim, ruthless bastard that at the time I’d expected it would be. Instead, to my astonishment, when I was summoned to his office at Fettes, in the ugly building that’s neither old nor modern, he gave me a cup of coffee, so strong that it was probably punishment enough, and told me, with a frankness that astonished me, that I wasn’t the first cop who’d let his dick bypass his brain, and that I was sitting beside another. ‘The trick, Sauce,’ he went on, ‘is not to let it do so twice.’
So when Ms Cheeky McCullough turned up on my doorstep a couple of nights later, what did I do? You guessed it. When she’d finished crying on my shoulder, I gave her a big hug and told her everything was all right. I was taking a chance, and I still am, because Cheeky’s granddad was . . . and how I hope that past tense is right . . . a villain, big time, but as long as I remember what Mr Skinner told me, it’ll be fine.
I’m still naïve at times, though. For example, because they worked together, it hadn’t occurred to me for a minute that Montell and Alice Cowan might have been dancing the horizontal mambo out of office hours.
‘Oh,’ I said to Jack, ‘so I’d better steer clear of Leith for a while.’
He laughed. ‘And hope you don’t get that DS vacancy.’ Then his face went straight. ‘You want some serious advice? Call Griff. Don’t apologise for what you did, because you were right, but for the way it’s turned out. He’s a sound bloke. He might not thank you, but he’ll respect the approach.’
We had been walking as we talked, towards a line of trees; it was late in the evening, but being July, it was still bright enough for us to see well enough. At some point in time, the car park where we’d met up had been created in the centre of a mature wood, and what was left surrounded it. A man was waiting for us, mid-thirties, bad haircut, in uniform: at least we assumed he was waiting for us, since we had walked past three police vehicles and a dark blue van on our way towards him.
‘Why are we here?’ Jack asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘You’re the fucking sergeant; you tell me. I had a call from the gaffer telling me to get here sharpish, that’s all.’
‘Same here.’
‘Through there,’ the uniform said, standing aside to allow us to pass through a gap between two trees behind him.
McGurk stopped, so abruptly that I almost bumped into him. ‘Can I have your name, and your age, Constable?’
‘Harkins. What dae you want my age for?’
‘Ach, you know. We always like it in the story.’
‘Eh?’ As he muttered his incredulity, Jack whipped out his warrant card and displayed it; I did the same.
‘We could have been Sun reporters for all you know, PC Harkins,’ the big man told him, not unkindly. ‘You want to sharpen up. There’s real competition for jobs these days.’
The plod smiled; personally, I’d have preferred to see a little contrition from him. ‘Tough for them, eh. Sorry, Sarge.’ He chuckled. ‘But I’ve never seen anyone looks more like a polis than you do.’ He pointed into the trees, towards an area that had been taped off, and in which we could see people, moving under lights that had been set up. ‘It’s over there.’
‘What is?’ I snapped at him, irked by his indifference to everything.
‘The body. What did you expect here, son? This is Mortonhall Crematorium ye’re at.’
That much I’d known, but that was all the DI had said. She’d sounded flustered, and that was a first for her, in my experience. As she approached us, holding a crime scene tunic in each hand, she looked less than her cool self, too.
‘Lads, sorry to haul you out past your bedtimes, but this one isn’t the normal run-of-the-mill homicide.’
‘A definite homicide, though?’ Jack quizzed her as he started to climb into the paper suit that wasn’t going to fit him any better than the last one had.
‘He didn’t bury himself,’ she replied.
‘How was he found?’ I asked, looking across at the sterile area we’d soon be entering. ‘This doesn’t look like a place where people walk their dogs.’ The woods seemed too thick, close though they were to the houses that I could just make out on the other side. I sniffed the air and caught the scent of cat piss: but no putrefaction, I noted.
‘He wasn’t. We were told where he was.’
‘We were told . . .’ Jack repeated.
She nodded. ‘You heard me right. There was a phone call, an hour and a half ago, on the public line to the communications centre. The caller said that there was a body buried in the woods, and told us precisely where. He even gave map co-ordinates.’
‘And communications called you?’ I knew what he was getting at. We were out of our area.
‘No, I did.’
The voice came from behind us, but we didn’t have to turn to know who owned it, or that he was not best pleased. He joined us, just as I fastened my paper pyjamas. We’d all been advised to walk as if on eggshells around DCS Mario McGuire, our head of CID, ever since his ‘soul brother’, Neil McIlhenney, had shocked the world by moving to the Met.
In truth walking on eggshells around McGuire is advisable at any time. There are a few people in this world on whose good side you always want to be, and he’s one of those for sure. He’s just over six feet tall, and built like a brick shit-house, although he’s always dressed to disguise the fact. He has thick curly hair, jet-black, but with some grey creeping into it, as you’d expected in someone around the forty mark. He’s usually amiable, but as someone once said, ‘If Mike Tyson ever gets into bother in Edinburgh, McGuire’s the man they’ll send to lift him, and Iron Mike will come quietly.’ I took a quick look at him, trying to assess his amiability gauge; it seemed to be still above the danger level.
‘In a week or so I might have called Ray Wilding,’ he said, ‘since this is Gayfield territory, but it’s his first day there as DI and he’s still bedding himself in. Besides . . .’ His voice trailed off, letting us fill in the rest as we saw it. My interpretation was that maybe he wasn’t ready to trust Gayfield with anything sensitive for a while.
‘I know what you guys are thinking,’ he continued. ‘People normally bury bodies
to hide them from us. They do not call us and ask us to dig them up, and when they don’t do that, they most certainly don’t use a scrambler to disguise their voice.’
‘How long’s it been there, sir?’ McGurk asked.
‘It’s fresh,’ I chipped in. ‘You can’t smell it.’
The DCS leaned forward and tapped me on the chest with a thick index finger. ‘The sergeant may well call you “sir” one day, lad, but not for a while yet. Until then, speak when you’re fucking spoken to unless I tell you otherwise.’ Then he grinned. ‘You are spot on though . . . although it was just as possible that it might have been very old. Come on and see for yourself.’
He led the way forward into the taped-off area. The SOCOs were all over the place, some of them working under hand-held lights. I guessed they were looking for traces of the mystery phone caller; people sign their names in the oddest ways these days.
The burial site was located in a small, square clearing, defined by four trees. It was just big enough for the hole to have been dug, grassy but covered in broken twigs and the brown mulch of last year’s fallen leaves. The grave itself had been excavated and the answer to Jack’s question was indeed apparent. The body was fresh; it had been enshrouded in what looked like a white bedsheet; that had been partly opened, enough to let us see that it was clean, and free of insect activity. The exposed torso was also naked, part of a young adult male with dark hair; the hands folded across it had neat fingernails and its muscular definition looked sharp even in death.
‘Okay, Sauce,’ McGuire said, ‘take a bow. He’s fresh all right.’
Emboldened again, I ventured a question. ‘How long’s he been there, sir?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ he replied, ‘ask the pathologist. Can you make an estimate, Sarah?’
I’d been aware of someone else at the edge of the clearing, but I’d been too focused on the body to take in any details. When she stepped forward I had a sudden, strange illusion; that I’d stepped into a television crime drama. The woman was tall, strikingly attractive, and the hair that had escaped from the hood of her outfit was a rich honey blond. Mid-thirties, I thought, in the same ball-park as Becky Stallings. The boss looked across at her, one professional to another, having already been introduced, I assumed, waiting for her reply. It was Jack McGurk’s reaction that set me on my heels: his mouth fell open and his eyes widened, as if a second hand had come down on his other shoulder in the middle of a prostate examination.
‘Hello, Sergeant,’ she murmured, smiling. ‘If it still is Sergeant, that is.’ Another surprise; her accent was American, and a little twangy, like the dead Kennedys. I had a flash of Marilyn Monroe crooning ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’, on old grainy black-and-white film.
Jack pulled himself together. ‘Yes it is. I’m sorry: I didn’t know you were back.’
‘No reason why you should,’ she replied. ‘The university was asked not to make an announcement when I took up my post. I was worried that it might attract the wrong sort of coverage.’
I hadn’t a clue what she was taking about, but I was more interested in the poor sod lying at my feet. I took another look; at first glance I had thought he was unmarked, but second time around I saw a dark discoloration, in the centre of his chest.
‘I’d rather call it a guess,’ she told the DCS in reply. ‘Estimate would be too formal; but I’d say he died around midnight last night, give or take a couple of hours. It was warm last night, so I’d expect that rigor mortis would dissipate at the normal rate rather than more slowly, if he’d been colder in the ground. He isn’t exactly floppy yet, but it’s going. As for cause of death, I won’t know for sure will I’ve seen all of him, but that bruising interests me. It could be post-mortem lividity, but I don’t think so.’
‘Will you do the examination yourself?’ McGuire asked.
‘Unless you want to wait for a couple of days for Master Yoda to come back, yes, I’ll be doing it, with a postgrad assistant. Is that all right with you?’
He nodded, vigorously. ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed.
‘Who the hell is Master Yoda?’ I whispered to Jack. The woman called Sarah heard me.
‘It’s what the students call Professor Hutchinson, our chief pathologist,’ she explained. ‘To his secret delight, I should add, even though they only call him that because he’s very small and looks a bit like the Muppet in Star Wars.’
Beside me, McGurk was still tense. Indeed, I’d have sworn he was quivering, slightly; I make a mental note to threaten to shop him to Lisanne over his reaction to the mystery blonde.
But that was for later. ‘Do we know who he is?’ I asked, of nobody in particular.
‘No,’ someone very particular replied, ‘and from the way he’s been left, someone’s keen that we shouldn’t find out too easily.’
I blinked and looked up. The chief constable had arrived quietly, without anyone noticing his approach. He wasn’t suited up like the rest of us, but I wasn’t going to be the first to point that out, and anyway, the SOCOs had been over the area around the grave.
Bob Skinner’s past fifty now, but if it wasn’t for the grey hair, which they tell me he’s had since he was around thirty, you might not think so. He has a presence about him, and it’s common knowledge that he has something of a temper too, although he didn’t reveal it to me when I was expecting to see it, and deserving of it.
They say you can tell his mood just by looking at his eyes, but on the rare occasions when I have done, I’ve sensed an underlying sadness more than anything else, although I’ve got no doubt that everything they say about his ruthlessness is true. One thing is certain; when he joined us that night, even McGuire seemed to diminish slightly in his presence. Not the blonde pathologist though; she seemed to grow a little taller, and her jawline seemed to firm up.
He looked at her. ‘Have you seen all you need to, Doctor?’ His tone was formal; but the sparks between them were practically visible.
She nodded. ‘Yes; all that I need to here. Can I have him now? The sooner I get him in the fridge the better it’ll be tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, fine,’ the chief agreed. ‘I passed the meat wagon on the way in; you might tell them to come and get him when you leave. But I’d like you to take a look at him tonight, if you’d be so good, just in case he’s got six toes on each foot, a regimental tattoo, a bar code on his backside, or some other distinguishing feature. Becky and the guys would need to know about that right away.’
As before, his voice was different when he spoke to her; there was a deference in it that I hadn’t heard from him.
‘I was going to do that anyway,’ she replied, calmly. I whistled, mentally; she’d put him in his place. ‘I pathologist: you, simple cop.’ The words hung in the air as if she’d actually said them.
She turned to the DI. ‘Can I have your mobile number, Ms Stallings?’ She took the boss’s card as it was handed over, then walked away, taking each step carefully, since it was quite a bit darker than when we had arrived, and illuminating the path with a small torch that she’d taken from her bag.
The five of us who were left stood back from the grave, waiting for the mortuary crew to come in with their black plastic coffin. I tugged Jack’s sleeve and drew him a little away from the others. ‘Who is she?’ I asked, quietly, not wanting to be overheard again, although as I looked away I saw that Skinner, McGuire and Becky had drifted off in the opposite direction.
‘Dr Grace,’ he murmured, lowering his head as if he was afraid of being lip-read. ‘Dr Sarah Grace.’
‘So?’
‘Sauce,’ he hissed, ‘were you asleep when you were a plod? She’s the chief’s ex-wife. She went home to the States after they got divorced, but now it seems she’s back, and in her old job. I doubt if she expected him to be turning up at crime scenes any more, though.’
‘It didn’t seem to faze her much.’
‘It wouldn’t. She’s a cool one, is Sarah.’
‘And a looker, as well.’
‘Then don’t. Cheeky and I have an understanding; she never, ever asks me about the job.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ he drawled. ‘And has she given up driving get-away vehicles as well?’
Yes, Jack knows which buttons to push. ‘That was a misunderstanding,’ I snapped. ‘Her mother pleaded guilty, remember. She said she’d spun Cheeky a story, and naturally she believed it.’
‘With respect,’ he chuckled, ‘it was a plea bargain and the fiscal bought it. She might have finished you, Sauce, yet you’re still seeing her.’
‘Enough, Jack,’ I warned him.
He held his hands up, palms out. ‘Okay, okay. Your life, your career.’
‘Exactly, and I’m not about to risk either.’ He was chasing the wrong hare, anyway. My relationship with Cheeky was working in my favour, but he didn’t know that.
We drifted back to the senior officers’ meeting, which was breaking up with the arrival of the meat porters. We stood together and watched as they lifted the body, shrouded once again, from its temporary resting place, encased it and took it away, the entire exercise completed without a single word being spoken. Just before they folded the sheet over the victim’s face I took a last look, and estimated that he must have been close to my own age, maybe a year or two older, but likely under thirty.
That brought it home to me; this was my job, the one I had chosen, but it had its moments of horror. The chief had been doing it for a lot longer than me, and I knew that he’d seen worse than that, much worse. Little wonder then, that it showed in his eyes, and in DCS McGuire’s, when I looked more closely. If it didn’t, then maybe they’d have a touch of the monster in them. That’s something I’ll guard against in the future, I promise.
Skinner stepped forward, and crouched down beside the grave, making sure that the bright lights above didn’t cast his shadow across it. He peered in, then reached in and touched something. He glanced over his shoulder, at me. ‘See that, Sauce?’ he murmured. He was frowning; still, it seemed to me, not quite himself. I wondered if something else had unsettled him, as well as the presence of his ex.