Cold Grave

by Craig Robertson

‘Don’t apologise, Julia. You did well. Anyway, we’re inches forward even if it’s only in things we don’t know. At least we now know we don’t know them. Okay, I’ve got to go. We’re about to start here.’

  The outer door had opened and Kirsten Fairweather emerged, smiling grimly. Her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail and she had quickly changed into jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and trainers since her drive north with Barbie’s body.

  ‘Rachel, I know speed is of the essence for you so I’m not going to stand on ceremony; instead I propose to begin the facial recon right away. Seeing as you’re here, you’re welcome to sit in on it.’

  ‘I’d like that. It would be good to see how the process works. And, well, to be honest, it just feels like the right thing to do. The first step in bringing her back, hopefully.’

  Kirsten smiled, more warmly this time.

  ‘Having seen the skull, I’m confident we will. We’ll need to do some mirroring work of the shattered part of the cranium but that won’t be a problem.’ Kirsten paused thoughtfully. ‘We’re always told you should disassociate and feel no personal connection to the subjects and I’m sure police officers are told the same. But I think I always do at least as good a job if I do feel a connection. And I feel one here.’

  ‘Me too,’ Narey admitted. ‘I’m a police officer but I’m a person first. And you’d have to have a heart of concrete not to feel for this girl.’

  ‘Come on,’ Kirsten told her, taking her arm. ‘I think we should go meet her.’

  Fairweather led Narey deeper into the department, opening a white door to reveal Barbie’s skeleton laid out on what looked like an operating table. Despite the glimpse when she’d emerged from the frozen earth in Brig o’ Turk, it was still a shock to see their girl lying there, her broken skull smiling up at the ceiling.

  The professor went to the side of the lab and produced a hand-held device that looked to Narey like the speed scanners traffic cops sometimes used at the roadside. There were two metallic heads, however, rather than one and she advanced on Barbie’s prone frame, angling the device towards her.

  ‘It’s a laser scanner,’ Kirsten explained. ‘It’s called a FastSCAN Scorpion. There’s a single-camera version called a Cobra but the dual camera gives us more detailed scans in fewer sweeps and the cameras view the laser from both sides. It’s a great bit of kit: the entire system fits into a briefcase and we can take it anywhere.’

  The professor began sweeping the Scorpion across the skeleton, steadily working her way from top to toe.

  ‘It feeds straight into our computer system as a 3D model,’ she continued. ‘It’s digitising her shape and surface contours as we speak. The areas we’ll have to reconstruct before we go much further are . . .’ Kirsten paused by the skull and gestured with her finger. ‘Obviously here . . . and here. The nose is missing, the eye socket badly damaged and parts of the forehead boss and coronal suture are also missing. But we can fix that.’

  Narey must have raised an eyebrow at the casualness of the remark because Kirsten hurriedly explained.

  ‘We will mirror the missing area simply by making a copy of the existing side and creating a symmetrical skull. It’s a bit misleading, as we are all naturally asymmetrical, but it will be close. If we had part of the nose, then we could do the same thing but as it’s entirely missing, we’ll fill it in using one from a template of skulls to get one that fits. It can be very accurate. The good news is that the mandible is intact; the jawbone is the most difficult thing to recreate.’

  Narey turned to the computer and saw that a 3D image of the girl was already on the screen. It was a million miles away from Inchmahome.

  ‘After we fill in the missing areas, we’ll dip into our database of muscles. They are all pre-modelled and we import them individually onto the frame. It’s the musculature map that gives us a detailed image of what she really looked like. That will probably be as far as we get today but I’m intending to come back first thing in the morning and continue from there.

  ‘We use sets of tissue depth data depending on where the subject came from. Obviously we know Barbie was a white European but if she was black African or, say, Korean, then we have data from there. When we get to that point, you’ll see little pegs over her face representing tissue depth and then we’ll put a layer of skin on top of that.

  ‘It’s all about using the clues we have. The teeth will tell us about the mouth, for example, and we can create its shape from there. If hair were found, as it was in this case, then we can input its colour and length. If there is clothing, then we can learn about stature. Normally, when we do facial mapping we don’t have as much to work on as we do here. We tend not to know skin colour, fat or thin. We’re in good shape with her, Rachel.’

  ‘So by tomorrow we’ll see her as she was?’

  ‘Yep. If we wanted to go all the way and have a 3D animated model, then that would take another two weeks. It can be a bit frustrating. We get from skull to face in two days; one day for muscles, one for skin; but it takes them a fortnight to add colour and hair. I’m guessing you don’t have that long.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Strange, isn’t it? We wait nineteen years to see her and suddenly we’re in a hurry that could literally mean the difference between life and death.’

  Kirsten looked at her in confusion.

  ‘Not her life obviously, so whose?’

  Rachel knew she’d said too much but instinctively she’d trusted Kirsten from the moment they’d first met.

  ‘Well, that’s the thing; I can’t be entirely sure. But I know if we can find out who she is, then we’ll be a lot closer to finding out who killed her. And if we do that, then we might just stop someone else from ending up the way she did. Put it this way: tomorrow can’t come soon enough.’

  CHAPTER 45

  Friday 21 December. 3.25 p.m.

  Munn’s Vaults on Maryhill Road wouldn’t have been Winter’s first choice for a quiet drink and, coming just a few hours after he’d frozen his arse off at Brig o’ Turk cemetery, it was just about the last thing he needed. Still, he and Danny weren’t out for a social beer so it didn’t matter that they’d be surrounded by tracksuits, baseball caps, aggressive stares and the continual rattle of pool balls. Instead they’d sit quietly in the darkened pub and await their prey.

  With its long, low frontage, Munn’s sat opposite boarded-up shops and scruffy tenements. Its neighbours were bookies, off licenses, To Let signs and abandoned buildings. To be fair, it had cleaned up its act from days gone by and the word was that the new owners didn’t stand for any trouble. First sign of bother and the offenders were chucked out and promptly barred from the premises. It still carried a reputation from past regimes that meant some people were wary of crossing its threshold but it was unlikely to put off the kind of person who wielded a samurai sword. Sam Dunbar drank in Munn’s so it was to Munn’s they were going.

  They both ordered pints on the basis that it could be a long shift and sitting without alcohol in front of them would send out all sorts of warning signals to the locals. They would think them to be either cops, customs and excise or Christians, and any of those things would mean not being trusted in Munn’s. The pints would be supped slowly, milked for all they were worth, because the last thing that was going to help if they did encounter Dunbar was them being drunk. Everything they knew about him suggested they’d need every ounce of their wits about them.

  A hollow-cheeked ned in a blue baseball cap and matching trackies was checking out Winter and Danny from the pool table. He looked like he hadn’t eaten for a month beyond a feast of yum yums or jam doughnuts from Greggs and the odd bag of chips. Being held up by his pool cue and scratching the growth on his cheeks and chin, he seemed to have the idea there was some mileage to be gained from the strangers. He mumbled something to his mate at the table and sidled up to Winter.

  ‘Awrite, big man? How’s it gaun? Cauld outside, innit?’

  ‘Aye,’ Winter responded, neither wanting to engage
with the junkie or antagonise him. ‘Freezing.’

  ‘Aye, freezing,’ the ned repeated. ‘Freezing.’

  He just stood there, mouth slightly open and eyes somewhere else, waiting for Winter to come back with his contribution to the sparkling conversation. When Winter didn’t oblige, the ned carried on regardless.

  ‘Game of pool, big man?’

  ‘Naw, you’re all right.’

  ‘Gaun, just one game. Play you for a pint.’

  ‘It’s not my game. Try someone else.’

  ‘Just for a pint, eh? I’m wasted, like. You’d probably beat me easy.’

  Danny put his head forward so it was almost resting on the bar and tilted it so he could look the ned in the eyes.

  ‘Wee man?’ he growled. ‘Gonnae just piss off, eh? He’s no wanting to play you.’

  ‘Okay, okay. No problemo,’ the junkie slurred. ‘Not a problem, big man. No worries. What about you then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You want a game? Play you for a pint, like.’

  Danny chuckled despite himself.

  ‘Naw. Now fuck off.’

  ‘Aye, aye. No problemo, big man. No problemo. Asta la vista.’

  With that, the junkie threw his weight to one side, spun on one leg and did a neat volte-face until he lurched back towards the pool table, where he held his arms out wide to his mate. ‘Naebody wants to play me. It’s ’cos ah’m like the Ronnie O’Sullivan of this pool table. Top dog.’

  ‘Aye, you are that, Spanner, no come on. Hit the baws, eh?’

  Danny sipped at his beer and shook his head in mild dis belief at the departing junkie. Harmless enough as long as you weigh more than a bag of tatties and didn’t try to get between him and a strawberry tart or a score of smack. He was just about to share some tales of junkie-baiting in days of yore when the front door opened and a broad figure walked in.

  It was the long, black leather coat that caught Winter’s eye first. In an instant, he was back in Mansionhouse Drive, seeing the world through his camera’s timed exposure: the crowd behind the two severed hands; the tallish guy, clad in black hide – the same figure that had just walked through the door of Munn’s.

  Danny saw him too and even if they hadn’t both studied Winter’s photograph, it was likely they’d have known their quarry for who he was as soon as he came through the door. There was an air of confidence about Dunbar that translated easily into menace. His eyes immediately scanned the bar to see if anyone was going to challenge him but none was forthcoming. Indeed, there was a noticeable scattering of bodies and the two wasters who had been inhabiting the pool table were suddenly gone as if they’d been picked up by a gust of wind. Dunbar pulled up a bar stool and perched on it, his leather coat almost skirting the floor like a vampire’s cape.

  ‘Usual?’ he was asked from behind the bar.

  ‘Aye.’

  The barman held a glass under a vodka optic and deposited a double in it before adding a shot of cola and setting it down in front of Dunbar. He shoved a fiver at the barman and waved away the offer of change.

  Winter and Danny had made sure they hadn’t looked over at Dunbar. They sipped on their pints and chatted quietly until Danny nudged Winter and nodded his head in the direction of the now vacant pool table. Both men got off their bar stools, made their way to the table and dropped coins in the slot to set up the game. Danny made sure he was noisily enthusiastic about the pots he made and encouraged Winter to do the same. They laughed a lot and jeered each other, successfully managing to sound like a pair of clowns. When Winter won the frame, Danny made a clumsy attempt to hide the fact that he was handing over a tenner, making it very obvious in the process.

  They were on their second frame when Dunbar approached them. He stood quietly for a few minutes, weighing up the standard of their play and sipping on his vodka and Coke. Clearly he wasn’t too impressed by what he saw because he put coins down on the rim of the table to signal that he wanted to play the winner. Danny, in the process of potting the six ball, glanced up at him but contrived to look indifferent about the prospect of someone else joining their game. Neither he nor Winter looked at Dunbar throughout the rest of the frame, just concentrating on each other and the game until Winter knocked in the black ball to snatch another victory.

  As soon as the black dropped, Dunbar stepped forward, slipped his coins into the slot and the pool balls clattered into the tray. Without saying a word or looking at Winter, he arranged the balls in the triangle, placing the ‘big balls’ and ‘wee balls’ to suit him. Only when he was satisfied did he stand up straight and look over.

  ‘Play you for twenty quid.’

  Winter looked at Danny, who simply shrugged. Now able to look at Dunbar properly without raising suspicion in him, they could both clearly see a glassy look in his dark eyes that had been fuelled by something other than vodka.

  ‘Aye, okay,’ Winter agreed. ‘Why not?’

  Dunbar, still wearing his leather coat, broke off and immediately left Winter with an opening he took advantage of, pocketing three balls before missing. Dunbar grinned at the miss and chalked his cue before knocking in four balls of his own and looked good to win the frame quickly before a ball rattled in the jaws of the pocket and stayed out. Winter stepped back in, potting two more, then snookering Dunbar behind the black.

  The younger man didn’t look at all impressed and arched his eyebrows disapprovingly at Winter as if he regarded it as unsporting. Winter merely shrugged in return, indicating that he should just suck it up and get on with it, immediately remembering the nature of the man he was winding up and regretting it. Dunbar got low over his shot and tried to come off the side cushion but failed to hit anything, leaving Winter with two shots. He knocked a ball over a pocket before potting it, then another before clipping the black into the middle bag to win the frame.

  He stood up from the table and looked over at Dunbar, who wore a scowl but was fishing in his pockets for money. He produced a twenty and dropped it contemptuously on the table for Winter to pick up. ‘Another frame,’ he demanded.

  Winter picked the cash up from the table and pocketed it. ‘If you’re sure.’

  Dunbar’s answer was to drop coins in the slot and send the balls crashing back into play. As he busily racked them up on the baize, another punter wandered over to the table to place a coin on the table so he could play the winner. Without looking up from the table, Dunbar reached for the coin and threw it across the room.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ the other guy protested.

  Dunbar didn’t look at him but continued to rearrange the balls in the triangle.

  ‘I said what the fu—’

  Dunbar turned, looking up to stare into the eyes of the slightly taller man who confronted him. Maybe the guy recognised Dunbar or maybe he just recognised the look in his eyes because he took a step back immediately. Dunbar followed him with a step of his own and the other guy retreated two yards, then another, albeit with an outstretched arm and mutterings of discontent. Within seconds he was safely back at the other side of the bar, his dignity almost intact.

  ‘Your break,’ Dunbar told Winter.

  Swallowing hard and wondering just what they were getting themselves into, Winter broke off, scattering the balls across the table. Dunbar, his large voddie freshly restored, moved in to the table and swiftly potted four balls before finally missing. Winter knocked in three of his own before leaving the cue ball tight on the bottom cushion. The safety shot forced Dunbar to let Winter in again and he potted another two balls, an attempt at a third coming back from the knuckles of the middle pocket. When Dunbar moved in again, it was with the merest hint of a stagger and both Winter and Danny thought the vacant look in his eyes had increased. Sure enough, he potted just one ball and Winter stepped in to win the frame.

  The twenty-pound note lay crumpled on the table almost as soon as the black hit the back of the pocket. Dunbar stood and stared at Winter, anger and frustration pouring out of him.
r />   ‘A hundred,’ he grunted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A hundred quid for the next frame.’

  Winter again looked over to Danny, who responded with a wary shrug of his shoulders.

  ‘Okay, but it’s the last frame,’ Winter replied.

  ‘Sure. Let’s see the colour of your money first. The big guy here can hold the stakes. He’s not going to run anywhere. Sure you’re not, big man?’

  ‘Not me, son,’ Danny agreed with him. ‘I’ve never run in my life.’

  The two men produced one hundred pounds apiece and handed them over for safe-keeping. Danny and Winter sought each other’s eyes over Dunbar’s head, anxiously seeking the reassurance that they both knew what the other was up to.

  The gleam in Dunbar’s eyes was wild now, a slippery yet distant self-confidence that knew no wrong. He prowled round the table, clearly enjoying living on the edge.

  ‘Your break,’ Winter told him.

  ‘Bollocks. Deciding frame. Toss for break. Call.’

  ‘Tails.’

  Dunbar lifted his hand from the coin that sat on the back of his hand. ‘Tails fails,’ he announced.

  Winter powered his cue through the white ball, sending it spinning into the pack and bursting it open. Balls spiralled round the table but none of them dropped into a pocket. Dunbar was straight onto the table, his eyes searching the balls for a likely opening, before he got down low to knock a long six-ball into the far pocket. Another three balls quickly followed without touching the sides and, although he looked to be in difficulty with his next shot, Dunbar cleverly doubled a ball into the middle pocket before tucking the white safely onto a cushion. Winter was forced to take on a long pot into the opposite corner, knowing that if he missed it, then Dunbar was probably going to be left with three relatively simple shots to win the frame and the cash. He glanced up from the table to see Dunbar’s eyes on his and he held them for a couple of seconds before going back to the cue ball and striking through it. The 12-ball rocketed towards the far pocket but just caught the jaws and rebounded out again.