Hen's Teeth

by Manda Scott

  ‘Perhaps if we knew “why” we’d have more chance of working out “who”.’

  ‘Aye. That’s usually the way of it.’

  He’s more friendly than he was yesterday. Less officious. I wonder if he knows Laidlaw’s back in town.

  We moved on to Midnight, last in the line.

  ‘Could you check to see if Bridget phoned the practice after she called Mary?’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The receptionist claims there were no calls logged to the practice from this number.’ He helped me to put a head collar on to Midnight. ‘I was wondering if there was another phone here that she could have called from. A mobile maybe?’

  ‘Not that I know of. There’s a cordless in the house but it’s on the same number.’

  ‘Then we have to assume that she never got a chance to make the call.’

  ‘Or she changed her mind?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  We put head collars on the remaining ponies and led them out, eight at a time, to the paddock. Rain’s filly walked out lame but not excessively so.

  The gate swung solidly shut behind the last rump and I wound the new chain around the fence post. MacDonald picked up the padlock, examining it with a policeman’s eye.

  ‘Are you worried about someone getting at the ponies?’ he asked.

  I shrugged. ‘It seemed like a useful precaution.’

  ‘And the Fort Knox round the chicken coop in the barn’ – his voice completely bland – ‘that’s just a precaution too, is it?’

  ‘Do you think it’s unnecessary?’

  ‘No.’ He turned and hooked his elbows on the gate. ‘But I think it won’t be the chickens they’re after when they come back next time. Nor the dog either.’

  When. Not if. And there was a question in his voice.

  I looked at him as he leant placidly on the fence, watching the dog quarter the field.

  Somewhere, some time you have to trust someone.

  ‘Wait there.’ I left him by the gate and crossed the yard to the kitchen, where the growing collection of bantam eggs lay nested in toilet tissue in the cutlery drawer. I lifted one each from either side of the drawer, used a marker pen to label them ‘A’ and ‘B’ and took them back to him.

  ‘These are from the bantams,’ I said, holding them out. ‘One from each.’ It was almost true. ‘If I was right about the pup, they have the insulin in the whites. Human insulin. You could probably get them tested.’

  ‘Aye?’ He held one in each palm, rolling them speculatively, waiting for more. ‘And why would someone want to kill your friend with these, do you think?’

  ‘Pass.’ That’s what we’re all here to find out. ‘Perhaps there’s more to them than that.’

  ‘You reckon?’ The dog put up a rabbit and we both watched as the pair raced for the fifty yards back to the warren. The rabbit won. MacDonald clicked his teeth in quiet disappointment, then brought his attention, with evident effort, back to the eggs.

  ‘Suppose we were going to look in these for something else,’ he said, ‘where, in your considered medical opinion, should we look, Dr Stewart?’ His expression was one of the mildest curiosity.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I paused to give it some thought. ‘Perhaps if there’s insulin in the white then there might be something else in the yolk.’

  ‘And what sort of thing might that be, do you think?’

  ‘I have no idea. Whatever it is, if someone has gone to this much effort, it would have to be worth a packet.’ I gave him my most helpful professional shrug. ‘You’re the policeman. I’m sure you have a better idea of the current market than I do.’

  ‘Aye. Maybe I do, at that.’

  He slipped both of the eggs into an inside pocket of the poacher’s jacket, nodding quietly to himself and then turned to look out at the ponies as they browsed and rolled in the damp grass.

  The dog put up another rabbit and made up more ground this time, coming close enough to graze its tail as it, too, sprinted for the sanctuary of the warren.

  MacDonald’s eyes creased in a smile and he sucked in a long-drawn sigh of appreciation. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘but it’s a beautiful morning.’

  He turned down the offer of breakfast with the excuse that he was due in at work at nine and he had to get back home in time to change into his uniform. The fact that I was offering scrambled eggs on toast, of course, had nothing to do with the speed of his departure.

  I hung on to the pup for a while after he left and then spent half an hour making breakfast, clattering around in the kitchen, digging out the old porridge pot that had been put away for the summer and searching the pantry for the tin with the oatmeal. The dog lay across the threshold with her nose poking out of the door, looking wistfully out across the fields at the footpath he had taken, which is, in a round about sort of way, a short cut back to the village.

  Caroline appeared, wrapped in her blue towelling dressing gown, as I was pouring out the porridge. Her hair was stuck out at sleep-pressed angles around her head and there were shadows beneath her eyes. She looked much like I felt.

  ‘Morning.’ I held out my bowl. ‘Breakfast?’

  She took a look at the mess in the pan and winced. ‘No thanks.’ She dragged her fingers sleepily through the tangles of hair. ‘I’ll have some toast.’ She dug out the three-day-old loaf from the pantry and began to saw off microtome slices, arranging them with care on the hot plate.

  I tipped some salt in my bowl, sat down beside the fire and watched her making toast as a spinal reflex.

  ‘Bad night?’ I asked.

  ‘It wasn’t good.’ She vanished into the pantry to get some butter. ‘Did you know it was after three when you got in?’

  Quite a long time after. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Looking for bits of Malcolm, mostly.’

  ‘Did you find them?’

  ‘No. I have to go into town later on for another look.’

  Caroline finished buttering her toast and took it across to the window-seat. Her hair glowed in the back-light of the morning sun and her face, in profile, lost years. Only her eyes, when they met mine, were still old. ‘You had a visitor last night,’ she said. ‘Would you like to guess who?’

  ‘The Tooth Fairy?’

  ‘Better than that.’ Her brows flicked upwards, suggestively. ‘Elspeth Philips. She “dropped in” about one o’clock. We had tea until two and then she went home.’

  Oh, joy. Bang goes the alibi.

  ‘What the hell did she want at one in the morning?’

  ‘Well, she said she wanted to warn you that her boss was back in town early, but I’d have said that was a pretty lame excuse myself.’ There was a tinge of amusement in her eyes. ‘I think you’ve made more of an impression than you might have wanted. She’s coming back this morning.’

  Some things are guaranteed to put me off my porridge.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s her day off, I’ve invited her for dinner. And I said we’d take her out on a ride to the waterfall first.’

  You have to be joking. Somebody here has just lost all sense of perspective. I don’t think it’s me. Caroline looked at her watch. ‘She’ll be here in twenty minutes,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want to end up taking her out, you’d better get out of here sharpish.’

  Quite. Ten minutes later, showered and changed, I was in the car and heading eastwards along the Great Western Road with fragments of jigsaw migrating fast into the places I least wanted them to be. McNeill in Anatomy was expecting me. He spotted me as I stepped through the revolving door into the hallway and flittered out of his cubbyhole, nodding a greeting.

  ‘Ms Culloch, good morning. You’ll be wanting Level Two?’

  I was. Like Pathology, the more interesting parts of the Anatomy Department are underground. The instinct for burying the dead, even when they are in pieces in small glass bottles, runs deep in the human psyche. The serial number from
the computer printout said that the relevant parts of Malcolm were in the second floor below ground, the one reserved for student teaching labs and the histology research department.

  McNeill led me down a series of subterranean passages, through rooms stacked with glass jars and plastic bottles where the very air was pickled with formaldehyde, and into the storeroom. He twitched his nose in the general direction of a bank of freezers ranged along the wall.

  ‘The blood samples are kept in there. If you take anything with you, sign it out with me at the desk before you go.’

  Very likely.

  I smiled acquiescent thanks and he left, blowing his nose briskly into a scarlet handkerchief.

  Anatomists are retentive to a degree that makes the average pathologist look positively freestyle. Every body that slides in through the hatch is labelled and numbered and every piece detached thereafter is sub-coded and stored in order in the appropriate drawer or cabinet.

  Malcolm’s blood, a pint or two divided into ten-millilitre aliquots, was in the right place in the right freezer. I took two of the vials, slid them into an envelope lined with plastic bubble paper to keep them cool, and fitted the envelope into a slim Lycra body belt where it would be safe from McNeill unless he chose to perform a full strip search.

  As an afterthought, on the way back upstairs, I visited the body racks on the first floor.

  According to Malcolm’s records, his body had been kept intact for the incoming year of students, preserved with one of the new phenol-based plastic resins that evolved after they discovered that formalin was carcinogenic. The racks fill two whole rooms, big drawers stacked from floor to ceiling in banks, like the ones in the Pathology mortuary, but less cold.

  Dragging a set of mobile steps in from the corridor, I climbed up to the labelled drawer on the third row that should have contained the body of Malcolm Donnelly.

  I stood there with my hand on the lock for a long time.

  In anatomy, things have come a long way since the days of Burke and Hare. There is a general consensus that looking on the preserved face of one’s loved ones is not necessarily a wise move and so, at the beginning of each new academic year, the records are checked and checked again to make sure that none of the new intake of students is about to come face to face in unfortunate circumstances with their Great-Aunt Hilda, deceased. It isn’t foolproof, but at least they try.

  Malcolm was once a very good friend and I owed him a lot. I thought about what he had looked like when I knew him, and all the images were active, vibrant, alive. I tried to imagine him dead, with the laughter lines smoothed out and replaced by the baby-doll face of the plasticisers and with the spark of understanding gone from his eyes and I knew that I didn’t really want to look. Even so, I still had to make sure he was there. Somehow.

  It’s a very long time since I fluttered my eyelashes at anyone, but I made up for it all in the next five minutes. Every ounce of waning Stewart charm went into persuading Archie McNeill to accompany me back down to the vaults and up the ladder to have a look inside the cabinet. Even then, it took a while to convince him that I knew what I wanted.

  He stood at the top of the ladder, his hand on the lid, and his drip was at eye height as he turned towards me. ‘I don’t see . . .’

  ‘I just want to be sure that it’s him.’

  ‘Right you are.’ He lifted the lid and frowned at the contents for a full second. ‘Aye, it’s Dr Donnelly, right enough,’ he said. ‘Why he would want to end up here is anybody’s guess. You’d no catch me . . .’ The lid dropped with a bang.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said.

  ‘I’d say it’s a pleasure, but I’d not like to lie to you.’

  McNeill skipped the last three treads of the ladder and landed nimbly on the floor beside me. He turned so that the drip on the end of his nose was parallel with my eyes. ‘I don’t want to go setting a precedent, mind,’ he said. ‘It’s no what I’m here for, you understand. There’s too many folk coming here wanting a look at the bodies these days. It’s not healthy.’

  Red flares sparked at the back of my mind.

  ‘Who else has been here, Archie?’

  He set off back upstairs at a trot. I followed, waiting for an answer. Near the ground floor he paused for breath. ‘Him with the fancy suit was in yesterday,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know his name. The one who reads the Telegraph and disnae do the crossword.’

  ‘Does he not leave his paper for you?’ I managed to filter a thread of shocked commiseration over the top of the unmasked glee.

  ‘Aye.’ He nodded sagely. ‘He did at that. Do you want to see it?’

  Do you think you could stop me?

  ‘That would be very nice.’

  I followed McNeill right into the inner sanctum of his cubbyhole and breathed down his neck while he dug out a copy of the previous day’s Telegraph. There at the top, above the bold type of the title, was a newsagent’s scribble: Kemp.

  Magic. If McNeill had less of a drip on his nose, I would hug him.

  One more question.

  ‘Who did he want to see, Archie?’ I asked.

  ‘What? Oh, the same as yourself. Dr Donnelly’s the flavour of the month, right enough. I still can’t think why he’d want to stay . . .’

  ‘No. I can’t either. Maybe he thought he’d leave something for posterity.’ I smiled brightly and dropped the Telegraph back on the pile at my feet, but McNeill was already back in his seat, hunched over the latest, still unsolved, set of clues.

  Kemp. The doctor with an urge to certify accidental death on no evidence. The kind of man who would sell his grandmother twice over if he could buy a bigger car on the proceeds. The man who is married to the professor’s daughter and knows the department like he knows his own reflection. Once in a while, it’s nice to have one’s more consistent prejudices confirmed. Pity that in this case it’s not the right piece for the right place in the jigsaw.

  I rode the Underground to Kelvinside with my brain locked in circles, trying, without notable success, to fit the new piece to the old pattern. I wandered, still thinking, up the road to Rae Larssen’s flat and dropped a brief note to Janine through the door, confirming arrangements for the evening and suggesting that she might prefer to arrange an alternative form of evening entertainment for Caroline and a certain green-eyed policewoman.

  Myself, I wouldn’t want anyone watching me hack into someone else’s system, particularly not a paid-up member of the Strathclyde Central Constabulary, but then I don’t have any faith at all in the integrity of the barriers between personal and private life.

  The farm was empty when I arrived home an hour or so later. The back door was locked and, when I checked the barn, two of the saddle racks were empty. A note from Caroline, tucked under a mug on the breakfast bar, said that the pair had left at ten and taken the dog with them. Beneath it was a roughly sketched map of their route: out along the bridleway, up to the waterfall in the foothills and the long way back, with an estimated time of return in the late afternoon.

  A whole afternoon to myself. Freedom.

  If I was intelligent, I would have used the time to sleep and then perhaps the things that happened later would have been more lucid. But I was still stirred up after the nightmare of the previous evening and the odd conflicts of the morning. Sleep would have been hard to come by.

  Instead, I raided the pantry for beans on toast and then changed back into horse clothes and went out to the barn to spend a happy hour venting frustration shifting barrowloads of damp straw and horse manure out to the dung heap at the back. It didn’t change anything, but it made me feel a lot calmer.

  When everything was tidy and ordered and, short of cleaning all the tack, there was nothing left to do, I pulled on a heavier jacket, filled the pockets with the things that I needed and went for a walk in the beech woods.

  It was about five o’clock and the sun was low, sending horizontal beams out across the f
ields, lighting up the tall grass and the clumps of horse dung that were scattered randomly, like mole-hills, across the field. Wood pigeons cooed together in the background and the hooded crows squabbled over squatting rights in the uppermost branches of the beech trees.

  The burn at the back of the field ran higher than it had done. Rain from the past few days poured off the Campsies, raising it temporarily above the winter level. The usual fording stones were awash with foaming white water and there were places where an inch or two of bank had crumbled away. A faint breeze picked up the mist rising from the water and pushed it in coiling tendrils between the trees, carrying the peaty scent of the hills with it.

  I slid between the rails of the fence and walked upriver to the place where the stream takes a bend round a boulder. The turning force of the water undercuts the bank on the field side and leaves an overhang that bridges out across the water and makes a gap narrow enough to jump. From there another path runs straight through the wood to the clearing. Clear and narrow like a sheep path, except there are no sheep in the wood and never have been. Deer possibly, or foxes. I jumped across the gap and followed the track between the trees.

  In the wood the air was electric. Some time after I crossed the river, the cooing and cawing had stopped, suddenly as if on command, leaving a raw silence. Even the rushing tumble of the water had died away. All I could hear was the crisp rustle of leaves as I walked.

  Then, between the last pair of trees at the edge of the clearing, I stopped absolutely still, and the silence, like the vision on the mound, was perfect.

  Mist, creeping in from the burn, met a stray strand of sunlight filtering through the trees to make a new, wavering floor to the clearing. The mound and Tan’s grave were hidden under the blanket. Only the tip of the ancient cairn was visible, poking up like an iceberg from the sea, and there, on the flat, moss-covered surface of the roof stone, dark against the pale air behind, stood a wren. She eyed me sideways, bobbed once, tail up, and then lifted her head to sing.

  Death, black and yellow and brown, exploded into the clearing.