The Meating Room

by T F Muir

  He followed the voices, his footfall echoing on the parquet flooring, and turned left into what he presumed to be the main lounge.

  One of the uniforms – a young WPC – was already on her way to intercept the intruder. In a firm voice, she said, ‘Step back outside, please.’

  Gilchrist flashed his warrant card. ‘DCI Gilchrist, St Andrews. We called Anstruther. Is that you?’

  ‘It is, sir, yes. Sorry, sir. PC Jennings,’ she said, and stepped aside.

  The other uniform, another constable Gilchrist did not recognise, finished talking on his phone, then turned to face him, his back to a wide bay window through which Gilchrist saw Jessie speaking into her mobile. The PC introduced himself as Taggart, and gripped Gilchrist’s hand as if intent on crushing it. Gilchrist thought the man’s face looked drawn and tired, too pale, as if he had not seen the sun in years, or had a good sleep in months.

  ‘What have we got?’ Gilchrist asked.

  ‘They’re upstairs. Three of them. All in bed.’

  Gilchrist felt his heart jump, and a lump choke his throat. ‘The children?’

  Taggart grimaced. ‘And the mother.’

  Something in Taggart’s haunted eyes, and in the resigned finality of his voice, told Gilchrist to expect the worst. ‘Show me,’ he said.

  Gilchrist followed Taggart into the hallway as Jessie entered. ‘SOCOs have already been called,’ she said. ‘So it’s not looking good.’

  Gilchrist nodded. He seemed to have lost the power to speak. His feet felt leaden as he mounted the stairs to the half-landing in silence, aware of Jessie behind him, then around a polished newel post, and up another flight to the upstairs bedrooms.

  Taggart stopped at an open door on the left and held out his hand – an invitation for Gilchrist to enter. Even from where he stood, the posters on the bedroom wall told him it was the room of a teenage girl with a passion for boy bands. A powerful sense of familiarity came to him – memories of his own family, Maureen and Jack as children, how he had missed so much of their growing up because of work, how he would come home late from the Office to find them both in bed, his only interaction with them being to kiss them goodnight when they were already asleep.

  ‘So, what’ve we got?’ Jessie asked, and brushed past him.

  Gilchrist followed, but managed only two or three steps before pulling up. The murder scene was not what he expected. No blood, no mess, no disturbance of any sort, just a young girl in her midteens, lying in bed, on her back, apparently asleep. He felt as if he and Jessie should be walking around the room on their tiptoes. The girl’s eyes were closed, lips curled in the tiniest hint of a smile, as if she were enjoying a peaceful dream. It seemed the gentlest of shakes would wake her.

  Jessie reached the head of the bed and looked down at the girl. Her lips pursed into a tight white line.

  Gilchrist asked Taggart over his shoulder, ‘You touch anything?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘So the bedside lamp was on?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Jessie glanced at the lamp, then at Gilchrist. ‘Is that significant?’

  Gilchrist shook his head. ‘Probably not.’

  Jessie leaned down to the girl’s face, and for one confusing moment Gilchrist thought she was going to kiss her. But she sniffed – once, twice – and said, ‘Not a thing. But vodka’s odourless.’ Then she took hold of the girl’s chin, as if to turn her head to look at her. ‘Full rigor,’ she said, and stood upright. ‘Which puts death at some time between, say, eight o’clock last night, and eight in the morning.’

  ‘Cooper might be able to narrow it down,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Her name’s Eilish,’ Taggart said. ‘Siobhan’s in the next room.’

  ‘You knew them?’ Jessie asked.

  Taggart nodded. ‘Most locals do.’

  Gilchrist closed his eyes for a moment’s thought. Two girls. What on earth had driven McCulloch to take their lives? How bad could his life have been? All that wealth, the big house, the big car, and the big salary to go with it, no doubt. But Gilchrist also knew that success in business was often achieved with other people’s money. Was Stratheden Enterprises in financial difficulty? Had investors in the company demanded back their money? Had McCulloch’s dreams of pots of gold turned into nothing more than buckets of rust?

  He turned away from the bed and saw that Taggart’s face was even paler now, if that were possible. The PC nodded in the direction of the other bedroom. As Gilchrist brushed past, he found he could not look Taggart in the eye.

  The second bedroom was smaller but brighter, with the curtains open. Other than that, the scene was almost identical. Boy bands offered white-toothed smiles from the walls. Their sparkling eyes and fresh-skinned energy were at odds with the scene before him. Another girl, smaller than her sister, maybe a couple of years younger, lay on her back, the sheets tucked neatly under her chin. Gilchrist thought she did not seem quite as peaceful, her mouth downturned a touch, as if she had gone to sleep and slipped away with a petted lip.

  He scanned the room, then said, ‘The bedside lamp’s not on.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Was that significant? He couldn’t say. But at least it explained the open curtains.

  From the hallway, Jessie asked, ‘Where’s the master bedroom? Is that it?’

  Gilchrist felt the floorboards shift as Jessie moved towards the door. He heard the click of its lock, then a sudden stillness and an ominous silence before a voice said, ‘Jesus fuck.’

  Gilchrist left Siobhan’s bedroom and crossed the hallway in three strides. Taggart was standing with his back to the master bedroom, his lips clamped tight, his throat and jaw working hard to keep down the bile.

  Even before Gilchrist entered the room, his mind was analysing the scene before him, telling him that it must be bad for Jessie to be standing with her hand to her mouth. But when he walked through the door, turned to face the bed, and saw what he thought must be the body of Mrs McCulloch, he realised nothing could have prepared him for just how horrific it was.

  His breath left him with a gasp, and he struggled to suck air back into his lungs.

  Jessie recovered first, and said, ‘I need to open the window.’

  ‘Leave it,’ he snapped.

  She stopped, but frowned at him.

  ‘Just leave it. Don’t disturb the scene. Don’t touch anything.’ He glanced out the bedroom door, but Taggart was no longer there. A hard retching cough came from the bathroom off the half-landing, and Gilchrist felt his own throat constrict. Christ, he thought, we could all be queuing at the door in a minute or two.

  He clenched both fists, closed his eyes, took two deep breaths, tried to ignore the bitter tang of blood and the sweet stench of raw meat that was pervading his senses. It struck him that he had not smelled anything from the upper hallway. The door must have been closed to keep the morbid guff inside. A chill ran through him, but then he heard a fan running and scanned the room. His gaze settled on the door to the en-suite bathroom.

  He knew he should go and check it out, but his feet were rooted to the spot as his eyes assessed the mess before him. If no one had told him it was Mrs McCulloch, he would have been hard pressed to tell if the skinned meat was male or female. He was conscious of movement at his side, of Jessie easing away from him, edging closer to the bed, as if to study what lay upon it.

  Although the bedclothes – the duvet cover, the folded blanket, the stacked pillows – were sodden with blackened blood, they seemed not to have been disturbed, other than the fact that a body lay on the bed, head missing, skin stripped to reveal bloodied musculature. And the body looked oddly slim around the waist, the stomach slack, which told Gilchrist she had been gutted. He also knew that the missing head was sure to be in the bathroom, along with the guts, the window open and the fan on full blast – he could hear it clearly now. The skin might be in there, too, laid out to dry in some kind of perverse, symbolic message.

  ‘You think it was him?�
�� Jessie asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Brian McCulloch.’

  Gilchrist let out another rush of air. His mind was spinning, firing away at a subconscious level, telling him that some piece or other did not fit, that it maybe even belonged in a different puzzle. He could not say what was niggling at him, only that something was not right.

  His mind continued to churn, desperate to figure out what he was missing.

  The children were at peace, while their mother had been decapitated, disembowelled and peeled back to the bone in the adjacent room. Surely they would have heard something? Unless they had been killed first?

  But then what mother could let that happen?

  Jessie walked around the end of the bed, heading towards the bathroom.

  ‘Don’t go in,’ he barked.

  She stopped and glared at him.

  ‘Don’t disturb the scene,’ he repeated. Jesus Christ. Don’t disturb the scene. What were they supposed to do? Dance around on tiptoes to keep any clue intact?

  Then a thought struck him. ‘Blood,’ he said.

  ‘There is that,’ Jessie agreed. ‘Lots of it.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She looked at him, puzzled, as if his ears had sprouted feathers.

  ‘Did you see any blood on McCulloch?’ he said. ‘Or in his car?’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘No.’

  He did not need to say that whoever had killed Mrs McCulloch, and ripped her stomach open, and pulled out her guts, and hacked off her head, and skinned her, must have been splattered in the stuff. The realisation dawned behind Jessie’s eyes.

  On automatic now, his mind crackling with possibilities, he walked around the end of the bed. Clotted blood formed black trails from the bed to the bathroom, marking the path of the head, the skin and the entrails. Together, he and Jessie stood at the door, facing a scene from a slaughterhouse in hell. Only then did Gilchrist understand that he had the trail of blood the wrong way round, that the skinned and headless and disembowelled corpse had been carried from the bathroom to the bed. Which was why the bedclothes were undisturbed.

  He edged closer to the bathroom threshold, taking care not to stand on any blood spots or bloodied footprints, although it did strike him as odd that the footprints were noticeable by their absence. By the door frame, he noted one of the switches on the wall was in the ON position. Which would be the fan. None of the downlighters was switched on, so he made a mental note to ask the SOCOs to dust the fan switch for fingerprints.

  He leaned forward and peered inside.

  The bathroom was as big as Fisherman’s Cottage kitchen and dining room combined. The floor and walls were fully tiled, the ceiling covered with pre-fabricated panels as glossy as marble, and riddled with downlighters. A wet room, large enough for a party of six, filled one corner. Even from where he stood, Gilchrist could see that was where the slaughter had taken place. Its glass panels were streaked with blood. Scraps of skin, hair, and lengths of gut as thick as rope were scattered across the tiled floor, although some effort had been made to sweep them to one side. Other areas looked as if a bucket-load of blood had been spilled over them, and the walls – from floor to head height – could be a blood-spatter analyst’s training room.

  ‘Any thoughts?’ he asked Jessie.

  ‘Bring back the death penalty?’

  ‘Do you see her head?’

  ‘We should check the boot of the Jag.’

  Gilchrist grimaced. ‘I don’t think he would do that.’

  ‘Why not? He’s not left much to chance here.’

  ‘The SOCOs will let us know soon enough.’

  Gilchrist continued to scan the scene, trying to imagine how the events unfolded – from a killing to a disembowelling to a beheading to a skinning to a ritual placement of the body on the bed. And, as he studied the bloodied mess, he came to see some order, some logic, in the massacre. The shower had been turned on to full power in the wet room, no doubt to clear most of the victim’s blood from the assailant. Skin and guts had been swept to one side as if in an effort to clean up the mess, and the tiled floor was streaked and smeared as if someone had tried to rub it clean.

  He froze for a moment as he took it all in, then said, ‘Where are the towels?’

  ‘In a cupboard?’

  ‘No. The towel rails are empty. There’s none in here.’

  He waited while Jessie eyed the full-length heated towel rail on the wall next to the wet room, those on either side of the double sink, the rim of the claw-footed bathtub.

  ‘Which means what, exactly?’ she said at length.

  ‘Check the laundry basket, the washing machine, the kitchen. I’d like to see—’

  ‘What, you’re thinking he washed up after doing—’

  ‘Just do it.’ The words came out louder than intended. ‘Bloody hell, Jessie, for once in your life do something straightforward without challenging it.’

  Her lips tightened and she said, ‘Yes, sir,’ before walking to the wicker laundry basket at the side of a wardrobe. She flipped back the lid, let it drop, then left the bedroom without another word.

  Gilchrist stepped away from the bathroom door and walked to the window.

  He pulled out his mobile and got through on the second ring.

  ‘Missing me already?’ Cooper said.

  ‘It’s a mess, Becky. An absolute hellish mess.’ He breathed in, knowing she would not break the silence. Cooper was like that; someone who would listen to the entire story, hear every word, before casting judgement, good or bad. ‘He’s taken out his whole family. Wife and two girls, in their beds—’ Another gush of air. Christ, it was difficult to breathe. All of a sudden, he was aware of the body on the bed behind him, the thick, stale air in the room. He reached forward and flung open the window, ignoring his earlier instruction to Jessie.

  ‘Andy?’

  ‘Sorry, it’s . . .’ He shook his head, struggling to stop tears nipping his eyes. Christ, what would he have done if this had happened to his own family? How could he have lived after that? But Brian McCulloch had not lived, of course. He had simply taken his own life, unable to live with the crushing burden of what he had done. As that logic fired through Gilchrist’s mind – his subconscious challenging, ideas flickering, fading, then resurfacing – he came to understand what he had failed to see earlier.

  He turned to stare at the skinless corpse.

  ‘I need you over here,’ he said to Cooper. ‘I need you to establish how the children were killed. I suspect they were drugged. Maybe injected. Maybe spiked drinks. And I need you to check McCulloch’s system for drugs.’

  ‘Are you all right, Andy? You don’t sound—’

  ‘No, I’m not all right.’ He paused, aware that he had raised his voice, and tried to pull himself together, squeezed a thumb and forefinger into his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Becky. I’m sorry, I . . . it’s just . . . I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘Andy?’

  He caught the urgency in her voice, sensed her desperation. ‘I’m okay.’

  A pause, then, ‘You’re not telling me everything.’

  He eyed the skinned carcass, and realised he had missed something in the bathroom. He strode to the door and had another look. The wet room where the murderer had showered himself clean; the blood-streaked floor that he had wiped with towels to erase his bloodied footprints; the clean corner by the full-length mirror where he had dried himself and dressed; the absence of towels that might have contained traces of his DNA; and . . .

  ‘There’s not enough skin,’ he said.

  ‘Skin?’

  ‘She’s been gutted, decapitated and skinned.’ Another deep breath. He had never fully understood how his subconscious mind worked, how it chewed through sensory information and spat out an answer. Nor did he understand how his sixth sense – his instinct – worked. All he knew was that they did work, more often than not. Mhairi’s voice came back to him – he seemed a nice man. Then he recalled the neatness of the crisp white
shirt and well-pressed trousers.

  ‘Brian McCulloch didn’t do this,’ he said.

  ‘So why did he commit suicide?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t.’

  ‘You’re saying he was—’

  ‘I need blood and toxicology results before I’m saying anything. How soon can you get them to me?’

  ‘Twenty-four hours. Midday tomorrow,’ she added.

  ‘How about today?’

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  He stared at the red raw body, ran his gaze along the stripped limbs, and realised for the first time that the fingernails were missing, too. And the toes were little more than bloodied stumps. He had to turn away.

  Back by the window, the March air felt cool, fresh, clean. He breathed it in, stared out across the open fields of the Fife countryside. It was the missing head and the lack of skin that sealed it for him. But he had one more question to ask.

  ‘How long is a human intestine?’

  ‘It varies,’ Cooper said, ‘but the small intestine is six or seven metres, and the large about one and a half. Why?’

  ‘He’s taken trophies.’

  ‘Intestines?’

  ‘And the head, skin, fingernails and toenails.’

  He heard her gasp, then realised he was probably telling her too much. After all, this was all a theory. But his instincts were so strong that he couldn’t stop himself. ‘The worst of it is, I think he knew what he was doing.’

  ‘Someone in the medical field?’

  Gilchrist gritted his teeth before taking another deep breath. ‘No,’ he said, offering a silent prayer to a God he didn’t believe in, that he was wrong. ‘I think he’s done it before.’

  CHAPTER 5

  By midday, Anstruther Police had erected a barrier across the gated entrance to the McCullochs’ driveway, with squad cars, forensic teams, uniformed officers and detectives on one side, and a baying media circus on the other. Within the space of a few hours, news of the Massacre at the McCullochs had gone viral. Every radio and TV station was carrying it as breaking news, and a distraught local MSP interviewed on Sky News had said how devastated she and her constituents were at the tragic loss of such a philanthropic man and his young family.