Follow the Dead

by Lin Anderson

  ‘The underage girl in the video,’ Olsen corrected him. ‘And yes, we can.’

  McNab knew this wasn’t true, but he admired the surety with which Olsen said it.

  ‘I understand the young woman has disappeared,’ the lawyer said. He didn’t add and therefore her age can’t be proved, and neither can she give testimony against my client.

  Olsen gave a half-smile. ‘And how would you know that, since Amena’s disappearance wasn’t released to the press?’

  The lawyer, realizing his error of judgement, adopted a stony silence, motioning his client to do likewise.

  Olsen, seemingly unperturbed by this, said, ‘Amena is clearly distressed in the video and begging Mr Lund to stop raping her. I’d say that was proof enough of an offence having been committed, without her testimony.’

  McNab watched the self-assured look slide from Lund’s face, and allowed himself a smile.

  ‘Now,’ Olsen said. ‘Let us discuss Mr Lund’s Norwegian activities.’

  42

  Rhona checked the arrivals board to find the Inverness train was running late. The announcer stated that this was due to snow on the tracks between Inverness and Aviemore. The estimated arrival currently stood at 12.40, which gave her time for a coffee before she tried to intercept Isla. Rhona bought one from an open stand and found a seat with a view of the ticket barriers.

  The station was busy, mostly, she suspected, with folk returning from their Hogmanay break, judging by the number of suitcases being trundled past her. Checking her mobile again, she found no response to her attempts to contact Isla by text. It looked as though she did have a wrong number. If so, whoever was receiving her messages couldn’t be bothered letting her know she was trying to contact the wrong person.

  As the board displayed the imminent arrival of the Inverness train at Platform 4, she dumped her coffee cup in a nearby bin and took up a stance whereby she could watch the approaching train disgorge its passengers. What she hadn’t anticipated was just how many there would be. With only four carriages, the occupants must have been standing two deep in the aisles. God knows where they’d stacked their considerable luggage. By the expressions on the faces coming towards her, they were mightily glad to escape the confines of the over-packed coaches, despite the freezing air of Glasgow which greeted them.

  Knowing Isla had an injured ankle, Rhona assumed she might have been given help to exit the train, maybe even collected by wheelchair. But although there was one wheelchair user heading for the barrier, it was an elderly man and not Isla.

  There was a moment when Rhona thought she’d been wrong to assume she would recognize the young woman she’d ministered to that night in the snow cave, but that frightened face was indelibly etched in her memory, even if the circumstances were different. And surely, with her injury, Isla couldn’t be one of the mass of people striding purposefully towards the exit?

  As the crowd gradually began to thin, Rhona thought she’d spotted Isla, at the rear of the platform. But her certainty was short-lived. It was a young woman and she was walking with the aid of a stick, but the young man who supported her in such a caring manner made it obvious they were a couple.

  Isla had been part of a couple, but was no longer.

  Maybe she’d been told to wait for assistance and that was why she hadn’t yet emerged from the train? The guard now stepped off and, slinging his bag over his shoulder, came towards the barrier.

  Rhona intercepted him. ‘Excuse me. I was supposed to meet a young woman here. She had a sprained ankle and got on at Aviemore?’

  The guard looked puzzled for a moment, then shook his head. ‘We were late into Aviemore and sat there for ten minutes at least. I didn’t see anyone like that get on. Did she ask for assistance?’ he added, concerned.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rhona admitted.

  ‘Maybe she waited for the next train?’ he offered. ‘This one was busy, if you had mobility problems.’

  ‘When is that?’ she said.

  ‘An hour’s time if there isn’t a hold-up. Check online,’ and he was off.

  Rhona’s unease at Isla’s non-appearance was tangible, yet common sense told her that there had been no certainty she would have caught that train. She brought up the number of the Cairngorm Hotel again. It rang out half a dozen times, then a slightly harassed male voice answered. By his accent he was one of the many Poles working in the Spey Valley.

  Rhona asked again about Isla’s departure.

  ‘Miss Crawford settled her bill last night,’ he said.

  ‘The last person I spoke to said Isla was catching the 9.30 train this morning to Glasgow?’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ he replied in a slightly defensive tone. ‘Didn’t she have a vehicle?’ he added, as though just remembering. ‘A blue van with a climbing logo on the side?’ He sounded pleased at his recall. ‘Shall I check the car park?’

  Rhona murmured an affirmative and the line went silent. He was back two minutes later.

  ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘But she couldn’t drive,’ Rhona said.

  ‘Then someone must have driven her.’ He was clearly growing exasperated by her questions.

  Realizing she would get no further, Rhona thanked him and rang off.

  Her final try was to Kyle Dunn, her fellow rescuer.

  ‘Hey, Doc, how are you? Back in the city?’

  As Rhona began her answer, Kyle, picking up on her unease, interrupted to ask what was wrong. She explained about Isla, the train and the van.

  ‘No way could she drive, although she clearly wanted to.’ Kyle explained about picking Isla up on the mountain and taking her to the hotel. ‘I brought the van down the hill and told her I would try and find someone from the team willing to take it south for her. She said she’d leave the keys at reception.’

  ‘Did you find anyone?’ Rhona said.

  ‘Not yet, no.’ When she didn’t respond to this, he asked outright. ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’

  Rhona couldn’t tell Kyle the full details of her discovery, but she could alert him. ‘We have reason to believe her original story of an assailant to be true,’ she said.

  Kyle’s outburst was a replay of his curses in the ice cave when he’d been trying to hack a way out for Isla’s stretcher.

  ‘So there was a bastard on the loose up there …’ He halted. ‘Did he have anything to do with the body from the plane?’

  ‘Nothing’s certain as yet—’

  Kyle interrupted her. ‘Except that Isla saw the bastard and could probably ID him.’

  43

  ‘Does McNab know?’ Chrissy said.

  ‘He’s in an interview with Olsen, so I left a message with Janice.’ Rhona discarded her outer garments and began to kit up.

  ‘She could be on a later train,’ Chrissy suggested.

  ‘She could be,’ Rhona agreed. ‘But if the van’s no longer there, it seems more likely that she managed to find a driver to bring both her and the van south.’

  ‘But wouldn’t she have told Kyle that?’

  Rhona was playing devil’s advocate, knowing Chrissy would pick holes in all her suggestions, which was a good way to examine the possibilities.

  ‘And,’ Chrissy went on, ‘if someone did try to kill her and found out they hadn’t succeeded, wouldn’t they try again?’

  Rhona’s conversation with Kyle had resulted in just that line of thought. She’d indicated as much to DS Clark, who’d promise to contact Aviemore police and have them look for both Isla and the van’s current whereabouts.

  Kitted up, Rhona entered the lab. Her prime concern now was to complete her examination of the evidence she’d taken at both deposition sites. The postmortem on the pilot had established that he had been attacked. On the other hand, the PMs on the three climbers hadn’t proved with any certainty exactly how they’d died. Something which concerned her. As Sissons had confirmed, both hypothermia and suffocation were subtle, and it was often the circumstances surrounding
the death from either that led to a conclusion.

  And she had been the one to examine the victims in situ.

  Rhona replayed the video she’d taken in the Shelter Stone. The suffocating darkness, only lessened by her head torch, had felt like being in a grave. And it was a grave.

  Three young people, who, having had both the courage and the ability to scale Hell’s Lum, had found themselves not anticipating the turn of the year below on the valley floor as planned, but stuck in the Arctic wilderness that was Cairngorm.

  But they hadn’t minded. They’d played games, drunk whisky. Then they’d climbed into their sleeping bags. Both couples had had sex. That had been obvious by the evidence she’d collected. They’d anticipated the New Year in extremis by celebrating life.

  But life had changed in a moment, just as it always did. Isla had wakened and gone outside. That need, that action, had sealed the fate of everyone in the cave.

  Of that Rhona was sure. Not through forensic science – yet – but through intuition, something a scientist wasn’t allowed to rely on.

  But that didn’t mean she couldn’t prove it through science.

  Evidential sources of DNA were variable. Blood was good, because the white cells were a rich source of DNA. Sweat stains, something all humans produced no matter how they tried to avoid it with deodorants, provided skin cells which were also rich sources of DNA. The nose and its secretions – not just sneezes, but mucus that dripped from the nostrils for a variety of reasons – were another rich source of DNA. One of which had happened in that cave.

  Cocaine.

  Chrissy’s careful examination of the top Gavin had worn had found both mucus and traces of cocaine. A powerful combination – but who had snorted and who had dripped?

  An image of what might have happened had played over in Rhona’s mind as she’d surveyed the results of her tests.

  No one who’d been present when Isla had gone out to relieve herself had sprayed mucus on her boyfriend, Gavin. The pattern of who we are and what we leave behind, Locard’s principle of ‘every contact leaves a trace’, had played out in that cave, in the middle of a blizzard, on a remote mountaintop, despite the freezing temperatures.

  But that wasn’t all.

  The first thing Rhona had noticed on entering the cave had been the scent of urine. She hadn’t been surprised by this. Some bodily functions continued when the heart had stopped. Because of the slacking of the sphincter muscles, urination was one of them.

  But the source of the smell hadn’t only been the climbers’ bodies. Someone had urinated copiously near the rear of the cave, over the brick. It had struck her at the time that it was an odd place to relieve yourself unless you were dousing a fire. Sampling the fire brick had led her to sample the urine too.

  Later, when they’d rescued Isla from her ice prison, the injured girl had rambled on about how she’d gone outside to pee in the middle of a blizzard, because ‘No one does it in the shelter’.

  So no one in the climbers’ party of four would have urinated in the shelter.

  Which meant someone else had been in the cave.

  Rhona admired the manner in which death acquired the body. This wasn’t a ghoulish feeling, but more a celebration of life. Breath had gone from the victims in that dark space under a fallen rock, but yet the detritus of life lived within, on and around them, revealing the story about how and why those hearts had stopped beating.

  As Rhona exited the lab and lowered her mask, Chrissy indicated that the analysis had arrived. Rhona skimmed the printout, aware that the conclusion would be one she’d reached already.

  The blood and skin deposits under Isla’s nails had proved to be a match for the mucus found on Gavin. That in itself placed her attacker inside the Shelter Stone; the urine test and the cocaine analysis, she suspected, would only add to the picture.

  The tall white figure that had appeared to Isla like Am Fear Liath Mòr out of the blizzard had most likely taken the lives of the three climbers, probably by suffocation.

  The ditched plane, destined for somewhere other than the frozen Loch A’an, had visited a kind of hell on the mountain, worse than any blizzard or spectre.

  44

  McNab had emerged from the Lund interview with a cracking headache and a belligerent air, which wasn’t helped by the news from Rhona, via DS Clark, that Isla Crawford hadn’t got off the train at Queen Street station.

  The headache, he decided, could be rectified by a double dose of caffeine. Hence his swift walk in the direction of the coffee machine. The bad mood might also be a sign of his caffeine addiction, but had more likely been caused by the interview with Petter Lund and his insufferable wee prick of a lawyer.

  ‘You have an addictive personality,’ Janice informed him en route.

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ McNab shot back at her.

  ‘Caffeine’s more addictive than nicotine.’

  Jesus, she was on her high horse today.

  ‘So, I was better off on the whisky?’ he challenged her.

  Janice’s withering look in response was one McNab would have been proud of himself.

  ‘Okay, what do we know?’ he said as he waited for his coffee cup to fill.

  ‘The van was spotted exiting Aviemore around midnight in a northerly direction. One witness, unconfirmed. There have been no subsequent sightings on the A9 north or south. If it was in a hurry, the average speed cameras would have clocked it somewhere on that route.’

  ‘Any idea who was driving?’

  ‘Our witness thought a male, with no one in the passenger seat.’

  ‘Jesus.’ McNab pressed for another coffee. ‘And the girl definitely slept at the hotel last night?’

  ‘They couldn’t confirm that, but her bag was found in the room by cleaning staff this morning around eleven. It didn’t contain her mobile. We had them check.’

  McNab ran his hand through his hair. He’d never met this climber girl, though judging from what Rhona had said, she was resourceful.

  But you can’t be resourceful if you’re dead.

  Janice came back in. ‘DS Abernethy says if the van didn’t take the A9, the other major route out of the valley would be to Aberdeen via Grantown and Aberlour.’

  ‘Those roads were open?’

  ‘The majority of the snow fell on the Central Highlands and the west, so yes.’

  ‘Any traffic cameras?’

  ‘It’s not the A90,’ she told him bluntly.

  It seemed all roads led to Aberdeen. He was beginning to hate that city and he’d never even been there. Something that looked about to be rectified by Inspector Olsen, his new best pal. Still, he was doing what the boss had ordered, cooperating with Ragnar Lodbrok. The thought of the boss made McNab pull out his phone. Rhona had said the DI wanted to be kept informed.

  Should I call him?

  According to Janice, DI Wilson was camped out at the hospital, which didn’t bode well for the prospect of getting Margaret home. McNab’s thoughts went to the boss’s kids, both teenagers. How would they cope with their mother gone?

  Same as I did.

  He dragged his mind back to a problem he could try to solve. If Isla’s mobile wasn’t in her bag, then it might be with her. He didn’t allow himself to think the words, whether she’s dead or alive. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d run a mobile literally to ground with its deceased owner.

  Ollie was circumspect. He never promised anything, yet always seemed to come up with the goods if given time. The last occasion they’d focused on Aberdeenshire together had been during the Stonewarrior case. Then it had been a Neolithic stone circle that had drawn them there. Ollie had been his right-hand man on that case, something McNab wouldn’t forget.

  ‘The number you gave me is registered to Isla Crawford. She pays fifteen a month for it but often runs the bill to twenty. The mobile’s been rarely used over Hogmanay, remembering that the signal for Tesco mobile and others is pretty rubbish up there. Go outside Aviemore
and there’s nothing.’

  That sorry story, McNab acknowledged, seemed to apply to the whole of the north of Scotland, including during his recent sojourn on the Orkney island of Sanday.

  ‘However, she made a call from the Day Lodge on Cairngorm yesterday afternoon to …’ Ollie quoted a number.

  ‘That’s the bloke from Cairngorm Mountain Rescue. He brought her and the van down the hill,’ McNab said. ‘So nothing after that?’

  Ollie shook his head. ‘Not from her mobile, but –’ he hesitated – ‘I took the liberty of calling the hotel. I wanted to check if they had CCTV footage of the car park. They don’t. But the guy on reception said that a man professing to be from CMR had asked to be put through to her room around ten last night. A few minutes later she went outside. He was off-duty after that, so couldn’t tell me when or if she came back in.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, could the Aviemore police not tell us that?’

  ‘Apparently the guy wasn’t on duty when they came by asking questions.’

  Ollie interrupted McNab’s few choice words about the inadequacies of rural policing.

  ‘There’s no CCTV at the hotel,’ he said, ‘but there are webcams dotted about the area. Mostly for observing the scenery and the wildlife.’ At McNab’s thunderous look, he swiftly added, ‘That’s how I found this.’

  McNab eased his seat nearer the screen.

  ‘It’s a recording of the Coire Cas car park next to the Day Lodge and the cafe.’

  ‘That’s her van.’ McNab pointed at the image. ‘But we know she left there with the CMR bloke.’

  ‘Wait,’ Ollie instructed him. ‘There’s a little tableau acted out here that’s worth watching.’

  McNab tried to quench his impatience and concentrate, but figures walking about a car park in the snow wasn’t riveting TV.

  ‘Note,’ said Ollie, ‘most people are dressed for skiing and are wearing ski boots. That makes them walk in a particular fashion. There are very few without that gait going in and out of the cafe. I’ve isolated them.’

  McNab watched Isla’s figure get out of a taxi and limp towards what was definitely the blue van. She opened the door and with an enormous effort pulled herself inside. A few minutes later she was sliding back out.