by Lin Anderson
‘There’s one more thing, sir.’
‘Yes?’
‘Claire Watson says she swerved off the road that night because a man appeared in front of her.’
‘There was another car in the area?’
McNab shook his head. ‘Not when we got there, apart from the van driver who stopped to help.’
‘And he is?’
McNab checked his PDA. ‘His name is Keith Walker, fifty-six, works for the gas board. He was on his way to a broken-down boiler. Walker says Mrs Watson stepped out in front of him. She was confused, knew she had been in an accident, but didn’t know who she was, then she remembered her daughter was in the back of the car. Except she wasn’t.’
‘OK, our first priority is to try and identify missing minors that might fall into the frame. Let’s keep the press release low key. Just “human remains found in wood”. Nothing about it being a child. Nothing about how they were discovered. We don’t want to raise hopes that we’ve found someone’s missing child until we know more. And we don’t want the Watsons hounded by the tabloids.’
‘Sir? Maybe we should bring in someone professional to talk to Emma. There might be stuff she hasn’t told us.’
‘You think her mother would agree?’
‘She believes her daughter’s been traumatised by what’s happened. I think she might.’
‘OK, get in touch with Professor Pirie. Ask him if he’s willing to get involved. If he is, run it past the mother. Let’s get the coffees in, then we’ll take a look at the skip fire case.’
Rhona saw McNab’s horrified expression. Magnus Pirie wasn’t a name he’d wanted or expected to hear, despite his request for professional help with the girl.
He told Rhona as much when they met at the coffee machine.
‘Magnus was cleared of any wrongdoing in the Gravedigger case,’ she reminded him.
‘Unlike the boss.’
‘That’s not Magnus’s fault.’
McNab threw her a look that spoke volumes. ‘The boss is lying to the inquiry.’
‘What?’
‘I found out that he gave a statement saying he had been the one to assault the suspect.’
‘But you’ve told them the truth?’
‘Of course, but Lane doesn’t believe me. And guess who also says it was him? Christ, the Gravedigger is stitching him up and I can’t stop it.’
Now she understood the suppressed fury on McNab’s face when he’d entered the strategy meeting.
‘What the fuck do I do? It’s two against one.’
Rhona was running the worrying scenario over in her mind. ‘They’ll have to take into account the mitigating circumstances.’
‘It’ll still mean a disciplinary charge, even if it doesn’t go to court. You have to talk to the boss. Get him to tell the truth.’
‘I’ll try after the meeting,’ Rhona promised.
She never got the chance. She was halfway through her contribution on the skip investigation when Bill was called from the room. There was an uncomfortable silence as the door closed behind him. The entire team knew the DI was likely to be up on a charge.
McNab indicated that she should continue. If the DI walked back in and they were discussing him rather than the case, then there’d be hell to pay.
‘As Dr Sissons reported, photographs taken at the scene and the subsequent post-mortem identified a break in the hyoid bone, suggesting that the victim could have been garrotted before the fire occurred.’
She brought up the collage of photographs she’d taken at the scene and flicked through them. Crime photographs always looked worse away from the locus. When you were there, you were surrounded by the horror. Here in the normality of the meeting room, the individual images had an obscene quality.
‘Blood tests on the body indicate the victim was not Fergus Morrison as stated on the dog tag. So this guy is not our missing soldier. We’re still testing the debris for accelerant.’ Rhona handed over to McNab, who seemed distracted.
‘The boss thinks a car on CCTV around the time of the fire could prove significant. The dog tag could indicate we were expected to assume the victim was the soldier. If that’s the case, Fergus Morrison could be involved, so priority number one is to find him.’ McNab brought up the squaddie’s picture. In the photograph he looked about fifteen, though his details said he’d passed his nineteenth birthday.
‘OK, let’s get on with it.’
McNab came over to Rhona as the team filed from the room. ‘What about the deposition site?’
‘I’ve got a mountain of mulch and soil to sift through. Unless anything else turns up out there, I won’t go back. Any luck with possible missing minors?’
‘Nothing yet. DC Clark’s working on it.’
She put her hand on his arm. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get an opportunity to talk to Bill.’
‘I’ve a feeling we’re too late, anyway.’
12
It was on the lunchtime news. Human remains had been discovered in woods south of Glasgow. He realised he had been anticipating this moment for a decade. He wasn’t afraid. He was angry. And not with himself.
He sat on the sofa, his body rigid, his eyes fixed on the screen. Details were scarce. Nothing about who had found them. Nothing about what exactly they had found.
He felt violated. Choking anger prevented him from breathing. He imagined their graves being defiled. Their remains being removed, examined. Bile rose to his mouth. How dare they.
He channelled his rage into cold, calculating anger. He would find out how they had been discovered. It wouldn’t be difficult with his connections.
He took out his mobile and began going through the list of names. He paused, knowing that any call, no matter how casual, might be questioned later.
He put the phone down and went out into the garden.
The trimmed grass and ordered wintering flower beds calmed him. He took the path that led to the wooded area. The starkness of the bare birch trees reminded him of the other wood. He should have laid them to rest here, like the others.
He would have needed no markers, no wind harp to guide him. He knew every inch of this garden, every plant, every tree, every secret thing. He sat down on the wooden bench he’d placed in his favoured spot and closed his eyes, feeling the weak warmth of the sun on his face.
It could not be coincidence that the remains had been discovered shortly after that woman had swerved off the road and crashed her car.
He pondered this. Through closed eyes, he relived the moment when the blue Peugeot had appeared from nowhere – the startled face at the windscreen, the mouth open in a scream.
He channelled his anger towards that face.
If she’d died in the crash, he had nothing to worry about. There was nothing else to link him to that wood.
If the bitch had survived, then the sooner he found her the better.
13
McNab sat down at his cluttered desk. The double shot of coffee he’d fetched from the machine was doing its job, but not fast enough. He surreptitiously added a nip of whisky from the half-bottle in his drawer. Everything was going arse up and he couldn’t stop it. He knew the boss was in with the super. It had to be about the assault case.
He swallowed the whisky-laced coffee quickly then got himself online. There were twenty emails waiting. He skimmed through them, hardly registering the titles, until he spotted one from Emma. It had an attachment alongside. McNab braced himself, then clicked to open. He had planned to offload the kid on the DI, but that no longer looked like a possibility. He would have to keep the contact going himself. He liked Claire. He liked the kid, even if she was a little strange, but he didn’t have the time to spend nursing either of them.
The message read:
I wanted to show you this when you were here, but Mum wouldn’t let me. This is what I dream. This is what I hear.
McNab opened the attachment.
It was a simple drawing of a tree done with a kids’ software program,
the branches bare of leaves. Under the roots, a small naked body hung suspended as though in the air. An attempt had been made to draw the genitals, making it a boy.
‘Jesus.’ McNab found himself repulsed by the image.
Below was the message Don’t leave me here alone.
The kid’s sick, he thought. Maybe she was sick before this happened. Claire had seemed frightened, but he’d assumed it was just the effect of the accident. He realised he should have asked more questions, but then he hadn’t been there to interview or interrogate either of them. Claire had asked him to come.
McNab’s first instinct was to ignore the email. If Claire contacted him about it, he could pretend he hadn’t checked his mailbox because of pressure of work. If in doubt, do nothing. A mantra that had served him well in the past.
What the kid was suggesting was nonsense anyway. As far as the investigation was concerned, they had one set of remains. They’d searched the area surrounding the deposition site and turned up nothing else. His job now was to check the records and find out which kids had gone missing a decade ago. Around that time he’d been intent on practising law. Had someone told him he would end up becoming a policeman and working in CID, he would’ve laughed in their face. No money and no respect in police work, he would have said. He’d been right back then. He was right now. At least if he’d become a lawyer he might have been able to help the DI, something at which he was failing spectacularly as a cop.
He selected ‘print’ and went to pick the page up. Only then did it register that the drawing was in colour. The tree printed out in black, the body in a lurid red. The message had been written in purple. All this seemed to reinforce his earlier suspicion that the girl was an attention-seeker. It was a game to her, a way of keeping her mother on her toes, or perhaps punishing her in some way.
McNab had an uncomfortable memory of the variety of ways in which he’d subtly punished his own mother for failing to produce his father. For years he’d secretly convinced himself that his dad was trying to see him and being prevented from doing so. It had taken a long time to register that his father didn’t care that he existed at all.
Claire had been quite adamant about not being married. Angry, even. So who the hell was Nick?
McNab didn’t want to go there.
He screwed up the drawing and went to toss it in the bin then changed his mind and stuck it in his pocket. He had enough to worry about without taking on childcare duties, especially a problem child.
He abandoned his desk and went looking for DC Clark.
‘Hey.’
Janice’s sympathetic look didn’t help. McNab had told everyone he’d been responsible for the assault. It didn’t make any difference. If the boss went down, the team would hold him responsible.
Janice handed him a list. ‘That’s UK-wide. D’you want to extend it to Europe?’
‘Is there anything here that might match?’
‘Hard to say with what we’ve got on the remains so far. In truth, it could be all or none of them.’
‘Better extend it to Europe.’
Barriers had been down for a while, the flux of immigrants from the Eastern Bloc steadily increasing. Rhona had said that a child’s remains didn’t last long above ground, even with the covering such as these had had. Her guess of a decade or so was just a guess, until she concluded her study of the detritus from the deposition site.
McNab took the list back to his desk. Janice had identified twelve possibilities. Eight girls and four boys. Over half of the list were believed to have been abducted by an estranged parent and taken abroad. One girl was thought to have been taken to California by her Russian father.
A child being abducted by a parent was often the most likely explanation for their disappearance, especially when custody had been awarded to the other parent. Most people who ran off with their children were never found. If your partner took your child abroad, the UK government could not bring them back, only offer you legal advice. But estranged parents rarely murdered the children they were fighting so hard to keep.
McNab concentrated on the others.
Four girls, two boys. All would have been between six and ten at the time of their abduction. All had disappeared south of the border, and the abduction sites were varied: London, Birmingham and the North of England. McNab stared at the photographs. Little faces, frozen in time. He thought about his first sight of Emma sitting under the tree. His elation that they’d found her alive – every mother’s dream – then his horror when he saw what she was holding.
One of the photographs was of a smiling, elfin-faced girl with light-coloured hair, cut so short she could have passed for a boy. She’d last been seen in the company of a middle-aged man in St Pancras station in London. The second girl was dark haired and older, of Indian extraction. She’d disappeared in Birmingham on her way home from school. One boy had a freckled face and ears that stuck out like the handles of the Scottish Cup. He was from Sunderland. These three disappearances had taken place over a two-year period.
The road where the accident had happened ran from Glasgow to the village of Muirkirk. The village itself wasn’t remote. It lay on the A70 between Edinburgh and Ayr, just ten miles from the M74 motorway, the main artery between Scotland and England.
McNab fished out a map. On his way to the scene of the accident, he hadn’t passed a single car on that road. True, it had been a bad night and folk had been warned not to travel, but even on his subsequent visits to the site vehicles had been scarce.
He thought about Claire’s conviction that there had been a man on the road. She’d insisted McNab take his description down on his PDA. He suspected believing in the figure was one way of convincing herself she wasn’t to blame for the accident and its consequences.
The man was short, Claire had said, and wore a dark, heavy coat. Initially his back had been towards her. That was why she hadn’t seen him. He’d turned and her headlights had lit up his face. He was middle aged and bald.
When McNab asked whether she’d hit the man, she’d shaken her head. ‘I wrenched the wheel round to avoid him. That’s why I went off the road.’
He logged into the incident files and had another look at the photographs. The team had taken a whole series from multiple angles showing where the car went off the road, the marks on the bank indicating how it had overturned and slid down. The one of the wreckage against the tree was pretty scary. Claire was lucky to have climbed out of that unscathed. As for the rear of the car crushed against the tree – Emma’s survival was little short of a miracle.
McNab replayed the geography in his head. Claire had said the figure had his back to her. So where was he facing? McNab rotated the 3D image on the screen, placing himself in the picture where Claire said the man had stood. Why had the mystery man been standing in the middle of the road looking towards the wood?
14
The majority of foods are plant based, and food remains undigested after death until the body starts to decay. Digestive erosion and volume of food can also help identify the time elapsed since the last meal. The body in the skip had been damaged by fire, but the food in his stomach was as it had been at the moment of death.
Sissons had sent through the stomach contents, retrieved at the post-mortem. They made an interesting study. Rhona was used to examining the remains of various Glasgow eating habits; McDonald’s and Burger King, pizza and chips, kebabs and curries.
These were more interesting.
Beetroot soup with dumplings was not a Glasgow speciality. Assuming the victim didn’t have a mother at home preparing his favourite meal, he must have eaten at a restaurant that served this type of food.
It didn’t take long to find a possibility. There were several restaurants that had borscht on their menu, but only one that claimed to be authentically Russian, so Rhona decided to try them first.
The phone rang a couple of times before it was picked up. Rhona could hear violin music and chatter in the background. Lunchtime at th
e restaurant sounded popular. The voice that answered was female with an accent, possibly Polish. When Rhona asked to speak to the manager, the girl called out a name that sounded like ‘Misha’ and a man came on the line.
Rhona explained who she was and why she was calling. His voice was deep and slightly accented. ‘Beetroot soup with dumplings. A speciality of ours.’ He laughed. ‘By all means come and try some.’
Mikhail Grigorovitch was younger than Rhona had envisaged on the phone. She’d always imagined Russian men as elderly, stocky and Cossack-hatted, watching tanks roll past, as in newsreels taken at the height of the cold war. Mikhail was the exact opposite.
He offered her a warm handshake and urged her to call him Misha.
‘You will eat, of course?’
‘I really came to take a sample.’
‘It’s important to taste what you sample.’
Misha called over a small, dark-haired waitress with eyes darkly rimmed like Amy Winehouse’s.
‘Borscht for the lady.’
He waved Rhona to an old church pew with the number 207 carved on the back. As she waited for her soup to arrive, she took in the rest of her surroundings. The place was simply furnished but stylish, the accent on colour and all things Russian. On a nearby wall was a painting of hens in a wintry birch wood, a setting sun bathing the scene in an orange-red glow.
The soup arrived, accompanied by Misha, who slipped into the seat opposite. Rhona liked beetroot, at least the pickled variety. She wasn’t so sure about beetroot soup with fat little dumplings floating in it.
Misha gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Try.’
She took a spoonful. It was surprisingly good.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Well?’
‘Delicious.’
‘And the dumplings?’
She broke open a dumpling. It tasted light and savoury. ‘I like them.’
Misha sat back, satisfied by her response.
‘Finish,’ he encouraged, ‘then we talk.’
On the last spoonful, Rhona made an excuse and escaped to the toilet. The interior was decorated with the music of famous Russian composers. She chose the cubicle papered with the work of Rachmaninoff. Then she washed her hands and checked her mouth for beetroot stains, slightly disconcerted that it seemed important to look good.
