by Peter May
He stood for a moment, looking up at the window from which he had so often watched the sun and the rain and the snow sweep across the shadowed slopes of Salisbury Craggs. All the seasons of all the wasted years. And he slipped out into St Leonard’s to flag down a taxi.
His cab dropped him on the steep cobbled slope of the Royal Mile, just below St Giles’ Cathedral, and he found Mona waiting for him in Parliament Square. She was still in her drab winter greys, almost lost among the classical architecture of this Athens of the north, sandstone buildings blackened by time and smoke. He supposed it reflected her mood. But she was more than depressed. Her agitation was clear.
‘You’re late.’
‘Sorry.’ He took her arm and they hurried across the deserted square, through arches beneath towering columns. And he wondered if his lateness had been subliminally contrived. Not so much an unwillingness to let go of the past, as a fear of the unknown, of leaving the safety of a comfortable relationship to face a future alone.
He glanced at Mona as they entered the portals of what had once been the home of the Scottish Parliament, before the landowners and merchants who sat here had succumbed three hundred years before to the bribes of the English and sold out the people they were supposed to represent to a union they didn’t want. Fin and Mona’s, too, had been a union of convenience, a loveless friendship. It had been driven by occasional sex, and held together only by the shared love of their son. And now, without Robbie, it was ending here, in the Court of Session. A decree nisi absolute. A piece of paper bringing to a close a chapter of their lives which had taken sixteen years to write.
He saw the pain of it in her face, and all the regrets of a lifetime came back to haunt him.
In the end it took only a few minutes to consign all those years to the dustbin of history. The good times and bad. The struggles, the laughs, the fights. And they emerged into brilliant sunlight spilling down across the cobbles, the rumble of traffic out on the Royal Mile. Other people’s lives flowing past, while theirs had been shifted from pause to stop. They stood like still figures at the centre of a time-lapse film, the rest of the world eddying around them at high speed.
Sixteen years on and they were strangers again, unsure of what to say, except goodbye, and almost afraid to say that out loud, in spite of the pieces of paper they held in their hands. Because beyond goodbye, what else was there? Fin opened his leather bag to slip the paperwork inside, and his photocopied sheets in their beige folder slid out and scattered around his feet. He stooped quickly to gather them up, and Mona crouched down to help him.
He was aware of her head turning towards him as she took several of them in her hand. It must have been clear to her at a glance what they were. Her own statement was among them. A few hundred words that described a life taken and a relationship lost. The sketch of a face drawn from her own description. Fin’s obsession. But she said nothing. She stood up, handing them to him, and watched as he stuffed them back in his bag.
When they reached the street, and the moment of parting could no longer be avoided, she said, ‘Will we stay in touch?’
‘Is there any point?’
‘I suppose not.’
And in those few words, all the investment they had made in each other over all these years, the shared experiences, the pleasure and the pain, were lost for ever like snowflakes on a river.
He glanced at her. ‘What will you do when the house is sold?’
‘I’ll go back to Glasgow. Stay with my dad for a while.’ She met his eye. ‘What about you?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes, you do.’ It was almost an accusation. ‘You’ll go back to the island.’
‘Mona, I’ve spent most of my adult life avoiding that.’
She shook her head. ‘But you will. You know it. You can never escape the island. It was there between us all those years, like an invisible shadow. It kept us apart. Something we could never share.’
Fin took a deep breath and felt the warmth of the sun on his face as he raised it for a moment to the sky. Then he looked at her. ‘There was a shadow, yes. But it wasn’t the island.’
Of course, she was right. There was nowhere else to go, except back to the womb. Back to the place that had nurtured him, alienated him, and in the end driven him away. It was the only place, he knew, that there was any chance of finding himself again. Among his own people, speaking his own tongue.
He stood on the foredeck of the Isle of Lewis and watched the gentle rise and fall of her bow as she ploughed through the unusually still waters of the Minch. The mountains of the mainland had vanished long ago, and the ship’s horn sounded forlornly now as they slipped into the dense spring haar that blanketed the eastern coast of the island.
Fin peered intently into swirling grey, feeling the wetness of it on his face, until finally the faintest shadow emerged from its gloom. The merest smudge on a lost horizon, eerie and eternal, like the ghost of his past come back to haunt him.
As the island took gradual shape in the mist he felt all the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, and was almost overwhelmed by a sense of homecoming.
FOUR
Gunn sat at his desk squinting at the computer screen. Subliminally he registered the sound of a foghorn not far out in the Minch, and knew that the ferry would be docking shortly.
He shared his first-floor office with two other detectives, and had a fine view from his window of the Blythswood Care charity shop on the other side of Church Street. Christian care for body and soul. If he cared to crane his neck he could see as far up the road as the Bangla Spice Indian restaurant with its luridly coloured sauces and irresistible garlic fried rice. But right now the subject matter on his screen had banished all thoughts of food.
Bog bodies, also known as bog people, were preserved human bodies found in sphagnum bogs in northern Europe, Great Britain and Ireland, he read on the Wikipedia page on the subject. Acidic water, low temperatures and lack of oxygen combined to preserve the skin and organs, so much so that it was even possible in some cases to recover fingerprints.
He wondered about the body laid out in the cold cabinet in the autopsy room at the hospital. Now that it was out of the bog, how quickly might it start to deteriorate? He scrolled down the page and looked at the photograph of a head taken from a body recovered sixty years ago from a peat bog in Denmark. A chocolate-brown face remarkably well defined, one cheek squashed up against the nose where it had lain in repose, an orange stubble still clearly visible on the upper lip and jaw.
‘Ah, yes, Tollund Man.’
Gunn looked up to see a tall, willowy, lean-faced figure with a halo of dark, thinning hair leaning down to get a closer look at his screen.
‘Carbon dating of his hair placed him from around 400 BC. The idiots who performed the autopsy cut off his head and threw the rest of him away. Except for his feet and one finger, which are still preserved in formalin.’ He grinned and held out a hand. ‘Professor Colin Mulgrew.’
Gunn was surprised by the strength of his handshake. He seemed so slight.
Almost as if he had read his mind, or detected his wince as they shook, Professor Mulgrew smiled and said, ‘Pathologists need good hands, Detective Sergeant. For cutting through bone and prising apart skeletal structures. You’d be surprised how much strength is required.’ There was just the hint of cultured Irish in his accent. He turned back to Tollund Man. ‘Amazing, isn’t it? After two thousand four hundred years, it was still possible to tell that he’d been hanged, and that his last meal had been a porridge of grain and seeds.’
‘Were you involved in that post-mortem, too?’
‘Bloody hell, no. Way before my time. Mine was Old Croghan Man, pulled out of an Irish bog in 2003. He was nearly as old though. Certainly more than two thousand years. Helluva big man for his day. Six foot six. Imagine. A bloody giant.’ He scratched his head and grinned. “So what’ll we call your man, then, eh? Lewis man?”
Gunn swivelled in his seat a
nd waved the professor towards a free chair. But the pathologist shook his head.
‘Been sitting for bloody hours. And the flights up here don’t give you much leg room.’
Gunn nodded. Slightly smaller than average height himself, he had never found that a problem. ‘So how did your Old Croghan Man die?’
‘Murdered. Tortured first. There were deep cuts under each of his nipples. Then he was stabbed in the chest, decapitated, and his body cut in half.’ The professor wandered across to the window and peered up and down the street as he spoke. ‘Bit of a mystery really, because he had beautifully manicured fingernails. So not a working man. There is no doubt he was a meat eater, but his last meal was a mix of wheat and buttermilk. My old pal Ned Kelly, at the National Museum of Ireland, thinks he was sacrificed to ensure good yields of corn and milk in the royal lands nearby.’ He turned back to Gunn. ‘The Indian restaurant up the road any good?’
Gunn shrugged. ‘Not bad.’
‘Good. Haven’t had a decent bloody Indian for ages. So where’s our man now?’
‘In a refrigerated drawer at the hospital morgue.’
Professor Mulgrew rubbed his hands together. ‘We’d better go and take a look at him then before he starts decomposing on us. Then a bite of lunch? I’m bloody starving.’
The body, laid out now on the autopsy table, had an oddly shrunken look about it, well built, but diminished somehow. It was the colour of tea and looked as if it might have been sculpted in resin.
Professor Mulgrew wore a dark-blue jumpsuit beneath a surgical gown, and a bright yellow face mask covering mouth and nose. Above it perched a ridiculously large pair of protective tortoiseshell glasses that seemed to shrink the size of his head, and turn him, incongruously, into a bizarre caricature of himself. Without any apparent awareness of how absurd he looked, he moved nimbly around the table taking measurements, his white tennis shoes protected by green plastic covers.
He crossed to the whiteboard to scrawl up the initial statistics, talking all the time above the squeak of his felt pen. ‘The poor bugger weighs a mere forty-one kilograms. Not much for a man of 173 centimetres in height.’ He peered over his glasses at Gunn. ‘That’s just over five feet eight to you.’
‘Was he ill, do you think?’
‘No, not necessarily. Although he’s well preserved, he will have lost of lot of fluid weight over the years. He looks a pretty healthy specimen to me.’
‘What age?’
‘Late teens, early twenties, I’d say.’
‘No, I mean, how long had he been in the peat?’
Professor Mulgrew raised one eyebrow and tipped his head scathingly in Gunn’s direction. ‘Patience, please. I’m not a bloody carbon-dating machine, Detective Sergeant.’
He returned to the body and turned it over on to its front, leaning in close as he brushed away fragments of brown and yellow-green moss.
‘Were there any clothes found with the body?’
‘No, nothing.’ Gunn moved nearer to see if he could discern what it was that had attracted Mulgrew’s attention. ‘We dug over the whole area. No clothes, no artefacts of any kind.’
‘Hmmm. In that case I would say he’d probably been wrapped in a blanket of some sort before being buried. And he must have lain in it for quite a few hours.’
Gunn’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment. ‘How can you tell that?’
‘In the hours after death, Mr Gunn, the blood settles in the lower portion of the body causing a purplish red discoloration of the skin. We call it post-mortem lividity. If you look carefully at his back, buttocks and thighs you will see that the skin is darker, but there is a paler, blanched pattern in the lividity.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that he lay for at least eight to ten hours on his back after death, wrapped in some kind of rough blanket whose weave left its pattern in the darker coloration. We can clean him off and photograph it and, if you like, have an artist make a sketch to reproduce the pattern.’
Using a pair of tweezers, he recovered several fibres still clinging to the skin.
‘Could be wool,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t be hard to confirm that.’
Gunn nodded, but decided not to ask what point there would be in identifying the pattern and fabric of a blanket woven hundreds or even thousands of years before. The pathologist returned to an examination of the head.
‘The eyes are too far gone to determine the colour of the irides, and this dark red-brown hair is no indication at all of what colour it might have been originally. It’s been dyed by the peat, the same as the skin.’ He poked about in the nostrils. ‘But this is interesting.’ He examined his latexed fingertips. ‘A fair amount of fine-grained silver sand in his nose. Which would appear to be the same as the sand apparent in the abrasions on his knees and the tops of his feet.’ He moved up to the forehead, then, and gently cleaned away some dirt from the left temple and the hair above it. ‘Bloody hell!’
‘What?’
‘He’s got a curved scar on the left front-temporal scalp. About ten centimetres in length.’
‘A wound?’
The professor shook his head thoughtfully. ‘No, it looks like a surgical scar. At a guess I would say that this young man has had an operation performed at some time on a head injury.’
Gunn was stunned. ‘Well, that means this is a much more recent corpse than we thought, doesn’t it?’
Mulgrew’s smile conveyed both superiority and amusement. ‘Depends what you mean by recent, Detective Sergeant. Brain surgery is probably one of the oldest practised medical arts. There is ample archaeological evidence of it dating back to Neolithic times.’ He paused, then added as an afterthought for Gunn’s benefit, ‘The Stone Age.’
He turned his attention now to the neck, and the broad, deep wound that incised it. He measured it at 18.4 centimetres.
‘Is that what killed him?’ Gunn asked.
Mulgrew sighed now. ‘I am guessing, Detective Sergeant, that you have not attended many post-mortems.’
Gunn blushed. ‘Not many, sir, no.’ He did not want to confess that there had only been one before.
‘It is bloody well impossible for me to determine cause of death until I have opened him up. And even then, I can’t guarantee it. His throat has been cut, yes. But he has multiple stab wounds in his chest, and another in the right scapular back. There are abrasions on his neck that would suggest the presence of a rope around it, and similar abrasions on his wrists and ankles.’
‘Like his hands and feet had been tied?’
‘Exactly. He may have been hanged, hence the abrasions on his neck, or else he may have been dragged along a beach using that same rope, which would explain the sand in the broken skin on his knees and feet. In any event, it is far too early to be submitting theories on the cause of death. There are multiple possibilities.’
A darker patch of skin on the right forearm was attracting his attention now. He wiped at it with his swab, then turned to lift a scrubbing sponge from the stainless-steel sink behind him, and began roughly rubbing away the top layer of skin. ‘Sweet fucking Jesus,’ he said.
Gunn canted his head to try to get a better look at it. ‘What is it?’
Professor Mulgrew was silent for a long time before looking up to meet Gunn’s eye. ‘Why were you so keen to know how long the body might have been in the bog?’
‘So I can clear it off my slate, Professor, and hand it over to the archaeologists.’
‘I’m afraid you might not be able to do that, Detective Sergeant.’
‘Why?’
‘Because this body has been in the peat for no more than fifty-six years – at the very most.’
Gunn felt his face colour with indignation. ‘You told me not ten minutes ago that you were not a bloody carbon-dating machine.’ He enjoyed putting the emphasis on the bloody. ‘How can you possibly know that?’
Mulgrew smiled. ‘Take a closer look at the right forearm, Detective Sergeant. I think you’ll see that wha
t we have here is a crude tattooed portrait of Elvis Presley above the legend Heartbreak Hotel. Now, I’m pretty certain that Elvis wasn’t around in the time before Christ. And as a confirmed fan I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, that ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was a number one hit in the year 1956.’
FIVE
Professor Mulgrew took almost two hours to complete the autopsy after breaking for a lunch of onion bhaji, lamb bhuna with garlic fried rice, and kulfi ice cream. George Gunn had a cheese sandwich in his office, and was having trouble keeping it down.
The leather-like quality of the skin had made it impossible to open up the chest using a simple scalpel, and in the end the pathologist had resorted to the use of a pair of heavy scissors to cut through it before switching to his accustomed scalpel to reflect the remaining skin and muscles away from the ribcage.
Now the body lay opened up, like something that might be found hanging from a butcher’s hook, internal organs removed and breadloafed. But this had been a strong, healthy young man, and nothing found internally had detracted from the notion that his death had been caused by anything other than a brutal murder. A murder perpetrated by someone who might, just conceivably, still be alive.
‘Bloody interesting corpse, Detective Sergeant.’ Beads of sweat had gathered in the creases on his brow, but Professor Mulgrew was enjoying himself. ‘Didn’t have quite as interesting a last meal as I did. Flakes of soft meat, and minute translucent fibre-like material resembling fish bones. Fish and potatoes probably.’ He grinned. ‘Anyway, happy to give you a hypothesis now on how he might have died.’
Gunn was mildly surprised. From everything he had heard, pathologists were almost invariably reluctant to commit themselves to anything. But Mulgrew was clearly a man supremely confident of his own abilities. He closed up the ribcage, folded the skin and tissue back across the chest towards his initial incision, and poked with his scalpel at the wounds.
‘He was stabbed four times in the chest. From the downward angle of the strokes I would say that his attacker was either very much taller than him, or the victim was on his knees. I favour the latter, but we’ll come to that. The wounds were inflicted by a long, thin, double-bladed knife. Something like a Fairbairn-Sykes, or some other kind of stiletto. This one here, for example’ – he indicated the topmost wound – ‘is about five-eighths of an inch in length and pointed at both tips, which almost certainly indicates a thin, double-bladed weapon. It is five inches deep, passing through the apex of the left lung, the right atrium of the heart and into the ventricular septum. So it’s quite long, and typical of the other three wounds.’
