by James Oswald
‘You think that’s deliberate? Why the killer chose this place to dump the body?’
Something like worry flitted across Cairns’ face at the idea. McLean could understand her concern. No one liked to be outsmarted. Not like this, with the stakes as high as they were.
‘Nobody’s that good,’ she said eventually. ‘We’ll find something. You can trust me on that.’
23
‘Subject is female, Caucasian, early twenties at a guess. In generally good health from her outward appearance.’
Another day, another visit to the city mortuary. McLean had hardly slept the night before, his dreams filled with the silent, pleading, nameless face of the dead woman. He’d risen with the dawn, then paced about the house drinking too much coffee until just before six. Even after walking to the city centre and stopping for yet more coffee, it had been a full hour after he’d arrived that the post-mortem was scheduled. Fortunately for him, Angus Cadwallader wasn’t much of a sleeper either. They’d managed to find another insomniac pathologist to witness the examination and started early.
‘What little blood was left in her has pooled around the shoulders and upper back, which is consistent with the way she was found. There was very little blood at the scene though, which would suggest she was killed elsewhere, then dumped.’
Cadwallader inched his way around the body, exposing the dead woman’s most intimate secrets. A final indignity to add to the violence already done to her. McLean fought the urge to turn away. It was important he witness this, and not just so he could get the information he needed as quickly as possible.
‘There’s no obvious sign of her having been restrained. No bruising around the arms.’
‘She knew her attacker, then.’
‘That would be my best guess.’ Cadwallader fell silent again whilst he studied the body some more. ‘No sign of sexual intercourse, so she wasn’t raped.’
‘She was naked when we found her,’ McLean said.
‘Yes. Yes, she was. That doesn’t necessarily mean any sexual motive though.’
‘No. You’re right. That would be too easy. Have you managed to narrow down time of death? I think we know what killed her.’
‘Don’t jump to conclusions, Tony. She could have been poisoned and her throat cut after she was dead.’
‘Was she?’
‘No. Well, I can’t be sure until the tox screening’s done. We’ve results for alcohol already, but the more esoteric poisons take time.’
‘Alcohol? She’d been drinking?’
‘Not a lot. Couple of glasses of wine maybe, but not long before she died.’
‘Food?’
‘I’m getting to that.’ Cadwallader picked a scalpel off the tray of torture instruments his assistant Tracy had brought over. McLean turned away, like he always did at this point. The picture began to form in his mind. Young woman, finished work and off for a drink. Was she on her own or with friends? Where did she go, and who saw her? Actions for the investigation dropping into place. She meets someone she thinks she knows, but it turns out he’s not the friend she thought he was. But why didn’t she try to defend herself? Unless she didn’t know what was about to happen. If so, it must have been quick, premeditated. And the method of disposal, so casual and yet at the same time so well thought out. It wasn’t by chance that she’d been left somewhere so difficult to investigate forensically. Wasn’t by chance she’d been stripped of all identification.
‘Ah. Now that is interesting.’
McLean turned to see what Cadwallader was talking about, then wished he hadn’t. The pathologist had opened up his patient and removed what was probably her liver. He turned it over and over in his blood-smeared hands, peering closely at it and prodding it. McLean was no expert, but even he could see it was diseased.
‘Cirrhosis?’
‘Quite advanced. Sad to say, but we’re seeing it more and more, especially in young women. I’d guess this one’s had a bottle of wine a day habit for quite some time. Probably binges on spirits at the weekends.’ Cadwallader ploiped the liver into a plastic specimen tub and Tracy took it off to weigh. ‘Poor girl would probably have been showing clinical symptoms soon. Heading for complete liver failure in a year or two if this hadn’t happened to her.’
‘Some silver lining,’ McLean said. ‘But it’s not really relevant to her death though, is it?’
‘No, but it’s interesting.’ Cadwallader gave him a pained look. ‘I suppose you want me to look at her throat now.’
He pulled the overhead light towards the young woman’s head, illuminating the mess that had been made of her neck. ‘The wound’s deep, right through to the vertebrae. It’s been done with a very sharp knife. Probably quite a large blade. I’d have to get a second opinion, but I’d hazard a guess he stood behind her, reached around with his right hand, swept from left to right.’
A chill formed in the pit of McLean’s stomach, only partly at the horrible image of execution and the dead body splayed out on the examination table in front of him. ‘You seen anything like it before?’
‘If you’re asking me was this done by the same person as did for your journalist, I really can’t say.’ Cadwallader prodded the fleshy mess around the dead woman’s neck with the tip of his scalpel. ‘If you’re going to cut someone’s throat, there’s only so many ways you can go about it. Same if you’re cutting your own.’
‘This wasn’t a suicide, Angus. Even I can tell that.’
‘Not saying it was. Just saying it’s not enough to jump to conclusions. There’s a few tests I’ll run that can shed some light on it, but these things are coincidence, occasionally.’
McLean looked again at the dead woman’s pale face, eyes closed, features relaxed in a manner that belied the violent nature of her ending. He shook his head gently, partly at the terrible waste of life, partly at his friend’s words.
‘You know me, Angus. I don’t believe in coincidences.’
‘Her name’s Maureen Shenks. She’s a paediatric nurse. Works at the Sick Kids.’
McLean looked up from his paperwork-strewn desk to see Detective Sergeant Ritchie standing in his open doorway clutching a sheet of paper that smelled as if it was fresh from the printer. A few days back at work and she was looking much better, seemed to have more energy. He wondered where she was getting it from and if there was any going spare.
‘Maureen Shenks.’ McLean repeated the name as if doing so might give any meaning to her death. ‘We know anything about her?’
‘Apart from this? No.’ Ritchie flicked the sheet of paper with a finger, then stepped into the room and handed it over. The top half of the page was a photograph, quite obviously of the woman whose body they had found in the bin the day before. The rest was a brief summary of her life. Edinburgh born and raised. Twenty-three years old. Nothing on record with the police.
‘Family?’
‘Not sure. MacBride’s working on it. She’s young enough her parents could be still alive. This came from Missing Persons, though. She didn’t turn up to work three days ago. Flatmate phoned it in.’
‘I guess we’d better talk to the flatmate then.’
‘I’ve given her a phone. She’s on duty. Works at the Sick Kids too. Want me to bring her in when her shift’s done?’
‘I think this is probably serious enough to interrupt her shift, don’t you?’ McLean grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. The wall directly opposite his window was painted bright with sunshine. ‘And it’s too nice an afternoon not to walk.’
‘It’s not like her to just up and leave like that. I mean, she loves the kids. Lives for them. Some of them get really upset if she doesn’t see them every day.’
Maureen Shenks’ flatmate was a mousy young woman called Adele. ‘Pronounced like the penguin,’ she’d said when they had first arrived at the hospital. She’d been hesitant about abandoning her duties, but as soon as McLean had identified himself as detective inspector her attitude had changed. Now they were hudd
led together in a small room at the back of the main building, which judging by its contents was a place old cardboard boxes went to die.
‘I asked about. You know, just in case she’d gone off on a date and … well …’
‘Did she do that often? Stay out overnight?’
The internal struggle in Adele’s mind was writ large across her face, the conflict between telling the truth and protecting the reputation of her friend and flatmate. ‘Not often.’ The stress fell tellingly on the second word of her answer.
‘Did she have a boyfriend, then? Someone she was seeing steady?’ DS Ritchie asked the questions; they had decided it would be better that way on the walk over from the station. McLean’s earlier idea that it was too nice a day not to walk had lasted almost ten minutes before the searing heat and his dark wool suit had persuaded him otherwise. It was refreshingly cool in their makeshift interview room, but his shirt was still clammy against his back.
‘There was a bloke. Tommy something. But that was a year or so back. They went out for almost three months before she broke it off.’ Adele paused in her flow long enough for Ritchie to start to ask another question, then added: ‘Tommy Adshead. That was his name. Knew it would come to me eventually.’
‘What about family?’ Ritchie asked again.
Adele looked momentarily puzzled, as if she couldn’t quite understand the link between ex-boyfriend and relatives.
‘Her parents. Where are they?’ McLean asked.
‘Oh, right. Mo never knew her dad. All her mum would say was he was her worst mistake and Mo was her best. That’s sweet, isn’t it?’
‘Have you spoken to her about Maureen? Her mother?’ Ritchie had a pad in front of her and had scribbled ‘boyfriend’ and ‘mother’ so far. Nothing else. She’d already put a line through ‘boyfriend’.
‘Oh, no. Jane’s away with the fairies. Half the time she doesn’t even recognise her own daughter, let alone me.’
Ritchie ran a line through ‘mother’. ‘She’s senile?’
‘Early onset Alzheimer’s. She’s in a home in Corstorphine.’
‘And there’s no one else? Brother, sister?’
‘Why do you … Oh.’ Adele fell silent, her gaze going from Ritchie to McLean and back. The full implication of there being a detective inspector involved beginning to sink in.
‘She’s not … you’ve … I mean, she’s OK isn’t she? You’ve found her?’
‘You reported her missing this morning.’ Ritchie glossed over the questions with her own. ‘How long had Maureen been gone by then?’
‘I’ve been on days and she’s been on nights, so we’ve not seen each other that much lately. But she usually lets me know if she’s going out. I missed her completely yesterday, but I could tell she’d not been in when I got home last night. I got a call from here to see where she was. She never turned up to her shift, you see. Thought she might have been … I mean … I called you lot when I got in this morning and she’d missed another shift.’
‘That was unusual, was it? For her to miss a shift?’
‘Don’t think Mo’s ever …’ Adele’s voice tailed off as her eyes widened in realisation. ‘You’ve found her, haven’t you?’
‘We think so, yes.’ At McLean’s words, Adele looked up from her nervous fingers. He held her gaze, waited until she had calmed down. ‘Am I right in thinking Maureen had no immediate family other than her mother?’
‘That’s right,’ the nurse nodded, seeming much younger than when they had first met.
‘And how long have you known her?’
‘Me? Since we were little. Six, maybe? Earlier?’
Damn, there was no easy way to do this. ‘Well, I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, Adele, but Maureen’s dead. We found her body yesterday afternoon.’
‘Dead?’ The nurse’s voice had been squeaky to start with. Now it notched up another octave. ‘How?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. All I can say at the moment is it wasn’t natural, and it wasn’t an accident.’
‘She … she was killed?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ The nurse was fidgeting with her hands again, wringing them round and round each other. McLean reached out and took a hold of one, gently. ‘Adele, I’m sorry. This must be a terrible shock, but it’s very important I know as much about your friend as I can.’
She looked up at him, eyes wet with tears. When did adults start looking so young? Had he been like that, back when he first joined up? It seemed unlikely.
‘Of course. Anything.’
‘Thank you.’ McLean patted the nurse’s hand, then sat back. ‘There is one thing. You’re not family, so you can say no if you’d rather not. But we need someone to positively identify the body.’
Adele looked up sharply, the ghost of an idea flitting across her face. McLean had seen it all too often before, that tiny spark of hope. Maybe it wasn’t her friend lying on the cold slab in the mortuary. Maybe it was someone else who just happened to look similar. Sometimes that spark flared, became a lifeline, and that made the crushing reality all the harder to accept. This time it died quickly; the rational, nurse’s mind winning the battle. She wiped at her nose, sniffed.
‘I’ve seen dead bodies before. Children, mostly. This place …’ She trailed off.
‘I’ll have a word with your boss. See about getting you the rest of the day off. DS Ritchie will organise taking you to the mortuary.’
Adele’s boss was a harassed-looking woman about McLean’s age. He could see that she wasn’t happy at losing yet another nurse for the day, but she took the news of Maureen Shenks’ death in her stride. McLean had been going to ask her to come to the station; he’d have to interview her as part of the investigation. One look at the bustling busyness of the hospital, though, was enough to persuade him it would be better to set up something there instead; possibly the box-filled room at the back of the old building. Losing one of the nurses in such a terrible fashion was going to be disruptive enough without all the staff being dragged off across town at hourly intervals to talk to the police.
‘We all done here?’ He turned away from the reception desk to where DS Ritchie was standing, mobile phone in hand.
‘For now, aye. Just sorting a car. I take it you want me to go with her?’ She nodded in the direction of Adele, sitting on a chair in the waiting area and staring into the middle distance in the manner of someone trying to come to terms with news that’s too big to comprehend.
‘Please,’ McLean said. ‘I’ll head back to the station and bring Dagwood up to speed. I’ve a horrible feeling this is another Category A, though.’
They were both walking across the reception hall, McLean for the door, Ritchie for the nurse, when she stopped in mid-stride, and turned so suddenly McLean felt her hand brush against him. He followed her gaze to where a white-coated doctor was disappearing through a door.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
Ritchie shook her head. ‘Sorry. Just thought I recognised someone. Didn’t expect to see him here.’
‘Oh yes? Something I should know about?’ McLean raised an eyebrow and grinned to let Ritchie know he was only kidding. He must have struck a nerve though, as her freckles darkened in embarrassment.
‘No. It’s nothing like … I mean … No. Just someone I met at a … meeting.’
‘None of my business anyway, Sergeant.’ McLean gave her a slap on the arm, as much to cover his own embarrassment as anything. He’d meant it as a joke, but it had clearly backfired. ‘I’ll see you back at the station, aye?’
He left her standing in the middle of the hall, resumed his walk to the door. He had an idea he knew what the meeting was that DS Ritchie meant, but couldn’t quite work out why she was so uncomfortable talking about it.
24
‘Jon’s been coming here since he was six. Can you imagine that?’
I let him stew a fortnight, kept away from both hospitals, disappeared as if I’d been no more than a figment of his
imagination. It was wise to keep away while the police were asking questions, too. She had to go, the nurse. She was too much of a temptation to him, and I couldn’t risk him falling when he’s so close to perfection.
It hasn’t hurt to keep him waiting, though. If anything his righteous zeal has grown. When I appeared in the reception hall just after his shift end, he fell upon me like a starving man on a meal. No admonishment for missing our earlier engagement, no asking me where I’d been. He simply guided me through the building to an intensive care ward, pausing only to make sure we were both kitted out in sterile gowns and face masks, even though we will come no nearer to the object of his concern than a pane of glass away.
‘What’s the matter with him?’
It’s fairly obvious, given the state of the boy. He lies sunken into plump white cushions, surrounded by machines, connected to them with wires and tubes. His face is mostly obscured by an oxygen mask, but what little I can see of it has a pallor associated more with the very old than the very young. His eyes are panda-like, dark and sunken as he dozes. He has no hair, not even eyelashes, just sweat-shiny skin the colour of rancid custard, splodged here and there with darker patches.
Jim reaches a slow hand up to the glass, splays fingers on the surface. ‘What’s right with him? Most of his organs are barely functional. Every time we think we’ve got it beaten, the cancer just comes back again. He’s on chemo at the moment, but honestly, it’s not going so well. It’s a brutal way to treat a child, anyway.’
‘What if we could try something different?’
‘There is nothing different. Unless you mean prayer.’ He looks at me. I can see the reflection of his head in the glass as he turns, but I keep my eyes on the boy. ‘Trust me, if I thought that’d work I’d try it.’
‘Actually I was thinking of something a little more … scientific? You’ll be aware of cell line therapy. Individual cultures, DNA reprofiling?’ I rattle off the words, all gleaned from the papers I found in his flat. Fascinating stuff, if you’re into that sort of thing. His reflection drops its head, his hand coming away from the glass as his young patient continues to die a long, painful, drawn-out death.
