by Caro Ramsay
‘You should look at this footage, you know.’
‘Can it wait until tomorrow? I have a bit of an emergency at home.’
‘No, you don’t, or you wouldn’t be hanging around here.’
Wednesday, 18 June
The sun was kissing the horizon when O’Hare pulled the Avensis on to the patch of waste ground, rocking over potholes and the kerbstones of old roads that went nowhere. The motorway thundered overhead.
Costello had been pleased to be pulled from her bed, she hadn’t been sleeping anyway. The shit was hitting the fan big time. The news on Radio Clyde was bad enough, stating that the body had been wrongly identified. God knows what the early editions were going to say. She had been thinking about Eoin since the meeting the previous night. He was the alpha male. He had lost a child, his house, his business. She couldn’t condone what he might have done to Mr Field, but she understood it.
Wyngate was trying to find a connection between Eoin and Riverview. They needed something concrete in this case of shifting sands.
Despite the heat there was a small fire burning in a grate, four men huddled round it, and two more were amusing the two uniformed officers standing guard at the entrance to the old factory. From the security of the car, it all seemed very good-natured. One young gentleman in tracksuit bottoms and a very dirty vest was offering a constable a drink from his can with his badly tattooed left hand. The officer was refusing with good humour.
‘Is this where they hang out now?’ Costello asked. ‘The homeless?’
‘The “domiciliary challenged”? This is one of their des reses. They need, they deserve to be taken off the street and cared for. No point in chasing them until they end up on my table, body fat too low to survive the winter, lungs eaten by TB and liver destroyed by parasites. We are a third world country, Costello.’ O’Hare opened the automatic boot lock. ‘But they will spend the summer down here, the winter up there under the motorway, warm but full of carbon monoxide. The younger ones sleep on the iron beams above the concourse at Glasgow Central.’
Costello turned to face him, grimacing in disbelief. ‘I thought that was an urban myth.’
‘Well, I have the proof. They end up on my table when they turn over in their sleep and hit the concrete below, not nice. Really puts the commuters off their Costa muffins.’
O’Hare killed the engine, and they both sat for a minute watching the scene in the headlights. The young man in the dirty vest was treating the two cops to a display of nifty Astaire-style footwork while holding his precious can of lager steady.
‘Shouldn’t happen in a civilized country, should it?’ said Costello. ‘Look at them, so young.’
‘Young indeed. All sorts now, you know. Some of them are well educated. Some ended up here by bad luck, some because of mental health issues. Some of them have no home to go to because home means systematic abuse of all kinds. Violence like you wouldn’t believe.’ Then O’Hare remembered who he was talking to. ‘Of course you would believe it. Sorry.’
Costello was leaning forward in her seat, watching Dirty Vest Travolta throw a few shapes. She noticed the cops had their hands on their radios, the tall one keeping an eye out back and front, fearing an ambush, wary that Dirty Vest was merely causing a diversion. Those two had been down here before. Dirty Vest finished with a traditional Saturday Night Fever step sequence. ‘I was thinking that we seem to be doing this all the wrong way round. Chasing the victims rather than chasing the perps. Poor sods.’
‘They are the visible nuisance, though, Costello, that’s why the money goes into making them disappear. It’s got better PR value than solving the problem with better housing, better social care … Oh, don’t get me started.’
‘I think he wants us to get started.’ She nodded to the uniformed constable who was walking towards the car while talking down his radio. He looked as if his chin was tucked into his left armpit.
‘He’ll be calling up our reg in a mo. Come on, better put him out his misery.’
‘Who the hell does he think we might be? Tourists wishing to watch the natives?’
‘Damn sight more entertaining than those bloody pandas.’ O’Hare nodded at Dirty Vest, who was now grinding his face into the ground, in a Buckfast-fuelled breakdance. He heard one of the cops tell him to get up before he caught something.
‘You here for Dotty?’ asked the approaching constable, an older man whose years had not mellowed him.
‘If that is the name of the deceased, then yes,’ said O’Hare.
‘Murphy,’ he introduced himself. ‘She’s up there,’ he said. ‘Can’t leave her alone, not with those hyenas circling.’ He looked over to the four figures still huddling together, thin fingers wavering over the fire. Dirty Vest was now trying a Cossack variation on his theme. His friend pointed at him like a magician’s assistant, bouncing slightly to the beat of silent music. Costello could hear the occasional burst of expletives and the punctuation of laughter, a shared joke. A small wiry brown dog pattered over the waste ground towards them with a crumpled chip poke in its mouth, crossing on the diagonal as if it was practising dressage. It lifted its head, looked straight at the car, at Costello, then O’Hare, dismissed them and went on his way.
‘Up here. I’ve left two colleagues with her. That lot would have nicked her back teeth if she’d died with her mouth open.’
Elvie was scrolling the internet, checking reports about McAvoy, when a chat box opened.
Great to hear from you, are you online right now … wow this is sooooo amazing.
Hi Amy Lee, it’s seven in the morning here.
It’s the middle of the night here. Fab! ZZZZZZZ
Amy Lee, have you thought about this?
Yip. It’s like a school project thing and Grandpappy is Scottish so I thought that would be really cool to see like where he came from and all that.
Have you ever been here?
Way no! I’ve been all over here though. Vancouver, Manitoba, Ramsay, Banff, Saskatoon and Revelstoke. That’s all the places I’ve been to school. I learned to rap it. Not that any of them managed to teach me anything. Awesome ;) U ever been here.
To Canada. No.
GP goes back home a lot – every yr that ends with a three and every year that ends with an eight, so that’s like … mmmmm …
Once every five years, does it take him that long to save up
You know my GP, he’s soooo mean!
Most Scotsmen are.
He got himself a really froody Samsung for the eighty-fifth birthday, I showed him how to use the camera on it so I have some pictures of places from that. He doesn’t know I looked. It looks nice, like Banff.
Maybe that’s because Banff is named after Banff. OK, so what would you like to know?
I have a few dollars left over. Can you tell me what I’ll get for my thirty dollars, Canadian dollars? I don’t know what that is in your money.
No worries, just tell me what you would like to know. What’s GP’s name?
He’s Bert Cohoon but was born with different spelling. Do they own bits? Bits near Loch Lomond. That’s where he goes on his holidays.
I’m going there myself tomorrow.
You going looking for clues? Hurrah. That’s awesome.
Not really, but if I find any I’ll let you know.
Haaaaaaa.:) Right on Elvis!
So when is his birthday?
Next Friday, 20 June 1934, like antique. He’s crumbly.
So he has long birthday?
????
It’s the solstice.
Murphy led the way. ‘It was not an easy crime scene to secure, and we weren’t sure it was a crime scene until later. Murder is murder in the eyes of God and the law. A homeless alcoholic setting themselves on fire with cheap alcohol and a dropped cigarette is not unheard of, but I’ve never heard of a homeless person shooting themselves with an arrow then setting themselves on fire.’
‘An arrow?’ repeated O’Hare.
‘Arrow?’ repea
ted Costello, to make sure.
‘Yip,’ he stopped and turned to face them. ‘This is a hangout for all sorts: drugs, homeless, spray painters. They have their wee community, mostly they keep out of the way of the traffic, but I am not having them used as target practice and filmed for YouTube.’
‘Lead on,’ said O’Hare.
‘Nobody from major investigation has been out yet, so I thought I’d call you, Jack. It doesn’t fit right with me.’
‘Oh, I thought this was a legit call,’ said Costello, stopping in her tracks, then recalling that she wasn’t getting any decent sleep anyway.
‘It is now that you know about it,’ said O’Hare, putting a hand on her shoulder and pushing her on.
‘Watch yourself. There are some difficult stairs and rotten boards. Try to stick to the path that we’ve secured. She’s up on the third floor.’
‘I see what you mean about not being able to secure the crime scene,’ said Costello. ‘So what happened here?’
‘Well, we got a phone call from a mobile, a boy from one of the spray-painting gangs that hang around here, from Plantation. He uses this place a lot, knew her as Dotty. He was pretty shaken up when they saw the flames and realised she was underneath. He knew it was her wee den.’
‘Did he see anything? Anybody?’
‘Thought he heard footsteps, more than one person. Maybe a white van driving away. That gang love their art, as they call it, bloody weird. God knows what they take to inspire that.’ He turned to go up on to the next floor and pointed to the wall painting of dagger-toothed ghosts, red eyed and sharp clawed, tearing through a wood of … limbs, Costello realized as she got closer. The paint flaking off the walls cast shadows on the floor of what was once a busy biscuit factory, Gray and Dunn. The home of the caramel wafer. It was a sad and pathetic place now. It seemed deader than the mortuary.
Murphy put his hand out, pointing. ‘Watch your feet there, biohazards, as they say.’
‘Pile of vomit, as we say in the CID.’
‘Ex-stomach contents,’ added O’Hare.
‘Pavement Pizza.’ Murphy chuckled. ‘But to answer your question, they didn’t see anybody specifically. One of them presumed it was a couple of folk from the soup kitchen. They did hear noises but everything in here echoes.’
O’Hare muttered to Costello, ‘Two of them? Old lady set on fire? Seeing a pattern here?’
Murphy caught it but didn’t ask further. ‘She’s up here in the far corner. It’s cool up here – with the height of the building, the wind has a good flow through.’ Murphy had done the job for a long time, telling the pathologist what he might need to know. ‘And life was pronounced extinct by the police surgeon at two a.m. this morning. She was dead as soon as the arrow hit her – nobody survives that. It smells as though an accelerant was used, just a smell that shouldn’t be there. Paraffin? Might be wrong.’ He shrugged.
Both O’Hare and Costello walked past two officers who were looking out of a fractured window pane on to the street below. There was a pile of boxes like a shanty town dwelling with a few plastic bags piled up on top. The concrete near them became blacker and the acrid smell of smoke was still heavy in the air.
There was a bundle of blackened mass that could have been a melted black bin bag. Closer, the form became clearer: a dead human being. An overcooked carcass skewered by an arrow.
Costello stood back, diverting her eyes. She started to feel angry. ‘Is this all there is? No arc lights, no scenes of crime?’
‘Well, look at the crime scene. It was well contaminated and not easy to keep secure. And let face it, she’s—’
‘What? Not worth it?’
Murphy smiled. ‘I was going to say that she’s not going to be easy to trace. Anybody she hangs about with is rarely coherent …’ He looked away from the anger of Costello’s stare. ‘It would be too much investment for not enough return. Sign of the times.’
Costello walked into the next room through a large concrete archway, leaving O’Hare to open his case and persuade Dotty to give up what secrets she was hiding. She looked along the length of the room at the central pillars with peeling paint. Little filigree fingers, waving and pointing, wafting this way and that in an invisible draught that she couldn’t even feel. She closed her eyes. This place gave her the creeps.
She wondered how Dotty got here, what path in her life brought her to this end. She walked round through a hole in the wall through to the room next door. Some old filing cabinets were still here with signs of more recent life: a rolled up fleece, a few old cans of Irn Bru, a few bottles, a wrapped up brown paper like a chip supper. And the dragon painted on the far wall. The art was the product of a dark childhood.
She jumped at a noise again, a rattle of claws. The image of the dagger-toothed demons eating their way through a forest of flesh crossed her mind. Something was up here with her, something of flesh and blood. She looked back and shivered when she realized how far she had walked from Dotty and the others. She backed up, feeling more secure with her gloved hands against the wall, but also a little stupid, four grown men within shouting distance. Couldn’t stop an arrow, though, could they?
It would be a rat. But the noise was loud, in tempo, not like the scurry of a rat. Too quick for a person. It was pitter pattering its way towards her, like the draught making its way up the stairs, winding left and right. She bit her tongue, this was ridiculous. She watched the top of the stairs, staring at eye-level, when something lower caught her line of vision. The wee dog … trotting round like it owned the place. It ignored her, following a well-worn circuit up to the gap in the wall, hopped over and began to sniff at the pile of plastic carrier bags lying beside the victim.
‘Get that bloody thing out of here,’ said O’Hare.
‘Watch out, they bite. Probably feral.’ Murphy extended his baton and started making shooing noises. The dog ignored him, pulling at the Morrisons bags, shaking at one as if shaking a rat, ripping it open and selecting some tasty morsel before trotting away with it, back the way it came.
‘Costello?’
‘Yeah?’ She stepped over the disrupted plastic bags to stand beside the pathologist.
‘See this?’ He indicated something long and thin with his gloved forefinger. ‘An arrow right enough.’
‘So she was hunted?’ Costello looked round. ‘She was cornered up here.’
‘This burning is intense. So I think the arrow came from a bow and it went deep. The arrowhead is missing; it will be in the body tissue somewhere. And this is more charred than the rest of it, so the arrow was alight when it was fired, if you’ll pardon the pun.’
‘Murphy, did you get the addresses of the boys who were here, the graffiti lot?’
He passed the buck smoothly. ‘The Plantation boys, everybody knows who they are, fancy themselves as Banksy.’
O’Hare was still stroking the arrow, his purple gloves pulling on the rough edges of it. ‘It’s rustic, homemade, has the aroma of pine. It’s not an easy thing to do, fire an arrow. You have to be very strong.’
‘As she lay there like a sitting duck.’
O’Hare turned to what was left of the body. ‘But Murphy, I think she is going to be easy to ID. One tooth and lacking in toes? I don’t think they’ve been burned off, so that means amputated. And that means heart disease or diabetes, but there will be a medical trail. She will not be nameless for long.’
‘I thought she was called Dotty?’ said Costello.
‘Only because it rhymed with Potty,’ Murphy told her.
‘Fair enough.’
She turned round, thinking about two old ladies, both set on fire. But it looked like a different accelerant had been used this time. The killer liked to leave a message. She prodded one of the plastic bags with her toe. Two polystyrene burger boxes from McDonald’s toppled out; a pristine black card fell on top of them. She vaguely heard O’Hare say something to her as she reached down and picked it up.
‘Costello!’ O’Hare’s voice
was sharp, but she opened the black envelope anyway. She turned the card up to show her two companions.
Temperance.
Costello was sitting beside the radiator wishing it was on as Sammy had opened all the windows and the draught felt arctic compared to the warmth of the day. She was attempting the Where’s Warren puzzle in the morning paper. This time a Cumberbatch Sherlock was looking deep in Loch Ness. The newspaper felt it was doing a public service by reproducing the cartoon in full to show the internet was not taking the case seriously.
She wiped the palm of her hand down her trousers. No matter how many times she washed her face and hands, she could still smell burned flesh. Sammy had given her a squirt of her Coco Chanel; it was almost worse than the smell of stale urine. She had also given her a tub of moisturiser, for the ‘more mature’ skin. Costello had tried not to be offended.
The smart money was on Dotty being Warren’s mother. The tarot card was now up on the wall. Temperance: the card for letting go of past guilt. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sick.
Wyngate banged through the door, carrying a box that smelled delicious. ‘Brekkie!’
‘There was another death last night, Gordon. Tuck in before you get started.’
He turned round and looked at the wall; the diagram was getting more complicated and more crowded. Two victims of fire, one dismembered. And the original three children. Warren’s face still centre stage. Lexy and Eoin’s photographs were starred, both under surveillance but for different reasons. And a snapshot of the boys from a film at Inchgarten, Warren McAvoy in the background, a crude bow lying in the foreground beside an empty quiver. The words ‘Restricted Information’ over it in black handwriting.
‘So what’s it been like working here?’ Wyngate asked Sammy as she delicately unwrapped two slices of toast – dry toast, Costello noticed – from a small brown bag and placed them in front of her before holding her cup out for Wyngate to fill.
