Bury Them Deep

by Oswald, James

  The tongue-cloth resumes its rough licking, working its way over her body with ungentle thoroughness. She is naked, she knows, and no part of her is spared the cleaning. It should be soothing, to be washed this way, but it is far from that. With each waking moment, each chafing rub against raw skin, the memories build. How long has she been asleep? How long since she stumbled through the forest to what she thought was help? The empty hollowness at her core is something beyond hunger. When did she last eat?

  With each passing moment more sensation returns. The sounds of washing and the woman’s breathy muttering are less muffled now. She can smell something foul, thankfully distant. A mixture of human ordure and rot that reminds her of dead animals in a farmyard. And there is something else mixed in, a spicy smokiness she can’t place. It sparks a fear in her, another fear among the many terrors she is helpless before.

  ‘That’s much better.’ The cloth has finished at her feet, and she hears the sound of it splashing into a bucket nearby. A hand runs over her damp body, fingers splayed over her naked flesh, feeling for something as they work back up to her head, softly caress her cheeks like a mother might quieten a frightened child, like a lover might express their devotion. Then the fingers pinch, forcing her mouth to open. Liquid trickles into her mouth, reflex making her swallow it down. It is water, but sweet and fresh. Only then does she realise how thirsty she is, how parched her throat.

  ‘Good, good. Drink it all down.’ The woman’s voice has a soft burr to it that might be soothing in any other circumstance. Her words don’t reassure though, quite the opposite.

  ‘God will free you from all your sins, my child. But you must be clean before He can enter fully into you.’

  31

  The lightest haze of smoke coloured the morning air as McLean walked across the car park and into the station. Normally he would have expected a breeze off the Forth to clear it away, but there was none, the utter stillness threatening another sweltering day ahead.

  There were few officers about as he climbed the stairs to the third floor and his office. It was early, but even so he would have expected more of a buzz. Clearly the fire had kept everyone busy throughout the night. It gave him a tiny pang of guilt to think that he’d been eating fine food and drinking fine wine while his colleagues were putting in the extra hours, but the feeling was short-lived when he realised he’d have to spend most of the morning trying to sort out the mess that would have been made of the budgets by so much unplanned overtime.

  He was coaxing the coffee machine into action, putting off the inevitable struggle with the paperwork, when a light knock at the open door provided a different distraction. Detective Inspector Ritchie stood on the threshold, her normal slightly worried expression deepened by weariness. Her cheeks and forehead had a slightly sunburned hue to them, accentuating the pale lines where her eyebrows had never quite grown back after she had rescued McLean from a fire some years earlier. Clearly she’d been close to the flames again, which surprised him. It was one thing to send as many uniformed constables and sergeants out to help, but a detective inspector?

  ‘Out on the moors last night, were you?’ McLean pulled two mugs from the tray beside the coffee machine. Ritchie looked like she needed one.

  ‘Aye. Not my idea of a great night out. See if I find the wee . . .’ She swore so quietly McLean couldn’t quite make out what she said. ‘. . . I’d throttle the life out of him, so I would.’

  ‘You reckon it was deliberately set?’

  ‘Like as not. There’s been a spate of fires around that area recently. Can’t all be accidental.’

  McLean recalled his conversation with the sergeant from Penicuik. He’d said much the same thing. ‘They got someone looking into that?’

  ‘Funny you should ask. Jayne just handed it to me this morning. Of course, it might all be nothing. Ground’s as dry as anything up there. It’s all dead heather and gorse too. Goes up like you wouldn’t believe. And the smoke.’ Ritchie stifled a yawn that turned into a cough. Thumped at her chest a couple of times.

  McLean poured coffee, then realised he had no milk. Shrugging, he carried both mugs over, handing one to the detective inspector. ‘There you go. That’ll wake you up.’

  Ritchie looked at the black liquid, grimaced. ‘You know they say people who drink their coffee black are more likely to be psychopaths?’

  ‘What about people who forget to buy milk on their way in to work?’

  ‘Definitely psychopaths.’ Ritchie drank, grimaced again, then drank some more.

  ‘What if it’s kids?’ McLean asked, the thought popping into his head almost from nowhere.

  ‘What, psychopaths?’ Ritchie’s brow furrowed, her missing eyebrows disappearing almost completely.

  ‘No. Setting the fires, I mean. You’ve had, what? One at Rosskettle, the burned-out car and now the moorland. All in the last week. What else has happened in that time?’

  Ritchie stared at him as if he were mad, then something clicked. ‘School holidays.’

  ‘Exactly. And it was a child who called in the car fire. Mentioned his friend Bobby. What’s the betting they started it in the first place? Probably didn’t think it’d go up the way it did. Our helpful caller found a conscience and headed for the nearest phone box.’

  Ritchie cocked her head to one side. ‘It’s plausible, I guess. How long’s it take to get from the burned-out car to the phone box?’

  McLean was about to answer that he wasn’t sure, but it was worth working out, when another light knock distracted the two of them. He looked past Ritchie to see Detective Constable Harrison standing in the doorway. Like the detective inspector, her face bore the rosy hue of someone who’d been standing too close to a source of heat for a while. Had the entire station gone out to help fight the fire while he went home?

  ‘What is it, Janie?’ DI Ritchie asked before McLean could speak.

  ‘Call just came in from the moorland fire. It’s pretty much out now. Certainly under control. But see, they’ve found something.’ Harrison was a little breathless, and McLean wondered if she’d inhaled too much smoke, or simply run to his office from wherever she’d been when she learned this clearly important news.

  ‘Something?’ he asked. ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘It’s bones sir. In the ground. Human bones.’

  McLean gazed over the blackened moorland, grey-white smoke still drifting up in places like dry-ice fog in a horror movie. The more hardy shrubs had been reduced to skeletons by the fire, and scorched boulders poked up out of dry earth like the skulls of the dead rising. The destruction spread from the road a good 200 metres up the hillside, where a low drystone wall had held back the flames. He dreaded to think what might have happened had it not been there.

  A lone fire engine stood in the lay-by, firemen packing up the last of their gear. Police cars and forensics vans clustered around it like piglets at a sow. Just as well they’d closed the road; there was no way anyone would be able to get through.

  ‘Any idea where it started?’ McLean asked, after showing his warrant card to the first fireman he could find who wasn’t obviously busy.

  ‘Down by the old farm track’s our best bet.’ The fireman waved a hand over the blackened, smoking ground towards a point a few hundred metres downhill. ‘There’s been a few fires around here in the past couple of weeks. Could just be coincidence of course. Everything’s so dry it doesn’t take much to set it off.’

  ‘Control said something about bones?’

  ‘Aye. The forensics folk are setting up over there.’ The fireman pointed to a spot a bit further up the road where a couple of technicians were standing outside a scene-of-crime tent. McLean thanked him and set off towards it. Out here, away from the city, the air was normally sweet, but now the smoke tickled his throat, threatening a nasty headache for later. The heat of the sun overhead felt amplified by the burned earth, and t
he still air only added to the sensation of being in some kind of hellscape. By the time he reached the tent he was sweating.

  ‘Might want to put some overalls on, sir.’

  McLean glanced at the young woman standing by the open rear doors of a forensics van. He was about to protest, when he saw the condition of her own white paper overalls. Black knees and arms from the burned heather, ash all over her front. At some point she must have rubbed at an itch on her face too, smearing more black on her cheek.

  ‘Thanks. I’m guessing you’ll not find much recent forensic evidence here.’ He took the overalls she offered him, and started to pull them on. They never fitted, and an extra layer in this heat was the last thing he wanted. On the other hand, his suit was clean on that morning. Emma wouldn’t be best pleased if he came home stinking like a fire pit either.

  Gazing out over the scorched earth, it was hard to imagine what this part of the hill had looked like before the fire. By the contours of the land, the point where the tent had been pitched was at the top of a natural gully, maybe a small burn in the distant past. No doubt the vegetation had been thicker there, hiding it from casual sight until it was scoured away by the fire. McLean followed the narrow path made by earlier feet, relieved to find a familiar face at the end. Dr Tracy Sharp was assistant to the city pathologist, Angus Cadwallader.

  ‘Afternoon, Tracy. Angus in the tent, I take it?’

  ‘He is, yes.’ Dr Sharp gave him a friendly smile, then coughed. ‘It’s not so easy to breathe in there, and a wee bit on the warm side to be comfortable. I’m not really needed here, given the circumstances.’

  ‘I’d better go see what’s up anyway.’

  ‘Aye, well. Suit yourself.’ She stood aside, and McLean squeezed past, pulled open the tent flap and stepped inside.

  Dr Sharp had been right about the heat. The inside of the tent was like an oven, and the smell of burned heather almost overpowered him. McLean wanted to tie back the entrance flap and let some slightly cooler air circulate, but he couldn’t find any kind of tether. Best make it a quick inspection then.

  ‘Morning, Angus. What have you got for me here?’

  The city pathologist had his back to the entrance, kneeling in the ash-blackened dirt. McLean recognised the balding crown and grey-brown hair well enough though. At his question, Angus Cadwallader straightened his back and turned. As he did so, McLean caught the first glimpse of bones.

  ‘Ah, Tony. Excellent. I’m afraid there’s not much I can tell you about this poor soul. Or should I say these poor souls?’

  ‘I was told it was a skeleton.’ McLean edged carefully around the pathologist until he could see properly. He crouched down beside a shallow pit, scraped in the ground. What could only be described as a mismatched jumble of bones poked from the charred soil at all angles.

  ‘Skeleton implies bones laid out as they would be in a body. These are more like dismembered remains. And from more than one person too.’

  McLean stopped himself from rubbing at his forehead, remembering the young forensic technician who had given him his paper overalls, the ash smudges on her cheeks. The more he looked, the more he saw. Dozens of bones scattered around like rubbish from a seagull-scavenged bin bag. Small pieces that might have been from hands or feet, one end of what looked like a femur poking out of the dirt at a jaunty angle. Something that looked uncomfortably like the top of a spine, although there was no skull to be seen.

  ‘They’re all human though?’ He sank gently onto his knees as a twinge in his own hip reminded him of what he was looking at.

  ‘Far as I can tell. And there’s more here than we can see. No idea how deep this pit is. We’ll have to get the specialists in to excavate. I can tell you this much though. These people didn’t die of natural causes, and these aren’t all ancient either.’

  McLean bent low, the better to see. He’d looked at far too many bodies in the course of his career, and in varying states of decay. One thing he’d never struggled with before was identifying how the various pieces were meant to go together though. Normally it was the whole body, or a piece of it still held together by muscle, skin and ligament. The bones poking up out of the earth here were clean, not a scrap of flesh on them. And there was no smell of rotting either. Fair enough, mostly all he could smell was burned heather and ash, but he knew the smell of decaying body and it wasn’t here.

  ‘You’ve noticed it too, I see.’ Cadwallader eased himself backwards before standing up with all the groaning someone of his years needed. McLean stared unseeing at the jumble of bones for a while longer before doing the same, only with a little less noise.

  ‘I have indeed. These bones have had their flesh removed before being dumped here. Almost as if the bodies they belong to have been butchered.’

  ‘Exactly as if they’ve been butchered, Tony. That’s what we’re looking at. This is no shallow grave here. It’s a charnel pit.’

  32

  ‘It’s not Renfrew. I can tell you that much.’

  The faint whiff of burned heather and gorse still clung to his suit as McLean sat at the all too familiar table in Deputy Chief Constable Robinson’s office. Detective Chief Superintendent McIntyre was there too, along with DI Ritchie.

  ‘That’s something, I guess.’ Robinson didn’t sound as if he meant it. ‘So who is it then?’

  ‘At the moment we don’t even know how many people, sir. Let alone who they might be. The pathologist identified parts from three different bodies before he decided to call in help.’

  ‘Help?’ Robinson asked. ‘What kind of help?’

  ‘As it happens, the university has just appointed a new professor in forensic anthropology. She’s had experience with investigating mass graves. If anyone can piece together this puzzle then it’s her.’

  ‘You know this woman?’

  ‘She worked with my grandmother, a long time ago, sir.’ McLean didn’t feel the need to tell Robinson that the woman in question had also been around to his house the night before for supper.

  ‘These bones. They’re recent, you say?’ McIntyre asked.

  ‘From what Angus could tell, yes. At least, the ones exposed by the fire. We won’t know how many and how old until Professor Turner’s surveyed the site. She should be on her way if she’s not there already.’

  ‘Christ, what a mess.’ The DCC rubbed at his face with both hands for a moment. ‘OK. So we’ve got at least three dead bodies. Dismembered, buried in a remote bit of scrubland. And none of them are our missing admin support officer.’

  ‘As far as we can tell, sir.’

  ‘How far are they from the spot where we found her car?’

  ‘About a mile as the crow flies. Two if you’re going by road.’ McLean had an OS Landranger map spread out on the table. He circled the spot at the southern end of Gladhouse reservoir in pencil, then marked the approximate site of the latest, grisly find. Green squares marked the forest, more than half filling the gap between the two.

  ‘But none of the bodies is Renfrew.’ The DCC made it a statement more than a question, as if the problem of multiple unexplained and very suspicious deaths was less bothersome than one missing admin support officer. ‘What’s your plan of action then?’

  ‘Angus is coordinating with Professor Turner. He’ll PM the bones we’ve already retrieved and give us a better idea of who they might belong to. And how long they’ve been in the ground. It’ll be a day or two, Monday, I guess, given it’s the weekend, before we get much back from that. Meantime I’ve some other leads to chase up on Renfrew. If we’re lucky, the two cases are entirely unrelated.’

  Robinson barked a humourless laugh, and McLean found he had to agree. Luck was rarely on their side, and something else was niggling in the back of his mind too. A conversation or something someone had said in his hearing. He couldn’t remember.

  ‘I’ll have a word with Duguid and see if
he can dig up any old Mis Per cases from that area,’ he said after a moment’s pause. ‘I’m hoping DS Gregg’s got an address for me by now too. If we can find out where Renfrew has been living, that might give us some idea as to where she’s gone.’

  ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’

  McLean glanced up from the report he’d been trying to read to see DS Gregg standing in the doorway. Like most of the officers he’d seen today, her cheeks were rosy from having spent much of the previous afternoon out on the moors helping with the fire. He almost imagined he could smell the heather smoke coming off her, but he felt sure she would have washed and changed her clothes in the intervening time.

  ‘I did indeed.’ He closed the folder on the report, not sure he could even remember what it was about. ‘I was wondering if you’d heard back from your contact about Anya Renfrew’s flat over in the East End.’

  ‘Oh. Aye. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, sir. Only what with the fire and everything, it sort of slipped my mind.’

  Gregg had a habit of retreating from the subject as soon as she was asked a direct question, McLean recalled. Some might find it endearing, but not him.

  ‘So you have heard then, Sandy?’

  The use of her first name brought her up sharp. ‘Sorry, sir. Aye, the flat in Pilrig. It’s on Spey Street, right enough. Top-floor flat at number seventeen.’

  ‘You busy right now?’ he asked.

  ‘Always busy, sir. Nothing that can’t wait, mind.’

  ‘See about getting us a car then, can you? I’d like to head over there as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’ll get right on it.’ Gregg stepped back out into the corridor, then turned and popped her head into the office. ‘You want me to sort a squad car and a couple of constables too? In case we have to break in?’

  McLean reached down and opened the drawer of his desk, pulled out the small evidence bag he’d been given by the forensics lab, and held it up for the detective sergeant to see. The keys that had been in the bag found in the woods.