Bury Them Deep

by Oswald, James

  ‘Don’t think that’ll be necessary. I’ve a hunch these will get us in.’

  McLean didn’t know Pilrig well. It had never been one of his beats, and somehow none of the crimes he’d investigated down the years – decades now – had brought him this way. He’d been close by, at the end of Leith Walk and up towards Trinity and Newhaven before, but Spey Street itself was new to him. Strange that he could live his whole life in a city as small as Edinburgh and still not know it all.

  Gregg drove the almost-new BMW that was the latest addition to Edinburgh CID’s pool. He could tell it wasn’t long out of the dealers by the way there was no rubbish under the seats and in the footwells. That and the new-car smell that never lasted more than a month when detectives were involved. Pool cars were something of a luxury these days, the victim of ever deeper cuts. The disappearance of Renfrew at the start of a major investigation and the extra expense of dealing with the moorland fire were going to play even more havoc with the budgets. No wonder the DCC was so crabbit most of the time.

  Number seventeen Spey Street was an unremarkable three-storey tenement building, overlooked by a more modern council high-rise on the other side of the road. Mid-morning there were few people about, and those that were ignored them as they parked at the bottom end of the street and walked back. Gregg said nothing as McLean produced the keys from his pocket and flipped through them until he found the one most likely to fit the front door.

  ‘There’s a possibility I’m going to look really stupid now,’ he said before sliding the key into the lock. ‘Please don’t tell everyone if I am.’

  Gregg frowned at him, then nodded her head in understanding. He twisted the key and felt a mix of emotions as it clicked and the door fell open. There was relief that his hunch had been correct, but there was also sadness that this seemed to confirm their worst suspicions about Renfrew, and worry at the implications.

  ‘I guess that answers that question,’ Gregg said as they both stepped inside. The narrow hallway beyond led to a stone stairwell, a door on either side opening onto the ground floor flats. Apart from there only being three storeys, this was much the same as McLean’s old tenement in Newington, over on the other side of the city. The stairwell even smelled the same, that unmistakable odour of damp and cat piss. A wave of melancholic nostalgia washed over him. Memories good and bad of the years he’d climbed those steps. Drunk and sober, with company or alone. He’d not realised how much he missed the place. Or was it the past that the place represented?

  ‘You said top-floor flat, right?’

  ‘That’s what Val told me, aye, sir.’

  ‘Val?’ McLean struggled with the name, then remembered how Gregg had found the address. ‘Renfrew’s friend from the club.’

  The detective sergeant nodded, but said nothing more. Instead, she started up the stairs, leaving him to follow. The landing at the top opened onto two doors, but only one bore a name plate. Since it didn’t say either Renfrew or Ramsay, McLean tried the keys in the other one. The lock clicked as swiftly as the main door downstairs. He pushed open the door onto a narrow hallway, sniffed stale air and a hint of something else. Across the sanded floorboards from the door, a narrow table held a phone, and beside it a turned wooden bowl filled with the sort of things you might want to get rid of as soon as you stepped indoors. There were no keys – he held those in his hand – but there were a few pound coins, a hairbrush, something that looked like a pac-a-mac still in its pac. And lying across the top of it all an ID badge on a lanyard, bearing the familiar logo of Police Scotland. He’d seen them countless times, the poorly printed photograph, the square where the chip was embedded, and the name printed in a large, bold font across the front.

  Anya Renfrew.

  ‘Gloves, I think.’ McLean shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and pulled out a pair of latex gloves. DS Gregg still stood on the landing, eyes wide as she stared at the tiny hallway. McLean turned slowly, taking it all in, worried that she’d seen something he’d missed.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked when he’d spotted nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

  ‘No. Sorry, sir. Just a bit surprised.’ Gregg shuddered slightly, like a dog shaking the water from its coat. Then she produced her own pair of gloves and pulled them on with rather more difficulty. The detective sergeant was good at administration, McLean reminded himself. Less so at investigation.

  ‘We’re going to have a look around. This isn’t a crime scene, but I’d rather not upset too much just in case. OK?’

  Gregg nodded her understanding, then followed him into the flat. McLean closed the door behind them to avoid an awkward conversation with the neighbours. They’d talk to all of the people who lived in the tenement in due course, but for now he wanted to see what this particular flat could tell him about Anya Renfrew. Or Grace Ramsay as she seemed to be calling herself.

  ‘Looks like the kitchen’s that way.’ He pointed Gregg towards the back of the flat and an open door. ‘Check the cupboards and fridge. If we’re right, she’s been away since last Friday, but this is where she lives most of the time. Should be milk, coffee, bread, that sort of thing.’

  The detective sergeant gave him a look that suggested this wasn’t her first rodeo, then she walked off in the direction he’d indicated. At the front of the flat, McLean found a decent-sized living room and a small bedroom that looked like it was more of a storage space than somewhere people slept. A compact bathroom separated them from the kitchen at the back and a second, larger bedroom.

  He found nothing more sinister than a small tub of ibuprofen and a packet of disposable razors in the cabinet in the bathroom. The laundry basket held an assortment of clothes he’d associate more with Anya Renfrew than the assortment of risqué clothes they’d found at the house in Joppa. A couple of sensible white blouses, normal underwear, rolled-up tights. A small airing cupboard was mostly filled with a hot-water tank, but there was also room for some linen and a few towels. So far, so unremarkable.

  The living-room floor hadn’t been vacuumed in a while, the remains of a takeaway curry still lying on the low table between the sofa and the television. Turning his attention to the rest of the room, McLean was struck by the lack of any personalisation. The pictures could have been in any flat anywhere in the country. Any cheap hotel for that matter. There were no books, he noticed, and the only thing that looked like it might have meant something to the woman who lived there was a single framed photograph on the mantelpiece. It showed a man in military uniform and a woman, posed slightly awkwardly with a baby between them. The dated hairstyles and saturated colours reminded him of pictures his grandmother had kept in an old album. Family shots taken in the early 1970s, before his parents had caught that fateful flight from Inverness. He recognised one of the people in the photograph as Detective Superintendent Grace Ramsay, although back then she would more likely have been a detective constable. The man must have been her husband, the baby young Anya.

  ‘Nothing much in the kitchen, sir. She lived here sure enough, but it doesn’t look like she ever had friends round.’ DS Gregg joined him in the living room, saw the plate and foil containers on the table. ‘More of a takeaway kind of person, I see.’

  ‘Not a lot in here either. I don’t know Renfrew well, but you’d think there’d be something here that showed a bit of personality, wouldn’t you? The house in Joppa’s a bit characterless too.’

  ‘I see what you mean.’ Gregg turned slowly, taking in the room. She walked over to the window, tugged back the lace curtain and looked outside, first down to the road and then up towards the top of the tower block that swallowed most of the light from across the way. Finally she went to the mantelpiece and picked up the photograph.

  ‘Could have been taken forty years ago. More, maybe. It’s almost as if she hasn’t had a life since then.’

  ‘There’s still the master bedroom. Maybe we’ll get lucky there.�
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  Gregg looked at him as if she couldn’t quite believe what he’d just said. McLean wasn’t sure he could either, hiding his embarrassment by striding out of the room and across the hall. The bedroom was a decent size for an Edinburgh tenement in this part of town, but not big by the standards of his own house. It was dominated by a double bed and an antique wardrobe that must have been fun to get up the stairs. The bed had been made, but a few clothes were lain out across it as if Renfrew had been deciding what to wear for her evening out in the woods and couldn’t make up her mind. None of the garments were as racy as the ones they’d found in Joppa, but neither were they the kind of thing he’d have expected Renfrew to wear.

  ‘These are a bit glamorous.’ Gregg picked up a dress in a thin, gold material that shimmered like fine silk. She held it up to herself, but it clearly hadn’t been cut for someone of her shape. ‘Shame. It would fit in perfectly at the folk club.’

  ‘Maybe not these two though.’ McLean waved a hand at the other dresses. They’d not look out of place in Newcastle on a Saturday night. He walked over to the wardrobe, opened the first of its three doors to reveal several more outfits he’d associate with a high-end sex worker rather than a long-serving police admin support officer. Those clothes were behind the second and third doors. Anya Renfrew’s two different lives laid out side by side.

  33

  ‘To be honest, Tony, this isn’t really my area of expertise. Soft tissue, organs, that sort of thing. I’m more comfortable dealing with those.’

  McLean stood in his customary position in the post-mortem theatre, watching as his old friend the city pathologist laid out a selection of bones on the central examination table. Unpleasant though it was to be there, it wasn’t as horrible as some post-mortems he’d attended down the years, and there was none of the usual smell of decay. In its place, the faintest whiff of burning heather permeated the room, a reminder of the fire that had uncovered this grisly find.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, I’ll not ask you for an estimated time of death.’

  Cadwallader sighed at the joke, peered at a bone and then put it back in the white plastic container they’d all been brought to the mortuary in before selecting another.

  ‘I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess. Some a lot longer ago than others. Right now I’m not even sure exactly how many people we’re dealing with here. More than the three I thought it might be when I examined them in situ. And that’s just what we found at the surface. Christ only knows how many more there are up there.’

  McLean shuddered at the thought of it. Quite apart from the horror of finding so many dead, his mind was already spinning through the ramifications. It was only a matter of time before the press got hold of the story and ran wild with it. He didn’t much relish broaching the subject of overtime costs with the DCC, but between this and the search for Anya Renfrew their understaffed team were going to have to put in a lot of extra hours. Beg a lot of favours. At least Professor Turner was happy to work the site with as many volunteer students as she could muster, but they still needed oversight.

  ‘This one’s probably the oldest. And the most interesting.’ Cadwallader’s voice broke through his musing, dragging McLean’s attention from the central examination table to the next one along. The bones laid out on this one made the most obvious skeleton, although none of them were exactly complete. They’d not found any skulls, for one thing.

  ‘Oldest as in age at death, or time in the ground?’

  ‘Fair enough, I should be more precise. Longest in the ground, although none of these were buried particularly deep. And that’s what’s so fascinating about them.’

  ‘OK. I know you’re dying to tell me, so what is so fascinating?’

  The pathologist looked at him with an expression that reminded McLean of his housemaster at boarding school. One of the few of the masters there who didn’t subscribe to the ethos of corporal punishment, he had kept the boys under his care in line with a mixture of praise carefully rationed and a knack for making you feel utterly miserable when you had done something wrong. His disappointment could crush the hardiest of souls, the knowledge that you had let him down, let the house down and let yourself down too. Cadwallader had somehow managed to tap into that same vein of deepest dismay.

  ‘What do you remember about the scene where these bones were found, Tony?’ Even the pathologist’s tone was the same. Old Mr Hewitson come back to haunt him.

  ‘Up on the moors, in a deep gully that would have been covered in thick vegetation before the fire scoured everything down to the peat and stones.’

  ‘And we had no idea they were there, did we?’ Cadwallader opened his arms wide to encompass all the examination tables with their assorted bones, the partly reassembled skeletons of long-dead people. ‘Tell me, Tony. Have there been the occasional unaccountable human bone discoveries in the area recently?’

  McLean understood where his friend was going with this. He should have seen it himself, straight away. ‘These bones were on the surface, not really buried at all. If they’d been dumped as whole bodies or even chopped up, then the scavengers and carrion birds would have spread bits of them around. Someone would have found something, a hand or a foot maybe. Reported it. That’s what you’re trying to say, right?’

  Cadwallader favoured him with a condescending smile. ‘Exactly so. I suspected as much when I saw them in the ground, but now I’m sure of it. These bones were dumped, as you put it. Some might have been buried deep enough to keep animals away, but not all of them. Whoever did it was either too lazy, or didn’t think it necessary because there wasn’t a scrap of meat on them. No connective tissue, no cartilage, no flesh or skin. Nothing left to attract carrion feeders. Do you know the only sure way to remove all the flesh from a skeleton?’

  ‘Beetles?’

  The pathologist shook his head irritably. ‘The only other way, smarty-pants.’ He picked up one of the larger bones from the central examination table and held it under the light. ‘Here, look at this.’

  McLean stepped closer, realising as he did so that there had been no need for his more normal distance. There would be no dissecting of these bodies, no need for scalpels, no whine of electric bone saw as the skull was opened up. He wasn’t familiar enough with skeletal anatomy to identify exactly what the pathologist was holding, but it had the look of a child’s drawing of a bone about it. Long and thin, with knobbly joint lobes at either end. Its time in, or on, the ground had stained it dark yellow, and the fire had left soot marks in places. If it had come out of an ossuary he wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s a bone,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a left femur from a middle-aged woman actually. More important are these marks on it here, see?’ Cadwallader angled the bone to the light, pointing just below the joint. McLean strained to look closer, wishing his eyes weren’t quite so tired. Maybe a trip to the optician’s was overdue. He couldn’t see anything beyond the stains and the soot. A crack up the length that must have happened after death. ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘Here. These marks. Like chips in the bone. See them?’ Cadwallader held the bone even nearer, so that McLean’s nose was filled with the scent of burning earth and something much deeper. This close, he could finally see what the pathologist was talking about, a series of parallel lines etched into the surface an inch or so below the more shiny lobe of the joint. They were stained, so must have happened before the bone went into the ground. He recalled a recent lecture, a series of projected images.

  ‘Knife marks?’

  ‘Ten out of ten, Chief Inspector.’ Cadwallader put the bone down on the examination table in roughly the space where a left thigh should be, picked up a right forearm. ‘And see here? Much the same. All of these bones show similar markings. They’ve been cut. More accurately I should say they’ve been butchered.’

  The cold sensation seeped into his gut as he stu
died the skeletons with new sight. ‘And the best way to get flesh off a bone is to boil it. Like soup.’

  The pathologist carefully replaced the bone in its place on the table, reached for another from the box. ‘Soup would suggest cannibalism, Tony. It’s possible these bodies have been rendered down simply to make identification impossible. We don’t know what became of the soft tissues.’

  McLean had to concede that Cadwallader was right. It didn’t make him feel any better. ‘And what about this one?’ He pointed at the skeleton on the central table. ‘You said this was the most interesting?’

  The pathologist put the bone back down again, then crossed to the table and picked up another. ‘This one might be useful for identification. See here?’ He pointed at the surface, and McLean saw it immediately.

  ‘It’s been broken, then healed. Some time before death.’

  ‘So you do pay attention sometimes. Excellent. Yes, she’d broken her right tibia. About ten years before death, I’d say. And it’s set well, so she was looked after properly. Given plenty of time to heal. If you’ve got a twenty-five to thirty-year-old woman with a broken leg from her late childhood, reported missing maybe twenty, thirty years ago? Well, this could be her.’

  McLean looked at the bone, not really seeing it any more. He remembered what he’d been trying to remember now, his conversation with Grace Ramsay. People going missing near Gladhouse Reservoir, she’d said. Ask Duguid about the unsolved cases where she’d been SIO.

  ‘You’ve got that look on your face, Tony. Thought of something?’ Cadwallader asked, breaking the moment.

  ‘I have indeed, Angus. Something I need to follow up right away.’ He looked once more at the bone, the telltale mark where it had been broken so many years before. ‘But I’ve a feeling I’m not going to be popular for mentioning it.’

  The cool air of the station basement was a welcome contrast after a sweaty climb up the hill from the city mortuary. McLean stood in the corridor outside the CCU room, enjoying the light breeze for a moment before he knocked on the door and went in.