by Tony Black
Ringing.
‘Hello, DI Gallagher.’
‘It’s Rob.’
There was a stalled breath’s silence on the other end of the line, ‘Hello, Rob.’
Brennan toyed with the idea of demanding a sir, let it pass. ‘I’m going over your file on Fiona Gow here …’
Gallagher cut in, ‘Oh aye, definite links I’d say.’
‘You would, if you were angling to take the case off me, Jim.’ Brennan let his remark sting. ‘And you are, aren’t you?’
Gallagher wheezed, ‘Look, it’s nothing personal, Rob …’
‘Sir.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll have the proper honorific, since I am leading this investigation.’
‘Yes, sir …’
Brennan knew he’d made it clear that he had Gallagher’s number, felt content to change direction. ‘Anyway, this file … a bit light isn’t it?’
‘Well, the lab reports are with the Chief Super … And there’s a profiler’s report on my desk but, truth is, we never really dug up that much.’
‘You’re not kidding, Jim.’
The line fizzed, then, ‘Well there would be a reason for that, which I think you know.’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘I think we have a serial killer on our hands, and they don’t get that tag because they’re easy to find, sir …’
A car revved on the street outside, Brennan put the phone to his other ear, ‘Nothing in this life comes easy, Jim. We’d have a damn sight more serial killers if it wasn’t for the likes of us. But let’s not get carried away with the terminology – Pettigrew’s meeting us at the morgue tomorrow at 7 a.m.; get yourself down there and let’s see what he turns up.’
Chapter 13
DI ROB BRENNAN had reached the stage where it no longer mattered what life threw at him. It couldn’t affect who he was any more. There was a time, he still remembered it, when life’s defeats and disappointments – the hurts and the devastations – felled him. It all seemed strange now – why? He was still here, after all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. None of his woes had killed him; killed a part of him, yes. He had lost the ability to feel wounded, hurt; they seemed like futile emotions to him now – like something children went through, not grown men. Not, for certain, police officers; men like him.
So what did that make Rob Brennan – insensitive? He didn’t think so, that part of him hadn’t changed. He still loved his daughter, nurtured fond memories of the brother he had lost. It was another part of him that had changed – the part that he showed to the outside world. His carapace had hardened. He knew this made him look insensitive, loutish to some, but there was nothing he could do about it. The act, the process itself, was instinctual. When he thought about it, he wondered if there was any real point to it. He could no longer feel, he could no longer be hurt, so why put up the shell? He surmised, after careful thought, and having assessed the trait in others, that it wasn’t for his benefit; it was for the rest of the world. Brennan’s outward subfusc was a warning flag, a marker for those who thought to seek the sympathies of a fellow traveller on life’s road: not here, it yelled. Move away, try someone else. If that was the case, so be it, he thought; we all wore masks anyway, at least his honestly reflected reality, as he saw it.
Brennan lay in the sagging bed, staring at the nicotine-stained ceiling of his bedsit. It was a high ceiling, hinted at an opulent past life before subdivision and the looting of architraves and ornate, wrought-iron fireplaces. He pitched himself on his elbow, glanced towards the billowing curtains, blowing in what appeared to be a breeze but could only be a draught because he hadn’t opened the window. He stared at the waves and folds in the fabric for a moment, surmised a fierce wind blowing across Leith Walk was to blame.
He sighed, a long deep sigh that seemed to come from the core of him; it caught him unawares. Was he so surprised to be here? There had been many times when he had thought of leaving Joyce, if he was honest with himself he had only stayed because of Sophie. Their lives had become separated – as much as any two lives could be whilst living under the same roof. It didn’t faze him to say goodbye to all of that. The house, the car, the family holidays; they all meant nothing to him. He didn’t need anything. Even as he looked around the dingy bedsit he could only regale himself with the complete lack of comfort. Why did he need any of it?
Brennan felt like he had jumped from a slowly-moving train and he was now lying at the side of the tracks watching the carriages snake past. He recognised all the carriages, they were the accoutrements of success and fulfilment and yet, to him, they were all empty. He was happy to watch them fade into the distance, pass over the horizon towards a destination he would never reach. He wondered why he had ever chosen to get on the train at all, but he dismissed the thought at once. He wasn’t the man who had made those decisions; when he looked back at the Rob Brennan of the past, he hardly recognised him. Who was he? Really? Who was this man who had joined the police force? Because he had decided the fate of both of them – the young and the old Rob Brennan – and now one questioned the other’s motives.
Brennan rose quickly, ran water in the tiny stainless-steel sink and splashed it on his face. He straightened himself, ran the splayed fingers of his hands through his hair. For a moment he stood in front of the tiny cracked mirror and stared at himself.
‘Thinking like that, now that would never do, Rob …’
He was being pulled down by his own thoughts. He knew the mind loved to show you your flaws, to take you back to past mistakes and flash snapshots of more to come in future. It had to be halted, distracted.
Brennan pulled his trousers from the arm of the chair and fitted himself into them. The suitcases were still closed, he reached for the nearest one and raised it onto the table, opened up. Inside the clothes sat in a jumble.
‘Fucking hell …’
He shook his head. As he rummaged for a shirt he realised how ridiculous he had been. What did he expect? Joyce to have freshly laundered, neatly ironed and folded his clothes? It was laughable. He had been thrown out by his wife and the sooner he came to that realisation, and what it meant, the better. There was no point going over it, trying to locate the triggers. They were unhappy. He had strayed and she had found out. That was it. Delving any further into the matter was a worthless exercise. He had to move on.
Brennan was smacked awake by the brewery fumes on Montgomery Street as he left the stairwell. He had heard there was only one brewery left in Edinburgh and longed for it to go the way of the others. When he was a child, his brother had hated trips to Edinburgh because of the brewery stench. The smell always made Brennan think of the past, of Andy, and he resented the incursion bitterly.
The car started first time and Brennan engaged the clutch, pulled out. The streets were surprisingly empty; he was not used to getting anywhere in the city easily, least of all by car. At the end of Montgomery Street he turned onto the Walk and was in second gear by the roundabout; there was no need to stop and he progressed past the John Lewis store, checking out a billboard for a new movie as he went.
The morgue was located in the Old Town, the hotchpotch of pends and wynds that huddled around the foot of the castle. Brennan felt out of place in this part of town, it felt too touristy, too synthetic. It was where out-of-towners came to sample whisky and take photographs of themselves in See-You-Jimmy wigs. He didn’t think anybody lived there, there were flats and there were new apartments, but they were rentals surely. There was certainly no local pub, no community spirit. It was an empty, vapid place; the perfect location for the morgue.
Brennan rounded the High Street, swung into the chicane that sat between the Parliament and the palace of Holyrood; on the next bend he spotted the granite massif of Arthur’s Seat, swathed in a morning mist.
DS Stevie McGuire was already sitting out front when Brennan pulled up. He rolled up his window and got out of the car when he saw the DI.
‘Morning, sir.’<
br />
Brennan nodded, ‘Stevie.’
‘No signs of life, I’m afraid.’
Brennan frowned, looked him over.
Realisation dawned, ‘Sorry. You know what I mean.’
‘Pettigrew has confirmed a 7 a.m. start, aye?’
‘Sure has …’
As they chatted, a green Vectra pulled up and DI Jim Gallagher raised a salute. He was smoking a cigarette and some ash fell as he lifted his hand from the wheel. As he left the car he removed a necktie from his jacket pocket and started to thread it through his collar.
‘Rob, Stevie.’
The pair nodded in reply.
‘Quite an early start, isn’t it?’
Brennan watched Gallagher struggle with his tie, ‘Obviously a bit of a challenge for you, Jim.’
The DI seemed to infer something from Brennan’s tone, he curled his eyebrow down as he dispensed with the necktie. ‘Look, Rob, do you think we could have a chat …’ He looked at McGuire, ‘No offence, Stevie, I just want a private word with the boss.’
McGuire looked at Brennan, appeared to detect no opposition and raised his open palms in the DI’s direction. ‘Be my guest.’
Gallagher touched Rob’s elbow, nodded to the end of the street. Brennan watched another car pulling up, it was Pettigrew’s Mercedes. ‘Look, whatever you have to say, Jim, make it quick, eh …’
‘Aye, sure, sure …’ He removed a packet of Lambert & Butler, offered one to Brennan.
‘No thanks.’
‘Sure.’ Gallagher seemed nervous, anxious to get his words out but desperate to make a proper build-up that would confer their true import. ‘I just wanted to say to you, Rob, that I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with you.’
‘Bit late for that isn’t it?’
Gallagher bit the tip of his cigarette, produced a Zippo lighter; the smell of petrol came sharp in the morning air. ‘Look, I’m not here to step on anyone’s toes, Rob.’
Brennan removed a hand from his jacket, hushed Gallagher quiet. ‘You’re not big enough to step on my toes, Jim.’
The DI pocketed his lighter, his face firmed. The open, expressionless façade seemed to slip, gave way to a harsh-eyed stare. ‘You’ve no right to play the Big I Am with me, Rob.’
Brennan smirked, leaned over Gallagher, he was the taller of the two men by some way. ‘Jim, lad, let me tell you something, if I catch a poacher on my land he can think himself lucky if he gets away with an arse-full of lead.’
‘You’re all wrong, Rob …’ Gallagher inhaled a deep drag on his cigarette, ‘I’m all about the team, me.’
‘Your team only has one player.’
‘Oh, come on … We’ve a lunatic to catch!’ He stepped to the side, waved to Pettigrew as he opened up. ‘Rob, you’ve no rank on me, and you’re not the most popular DI in the force either. I wouldn’t go throwing up a genuine offer of friendship.’
A smile spread on Brennan’s face, ‘Why not?’
‘Let’s just say it could backfire.’
‘If you’ve got a threat to put on me, Jim … Let’s have it.’
Gallagher dropped his cigarette, pressed it into the ground with the sole of his shoe. He was staring down as he spoke, ‘I don’t make threats, Rob.’ He edged towards the morgue. ‘… I don’t need to.’
Chapter 14
BRENNAN WATCHED DI Jim Gallagher approach the morgue, make his way up the steps. He waited for a moment, took a breath of air and started the slow trail behind him. DS Stevie McGuire was waiting for him, said, ‘What was that all about?’
Brennan held back for a moment, watched Gallagher enter the front door and strike up a conversation with Dr Pettigrew, then, ‘Just Jim being Jim … Look, did you check him out like I asked you the other day?’
‘His caseload, aye, aye …’
‘Well?’
‘Nothing spectacular, he seems to be flitting over to Glasgow quite a bit, helping out CID there with some tit-for-tat gang stabbings. But mainly he’s looking at the cold cases like our Fiona Gow.’
‘That it?’
McGuire scratched at his earlobe, ‘He’s counting his days, can’t be far off the pension now.’ He dropped his hand, ‘Is there something I should know about, boss?’
Brennan reached over, touched McGuire’s shoulder. ‘No. Not at all. I’m just a bit wary of him.’
‘In what way?’
‘He’s an old hand, you don’t get to his age in this racket without knowing where a few bodies are buried.’
McGuire’s eyes sunk in his head, his voice trailed off in a dull monotone. ‘Sounds tenuous?’
‘I just don’t trust him … Why is he taking such an interest in our case when he seems to be able to pick and choose the cases he works these days?’
A bin lorry started to roll down the street, the noise threatened to drown them out; McGuire pointed to the morgue, raised his voice, ‘Look, we should go in.’
‘Yeah, I know … Just keep an eye on Jim, let me know if he pulls any fast ones.’
Inside the building Brennan removed his overcoat and jacket, folded them over the crook of his arm, then walked the few paces to the cloakroom and hung them up. Gallagher and Pettigrew were already in there.
‘Morning, Rob.’
Brennan nodded to the doctor. He was tempted to have a dig about taking his time to get round to this postmortem but figured there would only be a grating reply about having to do private-practice work to pay for the Mercedes. He stilled his nerve and watched as Pettigrew bunched his brows on the way out the door. Gallagher stood square-footed in the middle of the room for a moment longer, a thin-eyed stare on Brennan, and then jerked his head to the side and followed the doctor out.
‘Ready to roll?’ said McGuire as he hung up his coat.
‘Let’s go.’
The steps down to the morgue were hard granite, the officers’ heels clacked on every one like hammer blows. No one spoke, the only sound came from the doctor as he lunged through the swing doors and made his way to scrub up.
Brennan and the other officers fitted themselves into green gowns and waited for the doctor by the edge of the room. The smell of the place was already settling in Brennan’s nostrils; he knew it would be on his clothes and skin for the rest of the day. His colleagues would notice and question him on it. After a visit to the morgue Brennan always felt like taking a shower, a long burning-hot shower, and smothering himself in a lather. The place had come to signify not only death but stagnation to him; when he went there he felt like it inculcated something that was alien to life itself, that seeped into him, right down to his bones.
‘Right,’ said Pettigrew, ‘get going shall we?’ He snapped his rubber gloves into place and opened the door to the refrigerated section; the corpse of Lindsey Sloan was lying there. Brennan looked at the trolley; it had the same kind of wheels as a supermarket one, a little larger perhaps, but the similarity always struck him. Since first making this observation he had always chosen a basket in Sainsbury’s.
Pettigrew asked McGuire to grab one end of the trolley and the pair removed the stretcher with the corpse on it towards the mortuary slab. The slab was grey as concrete and as the covering was removed Brennan noticed how similar the victim’s flesh was in tone.
There was a different, more pungent odour now. It pervaded the large room and Brennan watched as McGuire raised his hand towards his mouth and tweaked the tip of his nose a few times.
Pettigrew looked at the clock on the wall as a young man walked through the door and muttered apologetically, ‘The buses were late.’
‘Get scrubbed up, and be quick about it.’
The pathologist’s assistant threw himself into a gown and started to scrub up. He seemed jolly as he joined the others. ‘Morning folks, how goes it today?’
Nods. A chorus of ‘Good morning.’
‘Right,’ said Pettigrew.
His first scalpel cut pierced the sternum and exposed a layer of yellow subcutaneous fat. The tissue
was attached to the flesh and always struck Brennan as being far too bright, much brighter than any butcher’s meat. He watched as the pathologist removed the dead girl’s organs, weighed them, and replaced them in the body cavity. All the while his attendant washed away what blood there was with a hand-held hose; the blood ran down the slab and through a hole onto the cement floor where it met a drain and was carried away.
No one spoke for a while as the procedure was carried out. Brennan was the first to break the silence, ‘What about that, when are you going to look at that?’
He was staring at the victim’s head.
‘I have a procedure,’ said Pettigrew.
Brennan lowered his voice, it seemed too loud for the room. ‘Just the mouth, please. The cloth.’
The pathologist walked from the middle of the slab to the top. He creased up his eyes as he bent over, poked a finger into the girl’s mouth. ‘Yes, there’s something in there.’
‘What is it?’ said Brennan.
‘I can’t really see …’ He moved away, withdrew a slender grapple-hook, like a dentist’s instrument from his top pocket. ‘It’s soaked with blood of course …’
‘Can you remove it?’
As Pettigrew eased the item from the girl’s mouth it looked like a tight red ball, a crumpled-up piece of cotton. He laid it down on the table to the side of the slab and started to ease it open with his fingers and the chromium instrument.
‘Yes, looks like undergarments,’ he said.
The others watched as he unravelled cotton panties.
‘He’s gagged her with them …’ said Gallagher.
‘Suffocated her, you mean,’ said Brennan.
Pettigrew continued to poke at the blood-caked panties. ‘Hang on a minute …’ There was something wrapped up inside.
‘What is it?’ said Brennan.
The pathologist hovered over the small bundle. ‘There’s more here …’ he pointed with his gloved finger. ‘Look, it’s flesh, brittle flesh … Hang on.’ He took a long-nosed pair of scissors, eased them under the dark, pulpy tissue. The material was brittle, hard. As he snipped through, dark patches of blood crumbled and fell onto the table. Pettigrew leaned in again, picked up the thin, tight strips of flesh. ‘Oh, my God …’
