by James Oswald
‘If it’s that important, then why not Call-me-Stevie himself? Or you, for that matter, Jayne? Why not the chief constable, whoever it is this week?’
‘Because there’s a rota? Because sometimes seniority has perks?’ She grimaced as if even she didn’t believe that. ‘But mostly because Jane Louise Dee specifically invited you.’
The cold in his gut turned icier than the street outside. ‘And I’m supposed to just roll over and do what she says now, am I?’
McIntyre rubbed at her face as if she hadn’t slept in days. ‘No. And you don’t have to enjoy it either. But you do have to go. Turn up, drink the free champagne—’
‘Nothing is free where that woman is concerned.’
‘Don’t drink it, then. Just be there, OK?’
Closer to impossible now. McLean couldn’t recall the last time McIntyre had sounded quite so serious, and quite so scared.
‘You know who she is, right?’ he asked.
‘She’s the richest woman in Scotland. Fuck’s sake, Tony. She’s the richest woman in the world. You don’t say no when she asks you to be involved in her charities. You don’t even have to make a donation, just go. Be seen.’
‘I . . .’ McLean was going to say he’d think about it, meaning full well that thinking about it was all he’d do, but he was interrupted by the arrival at the door of Detective Constable Stringer.
‘Sorry to disturb you, sir,’ he started, then noticed McIntyre sitting on her armchair across the room. ‘Ma’am.’
‘What is it, Jay?’ McIntyre asked before McLean could get the question out.
‘Just in from Control. They’ve found a body out Braid Hermitage way. Another wee girl.’
16
Snow flurried from a sky the colour of broken slate, the light fast receding from the day. McLean glanced at his watch, wondering where the time had gone. Two visits to a sandwich factory and yet somehow he’d managed to miss lunch.
Blackford Hill disappeared into the gloom, lowering over them like a curse as they drove along Braid Hills Drive, DC Stringer silent in the passenger seat. At least he didn’t fidget like Dougie Naismith. It didn’t take long to find the point on the road nearest to the crime scene: a line of squad cars and forensics vans were playing havoc with the traffic.
McLean parked well back, then took his time changing into walking boots and heavy coat. He’d even remembered to put a hat in the back of the car, but wasn’t sure whether he could face the thought of everyone remarking on it. Chances were he’d be made to change into a thin paper suit by the forensic team before he was allowed anywhere near the crime scene anyway.
‘You know who’s crime scene manager?’ he asked DC Stringer as they walked along the roadside towards the centre of activity.
‘No, sir. Sorry.’
‘Never mind. See if you can track down whoever reported the body. I’ll go have a look myself.’
Stringer’s look of relief suggested he wasn’t all that keen on consorting with the dead. McLean could understand, even if part of him wondered why someone squeamish would ever apply to join the police, let alone become a detective. He watched the young man work his way through the crowd of uniforms and forensics technicians, and was about to go and find someone to show him the body when a familiar voice piped up behind him.
‘Forgot your hat again, did you?’
He barely recognised Emma, clothed as she was in heavy-duty overalls and with the hood pulled up over her head. At least she wasn’t wearing a mask this time. She held up her camera and took a quick photograph of him, the flash ruining his eyesight for a few blinking moments. By the time he’d recovered enough of his wits to pull the hat from his pocket, she’d turned away and wandered off. An improvement on her normal cold shoulder at work, but only a small one.
‘Ah, Tony. You’re here. Good.’
In among the mess of squad cars and dirty Transit vans, McLean hadn’t noticed the British racing green Jaguar of the city pathologist. The man himself approached from the verge, where a narrow path had been beaten through into the trees. His assistant, Doctor Sharp, followed along behind.
‘Is it, Angus? Is it really?’
Cadwallader shook his head. ‘No, you’re right. It’s a bloody nightmare.’ He looked McLean up and down as if only then noticing the overcoat and walking boots. ‘Not been down there yet, I see.’
‘I only just got here. Only heard about it half an hour ago.’
‘Fair enough. You’ll need to see for yourself though. Grab a suit and I’ll go find Jemima to sign you in.’
‘Jemima—? Oh, Doctor Cairns. Is she CSM here?’
Cadwallader grimaced. ‘If by that ugly abbreviation you mean, is she in charge? – then the answer is yes. Get a suit on, Tony. You need to see this, and I don’t think anyone will thank you for contaminating the scene more than it already is.’
He remembered the Hermitage of Braid from his childhood, of course. McLean had spent many a happy summer’s day making dens in the trees that clung to the steep slopes leading down to the Braid Burn. In winter it was less welcoming, the leaf litter dusted with a light coating of snow that made it even more slippery to walk on. Fortunately for him and Angus, the forensic team had been busy creating a safe path, and had even strung a rope handrail between the trees.
The gloom deepened as they descended into the dell. Not much light left in the day anyway, but the broken-finger branches cut it further still. The two of them weaved a twisty path, continuously downwards, until they finally reached a small clearing. McLean could hear the burn babbling away in the background, not too distant. A footpath followed its course, if his memory served. It had been a while since he had last come this way. This place was like many of his dens though, screened from view by whippy saplings and squat rhododendron bushes. Frost rimed the ground to either side of the marked path, but even so McLean could see the discarded needles, the used condoms, beer cans and plastic cider bottles that marked this place as very different from the childhood world of adventure he remembered.
Forensics had erected a tent towards the far end of the clearing, and it glowed from the arc lights within. A few white-suited technicians stood outside it as if reluctant to enter. They moved aside as Cadwallader and McLean approached, faces pale in the cold. McLean took a moment to steady himself. There was something about the trees, the greying sky overhead, the sombre atmosphere that weighed heavily on him. Knowing there was a dead child inside the tent didn’t help either.
‘OK then,’ he said, his voice flat, all echoes absorbed by the watching woods. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
The air was warmer inside the tent, heat from the lights trapped by the synthetic fabric. It had melted the frost on the ground and leached a slightly unpleasant odour from the soil. Without his prior knowledge, McLean might have been able to fool himself that the small form lying in the middle of the covered space was merely sleeping, except that nobody would sleep outdoors in the winter, and certainly not barefoot. She was curled up on one side, almost foetal, hands drawn up to her face. She wore old, hand-me-down clothes caked with mud and smears of snow. A thick black woolly hat covered her head, pulled down past her ears and almost over her eyes. From where he stood he couldn’t see much bare skin except her feet, and her tiny fists bunched into her mouth and chin as if to ward off the bitter cold. What little he could see was dark like weak tea.
‘It’s hard to tell, but I think she’s been moved after she died.’
‘Died? Or was killed?’
‘Impossible to say without a more thorough examination. I’m inclined towards the latter. I don’t think she’s been moved far either. Just enough to make it look like she’s gone to sleep.’
Cadwallader inched his way around the body until he was on the other side of it from McLean. He crouched down with much popping of knees, and reached out a hand to the girl’s face. As he gently
shifted one hand, McLean felt a coldness grip his gut that had nothing to do with the ice outside. The skin beneath her hand, where the air hadn’t yet reached it, was far paler than her cheek.
‘You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you, Angus?’ McLean crouched down beside the tiny body, and for an irrational moment he had an urge to gather it up into his arms. This little girl had barely been given a chance at life before it had been snatched brutally away.
‘I’m saying nothing until I’ve got her back to the mortuary, Tony.’ Cadwallader shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘Not going to make that mistake again.’
‘Let’s not go jumping to any conclusions, aye?’
As opening gambits went, it was an unusual one. McLean had just briefed the senior officers about the second dead girl, the silence as he finished a clear indication as to what everyone was thinking. What everyone was dreading. Deputy Chief Constable Robinson had broken first, and his words struck a chord.
‘We don’t have an ID on the first girl yet, do we?’ DI Ritchie flicked through the notes McLean had cobbled together, or more accurately the notes DC Stringer had cobbled together on his behalf. The detective constable wasn’t quite as thorough or quick as Harrison, but he’d done an OK job of it. Including post-mortem photographs of the first girl was maybe edging towards the kind of conclusion Call-me-Stevie was trying so hard to avoid though.
‘Nothing from Missing Persons, nothing from the DNA database. But then that’s hardly surprising. There’s not that many minors on it, after all. Our best guess is illegal immigrant or refugee. Someone who thinks they’ll be shipped back home if they speak to the police, anyway.’
‘Did Angus say how long he thought the second girl had been dead?’ This from Detective Superintendent McIntyre, sitting at the head of the conference table, since they had convened the meeting in her office.
‘You know what he’s like.’ McLean waggled his hand to indicate the pathologist’s reluctance. ‘And after the mistake with the first girl, he’s being very cautious. Can’t say as I blame him, really.’
‘What about the skin. You can’t deny there’s a similarity there. What’s causing that? It’s not the cold.’ Detective Sergeant Grumpy Bob Laird was the most junior officer in the meeting by rank, the most senior by experience and age. As ever, he saw straight to the heart of the matter.
‘Angus is baffled. Tom MacPhail is baffled. Even Tracy Sharp hasn’t a clue, and there’s not much gets past her. They’ve sent samples off to the hospital and the university to try and work out what it might be.’ McLean flicked slowly through the collection of photographs from the scene at Hermitage of Braid. ‘The one thing I think we can be sure of is that this second death happened recently. The body was cold, but there was some snow on the ground underneath it. That means it happened no more than three days ago. That’s when we had the first snowfall.’
‘And we don’t know what killed her yet?’ Robinson asked. ‘What if she just caught a fever or something? If she’s here illegally, her family might not have wanted to turn to the authorities for help. Then when she died they couldn’t think what else to do with her.’
McLean turned the last photograph face down so that he didn’t have to look at it any more. ‘That’s very possible, sir. It’s possible the same thing happened to the other girl, too. But if that’s the case it leads to another question, doesn’t it.’
‘It does?’
‘We’ll know more once Angus has done the post-mortem, but the first girl died of multiple organ failure, as if she’d been poisoned or something. If the same is true of this girl, then it’s more likely some infectious agent. Of the two options, I know which one I’d prefer were the case.’
The silence that followed his pronouncement did nothing to allay McLean’s fears. It lasted far longer than he would have liked too.
‘Do we need to get Disease Control involved in this?’ Ritchie asked.
‘Christ, I hope not.’ Robinson slumped back in his seat a bit too theatrically. ‘Last thing we need is the press going on about some immigrant flu.’
‘At the very least, we need to tell them what’s happened. I’ll get on to Angus, check who he’s sent samples to already.’ McLean drummed his fingers on the desktop in frustration. For all his moaning, the DCC had a point about the press. ‘As to your second point, sir, I’m surprised they’re not all over it already. We got lucky with the first body. I was the one who found her, remember? And we’ve kept a lid on things for now. This new one? It was a couple out walking their dog who found her. We can ask them not to talk to the press, but there’s no way it’s not leaking out in the next twenty-four hours. Sooner would be my guess. It’ll be all over the papers in the morning, probably doing the rounds of the online news sites already.’
‘OK then. We need a strategy.’ McIntyre pulled together all the pages of her copy of the report like a headmistress shuffling papers at assembly. ‘Priority has to be to identify both of these children while we wait to hear from Angus about what killed them. Kirsty, I want you to liaise with Disease Control and keep on top of the medical side of things. The sooner we know how they died, the better. That’s the first thing the press are going to want to know, after all.’
‘I’ll take that as my cue, Jayne.’ Robinson leaned forward and gathered up his report too. He wasn’t quite as skilled at shuffling it together as Detective Superintendent McIntyre. ‘We’ve missed the evening news, but we’ll have something for the late bulletin. We’ll set up a press conference for tomorrow morning, so any new information to me before seven, OK?’
Galvanised by the decision, the DCC stood up, meeting over. One by one they filed out of the room.
17
‘Thought you’d like to know that’s Sheila Begbie given her statement, sir. She’s in interview room one, if you want a word.’
McLean looked up from his desk, eyes tired from too much reading of small type. DC Harrison stood in the open doorway to his office.
‘Wasn’t she coming in earlier?’ He hauled himself out of his chair, not quite sure why he felt so weary.
‘She was going to, but with the wee girl found down in the Hermitage, everyone was out. I gave her a call, asked if she could maybe make it later in the day.’
‘Well, it’s certainly later in the day now.’ McLean checked his watch. He ought to have been wrapping things up and heading home himself, if he wanted Emma to actually speak to him for a change. ‘Not sure why I needed to know, mind you.’
Harrison frowned. ‘I thought you asked to see her when she came in.’ She turned and looked out of the doorway into the empty corridor, as if there might be some answer to her confusion there. ‘Did you not say that?’
‘It’s possible. I don’t remember. Never mind. Let’s go and see her, since she’s here.’
The detective constable said nothing as they walked to the stairs, then down to the ground floor and the interview rooms. McLean could almost hear the cogs whirring in her head though. He had no memory at all of having asked to see Begbie when she came in, but that didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t. The artist’s impression of the wee girl had come through now, so it would be interesting to see her reaction to it first-hand anyway. He’d like to know if she was hiding something.
‘Thank you for coming in, Ms Begbie. I understand you’ve already given a statement to the detective constable.’
The short, round woman he’d met the day before seemed somehow different. He couldn’t exactly say how, but he’d imagined her as older than she looked, more dowdy. She wore a different cardigan, and a lighter skirt, but still what he would class as sensible clothes. The interview room was small and stuffy, and her perfume almost stung his eyes as he and Harrison entered: a slightly sickly mix of something floral and a deeper, more masculine musk. At least, he assumed it was her perfume. Someone else might have been in here before her and left the place
stinking. Nobody ever opened the windows in the winter.
‘Aye, that’s right,’ Begbie said. ‘No’ much to add to what I told you before, but at least it’s all down on paper now.’
‘Indeed.’ McLean took the chair opposite her, Harrison sitting beside him. ‘There have been a few developments in the past twenty-four hours though, and I had a couple more questions if you didn’t mind answering them?’
‘Not at all. Ask away.’
‘We’re looking for some refugees. Possibly Syrian or from that region. Wondered if their names were familiar to you. Rahel Nour, Akka Nour and Akka’s five-year-old daughter, Nala Nour?’ McLean studied Begbie’s face as he said the names, looking for any tic of recognition. Either she had never heard of them or she’d be a very good poker player.
‘Can’t say as I know them, no.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘There’s a fair few Syrians been arriving in the past year or two, mind. Hardly surprising, given what’s happening in the Middle East right now.’
‘OK. What about this girl?’ McLean held a hand out and Harrison passed him the artist’s impression. He studied it himself for a moment before turning it over to Begbie. ‘Do you recognise her?’
Again there was nothing in the woman’s face to suggest she did.
‘Is this her? The poor wee thing you found in the basement?’ Her eyes glistened with tears when she looked up at McLean after a long time studying the picture. He nodded once.
‘Have you seen her before?’
‘No. No. I think I’d recognise her. There’s no’ many that young come through the door.’
McLean took the picture back. ‘Well, thank you for looking at it anyway. And if you hear anything please get in touch. I know you think all we want to do is round these folk up and send them back where they came from, but that’s really not the case.’
