Still, as Strachan had said, it could have been much worse. Brody and Fraser stood behind me as I studied the smoking wreckage. By rights I should have waited until a fire inspector had made sure that the structure was safe, but there was no telling when that would be. I was under no illusion that Janice Donaldson’s remains would have survived this second incineration. But I had to see for myself.
The rain fell as if the sky were made from water, tamping down the ashes and dampening the outer layer to a black mush. Even so, it hadn’t beaten the fire completely. The debris was still smouldering from within. I could feel the heat from it on my face, contrasting the chill against my back.
‘Do you think there ’s a chance anything could still be intact?’
Brody asked.
‘Not really.’ My voice was still hoarse from the smoke. Fraser gave an irritable sigh. He looked bedraggled and miserable in the rain. ‘So why bother?’
‘To make sure.’
I could make out one blackened corner of my flight case, protruding from the ashes of what had been the medical clinic. It was open, its contents reduced to so much char. Just beyond it was the stainless steel trolley where I’d worked on Janice Donaldson’s cranium. The trolley was lying on its side, half buried under the remains of the roof. The skull and jawbone were nowhere to be seen, but I didn’t hold out much hope. The already calcined bones would have been shattered to powder by the impact. A few teeth might have survived, but nothing more. In any event, whatever was left would have to wait until a forensic team arrived to sift through the debris. It would take more resources than I had to carry out a proper search.
I brushed a piece of windblown ash from my face as I carefully
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picked my way towards the fridge. The dead woman’s hand had been inside it, and there was a chance the insulation had protected it. But that hope quickly died when I cleared away the covering of debris. The fridge ’s white enamel had been burned black and the rubber seal had melted, letting the door swing open to expose the contents to the flames. Of Janice Donaldson’s hand, all that was left was bone, cooked to a dark caramel colour by the heat.
The individual finger joints had fallen away from each other as the connecting tissue had burned from them. They lay in the bottom of the fridge, still hot to the touch. I picked them out, allowing them to cool a little before bagging them. All my unused evidence bags had been in my flight case. They’d gone up in flames with everything else, but I’d brought a box of freezer bags from the hotel to use instead. When I’d collected what was left of the hand in one of them I rejoined Brody and Fraser.
‘That it?’ Fraser asked, squinting at the bag.
‘That’s it.’
‘Hardly worth bothering with.’
I ignored him and went to where an upright section of charred timber still stood in the ruins of the community centre. The wooden spar was blackened to charcoal. Attached to it were bright copper strands, all that remained of the centre ’s electrical wiring. The plastic insulation around the copper had been burned away, but the wires themselves were intact, still stapled to the wooden post. Judging from their position, they would have fed the light switch by the entrance. Seeing them, an idea began to form, too faint even to call a suspicion. I’d only managed to escape from the burning hall because the fire hadn’t spread as far as the doors. So it must have started at the far side, opposite where I now stood. I started to circle the wreckage of the centre, making my way round there.
‘Now what?’ Fraser demanded irritably. Brody said nothing, just watched, thoughtfully.
‘There ’s something I want to check.’
I told myself I was probably wasting my time as I scanned the ashes and wreckage where the back wall had stood. Then something 168
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caught my eye. Crouching down, I gently brushed away the ash to reveal what I’d hoped I wouldn’t find.
Small metal puddles, gleaming against the charred wood. The sight sent a chill through me. I’d attended enough fire scenes to know only too well what they meant.
This was no accident.
And then an even worse thought struck me, one I hadn’t even considered until now. Oh, Christ.
Gripped by a new sense of urgency, I hurried back to Brody and Fraser. But even as I did I heard a car approaching, and saw Maggie Cassidy’s battered Mini bumping up the road towards us. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. She climbed out, diminutive as ever in her oversized red coat.
‘Morning, gents,’ she greeted us, cheerfully. ‘I hear somebody had a barbecue last night.’
Fraser was already striding towards her. ‘This is off limits. Back in your car. Now!’
The wind flattened her coat around her like a cocoon as she held out her Dictaphone, as though to ward him off. There was nervousness in her face, but she did her best to disguise it.
‘Aye? Why’s that?’
‘Because I say so.’
She shook her head with mock-regret. ‘Sorry, not good enough. I slept through all the excitement last night, and I’m not missing out on it now. Perhaps if you gave me a few words, oh, say about how there ’s now a murder investigation going on, and how you think the fire started, then I’ll be very happy to leave you in peace.’
Fraser balled his fists, glaring at her with such animosity I was worried he ’d do something stupid. Maggie gave me a smile.
‘How about you, Dr Hunter? Any chance of—’
‘We need to talk.’
I don’t know who looked most surprised, her or Fraser.
‘You’re not talking to her !’
I caught Brody’s eye. ‘Let him be,’ he told Fraser.
‘ What? You’ve got to be joking. She ’s a bloody—’
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‘Just do it!’
All his years of command cracked into his voice. Fraser didn’t like it, but he gave in.
‘Aye, fine! Do what you bloody like,’ he snapped, walking back towards the Range Rover.
‘Don’t let him go anywhere,’ I warned Brody. ‘We need the car.’
Maggie was watching me suspiciously, as though this might be some new sort of trick.
‘I need your help,’ I told her, taking her arm and leading her back towards the Mini. ‘We ’re going to leave now, and I don’t want you to come after us.’
She stared at me as if I were mad. ‘What is this, are you—’
‘ Listen. Please,’ I added, knowing too much time had already been wasted. ‘You want a story, I promise you’ll get one. But right now, I need you to leave us alone.’
The incredulous smile slowly died from her lips. ‘This is bad, isn’t it?’
‘I hope not. But I think it might be, yes.’
The wind blew a strand of hair across her face as her eyes searched mine. She gave a nod as she brushed it away.
‘All right. But there ’d better be a front-page story for me in this, all right?’
I hurried back to where Brody and Fraser waited by the Range Rover as she climbed back into her Mini.
‘What the hell did you say to her?’ Fraser demanded as she drove away.
‘It doesn’t matter. Have you spoken to Duncan this morning?’
‘Duncan? No, not yet,’ he said, defensively. ‘He hasn’t called in yet. But, you know, I was going to take him out some breakfast later . . .’
‘Try him now.’
‘Now? Why, what’s—’
‘Just do it.’
He gave me a dirty look but reached for his radio. ‘Can’t get through . . .’ he frowned.
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‘All right, get in the car. We ’re going out there.’
Brody had been watching with a worried expression, but said nothing until we were in the car and Fraser was pulling away. ‘What is it? What did you find?’
I was staring anxiously through the windscreen as we left the village,
scanning the sky ahead of us. ‘I checked the wiring back at the community centre. A fire caused by an electrical fault wouldn’t have been hot enough to melt the copper core. But there ’s an area round the back where the wires were melted.’
‘So what?’ Fraser asked, impatiently.
‘It means the fire was hotter there,’ Brody said, slowly. ‘Oh, Christ.’
Fraser banged the steering wheel. ‘Will somebody please tell me what the fuck’s going on?’
‘It was hotter there because that’s where an accelerant was used to start it,’ I told him. ‘The fire wasn’t caused by a short. Somebody set it deliberately.’
He was still trying to work it out. ‘What ’s that got to do with Duncan?’
It was Brody who answered. ‘Because if someone wanted to get rid of the evidence, it might not only have been the clinic that was torched.’
I could see from Fraser’s face that he finally understood. But even if he hadn’t there was no need to explain further. Smeared across the sky directly ahead was a black trail of smoke. The meandering terrain prevented us from seeing the source of the smoke. It seemed like every hill and bend in the road conspired to keep the cottage and camper van from view. Fraser put his foot down, tearing along the narrow road much faster than was safe in the atrocious conditions. No one complained. Then we rounded one final bend, and the old cottage was revealed in front of us. So, too, was the camper van.
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What was left of it.
‘Oh, no,’ Fraser said.
Most of the smoke we ’d seen was coming from the cottage. There hadn’t been much left to burn, but the thick roof beams and timbers that had fallen in the day before were still smouldering in the ruins. If there had been anything in there that SOC might have salvaged, it had been destroyed now. But it was the sight of Brody’s camper van that transfixed us. It had been reduced to a burned-out shell, tyres melted to misshapen lumps of rubber. The living quarters had been almost completely consumed, walls eaten away by the fire, roof partially blown off when either the gas cylinder or petrol tank had exploded. Thin trails of smoke rose wraith-like from it, only to be whisked away by the wind. There was no sign of Duncan.
Fraser didn’t slow as he went off the road and on to the track, the heavy car slewing on the muddy surface as he stamped on the brakes. He jumped out of the car and ran towards the camper van, leaving the door swinging in the wind behind him.
‘Duncan? Duncan! ’ he bellowed, charging across the grass. Brody and I ran behind him, rain whipping into our faces. Fraser lurched to a halt in front of the camper van.
‘Oh, Jesus Christ! Where is he? Where the fuck is he?’
He stared round wildly, as though hoping the young PC would suddenly come strolling up. I became aware of Brody’s gaze. There was the same awareness in his face that I felt myself, and I knew that he ’d seen what I had.
‘He ’s here,’ I said quietly.
Fraser followed the direction of my gaze. A boot was sticking out from under a piece of heat-buckled roof, the leather burned away to reveal charred flesh and bone.
He took a step towards the camper van. ‘Ah, no, Christ . . .’
Before I could stop him he grabbed hold of the panel and started trying to heave it off.
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‘Don’t,’ I began, but as I started forward a hand fell on my shoulder. I looked round at Brody. He shook his head.
‘Leave him.’
‘It was a crime scene; none of us should touch it. But I understood why Brody didn’t try to interfere.’
‘I don’t really see it making much difference now, do you?’ he said, bleakly.
Fraser wrenched the panel free, letting the wind carry it away. It pitched and bounced along the grass like a grounded kite until it came up against the cottage. Fraser continued to tear at the rest of the wreckage like a madman. Even from where I stood, the smell of burned meat was overpowering.
Then he stopped, staring at what he ’d uncovered. He stumbled back, as uncoordinated as a broken puppet.
‘Oh, Christ. Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not him. Tell me that ’s not him!’
The body lay in the centre of the camper van. It wasn’t as badly burned as Janice Donaldson’s remains had been, but in some ways its scorched humanity made the sight even worse. Its limbs had drawn up, so that it was curled in a foetal position, pathetically vulnerable. Cooked into the flesh round its middle was a charred police utility belt. A fire-blackened baton and handcuffs were still attached to it. Fraser was weeping. ‘Why didn’t he get out? Why the fuck didn’t he get out?’
I took hold of his arm. ‘Come on.’
‘Get off me!’ he snarled, jerking free.
‘Get a grip, man!’ Brody told him, harshly.
Fraser turned on him. ‘Don’t tell me what to do! You’re a fucking has-been! You’ve got no authority here!’
Brody’s face was uncompromising. ‘Then start acting like a police officer yourself.’
All at once Fraser seemed to sag. ‘He was twenty-one,’ he mumbled. ‘Twenty-one! What am I going to tell everyone?’
‘Tell them he was murdered,’ Brody said brutally. ‘Tell them
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we ’ve got a killer loose on the island. And tell them if Wallace had sent out a proper inquiry team in the first place, your twenty-oneyear-old PC might still be alive!’
There was rare emotion in his voice. And we all knew what he ’d left unsaid: that it had been Fraser’s slip that had shown our hand about the woman’s murder, and perhaps panicked her killer into action. But there was no point in recriminations now, and looking at Fraser I thought he was suffering enough already.
‘Take it easy,’ I told Brody.
He took a long breath, then nodded, in control of himself again.
‘We need to let the mainland know what ’s happened. This isn’t just a straightforward murder inquiry any more.’
Red-eyed, Fraser took out his radio, turning his back to the wind and rain as he stabbed a number into its keypad. He listened, then tried again.
‘Come on, come on!’
‘What ’s wrong?’ Brody asked.
‘It ’s not working.’
‘What do mean, it’s not working? You called Wallace last night.’
‘Well, now there ’s nothing!’ Fraser snapped. ‘I thought it was just Duncan’s radio before, but I can’t raise anybody. See for yourself, there ’s no bloody signal!’
He thrust it at Brody. The retired inspector took it and tapped in a number. He put the handset to his ear, then handed it back.
‘Let’s try the one in the car.’
The Range Rover’s fixed radio used the same digital system as the handsets. Without bothering to ask Fraser, Brody tried it, then shook his head.
‘Dead. The gale must have taken out a mast. If that’s happened the whole comms network for the islands could be down.’
I took in the empty, windswept landscape that surrounded us. The low, dark clouds that squatted over the island seemed to shut us in even more.
‘So now what do we do?’ I asked.
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For once even Brody seemed at a loss. ‘We keep trying. Sooner or later we ’ll get either the radios or the landlines back.’
‘But what happens until then?’
The rain streaked his face as he looked at the camper van. His mouth set in a hard line.
‘Until then, we ’re on our own.’
CH APTER 17
I VOLUNTEERED TO stay at the croft while Brody and Fraser drove back to the village to find stakes and a hammer. We needed to tape off the camper van, but there wasn’t enough of it left to fix the tape to. Moving Duncan’s body wasn’t an option, even if there ’d been anywhere left to take it. With Janice Donaldson’s remains we hadn’t had a choice, but that didn’t apply here. True, it would mean leaving the van a
nd its grisly contents exposed to the elements. But—Fraser’s frenzy apart—this time I was determined to preserve the crime scene as we ’d found it.
And none of us doubted that it was just that—a crime scene. Someone had torched this deliberately, just as they had the medical clinic. Except Duncan hadn’t managed to escape. Before he and Fraser left, Brody and I stood huddled on the track, bracing ourselves against the gale while the police sergeant tried once more to raise the mainland on the radio. The weather was worse than ever. Rain fell like lead shot, dripping from the scorched hood of my coat in shining strands, and 176
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heavy clouds raced overhead, their movement reflected in the rippling of the wind-flattened grass. But nothing could carry away the stink of burning, or the stark fact of the young policeman’s death. It hung like a pall over everything, adding a further chill to the already frigid air.
‘You think this was done before or after the community centre?’ I asked.
Brody considered the van’s blackened shell. ‘Before, I’d say. Makes more sense for him to have come out to torch this first, then set fire to the clinic. No point in starting a fire that would alert the entire village until he ’d taken care of things here.’
I felt anger as well as shock at the senselessness of it. ‘What was the point? We ’d already moved the remains to the clinic. Why leave them out here for weeks, and then suddenly do this? It doesn’t make sense.’
Brody sighed, wiping the rain from his face. ‘It doesn’t have to make sense. Whoever this is, he ’s panicking. He knows he made a mistake leaving the body here, and now he ’s trying to rectify it. He ’s determined to destroy anything that might tie him to it. Even if that means killing again.’
He paused, giving me a level look.
‘You sure you’ll be all right by yourself ?’
We ’d already discussed this. It made sense for Brody to go back to the village since he knew where to find the materials we needed to seal the site. But someone had to stay out here, and Fraser was in no fit state.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said.
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