Sinky’s superpower was knowing who was going to order a deep-fried Mars Bar with chips. He could spot them a mile off. First off, chances are they were tourists. Hear an English accent in the queue and it was a good bet they’d be eying up the DFMB. Liverpudlians were the worst for it. You’d see them nudging their mates – Go on, dare you.
Chip shop hours weren’t exactly nine to five, even in Glasgow, so when he got the chance of a night off, he grabbed it. Most free nights he’d head out for a few beers with his best mate Titch, and then anything could happen. Titch was the kind of guy that could get Mother Teresa into trouble. As long as she’d had a few pints of Best.
So it was that they were walking in Springburn at half one in the morning. They’d got a taxi from town and Titch had insisted the driver dropped them a quarter of a mile from where they going. Just in case.
Titch wasn’t small. He was a good six foot, but his first name was Richard so it was the law that he be called Titch. He was a student. Sort of. He was doing a course in social sciences at Glasgow Caley. Sort of. He’d dropped in and out and was always spinning them some line as to why he had to defer another year before he picked it up again. He was a year shy of thirty now and still going strong with the studying. Sinky had never quite worked out what social sciences actually was and he couldn’t ask anymore.
Titch was the one that was always coming up with plans for them. Sinky figured it was because he had plenty of time on his hands to do it. So it was this night. Titch had been reading on some forum about how the old Highland Fling pub on Cowlairs Road was haunted. The bar had been abandoned for years and was supposed to be in a hell of a mess inside but, of course, Titch being Titch, he was dismissive of any suggestion of spirits other than whisky, vodka or rum.
If Sinky’s superpower was detecting potential purchasers of deep-fried confectionery, Titch’s was pubs. He quite literally knew them inside out, including knowledge passed on lovingly by his dad and grandad, and his mission this night was to prove that the Highland Fling was haunted by nothing more than neglect.
‘Ghosts my arse,’ he said for the umpteenth time as they staggered up Millarbank Street. ‘Some wee neds fucking about maybe. But ghosts my arse. We’re going to see some genuine Glasgow history, Sinky. And we’re going to prove that shitehawk on the forum is talking through his hole.’
Sinky had given up arguing. When Titch was on one it was best just to let him get on with it. Anyway, Sinky was rubbered.
‘My granda says the old Highland Fling was a great night out. Live music all weekend. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. There was a house band but the talent was the locals. Sandie Shaw impersonators. Maurice Chevalier too, whoever he was, and some guy called Wee George who could do every hit of the day in a Donald Duck voice. Can’t buy that stuff, Sinky.’
Sinky nodded even though Titch wasn’t looking.
‘My da was in the Fling one morning, seven o’clock it was. Cops had been tipped off it had been opened to serve booze to boys over from Ireland for the Walk. Lifted gey near the whole pub. Never got to court though. Half the Springburn polis were in there having a bevvy with the boys so they had to let them all go.’
They neared the corner of Cowlairs Road, a glazier’s on their left, and Titch saw what they were looking for. ‘There you go, wee man. The Highland Fling. Or what’s left of it.’
All Sinky saw was a whitewashed wall and a boarded-up window, a shutter down over the door and a red sign above that had faded to a poorly pink. They turned the corner and saw the whitewash, not so white anymore, stretch fifty yards down the street. It was a single-storey concrete block with little in the way of windows, a sure sign of a pub to be avoided, according to Sinky’s dad. Above the wash, in white lettering on red, you could just about make out the words ‘The Highland Fling’. As long as you knew what they were.
‘Mon, wee man. We go in here.’
The opening was just about wide enough to let one of them walk through at a time. Neither it or the thought of what was inside made Sinky feel very good about the adventure. Titch, on the other hand, was full of lager and vodka and had the confidence of a social scientist.
He led the way and Sinky followed. They put on the torches on their phones and picked their way across broken glass and strewn rubbish: chair legs and crates, ashtrays and coils of wiring. The light picked out a pool table with a strange white crust that turned out to be fallen plaster. It was an island in an ocean of plastic tumblers, beer cans, empty bottles and carrier bags.
‘Wee vandal bastards,’ Titch complained.
They moved into another room, one ringed with a sweeping arc of leather seating that hugged the wall. It, like everything else in the abandoned Highland Fling, had seen better days. It might have been dark green or black under the dirt. If Sinky didn’t know better he’d have sworn it was covered in pigeon shit. The smell suggested he didn’t know better.
There were chunks out of the walls and furniture trashed for the fun of it. Graffiti named the culprits but they’d never face justice. The old pub looked like a bomb had gone off.
They were looking round the room seeing torn leather, cracked and blackened mirrors, all under the thin stream of mobile phone light. From the corner of the room, or maybe somewhere beyond, Sinky heard a scurry that confirmed his worst fears. He stepped to the side and a polystyrene cup cracked under his foot, sending the sound round the room and his pulse rate soaring.
‘The ghost,’ Titch made exaggerated bunny ears with his fingers, ‘was supposedly seen in the cellar. So that’s where we’re going, my man.’
Great, Sinky thought. What could possibly go wrong, tripping around in the dark in a shithole like this?
They passed another room, a second bar by the look of it, that defied walking through as the floor was swamped by plaster, breeze blocks and strip lighting. Titch led the way down to the cellar, singing ‘My Way’ in a Donald Duck voice as he went.
They were aware of a difference as soon as they entered the room. The chill was instant and obvious. The cellar smelled too, big time. Sinky wasn’t sure if it was either or both of those that made him suddenly uneasy or the fact that they were tripping into the bowels of this hellhole.
The ceiling was lower, the floor no less of an obstacle course. The torch from Titch’s phone picked out five beer barrels dotted round the floor.
‘Don’t suppose there’s actually gonna be beer in those? I could go another drink right now.’
‘Nae chance, Sinky. They’d have disappeared long ago if there was. Okay, ghosties. Come out, ya bams, wherever you are.’
Sinky didn’t appreciate the daring of unknown demons as he ducked low to avoid a strip of something hanging loose from the low ceiling. They were venturing further into the corner, the walls whitewashed and exposed under torchlight. As he lowered his head, he saw something pass through the sweep of his own phone’s beam – his brain immediately told him it shouldn’t be there. A brief flash of limb and flesh that made his sphincter twitch and his heart hit the concrete floor.
‘Holy fuck!’
‘Calm down, Sinky. There’s no such . . .’
Titch saw it too and dropped his phone in shock. He fell to his knees and scrambled around to pick it up. Together they shone their lights into the corner.
There, on the cellar floor, next to a beer barrel, lay a body.
Naked. Discoloured. Female. Dark hair falling onto purpled shoulders.
Titch took two steps backwards and fell on his arse. Sinky moved back and offered a hand to help him up, never taking his eyes off the body even though he desperately wanted to.
‘Ghosts, you said, Titch.’
‘No, no. I said no ghosts. And that’s no a ghost.’
‘Too right it’s not. Although if it starts to fucking move and wail, I’m running right through that wall.’
Titch was back on his feet and they edged closer. It wasn’t courage, or even alcohol that took them forward, it was something neither could quite explain. T
hey just wanted to see.
Whatever they’d expected, whatever they’d feared seeing the body from the other side of the cellar, the close-up reality was worse. The two men stopped and stared, not believing what they saw.
The body had been cut in half just above the waist. Like a magic trick. Like a horror movie. Like a nightmare.
‘Holy fuck.’
‘Aye.’
‘We phone the cops, Titch?’
‘Oh fuck aye. But let’s get the fuck out of here first.’
CHAPTER 9
When the phone rang, Narey sat straight up in bed and grabbed it before it could ring again. The clock said it was 4.07. She’d done this long enough to know that good news never rang in the middle of the night.
Tony stirred next to her but he just pulled the cover over his head rather than ask what was going on. His own experience told him it was something he didn’t need to know about.
‘Yes?’
‘DI Narey? Sergeant Iain Finnie at Barloch Street.’
‘Yes, Sergeant?’
‘I’m told you’re the person to talk to about the Eloise Gray case.’
If she’d still been half asleep, that had changed in those two words. ‘Yes. What’s happened?’
‘Two men had been crawling about in the old Highland Fling pub in Springburn earlier this morning. We took the call. They were exploring the place for some daft reason. Anyway, they found a body in the cellar.’
‘Eloise?’
‘Certainly looks that way. One of our boys, Kevin Waddle, he made the connection and pulled up her mispers sheet. Everything fits. Height, build, hair colour. Clothes and shoes that she was last seen in.’
‘Any jewellery?’
‘Yes. Silver ring on her right index finger. Moon necklace.’
‘It’s her.’
‘We think so, ma’am. SOCO is there now and they will take DNA. But we’re sure it’s her.’
‘I’ll be right there. Where’s the pub?’
‘Cowlairs Road. But, DI Narey . . . there’s something you need to know about the body.’
*
The corner of Cowlairs Road was cordoned off. An abandoned pub in an abandoned corner of the city, looking even smaller and more desolate under the early morning streetlight. Despite the hour, a few shadowy figures kept watch from the underpass a hundred yards away. Going out or going home, or having no home at all, they’d been drawn by the cop cars and the ambulance. But for that activity, the entrance to the pub would be completely overlooked and easy to enter unnoticed.
Narey showed her warrant card to the uniform on the door, standing tall in the falling rain like an unlikely bouncer on a long-shut pub. He moved aside to let her in and she saw the interior of the old bar in all its vandalised glory under the temporary spotlights.
A call like this always made for mixed emotions. She’d wanted to find Eloise from the first day of the investigation and that had become a desire to find her come what may. When you know you can’t do anything to change what’s happened, it becomes easier to accept, even hope for, the unwanted option of finding her dead. That at least offers the chance of going after the bastard who did it. Still, for all that, this wasn’t what she wanted. Not here, not now.
A constable led her through the ruins of the pub to the cellar. As soon as she stepped inside, she saw the white-washed walls bathed in light and a huddle of blue-suited SOCOs near the corner of the room. As they moved, she caught glimpses of purple-hued flesh. Eloise. Oh Jesus, Eloise.
The forensics became aware of her arrival and parted to make way for her. For a brief moment, she wished they hadn’t. The disfigurement, the decomposition, was awful, but it was clearly Eloise. She forced herself to look longer than she wanted, making sure, taking what she could from it.
The body had been posed. Her arms were positioned above her head, the elbows bent at right angles. Her legs spread apart.
‘Was she killed here?’
‘No.’ The crime scene manager was Campbell ‘Two Soups’ Baxter, his bearded jowls evident behind his mask. He was abrasive at the best of times, and this wasn’t one of those. ‘She has been moved here post-mortem, possibly quite considerably so. You will have been appraised of the dissection. It’s a technique called a hemicorporectomy. In this case, done somewhat inexpertly. Her body has been drained of blood but there’s no evidence of it within the cellar.’
‘Cause of death?’
He sighed and wobbled his head from side to side. ‘Let’s wait and see, but the cuts you can see at her wrists, relatively small as they are, may have been designed to have her bleed out. There are contusions above her wrists consistent with tie marks, so I’d suggest she was restrained and left to die slowly.’
It was unlike Baxter to make any kind of speculative offering, particularly without being asked. Narey knew this kind of savagery, particularly against a young woman, was the weak spot that allowed his humanity to show.
‘You’re saying that her death was deliberately prolonged?’
He didn’t look her in the eye but cast his head down, seemingly quite literally chewing on the answer, finally nodding reluctantly but firmly.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
‘Have you found anything else?’
‘We have. A piece of clothing snagged on a loose nail. It isn’t covered in dust or dirt like the rest of the place so we believe it to be recent. It doesn’t come from either of the gentlemen who discovered the body. We’ll tape-lift from it and hopefully get skin cells for matching.’
‘Can I see it, please?’
Two Soups held up an evidence bag. Inside was a scrap of black cotton, perhaps an inch square in size.
‘You’d think he’d have noticed leaving that behind.’
‘I can only imagine that he had his hands full, Detective Inspector. Quite literally.’
‘I guess so. This is ripped from a T-shirt, maybe?’ Tam Harkness habitually wore black T-shirts.
Baxter demurred, ‘It’s possible.’
Narey hesitated. The one question that she really wanted to ask had been stuck in her throat.
‘How long, Mr Baxter? How long has she been dead?’
That question could as easily have been rephrased as, ‘Was she alive when I was searching for her? Or had she been murdered before I even heard her name?’
Baxter reverted to type and refused to answer either spoken or inferred questions.
‘I wouldn’t care to speculate, Detective Inspector. We have science for that. You will have results as soon as it is humanly possible to get them to you.’
He left her to it, his parting gift a look that suggested he’d be grateful for her getting out of the way before too long. She was in no hurry to oblige him.
Why here? Why did he bring you here, Eloise? Somewhere you would inevitably be found. And why place you next to the beer barrel rather than hiding you behind it? And why take you at all?
She was still lost in her own thoughts when DS Rico Giannandrea made his way through the cellar minefield to stand at her shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, Rachel. I know this wasn’t how you wanted it to end.’
She answered without taking her eyes of Eloise. ‘Ah, but I did want it to end, Rico. That’s my sin. I’d got to that stage that I wanted to find her. Dead or alive. Be careful what you wish for, that’s what they say.’
‘Yes, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. I know how you meant it and so do you. You couldn’t have done more to find her, and you couldn’t have done anything to stop this from happening.’
‘Yeah, maybe. Okay, you stay here and oversee this, Rico. I’ve got a visit to make.’
‘Eloise’s mother?’
‘Yes. I should maybe wait until they confirm it but it’s her, I know it is. And I don’t want her finding out from anyone other than me.’
‘You don’t want me to go with you?’
‘No. I need to do this myself. But I’ll be paying another visit later today and I’ll need you w
ith me for that one. Just to make sure I don’t do anything I shouldn’t.’
‘Tam Harkness.’
‘Yes.’
CHAPTER 10
When the caller named Matthew Marr signed off there had been stunned silence in the room. For an instant. It broke, almost immediately, into a cacophony of recrim- ination, anger and confusion.
‘Shit, Salgado what the hell have you done?’
The detective turned open-mouthed to face O’Neill’s accusing stare. ‘Well at least I did something. Everyone else just wanted to sit and look at it.’
‘Yes, you did something. You blew it.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘It sure as shit looks that way.’ O’Neill was furious. ‘Geisler, is there any way of knowing who the hell that was and where he is? How do we get back in touch with him?’
‘Of knowing who he is or where? No. To get back in touch we can just do what we did. But we can’t make him play. He’d have to want to talk to us and it don’t seem like he does right now.’
‘Dammit.’
The caller’s opening line was still on the screen, scream- ing at them.
Where the hell have you been, Ethan? It should be done by now. He should be dead.
‘He should be dead,’ Salgado repeated. ‘What the hell is this?’
‘We need that guy back on the line,’ O’Neill insisted. ‘We do whatever we need to get him to talk to us. Fuck. Geisler, we’re going to need everything you can find on this damn computer. Everything. If someone – what the hell have we got here – if someone is dying then we need it fast.’
‘I’m on it. Our first problem is doing two things at once that will get in the way of each other. We need that line open for you to communicate with your guy, but I also need the elbow room to get into the guts of this machine. Can I make a suggestion?’
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