A Song for the Dying

18

Bad Bill’s Burger Bar was a rusty Transit van — painted matt black, with the menu chalked on the bodywork beside the open hatch. He’d parked it in the far corner of the B amp;Q car park, the air around it heady with the smell of onions frying in the fat that oozed out of the burgers and Lorne sausage.

Alice wandered back towards the car with her shoulders hunched, woolly hat pulled down over her ears, curly hair escaping to sprawl down the shoulders of her padded jacket. The fog of her breath mingled with the steam rising off the Double Bastard Bacon Murder Burger clutched in both hands. She curled in for another bite.

I popped the Suzuki’s boot and loaded the contents of the trolley into it. Shovel. Pick axe. Stanley knife. Three-and-a-bit-foot-long iron crowbar.

Alice chewed — tomato, marie rose, and brown sauce made a Joker-from-Batman smile that nearly reached her ears. The words were barely audible through the mouthful of bun and meat and lettuce and crisps. ‘Sure you don’t want a bite? S’good.’

Duct tape. Bolt cutters. Compost accelerant. Heavy-duty rubble sacks. Firelighters. Lump hammer. Five-litre container of methylated spirits.

‘Not hungry.’

Tarpaulin, plastic washing line, pliers.

‘I’ve never had a burger with Bacon Frazzles on it before.’ More chewing. Then she frowned at the boot full of tools. Shuffled her feet. ‘I still don’t see why you made me buy all this stuff just to go visit Mr McFee.’

‘Because that’s how the law works: if you batter someone to death with a crowbar, it’s assault with a deadly weapon. Why did you have a crowbar? You must have taken it with you to attack the victim. You’re going to prison.’ I clunked the boot shut. ‘But if you’ve got a car full of DIY stuff, because you’re going to do up your new flat in Kingsmeath, you can batter the same person to death and call it self-defence. All about context. And I will pay you back.’

Alice froze, mid-bite. ‘Are we planning on doing that? Killing him?’

Not him, exactly… But it’d make for an evening Mrs Kerrigan was going to remember for as long as she lived. Which would be about two hours if I could keep the blood loss to a minimum.

I turned the trolley around and gave it a shove towards the battered orange pipework corralling a few of its mates. Letting it find its own way in. ‘I don’t care what Jacobson says, muscle or not, there’s no way we’re going to see Wee Free McFee without a bit of hardware.’

And if the crowbar didn’t work, there was always Bob the Builder. He smiled up at me from the back seat, that bright yellow spanner clutched in one hand.

‘Ash…’ She licked a smear of sauce from the side of her mouth. ‘You were really quiet at Ruth Laughlin’s and I think it’d be a good idea if we talked about how you feel about the-’

‘Can you do me a favour?’ I looked back towards Bad Bill’s, where the man himself was hammering a chicken into bits with a cleaver. ‘I know I said I wasn’t hungry, but now I think about it, I could go a stovies. Only, my foot’s killing me, and you know … would you mind?’

She sighed. Took a bite. Chewed. Swallowed. ‘Tea?’

‘Yeah, please.’

But Alice stayed put. Tilted her head to one side. ‘When you were on the phone with Bear, why didn’t you tell him about Ruth being raped?’

Why? Because knowledge was power. What was the point of giving it away without getting something back?

I pointed at the Transit van. ‘And make sure Bill doesn’t skimp on the beetroot.’

Another sigh. Then she ripped a bite from her burger, turned, and munched her way back to Bad Bill’s.

When she reached the counter, I ducked into the Suzuki and grabbed Bob the Builder. Gave the car park a quick scan — no security cameras pointing this way, but better safe than sorry. Got into the passenger seat and turned Bob face-down in the footwell. A seam ran up the middle of his back, but it was stitched tight. I flipped him upside down.

A line of Velcro ran up the inside seam of his dungarees. It scritched open, revealing wads of kapok stuffing. The stuff snagged on my nails as I pushed my fingers inside Bob, grabbed the gun, and pulled it out.

Black. Small enough that when I wrapped my hand around the grip and pointed my index finger the tip poked out past the end of the barrel. Light, too. I thumbed the release and the clip slid out into my open palm. Empty.

A quick check over my shoulder — Alice was standing at the hatch of the burger bar, talking to the dark rounded bulk of Bad Bill while he ladled something into a polystyrene container.

I dipped back into Bob and gave him what had to be the world’s roughest full body-cavity search: rummaging through his innards till I had thirteen bullets in my lap. They were tiny — not even as long as the last joint of my thumb — steel-bodied with a copper tip, like a small metallic lipstick.

The first one was a struggle to get into the clip and it just got worse after that as the spring inside compressed. When the final one snapped into place I slipped the magazine into the handgrip again. Hauled back the slide and racked a round into the chamber. Made sure the safety catch was on.

Then gave Bob a loaded-handgun suppository and returned him to the back seat where he’d come from.

A knock at the window: Alice, her face now free of sauce, a polystyrene carton in one hand, a couple of wax-paper cups in the other.

Lunchtime.

Stovies. Couldn’t remember when I’d last had proper ones, made with lamb instead of prison gristle and stock-cubes. The beetroot sat in one corner of the carton, staining the potato like spilled blood. I forked up another mouthful and shovelled it in while Alice sat with her phone pinned to her ear.

‘Uh-huh… No, I don’t think so…’ Her satchel lay in her lap, a makeshift desk for one of the Inside Man letters. Its grainy, badly photocopied scrawl was streaked with yellow highlighter pen and red biro. The rest were stretched across the dashboard. Waiting their turn.

The view from the lay-by wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been: out across a ditch, then a couple of fields, a garden centre, a static caravan park, a patch of woodland, ending at the sprawling boundary of Shortstaine. From here, the suburb was a soulless swathe of gingerbread houses crammed into twisting cul-de-sacs. Eight years ago, it was all fields.

‘Yeah… Uh-huh… I’ll ask.’ She put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Bear wants to know where we are.’

I lifted my left shoe from the footwell and jiggled it. The ankle monitor shoogled against my skin. ‘Thought that was the point of the GPS.’

Alice’s face turned down at the edges. ‘But he’s-’

‘Tara McNab.’ I sooked my plastic fork clean and pointed it at the bins by the side of the lay-by, overflowing with McDonald’s bags and empty drink cans. ‘The Inside Man’s second victim was found right there. Flat on her back, staring up at the dawn.’

‘Ah…’ Back to the phone. ‘We’re revisiting the deposition sites from the original investigation… Yes… No, I haven’t met with Dr Docherty yet…’

A tangent of beetroot clipped off beneath the fork, got skewered, then loaded up with mushy grey potato and a lump of meat. Say what you like about Bad Bill’s grubby van, hairy arms, and collection of tattoos, he made a mean stovie. Lots of meat, sod-all gristle, and comforting as a lover’s embrace. I chewed around the words, ‘Ask him what’s happened with Sabir.’

‘Yes … I know, but we’ve been… No, Chief Superintendent Jacobson…’

Chief Superintendent Jacobson. Sounded as if she’d lost her ‘call me Bear’ privileges.

‘Has he got those numbers from Sabir yet?’

‘What?… No… Em, Ash wants to know if you’ve heard anything back from Detective Sergeant Akhtar?… Right…’

The carton squealed as I scraped the last morsels up with the fork. ‘And while you’re at it, when do we get our muscle?’

‘Yes, I understand that, Chief Super-… No, it’s… Yes. Soon as we can. Now, about getting someone to come with us to Mr McFee’s house, is… Ah, right, yes…’

‘Well?’ The last dobs of mushy potato gravy got wiped up on a fingertip.

‘No, I understand… Yes.’

I scrunched the carton up and opened the car door. ‘Tell him to get his finger out, we’re supposed to be catching a killer here.’

‘What? Yes… It’s…’

At least the drizzle had stopped. I climbed out and limped between the puddled potholes to the bins. Jammed the polystyrene container in with the shells of dead Happy Meals.

Was it raining that night — when we found Tara’s body? Difficult to remember. Probably. All of us standing around in our white SOC suits, caught in the spotlights’ glow like ghosts at a party for the dead. The guest of honour laid out, with blood thick and dark on the front of her nightdress…

Tara McNab’s mother never got over the death of her little girl. She went on the drink. Started hanging about outside Force Headquarters with a thermos full of tea and a placard with ‘POLICE INCOMPETENCE ~ CAN’T CATCH MY DAUGHTER’S KILLER!’ on it in big black letters. Three weeks later she jumped off Dundas Bridge.

Couldn’t really blame her.

The worst thing about losing your child was having to go on living every day. Everything else was a bloody cakewalk compared to that.

‘Ash?’

I blinked. Turned.

Alice was half out of the car, clutching the satchel to her lap with one hand, holding her phone out in the other. ‘Detective Superintendent Jacobson wants to talk to you.’

I hobbled back and took the mobile. ‘What’s the result on the phone box?’

‘Why the hell are you sodding about at old body-dump sites? It’s-’

‘Dr Fred Docherty is an idiot. We’re putting together an independent profile: the Inside Man picked these deposition sites for a reason, Alice needs to see them if she’s going to work out what it is.’

‘I’m not happy she’s-’

‘And while we’re on the subject, I want to limit her exposure to Docherty. He’s got an agenda to push — that’s why his profile for Unsub-Fifteen’s pretty much identical to the one he came up with eight years ago. He’s not interested in the truth, he’s interested in being right.’

An eighteen-wheeler thundered past the lay-by, tyres kicking up a mist of dirty spray.

‘I see.’

‘If Professor Huntly’s about, get him to put a fire under the lab for those samples from Wishart Avenue. Probably a waste of time checking if Castle Hill Infirmary did rape kits on the original survivors, but you never know.’

Silence.

‘Jacobson?’

‘Normally I’m the one who gives the orders round-’

‘Sorry if you’ve got sore toes, but we’re looking for someone who’s killed five women, mutilated three, and right now Jessica McFee’s out there waiting to be slit open like an Arbroath Smokie. We don’t have time to sod about with niceties. We’re doing our jobs, and I need you to make sure everyone else is doing theirs.’

Laying it on a bit thick, but what the hell. Look at me, I’m a team player.

Don’t send me back to prison.

‘All right, but I’ll be expecting results.’ He hung up.

I switched the phone off and handed it back to Alice. Climbed into the car and pulled on my seatbelt.

She picked the photocopied letter from her lap and held it up. Some of the blurred spidery words were circled with red biro. She pointed at a line she’d highlighted in yellow. ‘Does that say “fusillade”, or “forward”?’

It was little more than a squiggle of grainy grey. ‘Looks like … maybe “funwarde”? Thought these were transcribed years ago. It’ll be in the case file.’

‘Always go to the source material. It’s not just about the words, it’s how they fit together on the page — what happens on the lines above and below.’ Alice squinted at the paper for a bit. ‘Maybe that’s a “T” not an “F”. “Terrified”?’

‘Next time we’re at FHQ we’ll go see Simpson. The man’s like a cadaver dog — if the original letters are in the archives, he’ll find them.’

Another eighteen-wheeler thundered past.

She started the car, then sent the windscreen wipers groaning through the dirty spray covering the glass. ‘I’m supposed to go discuss the profile with Dr Docherty.’

‘Screw him. We’re going to take a look at where Doreen Appleton was dumped.’

The jagged sea of brambles, where we’d found Doreen Appleton eight years ago, wasn’t there any more. An electricity substation stood in its place, secured behind a chain-link fence with bright yellow ‘DANGER OF DEATH’ notices.

Bit late for that.

Alice peered out through the windscreen. ‘Do you think we could arrange for Ruth to meet Laura Strachan? I think it’d be good for her.’

‘Don’t see why not. Have to find Laura first though — she’s gone to ground somewhere, ducking the media.’

‘Ash?’

‘What?’

‘If Doreen was his first victim, why didn’t we come here first?’

‘Because I didn’t want to eat my lunch looking at a substation.’

‘Oh…’ She started the car again.

Holly Drummond’s ditch was still there, running along a winding country road leading northeast from the Wynd. The regular Edwardian terraces glowed like rows of sandstone teeth, small private parks glimmering green in the afternoon light.

From here, standing at the side of the road, Oldcastle was laid out like a 3D map. Blackwall Hill to the left, rising up in a mound of grey housing developments and trendy shops. Kingsmeath beyond it, with its tombstone tower blocks and crumbling council housing. Then across Kings River to Logansferry: industrial estates, the big glass-roofed train station, and abandoned riverside developments. Castle Hill in the middle: twisting Victorian streets curled around the blade of granite where the ruins sulked. Part of Shortstaine just visible behind it. Then Cowskillin to the right: all seventies houses and an abandoned football stadium. And back across the river to Castleview, the spire of St Bartholomew’s Episcopal Cathedral rising like a rusted nail from the surrounding streets, catching the last rays of a dying sun.

Nice place to dump a body. Heft your victim into a ditch, then stand here admiring the view for a bit, before heading off into town to pick up the next poor sod.

I got back in the car. ‘Across the river, then take a left.’

The view from where he’d dumped Natalie May wasn’t nearly as impressive. A railway culvert — just a small stone arch beneath the single line heading north — with a burn running through it. The embankment rose up on both sides, following the tracks, but the burn cut across it at right angles, like a cross.

Alice joined me on the grass verge at the side of the road, one hand on the barbed-wire fence, peering down into the shadows. The drop had to be at least fifteen feet to the water. She stood on her tiptoes. ‘This isn’t like the others.’

‘There isn’t a phone box for eight or nine miles.’ I picked up a stone and tossed it over the fence and down into the burn. ‘Everyone else was dumped where an ambulance could get to them in ten to fifteen minutes, clear directions, nice and easy to find. Natalie gets dumped in the middle of nowhere. If that maintenance team hadn’t come out to fix the wiring, she could’ve stayed hidden for years.’

‘No nine-nine-nine call.’

‘No point, she was already dead. Same with Doreen Appleton and Claire Young. Dumped off the beaten track. Failures. If he thinks they’ve got a chance, he makes the call…’

Alice scuffed her foot along the verge, drawing a line in the mud with the toe of her Converse trainers. ‘Except for Ruth.’

‘Except for Ruth.’

‘It’s not your fault. She was a nurse, she lived in the same halls as the other victims, it was just … bad luck.’

I hurled another stone in after the first. It splashed into the dark water and disappeared. ‘There’s what, thirty nurses in each building? Three halls in total. Ninety nurses to choose from and he grabbed the one who’d helped me. Luck?’ My walking stick squelched through the grass as I limped back towards the car. ‘Of course it’s my fault.’