Aftershock

Three

‘How long has she been here?’ the head of CID asked.

‘The doc reckoned about ten days, sir,’ Jack McGurk replied, his voice muffled by his face mask. The space in the copse was restricted by overhanging branches, forcing the towering detective sergeant into an awkward crouch. ‘He can’t be certain, though,’ he continued. ‘He was going by maggot infestation, mostly. It’s been hot for the last week, and he did say that could have affected it. Poor lass,’ he murmured, ‘she’s not a pretty sight.’

‘That went without saying,’ Neil McIlhenney growled. The ears, mouth and nasal cavities of the body were filled with pupae, and with black crawling insects that were feeding on them in turn. He turned to McGuire. ‘You’re in no doubt, now you’ve seen her close up?’

‘None,’ said the chief superintendent. ‘The way she’s been left, been laid out. It’s. . it’s very similar to the others. Come on, let’s get the smell out of our nostrils, and let the crime-scene people back in.’ Stripping off his mask, he led the way out of the small clearing and on to the green hillside below. A woman dressed in a white tunic, like the three men, stood waiting for them on the edge of the golf course. She was in her mid-thirties, tall and slim with dark, close-cropped hair.

‘Is it what you thought?’ she asked McGurk.

McGuire answered for him. ‘No, Inspector, it’s as Superintendent McIlhenney and I suspected when we saw the image on the mobile. Jack wasn’t at any of the earlier crime scenes. The body’s laid out in exactly the same way as they were. It looks like an overdose, a suicide or a natural death, except there’s no sign of drug use, no empty pill bottles, and the victim was young and apparently healthy. The only difference is that the others were in fairly public places and were all found immediately after the kill. This girl’s off the beaten track.’

‘Are we sure about that?’ McIlhenney asked him. ‘Don’t people walk through these woods?’

‘I’ve never imagined so, but maybe I’m wrong. There is a path by the fence, but it’s pretty much overgrown.’ He looked at McGurk. ‘How was she found?’

‘By a golfer,’ the sergeant told him. ‘He hit a big hook off the tee, and knocked his ball into the woods. It’s out of bounds, but he went looking for it just the same.’

‘He hit it that far off line?’ McIlhenney exclaimed.

‘No. The ball was just inside the tree-line. He said to the uniforms it was the smell that attracted him, once he got in there.’

‘Have you spoken to him?’

McGurk winced. ‘I thought I’d leave that to you, sir. He’s a High Court judge.’

‘Who?’

‘Lord Archibald. I was in the witness box before him once. He gave me a hard time.’

McGuire laughed. ‘Archie Nelson gives everybody a hard time; it’s what makes him a great judge. Did you learn from the experience?’

‘Yes indeed, boss. I learned never to cross his path again if I can avoid it.’

‘I’ll interview him, if you like,’ said the woman.

The head of CID nodded. ‘You do that, Becky,’ he said. ‘You should be getting to know landmark figures like him. How are you settling in at Torphichen Place, by the way? I do plan to come and visit you there, honest.’

‘I like it,’ Detective Inspector Becky Stallings replied. ‘It’s a change from Charing Cross and no mistake, but it’s so much more civilised.’ Stallings was a newcomer to the Edinburgh force. She had been seconded from the Metropolitan Police to assist the internal inquiry into Stevie Steele’s death, and had applied for a permanent transfer shortly afterwards.

‘Do you understand what we’re talking about here? You know all about the Boras investigation, but are you up to speed with everything that went before?’

‘Not completely,’ she admitted.

‘That’s okay,’ said McGuire. ‘There’s no reason why you should be: those cases were all closed. Let me give you a run-down. Earlier this year, a young artist named Stacey Gavin was found dead near South Queensferry. There was no sign of a struggle, and the body was. . how do I put it?. . composed, as if she had simply laid down to die, just like that girl in there. This caused the officers who attended the scene to. .’ he paused ‘. . I’ll use a technical police term here. . to fuck up, and assume that Stacey had either ODed accidentally or topped herself. This led to the autopsy being given low priority, so it was over twenty-four hours before she was properly examined and we discovered that she’d been killed by a single shot to the back of the head.’

He sighed. ‘Almost as soon as the fan started dispersing the shit, we pulled out all the stops. . and came up blank. Stacey was a genuinely nice girl, and if she had an enemy in the world, we couldn’t find him, at that point at any rate. No blame was attached to Stevie Steele, who led the team; once all the available lines of enquiry were exhausted, he had nowhere else to go. He did a reconstruction, even got it on Crimewatch, but there was no arrest, not even a viable suspect.’ He glanced at McIlhenney. ‘Does that sum it up accurately, Neil?’

The superintendent nodded. ‘Yes. Stevie reported to me. He didn’t miss anything; former boyfriends, family members, life-sentence prisoners out on licence, he checked them all out. And then. .’

‘A couple of months later,’ McGuire continued, ‘a second body, another young woman, was found on a beach near Gullane, killed and laid out in exactly the same way as Stacey had been. There was nothing on her to tell us who she was. . nor was there on Stacey, by the way. By sheer chance, the driver of the vehicle that came to collect the body had been at school with her.

‘It took some time, some forensic evidence and a bus driver with a good memory to help us identify the second victim as Zrinka Boras, another artist, the daughter of the businessman Davor Boras, address, a flat just off Princes Street. We found the tent that she’d camped in the night before she was killed, and a short while later we also found the body of her boyfriend, a poor lad called Harry Paul. There was nothing neat about his death. He was killed and his body stuffed away in the bushes for the foxes to get at.’

‘Was there any sign of a struggle this time, near the woman’s body?’ Stallings asked.

‘None at all. We decided, in the absence of any evidence, that she had left young Harry asleep and gone for a walk, or maybe to wash herself in the sea. . they’d had sex. The killer tracked her and shot her. Maybe he killed Harry first, or maybe he went back and did it.’

‘Probably the latter,’ McIlhenney interjected. ‘It must have taken him some time to dispose of the lad’s body.’

‘True,’ McGuire conceded. ‘Anyway, this time, we had something to go on. Zrinka’s mother told us about an ex of hers, a man named Dominic Padstow. They’d had a thing until she’d dumped him. Straight away, this opened a lot of doors for us. We took the name to the Gavins and discovered that Padstow and Stacey had also had a relationship, post-Zrinka, serious enough for her to have painted him in the nude. We also found out that Zrinka and Stacey knew each other.’

Stallings frowned. ‘The parents didn’t mention this?’

‘No. Doreen Gavin was deeply shocked by her kid’s death, plus she’s a bit unworldly at the best of times. As for her husband, it turned out that he’d been giving Zrinka one on the side, so he wasn’t for volunteering much. To be fair, though, he might not even have known about Padstow. Whatever, our information on Zrinka led us to a third woman, a hairdresser called Amy Noone. She’d met Padstow, and couldn’t stand him; she told us that Zrinka and Stacey fell out over him, and that eventually Stacey binned him too. We started looking for Padstow, and when we did, we discovered that he didn’t exist; the name was a phoney.’

The head of CID sighed again, even more heavily. ‘I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Neil was on leave, and Stevie was reporting to me. Amy was a key witness, the only person who could place him with both women. I should have given her protection, straight away, but I didn’t, and she was killed too, shot dead in her flat and laid out in the same way as Stacey and Zrinka. The only difference was that she was naked.’

‘Had she been sexually assaulted?’

‘No. He wasn’t into that, it seems.’ McGuire paused. ‘But this is more or less where you came into the story, Becky. We identified Padstow as a fairly seedy investigative journalist called Daniel Ballester, out to dig the dirt on the dealings of Davor Boras. . and there was dirt in plenty. Then you and Stevie Steele traced him to a cottage in Wooler, in what’s now called Northumbria, and Stevie went up there, alone. When he looked through a window, he saw Ballester, hanged by the neck from a light fitting. He charged in there, but the door was booby-trapped: end of Stevie.’

‘Only it wasn’t Ballester who rigged the door, was it?’ McIlhenney growled grimly. ‘The Borases knew where he was too, before we did, thanks to a very iffy security firm that Davor had on his payroll. Dražen went up there; he beat Stevie to it. He killed Ballester, made it look like a suicide, right down to a goodbye note on his computer confessing to the four murders, then he rigged the door, not to get Stevie but to eliminate the security guys his dad had sent up there: the only people who could put the two of them in the frame. It was meant to look like a last vicious killing by Ballester, one that could never be pinned on them.’

‘Or so they thought,’ said McGuire, ‘until Bob Skinner got involved, and found a witness, and some DNA evidence that nailed Dražen fair and square. It did hand us Ballester as our multiple murderer, though. We found all the evidence we needed hidden around the cottage: the gun, personal effects from all three women, including a couple of Zrinka’s paintings that had vanished from the scene of her death. It all went to prove that Daniel Ballester committed all four murders; we reported our findings, the case was written up by the procurator fiscal, and signed off, closed.’

Becky Stallings looked at him. ‘And now?’ she murmured.

‘And now we’ve got a body in that wood, not as fresh as the others, but laid out in more or less the same way. Neil and I have going on for forty years’ police service between us; I know he’s as worried as I am that the pathologist is going to find a bullet in the back of that woman’s head.’

McIlhenney nodded, firmly, in agreement.

The inspector took a breath. ‘You’re saying we’ve got a copycat killer on our hands.’

‘That I am, Becky; that I am.’