Funeral Note

Detective Inspector Becky Stallings

‘What the devil am I doing here?’

That’s what I ask myself sometimes, when I think of the world I left. Of course, Edinburgh has its attractions. It’s a much gentler city than London, and the pace of life is so much easier. From the job point of view there’s less serious crime, the body count is lower, and I never feel that I’m taking my life in my hands when I go to work of a morning.

But it’s about one-fifteenth the size of the capital (you can shove the nationalist nonsense: I’m British, we have one capital city and that’s London), and the force I left to move north is eighteen times larger than the one I joined, with promotion prospects commensurately better for a smart cop, and even better for a smart female cop — both of which boxes I tick — in this politically correct century. Plus, I liked being called ‘guv’nor’, not plain ‘boss’ which is all I get here, and that’s on a good day.

So what the devil am I doing here? Well, it’s Ray, innit? This flash Detective Sergeant Wilding pitches up in London in hot pursuit of some bad guys, I’m assigned to him and his mate, DI Steele, and the next thing I know he and I are staring at my bedroom ceiling and I’m in love with the guy. It might have stayed unrequited from then on if I hadn’t found myself loaned to his big boss for the duration of the investigation and impressed him enough to be offered a permanent transfer, but that’s how it played out.

The love thing hasn’t worn off, no, that’s gone from strength to strength, and there’s still enough about Edinburgh’s social life to interest me, but from time to time I miss the thrill and the pace of the job that I left. Not the mindless street violence side, oh no, that’s just sordid, but the pursuit of the unusual, of villains with a bit of class and imagination about them. Because, to be honest, your average Edinburgh criminal mastermind wouldn’t go halfway to meeting the Mensa IQ requirement. (That said, the only Mensa member I’ve ever known wound up shooting himself, so maybe a great big brain can be a curse as well as a blessing.)

Ray can read my occasional frustration, and bless him, the love’s even offered to put in for a transfer to London himself if I want to go back. We could probably have worked it too, on the coat-tails of Neil McIlhenney’s move down south, but Ray’s only just made DI and as a new boy down there he’d probably have been given the jobs that nobody wants, like cleaning up the mess that youth gangs leave, and investigating drive-by shootings. So we’re staying put, he and I, although we have discussed the possibility of me applying for a spot with the Serious Crimes Agency.

All that said, the job isn’t always boring; the oddest things can happen, and they don’t come any odder than a call-out to a grave site in the grounds of a crematorium. Funny, I take most things in my stride, but that one threw me right off kilter, especially when I saw the body, as it had been left. It gave me the creepiest feeling.

Every death is sad, and every homicide is positively tragic, but there was something about that one that I found unnerving. It even brought a couple of tears to my eyes, although I hid them from the rest of the team. And then the chief constable turned up, and said what I’d been thinking, that the burial was a thing of honour and respect, not violence and hate.

I couldn’t work out what had happened to the dead man, though. Like the rest of us, I had to wait for the pathologist to tell us. That pathologist; she’s a cool one. I had no idea about her back story with the chief until Jack McGurk filled me in, and I gather that Sauce hadn’t either. Not that I’d have dropped any clangers. She isn’t the sort of woman that you can dig in the ribs and whisper, ‘Hey, see the chief? I fancy him a bit.’

Not that I do; I’ve always been good at reading men who are dangerous. I don’t mean potential wife-beaters or anything like that. No, I’m talking about men who radiate sexual attraction, without being aware of it. In my experience guys like that are emotional train crashes waiting to happen, and I’ve always avoided getting on board with any of them.

That’s my take on Bob Skinner, and the fact that he’s on his third marriage, not counting what I’m told was a serious thing with a woman DI about fifteen years ago, is proof enough for me that I’m right. As for Dr Sarah Grace, she’s his female equivalent; aloof and a bit of an ice maiden when she’s at work, but she’s as sexy as hell, and I’ll bet she’s hardly ever been without a man somewhere around.

I was wondering, idly, how Sauce was getting on with her when he walked into the CID suite. Detective Constable Harold Haddock makes me laugh, but always with him, never at him, for all that he can look a bit like Tintin with muscles.

There are those who do make that mistake, usually time-serving officers who can’t see behind his gawky appearance and think he’s gullible. I’ve noticed them size him up, and I’ve heard them take the piss. He never reacts, never gets riled, never rises to the bait, but I’m quite sure that he’s filing everything away, and that those comedians might live to regret their mistakes.

Jack McGurk, his sergeant, was Sauce’s mentor when he came into CID, but those days are over; the long fellow has nothing left to teach him. Now they’re equals in rank, since Sauce’s move down to Leith to replace my Ray in the DS slot there. But that was still in the wind on the day he attended the autopsy of Mortonhall Man, as we were calling him then.

He was frowning as he came through the door, as if his mind was still in the mortuary. ‘Tough day at the office?’ I asked.

He stared at me, surprised. ‘Sorry?’

‘The autopsy,’ I said. ‘Gruesome, was it? Don’t worry about it, they always turn my stomach too.’

He smiled. ‘My Uncle Telfer, that’s my mother’s brother, was the manager of an abattoir before he retired,’ he replied. ‘He took me to work with him one day, when I was fourteen. I didn’t say so to Dr Grace, in case the comparison offended her, but a post-mortem’s nothing earth-shaking compared to that.’

‘Jesus, Sauce,’ Jack exclaimed, ‘are you saying that animals mean more to you than people?’

‘Of course not, ya daft. .’ He shook his head. ‘The big difference is that in an autopsy, you don’t see the thing that’s going to be carved up walking in through the doorway. Try watching what happens to it and see how you react.’

I shuddered. ‘Are you trying to put me off black pudding for life?’

He laughed. ‘Boss, if you saw that being made. .’

‘Enough,’ I declared. The boys weren’t to know it, but I’d been sick that morning. . and I was nearly four weeks late. ‘Come on; tell us what we want to hear. What are we dealing with?’

‘Nothing, boss; this is officially not a suspicious death. The man died from natural causes, namely a spontaneously ruptured artery in the brain. There were no contributory factors, no signs of trauma and he was in perfect health otherwise. A man in the second half of his twenties in an athlete’s body with just one fatal weakness, Dr Grace said.’

‘Did she tell you what his name was?’ McGurk grunted.

‘Sorry, no. She’s a remarkable woman, but she’s not that good. Tracing him is still down to us.’

‘Did she tell you anything at all about him, other than that he’s male?’

‘His blood type was O positive,’ Sauce replied, ‘the most common there is. His last meal looked as if it had fish in it and some other stuff, washed down with mineral water, and he ate it no more than a couple of hours before he died. Analysis will tell us exactly what he had. His prints are being emailed to my address, for checking with NCIS, and the lab’s going to give us his DNA profile, to be run through the national database. That’s as much as we have to work on, but don’t get too excited about that.’

‘Why not?’ I asked, catching up with him. My mind had paused to reflect on ‘remarkable woman’.

‘Because Dr Grace suspects he isn’t British.’

‘Remarkable indeed,’ I muttered, dryly. ‘How does she work that out?’

If he caught my sarcasm, his face didn’t betray it. ‘His teeth are too good. She told me that she’s never done an examination in this country, or in America, where the subject’s been dentally perfect. This man was; she reckons he had a sugar-free diet because there’s no sign of decay, and that he never drank tea or coffee because there’s no staining.’

‘So,’ McGurk boomed, stretching his absurdly long frame in his chair, ‘why the hell are we dealing with it? In case you’ve both forgotten, CID stands for Criminal Investigation Department. The chief constable himself said he doesn’t believe that a crime’s been committed, and now we know that for sure. It’s a sudden death. Okay, someone chose to park him in a grave, temporarily. It’s not a homicide, and it wasn’t concealed. So? One for our colleagues in the furry tunics, surely.’

I picked up the phone on his desk and handed it to him. ‘Give the chief a call,’ I challenged. ‘Tell him that.’

He wasn’t up for that, so I went into the office and phoned Bob Skinner myself. Gerry Crossley, his civilian doorkeeper, told me that he had someone with him, but asked me to hold on. A couple of minutes later he came on line. I started to brief him on Sauce’s report from the post-mortem, but he knew already.

I asked McGurk’s question, but less bluntly. ‘Where do we go with this, sir?’

‘Good question, Becky. As far as you can; that’s all I can ask.’

That wasn’t quite the answer that I wanted. I’d been hoping that Jack was right and that the weird problem would be dumped on a uniformed colleague’s desk. My fingers had been crossed for that. I’m like any other punter; I’m only interested in backing winners, and I didn’t see much chance of a result with Mortonhall Man.