One Good Turn

56

The body washed up a second time at Cramond, as if the girl were determined to come back again and again to the same place until someone took notice of her. The pathologist at the scene thought she might have been strangled (“Postmortem lividity on the neck”), but they would have to wait for the postmortem to know anything more certain. Three days in the waters of the Forth surfing up and down the coastline hadn’t done her any favors. Not quite Ophelia, washed down the stream, garlanded with flowers.

Cramond was under the flight path for Edinburgh Airport, and Louise wondered what they looked like from the air, little spiders scurrying around with no purpose, or a well-drilled army of ants working together? From the single policeman who had responded to the call, the number of people had expanded exponentially in the course of an hour. Her team, her case. Her first murder. They had found Hatter’s car parked in the long-stay car park at Edinburgh Airport, Jackson had been right, the boot was swarming with DNA, hopefully they would find matches to their corpse. Sooner or later they would find Graham Hatter.

They took the body away in a police launch, but both the procurator fiscal and the pathologist elected to fly in the helicop-ter. Louise went on the boat with the body, like an honor guard. She touched the thick plastic of the body bag.

“Hello, Lena,” she whispered. She had been Jackson’s girl all this time, now she belonged to her. She dialed his number. There were all kinds of things she would have liked to say to him, but in the end, when he answered, all she said was, “We found her. We found your girl.”