Полная версия
A heavily pregnant woman sat at the table, with a small boy on her knee, holding him close as he made a pig’s arse of colouring a triceratops in horrible shades of puce and turquoise.
Mother’s wide back was turned towards us, frizzy Irn-Bru hair spilling across the shoulders of her black police-issue fleece. She’d pulled the sleeves up, exposing two large pale forearms clarted with tattoos of roses and thistles. ‘And you’re sure they weren’t animal bones, or something like that?’
The pregnant woman rolled her eyes. ‘I should be graduating with a degree in forensic anthropology tomorrow, but I drank too much prosecco at my birthday party and here we are.’ Pointing at her swollen belly. ‘I know human anatomy, and those bones were definitely human.’
DC Watt cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, Guv, but that’s the LIRU lot here.’ Pronouncing ‘LIRU’ as if it were a venereal disease.
Mother turned and raised an eyebrow at us. ‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Ash Henderson. Returned to the land of the living?’
I nodded back. ‘Detective Inspector. You know Dr McDonald?’
Alice scampered forward like an excitable spaniel, hand out for the shaking. ‘Actually, we haven’t met, DI Malcolmson, but please call me “Alice” – I’ve heard a lot about you, it’s a pleasure, and don’t worry, we’re not here to take over your case, we’ve only come because you said you needed our help, well, probably not our help, but Ash’s help anyway and I came along because he can’t really drive, what with his foot and everything.’ All delivered in one long machinegun breath. ‘And I was wondering about your nickname, why do people call you “Mother”, is that because you’re a nurturing influence, which I know is a repressive societal stereotype imposed on the female psyche by the repressive forces of a dictatorial patriarchy, “oh women are so nurturing and soft, they can’t possibly compete with men,” but sometimes that really is the case, isn’t it, well the nurturing bit, not the competition thing, and is that a pot of tea, I’d love a cuppa if there’s one going spare?’
Mother’s eyebrow went up even further. ‘Is she always like this?’
‘More than you could possibly believe.’ I stuck my hands in my pockets. ‘Now, can we get this over with? Alice and I have a child-murdering …’ my eyes flitted to the small boy, staring up at me from his badly coloured dinosaur, ‘naughty man to catch.’
‘I dare say you do.’ Mother waved at Watt. ‘John, be a dear and stay with Miss Compton. Mr Henderson and I need to go check something.’ And with that, she was squeezing her way past me and out into the hall. Hauling on a large wax Barbour jacket. Pausing at the front door. ‘You don’t mind making a wee detour before we get down to it, do you?’ She didn’t bother giving me time to answer that. ‘No? Good. Come on then.’
She flipped her hood up and stepped out into the howling gale. Round shoulders hunched against the wind as she picked her way down the path, between the puddles.
Alice pouted at me. ‘Do you think I made a bad first impression there, because I think I made a bad first impression and I really didn’t want—’
‘No point us both getting soaked. You stay here with DC Watt and the witness. Maybe, if you’re lucky, she’ll give you some mince and tatties. On proper plates. With cutlery.’
‘Be careful, OK?’
‘Promise.’ The horrible weather wrapped itself around me like a fist as I limped after Mother. Down the path and out onto the pockmarked tarmac. Struggling to keep up. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Well, we can hardly take a civilian’s word for it, can we? Even one who almost has a degree in forensic anthropology.’ She pulled out a torch, sending its beam sweeping across the gardens to either side as we made our way towards the end of the road. Raising her voice over the howling wind. ‘We used to come here when I was a wee girl. Every Easter, Mum and Dad would take a cottage down by the beach and we’d play in the dunes and build sandcastles and chase other people’s dogs.’ She stepped over a small picket fence and scuffed her way through wind-whipped clumps of yellowing grass. ‘I remember Clachmara was really pretty, till the old part fell in the sea. Still, that’s climate change for you, isn’t it?’
She came to a halt at a line of chain-link fencing panels. Pursed her lips as she frowned at the gap between two of the segments – pulled tight against a padlocked chain – then down at herself, then back at the gap again. ‘Somehow, I don’t think this is going to work.’
‘A pregnant woman managed to squeeze through, remember?’
‘Not this bit, she didn’t. And besides, you’re in a rush to get back to catching your child-murdering naughty man, remember?’
For God’s sake …
‘Fine: give me the torch.’
I forced my way through to the other side, following the circle of white as it writhed through the long grass, leaving her in darkness.
‘Take photographs, we need evidence!’
Rain soaked through my trouser legs, making the cold wet fabric stick to my skin. Seeped through the shoulders of my jacket. Ran down my face and the back of my neck. ‘“Oh, it’ll be a quick job,” he said, “a simple hand-holding exercise,” he said, “in and out in a jiffy,” he said.’
And on I went, following the torchlight. Limping and stumbling through the tussocky remains of someone’s garden, grass dragging at my walking stick with pale wet tentacles. The house itself was reduced to a single gable end, the rest of it had been ripped away, leaving a jagged line of cliff face with the North Sea roaring beyond.
Jesus, this was bleak.
A gust of wind shoved me back a couple of paces. Punched another fistful of rain into my face.
Sod this for a game of police officers.
The torch’s beam slithered along the boundary between here and oblivion. Off to the left, the near-vertical cliff had given way: a thick spill of rock and earth that ran down into the battering black waves. That would be where the fishing boat had disappeared.
Poor sods.
Waves crashed against the ramp of fallen headland, tearing it away with foaming teeth.
Its upper slopes reached down from the garden opposite. The house sat about a dozen feet back from the edge: a detached bungalow in sagging greys and manky browns. They’d tacked a wooden garage on the side closest to the sea, its up-and-over door hanging squint.
I slid the light across the exposed slab of earth. Faint glimmers of white shone back at me. Yup, those definitely looked like bones.
First couple of snaps on my phone came out as nothing but wobbly blurs, its flash nowhere near strong enough to illuminate anything, even with the torch’s help. The video setting was slightly better, zoomed in full, footage jerking about as wind tore at my back.
Looked as if our heavily pregnant friend was right – what loomed out of the black soil was definitely human. A pair of empty eye sockets stared at me from a skull, tilted to one side, the jaw missing. Then another thumping from the North Sea sent a chunk of dark earth peeling off, taking the skull with it, tumbling and bouncing down into the crashing waves.
A small rumble sounded beneath me, and the garden I was standing in lost another foot of mud and grass.
Yeah, maybe not the best of ideas to hang about here any longer.
Hurry back to the fence line and through to the relative safety of the storm-battered road.
Mother peered out at me from her hood. ‘Well?’
‘One hundred percent human.’
Her shoulders dipped. ‘Sod. Why couldn’t it have been a tasteless hoax? Or a stupid misunderstanding? Maybe a buried pet, or something?’
‘Never mind, leave it a couple of hours and it’ll all have fallen into the sea anyway.’
‘I knew this one was a poisoned chalice soon as I saw it. But I couldn’t go home early when everyone else did, could I? Couldn’t leave it for the nightshift to deal with. No, I had to be all stoic and dedicated.’ She sagged. Huffed out a long sad breath. ‘Take it from me, Mr Henderson, never ever answer the office phone two minutes before your shift ends. It’s always a disaster.’ Deep breath. Then a nod. ‘Suppose we’d better get Scene Examination Branch down here. Pathologist, Procurator Fiscal, search teams …’
Wind howled through the chain-link, sending us lurching sideways until we leaned into it.
‘Good luck with that.’ I gave her the torch back. ‘Now, any chance we can get on with the reason I’m actually here, while there’s still some of me that’s not drenched?’
‘Sure you don’t want to hang around and help?’ Pointing the beam at the crappy green Fiat Panda parked outside the pregnant not-quite-qualified forensic anthropologist’s house. ‘I’ve got biscuits in the car.’
‘Still got a child-killer to catch.’ No one ever listened, did they?
‘Can’t blame a girl for trying.’ Mother swung the torch around, shining it across the street at the last house on this side of the fence, the one next door to where the body was buried. A semi-detached with sagging guttering and a lichen-acned roof. An old blue Renault rusting away by the kerb and a filthy caravan in the driveway. A light in the living room window. ‘Shall we?’
‘Still don’t see why you couldn’t have done this without me.’
‘Because Helen MacNeil won’t talk to me. And she won’t talk to John. And when I sent a uniform round to try, she came this close,’ holding up two fingers, millimetres apart, ‘to making him cry. Control says you and Helen have history, so maybe she’ll talk to you. What with your overabundance of charm and everything.’
Sarcastic sod.
Besides, the kind of history Helen MacNeil and I had wasn’t exactly the good kind.
I followed Mother over to the house. The caravan acted as a windbreak, groaning on its springs as the storm pushed and shoved into the other side.
She leaned on the bell for a second or five, then squatted down and levered the letterbox open. ‘Helen? Helen, it’s Flora, can you come to the door please?’
No reply.
She tried again. ‘Helen? Hello, can you hear me?’
‘Can we stop pussyfooting about?’ I whacked the head of my walking stick against the door, three times, nice and hard. Hauled in a deep breath. ‘HELEN MACNEIL, POLICE! OPEN UP OR I’M KICKING THIS BLOODY DOOR IN!’
A tut from Mother. ‘The epitome of diplomacy, as ever.’
Three more whacks. ‘I’M NOT KIDDING, HELEN, OPEN THIS DOOR OR IT’S—’
The door swung open and a middle-aged woman scowled out at us. ‘All right, all right.’ The years hadn’t been kind to Helen MacNeil, each one of them carved into her heart-shaped face in deep spidery wrinkles. She hadn’t lost any of her bulk, though: broad of shoulder and thick of bicep, wearing a black muscle shirt with a pentagram and goat’s head on it. Short cropped grey hair. A long sharp nose that had been broken two or three times since we’d last met.
Helen clearly didn’t like me staring. ‘What the hell are you looking at?’
Mother shuffled closer, trying on her big dimply smile. ‘I know you weren’t keen on talking to us before, Helen, but it’s really important we—’
‘Wasn’t asking you. Him.’ Pointing. ‘The lump with the limp.’ Her chin came up. ‘Think I don’t know who you are?’
I nodded. ‘Helen, you’re looking well.’
Her eyes narrowed, the wrinkles around them deepening. ‘Eleven years in HMP Bastarding Oldcastle – I missed my granddaughter’s birth because of you!’
‘No, Helen, you missed your granddaughter’s birth because you battered Neil Stringer’s head in with a pickaxe handle. And you’d have been out after eight years, if you hadn’t chibbed Ruth Anderson in the prison library too.’
‘Hmmph … Bitch was asking for it.’
‘Sure she was.’ I jerked my head towards next door, on the other side of the chain-link fencing. ‘You heard about the body?’
‘Alleged body.’ Helen folded her thick arms, muscles bulging through the freckled skin. ‘Fat Girl here said it was—’
‘Who are you calling fat?’ Mother pulled herself up to her full height, shoulders back, considerable chest out. ‘I’ll have you know—’
‘—don’t see what it’s got to do with me, and—’
‘—because big bones are nothing to be ashamed of! It’s—’
I thumped my cane on the door again. ‘ALL RIGHT, THAT’S ENOUGH! Both of you.’
Mother shuffled her feet. Turned her reddened face away. ‘Not fat.’
Helen shrugged. Looked at the ground. Cleared her throat. Didn’t say anything.
Better.
‘There’s nothing “alleged” about the body, it’s real.’
‘Still don’t see what it’s got to do with me.’
‘With your reputation? A dead body miraculously turns up next door: you really think we’re not going to connect the dots?’
The chin came up again. ‘No comment.’
‘Just like old times.’ I took a step back and made a show of examining the roof, then the walls on either side. ‘Place looks ready to fall down round your ears. Crime really didn’t pay for you, did it? What, they didn’t have a retirement package waiting when you got out of prison? A nice golden handshake to say thank you for keeping your mouth shut?’
‘No comment.’
‘Dropped you like a radioactive jobbie, didn’t they? And I thought loyalty was supposed to go both ways?’
Her eyes hardened. ‘No comment.’
‘There you are, sent down for killing Neil Stringer, on their orders, and I bet they didn’t even bother picking you up from prison when you finally got released. Bet they stopped taking your calls. Bet they ghosted you. Like you were nothing to them.’
‘No – comment!’ Both words squeezed out through gritted teeth.
‘Stuck out here, waiting for your craphole house to fall into the sea. An irrelevant, useless old lady.’
Helen stiffened, as if she was about to take a swing … then licked her lips. Blinked. Let her shoulders drop. ‘I know what you’re doing.’
Mother huffed out a breath. ‘I’m glad someone does.’
‘You think if I kick off, you can do me for assaulting a police officer. Drag me down the nick and fit me up for whoever got buried over there.’ Pointing in the vague direction of next door’s garden. ‘Well I’m not stupid and you can bugger right off. Go on, and take your fat bitch with you.’
Mother’s eyes bulged. ‘There’s no need to be so rude!’ Fists curled, trembling.
A voice peeped up at my shoulder: ‘Hello?’ And there was Alice, slipping into the gap between Mother and Helen MacNeil, the hood on her jacket thrown back, nose a Rudolf-shade of pink. She had Henry’s lead in one hand, the other held out for Helen to shake. ‘I’m Dr McDonald, but you can call me Alice if you like, because it’s easier when everyone’s not standing on ceremony, isn’t it, and I like your T-shirt – is that Crowley’s Ghost, I used to listen to them all the time, there’s a lovely urgency to proper death metal, isn’t there – anyway I was taking Henry for a walk and I heard raised voices and thought maybe I could help?’
Helen MacNeil stared at her.
Alice handed Henry’s leash to me. ‘Excellent, right, now: Ash, DI Malcolmson, could you give me and … Helen, isn’t it? Yes, so if you can give us a moment – if that’s OK with you, Helen – and we can have a chat, you and me, two girls together, and see if we can’t find a way to be all friendly about things and really work as a team, right?’ She turned a full-strength smile on all of us. ‘Great, let’s do it!’ Clapping her hands as she advanced on the door.
Helen’s face went a bit pale as she backed away, looking as if an articulated lorry was bearing down on her, but Alice followed her in anyway.
Thunk, the door closed behind them, leaving Mother, Henry, and me outside in the rain.
A shuffle of feet, then Mother cleared her throat. ‘Are you sure your wee friend’s safe in there? Like you said, Helen MacNeil’s reputation isn’t exactly—’
‘You mean the organised crime, loan-sharking, enforcement beatings, general mob violence, and involvement in at least three murders, two of which we couldn’t pin on her?’
‘That kind of thing, yes.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s not Alice I’m worried about. Helen MacNeil doesn’t stand a chance.’
3
‘Well, this is nice, isn’t it?’ Alice patted the arm of the saggy couch she was sitting in, smiling around at a living room that had all the warmth and charm of a decomposing corpse.
In addition to the two horrible couches; horrible armchair; horrible painting of a wee girl holding a balloon, above the horrible china dogs on the mantelpiece; horrible Anaglypta wallpaper; and horrible brown carpet; a large multigym took up a good third of the space. But unlike any normal person, the stainless-steel bars and weights weren’t draped with washing and furred with dust. The thing shone, the scent of metal and WD40 almost strong enough to mask an underlying grubby taint of mildew.
God knew how she’d done it, but Alice hadn’t just managed to get us all invited inside, she’d even talked Helen MacNeil into producing four mugs of tea. And a couple of biscuits for Henry, too.
The wee lad sat at my feet, crunching away on his Hobnobs, tail thumping against the armchair’s side, as Helen wriggled backwards along a black leather bench until her head and shoulders were under the metal rod of a loaded barbell. Hissing as she lifted it off its metal pegs and bench-pressed what had to be about sixty kilos.
‘So, Helen,’ Mother had a sip of tea, grimaced, then put the mug back on the coffee table, ‘if you had nothing to do with the body buried next door, who did?’
‘See, the trouble with most people is they bulk up in prison for protection.’ The weights went up and down again. ‘No one messes with you when you’re solid muscle.’ Another rep. ‘Then they get out and it all turns to flab.’
‘Tell us about your next-door neighbour …’ She checked her notebook. ‘Mr Gordon Smith?’
Another rep. ‘No comment.’
Alice leaned forward. ‘Please, Helen, I know it can’t be easy, helping the police after everything that’s happened, but if—’
‘You useless buggers didn’t help me when our Leah went missing, so why should I?’ The barbell made another trip. ‘My granddaughter disappears and you tossers didn’t even bother your arses sending someone round.’
I looked at Mother; she just shrugged.
OK.
Good to see Oldcastle Division was every bit as useless as it’d always been. You’d think any competent police officer would have run a PNC search on someone before trying to interview them.
‘How long ago was this?’
Helen clunked the barbell back on its support pegs. ‘Don’t pretend you care. None of you police bastards ever do.’
‘We’re not police. Well, DI Malcolmson is. Alice and I work for the Lateral Investigative and Review Unit: think the A-Team meets New Tricks, only with civilian experts bailing the local cops out when they cock stuff up. Like this.’
That got me a slightly outraged stare from Mother.
Tough. Truth hurts.
‘So when did Leah go missing?’
‘Friday, ninth of October. Walked out of here to go shopping, never came back.’
What was that … five weeks ago? So too recent to be our skeletonised remains. Well, unless he boiled her down, of course.
‘How old was she?’
Helen wriggled out from under the bar and sat up, wiping the sweat from her face with a holey tea towel. ‘Eighteen. Which means your lot did bugger all.’
‘Eighteen’s old enough to make her own decisions.’
‘Leah wouldn’t run away! She wouldn’t do that to me. Not after her mother …’ A deep breath. Silence settled into the room as Helen wiped the tea towel across her eyes again. ‘She wouldn’t.’
That was the thing about missing people, though – no one they left behind ever believed their loved one was unhappy enough to disappear without a word.
‘OK.’ Trying to sound like I actually cared. ‘You give me her details and I’ll see what I can do.’
Alice sat forward. ‘You should get a tracker app on Leah’s phone. For peace of mind. I’ve got one on Ash’s, haven’t I, Ash?’
‘Can we not do this, right now?’ I turned back to Helen. ‘I promise I’ll chase up whoever’s looking for your granddaughter, OK?’
A nod. Another breath. ‘Gordon Smith was the best neighbour you could ever have. Him and his wife, Caroline, were like grandparents to my Sophie. Then when she … After that, they looked after Leah for me, while I was inside.’ Helen picked at the holes in her tea towel. ‘Broke her heart when Caroline died. Bowel cancer, four years ago. Took eighteen months.’
‘And where is he now?’
‘Gordon? End of September, the council come round and condemn his house. Poor old sod’s been living there for fifty-six years and some spotty Herbert with a clipboard tells him he’s got three weeks to get out. Oh, and not only does he get bugger-all compensation, he’s got to pay for their contractors to tear down his home and ship it off to landfill somewhere? How’s that fair?’
‘Yes, but where is he?’
She draped the tea towel over the pull-up bar. ‘Gordon wouldn’t hurt a fly. Everybody loved him and Caroline. And how do you know your dead body wasn’t there when they moved in? Got nothing to do with him.’
‘Indulge me, Helen: where’s your sainted next-door neighbour?’
A pause as she frowned at me.
‘And before you try “no comment” again, I’m tired, I’m soaked through, and I’m in no mood to fanny about. Where – is – he?’
‘His brother’s got a croft on the Black Isle. Gordon said something about staying there till he figured out what to do.’
‘There we go, that wasn’t difficult, was it?’ I stood. Nodded at Mother. ‘And that concludes our hand-holding duties. You can take it from here.’
‘Actually,’ Alice put her hand up, ‘if he had to pay the council to tear his house down, why is it still …?’ Pointing at the wall nearest next door.
‘He told them to stuff their landfill charge. Sixteen grand? They try getting sixteen grand out of me, I’ll break every bone in their bodies.’
Another grimace, then Mother levered herself to her feet. ‘Helen, if Gordon Smith was like a grandad to your girls, any chance you’ve still got the keys to his house?’ Frown. ‘And you wouldn’t happen to have a pair of bolt cutters, would you?’
‘Are we certain this is a good idea?’ Alice turned on the spot, breath making a trail of white that glowed in the light of her phone’s torch app. ‘I mean a hundred percent, definitely, shaky-boots, cast-iron certain, because it feels like a really risky thing to be inside a condemned house on the edge of a crumbling cliff during a massive storm …’
Mother’s real torch drifted across the pile of furniture heaped up in the living room. Didn’t look as if Gordon Smith had bothered taking any of his stuff with him. When he left, he heaved it all in here and left it in a big mound of sofas, sideboards, a double bed, a Welsh dresser, dining table and chairs, medicine cabinet, spare bed, wardrobes, what looked like a wicker laundry basket. All piled up, higgledy-piggledy, as if he’d been planning an indoor bonfire but forgotten to set fire to it.
Rain crackled against the window, no sign of anything through the dirty glass but blackness. As dark outside as it was in.
‘What if the house falls down while we’re here?’ Alice huddled closer as wind screeched across the roof. ‘Or the whole thing ends up in the sea?’
‘You’re right. Here,’ I held out Henry’s lead, ‘take the wee lad and go wait in the car.’
That got me a pout. ‘Bit sexist. Just because I’m a woman, I have to go wait in the car?’
‘It’s not because you’re a woman, it’s because you’re a whinge. And DI Malcolmson’s a woman, aren’t you, DI Malcolmson?’
‘Last time I checked …’ She opened one of the wardrobes – a heavy mahogany job that lay at forty-five degrees, propped up on the back of a dusty floral sofa – and peered inside. ‘Women’s clothes. The dead wife’s?’
