Perfect Silence

They stood silently, contemplating the scene for a few moments. A tractor could be heard starting up in the distance. The wind rushed noisily over the expansive reservoir to the south. It was a place of extraordinary beauty, just a few miles south of the Edinburgh City Bypass, and now it was home to a ghost.

‘She was on her back,’ Ava said. ‘You think she collapsed from her knees and rolled?’

‘No, she’d have stayed face up if she’d simply collapsed. There’s not enough of a gradient for gravity to have moved her. I believe she stopped crawling and decided to rest. Or gave up hope. She’d have been delirious with blood loss and shock by then. Can I move the body now? I don’t want it to degrade any further before I start the post-mortem,’ Jonty said.

‘One more look,’ Ava said. ‘You were right about the breakfast, Jonty. Every time I think my years in the force have hardened me, something new comes along.’

‘Peace and justice. It’s all we can do for them at this stage. I’ve some documents to sign. You can take another look but don’t disturb her and stay on the mats, okay?’ Jonty said.

Ava stepped forward to the girl and knelt down next to her, peeling the sheet back once more to reveal her face and arms. ‘Her right arm’s almost semi-circular on the ground. It’s as if she was holding something,’ Callanach said.

‘It might have just fallen that way,’ Ava said. She moved to the end of the body and lifted one foot. ‘I can’t see any injuries beneath the dried blood. No obvious bruising. I don’t think she walked very far. She was dropped off close by.’

‘It wasn’t raining last night, and there’d have been no reason for the vehicle to have pulled onto the verge if there were no other cars around. We won’t get tyre tracks,’ Callanach said.

‘Agreed. We don’t know which way it was going so CCTV at the nearest junctions will be a needle in a haystack. There are a few houses dotted along the road, though,’ Ava said. ‘Get uniformed officers doing a house to house. Any vehicles seen or heard late at night. Ask if local landowners mind us searching their premises. Anyone who says no, do a background check.’

Jonty Spurr rejoined them, stripping off his gloves as a photographer stepped in to capture the scene before the body was prepared for transfer to the mortuary.

‘Dr Spurr, any possibility this was an operation gone wrong? The cotton wool packing, the incisions. And dumping the body so publicly. Whoever did this wanted her to be found,’ Ava said.

‘It would have been obvious that the blood loss would have been beyond her capacity to recover from. There’s no medical reason for what happened here. The wound packs might have been applied to simply keep her alive longer,’ Jonty said.

‘You’re suggesting that treating the wounds was actually a way to prolong the agony?’ Callanach asked.

‘My remit is science, not speculation. It’s a wonder she survived as long as she did. She was tough and brave. To have crawled at all, even just a few metres was, in the circumstances, remarkable,’ Jonty said.

‘How long since she died, do you think?’ Ava asked him.

‘Three to four hours. Apparently, she was found by a farmhand who was on his way to let out some cattle further down the lane. I saw him talking to the first officers on the scene. Given that he’s being treated for shock himself, I’d say he’s nothing to do with it. The pathology aside, it took someone with a strong stomach to take a knife to this girl, then to turn her over and do it again. It’s not like stabbing in anger. It takes medically trained professionals a long time to prepare themselves to make major incisions.’

‘A psychopath, then,’ Ava said. ‘Or someone completely inured to the extremes of violence and bloodshed.’

‘Someone you shouldn’t underestimate, I think I’d say,’ Jonty confirmed. ‘We’re moving her now. I’ll perform a post-mortem today but it’ll take some time. Join me first thing tomorrow morning for some answers.’

They said their goodbyes. Luc and Ava stood watching as the corpse was moved from the ground into a body bag and onto a stretcher. The ground where the young woman had died was crimson in the centre and black at the edges. With the body removed, the trail she had crawled was more obvious.

‘She didn’t get very far at all,’ Callanach said. ‘My guess is that when she was left here, the perpetrator knew she wouldn’t last much longer. I also think they drove away south west, towards the reservoir.’

‘Why?’ Ava asked.

‘Because she started crawling towards Edinburgh. There’s no way she’d have crawled in the same direction the vehicle went. You move away from your attackers as fast as you can. Gut instinct makes you go in the opposite direction to where they’re going.’

‘Do you think it was someone she knew?’ Ava asked him.

‘I’m not sure which would be more dangerous, having the capacity to do that to a total stranger or being able to look into the eyes of someone you know and cutting into them. It’s like she was attacked by an animal. I’ve never seen that much missing skin,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk down the road a bit, see if there’s anything that’s been missed.’

They walked quietly for a hundred yards, knowing each other’s stride, finding some calm in the greenery. ‘I hate this job,’ Ava said.

‘No, you don’t,’ Callanach responded, ‘you just hate why it’s necessary. You need to remind yourself that the decent people outnumber sick bastards like this one by the millions. If we weren’t here, how many more bodies would end up mutilated at the side of the road?’

‘Do you never think about going back to Lyon? I know what happened to you there was bad, but time has passed. You could rejoin Interpol, your name has been cleared. You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,’ Ava said, turning around to stare back up the lane at the lights and the parade of white-clad personnel walking methodically to and fro.

‘You never clear your name after a rape allegation,’ Luc said. ‘It’s like trying to get ink out of a white shirt. I’m settled here now. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Scotland feels like home, but I’m comfortable. If we could just replace all of Edinburgh’s fast food joints with delicatessens it would be better.’

‘You’re never going to forgive us for our food, are you?’

‘If you expect me to accept atrocities such as haggis, porridge, and what I believe you call mince and tatties, then no.’ Callanach’s French accent accentuated the words as if they were exotic foreign diseases.

Ava smiled. ‘This route becomes more track than road as it goes past the two reservoirs, but it’s stony. The one time I wish the ground was soft, and we’ve had virtually no rain for a week. You’re right. No fresh tyre marks. The vehicle will have her blood in it, though. We have to find the person who did this, and quickly, before they have a chance to destroy the evidence.’

‘Which is what they’ll be doing right now,’ Callanach said. ‘Let’s get back to the station. I’ll brief the squad while you sort out the resources we’ll need.’ His phone rang as they were turning around to go back. ‘Yes, that’s right. Get hold of next of kin. Ask for a photo first. We can’t have anyone seeing this body if we’re wrong about the identity. Thanks.’ He rang off. ‘A young woman was reported missing last Sunday who fits the general description. DC Tripp is chasing an up-to-date photo.’

‘I didn’t hear about that. Any reason why the missing person report wasn’t widely circulated?’ Ava asked.

‘She was living in a domestic abuse shelter. Women come and go quite regularly. I guess sometimes they just get sick of the lack of privacy, or go back to their previous situations, and many don’t want to be found. Police at the time took a statement from the shelter but there was no evidence of foul play, so they haven’t done much about it since.’

‘Did you get a name?’ Ava asked.

‘Zoey Cole. Eighteen years old. Caucasian, brown hair, hazel eyes. Sounds like our girl.’

‘It does,’ Ava said, picking up the pace as they walked. ‘The question is, how did she come to be living in a women’s shelter in the first place? Maybe whoever made Zoey scared enough to move there might have found out where she was and decided to pay her a visit.’

‘I’d be surprised if this stems from domestic violence. It would be the most extreme evolution of offending I’ve ever seen,’ Callanach said.

‘People can suddenly erupt and reveal a completely hidden side to their nature. You only went on one date with Astrid and look what happened at the end of that. She was sufficiently fixated to accuse you of rape and to hurt herself dramatically to back it up. Can you imagine how much more obsessed and deranged she’d have been if you were in a relationship with her for six months, or two years? Human beings don’t have any limits when they’re broken. It’s the damage you can’t see on the surface that’s the most dangerous.’

Chapter Three

The Major Investigation Team’s incident room was empty. Detective Constable Christie Salter stood in the doorway, coffee cup in one hand, box of doughnuts in the other. One step forward would take her back into a world she’d left months earlier, when a hostage situation had gone terribly wrong and she’d been stabbed in the abdomen with a shard of broken pottery. Salter had lost her baby. Her sanity, too, for a short time, if she was completely honest. Coming back to work hadn’t been a choice. If she’d spent one more minute at home, staring at the wallpaper and flicking through the TV channels, the damage to her mental health might have slid up the scale from temporary to irreparable.

‘I hope they’re all for me. I’m not sharing my trans fats with the rest of the greedy bastards when they get back,’ DS Lively said behind her.

Salter smiled at the blank room she’d been facing, then made the effort to straighten her face before turning around.

‘Sarge, you’re such a lardy bugger anyway, I’m sure eating another twenty chocolate-iced custard-filled cakes won’t make a dent. Knock yourself out.’ She offered the box in his direction.

‘Glad to see your wee holiday hasn’t blunted your tongue. You recall that as your sergeant, you still have to make me coffee and shine my boots every morning,’ Lively said, grabbing a week’s worth of calories and taking a bite.

‘The way I heard it, Max Tripp has taken his sergeant’s exams and is waiting for the results. I’m guessing it’s him I’ll be making coffee for pretty soon. I’m sure you’ll still have plenty of your usual goons willing to fetch and carry for you,’ Salter grinned. ‘Speaking of which, where are they all?’

‘Got a call to a body found on the Torduff Road. They’ll not be back for a few hours yet. Starting house to house enquiries, about now I reckon. DCI Turner and the underwear model I get to call sir are both down there,’ Lively said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘You and DI Callanach still sharing the love, are you? I thought you might have got over your infatuation by now. Maybe I should get down there. If they’re kicking off a new murder investigation, they’ll need every pair of hands they can get.’

‘I think they’ll need backup here. You know how it gets. The phone’ll start ringing off the hook with leads and enquiries. Pretty soon the whole place will be chaos. They’ve plenty of officers down there for now,’ Lively said.

‘That’s ridiculous. We can get any number of people in here to answer the phones. I’ll take a car from the pool. Traffic’s not too bad this morning. It’ll only take me …’

‘Christie,’ Lively said. ‘It’s a bad one. Young woman with her stomach messed up. I really don’t think …’

‘Stop,’ Salter said. ‘You’ll call me Salter, just like you always did. And we don’t talk about what happened. If I wanted to do that I’d have stayed at home with my family popping round twice a day to check on me. This is work. I need it. So don’t patronise me and don’t try to wrap me up. It’s too late for that.’

The phone rang, sparing Lively a response. He picked up a pen and began scribbling details on a notepad, muttering a stream of affirmatives as he wrote.

‘Give us ten minutes,’ he said, before putting the receiver down. ‘Get your coat then, Salter. We’re off into town.’

Crichton’s Close provided pedestrian access onto the Royal Mile and was a regular night stop for the homeless, courtesy of high walls at either side stopping the wind, and providing some shelter from the rain. As a no through route for traffic, it had the added bonus of excluding passing police vehicles. Only the drunks or unwitting tourists passed that way in the small hours. Unless you were looking for trouble. Lively and Salter took the car up Gentle’s Entry and parked it in Bakehouse Close, walking the few metres round the corner to where uniformed police officers and paramedics were doing their best to persuade a man to get medical help.

‘Who is he?’ Lively asked an officer as they approached.

‘Name’s Mikey Parsons. Long-term homeless, known drug user. We see him fairly regularly on the beat. Never had any trouble with him except for public pissing, and then he moves on without getting nasty.’

‘How’s it going, Mr Parsons?’ Salter asked, walking up to him.

The man swung round, trying to face her but missing by ninety degrees, staring instead at a poster for a gig that was hanging off the opposite wall. The whites of his eyes were an angry shade of red and his mouth was hanging open. Arms swinging at his sides, he swayed but remained standing. A paramedic took another step towards him with wipes, aiming for Mikey’s left cheek. As he mopped the dried blood away, the three slashes on his cheek became clearer.

‘That’s just fuckin’ great,’ Lively muttered. ‘We’ve got a deranged Zorro impersonator in the city.’

The top line of the Z ran from the bridge of his nose to the outer edge of his cheekbone, with the diagonal following down to the corner of his mouth and the final line reaching right back to his ear lobe.

‘Lucky they didn’t cut his neck,’ the paramedic said. ‘Mr Parsons, are you in any pain?’ he asked loudly.

Parsons groaned. His face was sweaty in spite of the chill and he seemed oblivious to his wounds.

‘What’s he taken, do you think?’ Salter asked.

‘I’d put my money on Spice,’ the paramedic said, sticking butterfly plasters every few millimetres along the slash to hold the sides together. ‘We’re seeing an epidemic of it at the moment. The accident and emergency room is stretched to capacity and it’s freaking members of the public out seeing people standing in the middle of the street like zombies. The drug causes hallucinations and psychosis. Total oblivion like this is common. It can render the user completely incapable of normal communication. If Mr Parsons is still in there, he may well be in agony. No sure way of knowing.’

‘Who notified you?’ Lively asked.

‘A shopkeeper walked past this morning, saw the blood, called it in. We didn’t realise what had happened until we got a proper look at his face. He was trying to hide his head in a bin when we first arrived.’

‘Well, it’s not accidental,’ Salter said. ‘What do you think, Sarge? Row with his dealer, unpaid debt, or a fight gone wrong?’

Lively took out his phone and got a few close-up shots of the wound as the paramedic finished up, then added a few more of the general area for good measure.

‘Not a fight,’ Lively said. ‘This is more of a branding. The lines have stayed pretty neatly on one side of his face and they’re quite straight. It was planned. Any blood on the ground around here?’ he shouted across to one of the uniformed officers.

‘Over there, by the pile of bin bags,’ came the response. ‘We think that’s Mikey’s stuff.’

Salter and Lively walked across to the mound of stinking clothes and cardboard that constituted Mikey Parsons’ home. An arrow of spattered blood decorated the external wall of a shop, a metre from the ground. Lively completed his portfolio of pictures with the images.

‘If he’d been sitting down on the cardboard there, the spatters would have been level with his cheek,’ Lively said. ‘Given that he’d have been hard pressed to have rolled a joint with half his skin hanging off, I’m going to put my money on him being well and truly stoned before he was attacked.’

‘You think someone just walked up to him while he was out of it, and decided to slash his face open?’ Salter asked. ‘Could it be another Spice user? If the drug causes psychosis, it’s possible they looked at Mikey here but saw something completely different.’

‘I strongly suspect that we’ll never find out,’ Lively said. ‘Mr Parsons here doesn’t seem to want to cooperate or go to the hospital, and he’s sure as hell not going to be giving any coherent statement to us about it. Have you done all you can?’ he asked the paramedics.

‘Everything we can out here. Ideally we’d have taken him to the hospital to clean the wound, administer antibiotics and stitch him up properly, but he won’t get in the ambulance and we’re not going to try restraining him.’

‘Fair enough,’ Lively said. ‘Salter, I hope you’re not wearing your best frock. You and I are about to get Mr Parsons here into the back of the squad car. Could we borrow a couple of pairs of gloves?’

‘Be my guest,’ the paramedic replied, handing over scrunched-up rubbery balls to each of them. ‘Good luck.’

They slipped the gloves on. Parsons remained in place, staring off into the distance, his mouth opening and closing as if trying unsuccessfully to speak. Salter went to one side of him and Lively took the other, guiding him slowly towards their car. It took some time to get him to fold his body into the right position to get in the rear seat, but eventually he was in. Salter closed the door and sighed.

‘It’s almost as if you planned this for me on my first morning back to put me off,’ Salter said.

‘Did it only take eight months for you to forget how glamorous and fun our job is?’ Lively replied. ‘I’m driving. You watch our guest.’

Salter checked out Mikey Parsons in the mirror. His head was bouncing up and down like a nodding dog with the movement of the car, and the white butterfly strips over his dark red wound resembled ghoulish Halloween face painting. He looked up suddenly, his pupils contracting as his eyes met Salter’s.

‘Hey, Mikey,’ she said. ‘Do you know where you are?’

He let out a long, whistling breath. The sourness from his mouth wafted through the vehicle. Fighting his seatbelt, Mikey threw himself forward to bash his head against the dividing screen at the rear of Lively’s seat, then thrust backwards to slam the back of his skull into his headrest. Back and forwards he went, hammering his head harder each time.

‘Stop the car,’ Salter said. ‘We’ve got to do something before he knocks himself out.’

‘No, we’re getting back to the station. If he’s unconscious by then, we’ll call an ambulance. I’m not touching him while he’s like that and neither are you. We’ve no idea what he’s capable of with that crap in his system. An officer got bitten last month during an arrest.’

‘How much do you know about this Spice drug?’ Salter asked.

‘They market it as an alternative to cannabis, only it’s completely synthetic. Supposed to work like cannabinoids but the effects are more like LSD from what I’ve seen. Each brand is made using different chemicals so users don’t really know what they’re smoking.’

‘Where are they getting it?’ she asked, trying to ignore the thumping from the backseat.

‘Everywhere. It’s relatively cheap to produce, they package the stuff so that it looks professional, and it’s less risky than trying to import heroin or cocaine. We won’t get this stuff off the streets for a decade. Unless the anti-Zorro scares the crap out of users so badly, they stop.’

‘Come on Sarge, don’t go calling whoever did this the anti-Zorro. The press gets a whiff of that and it’ll be everywhere.’

Mikey turned his head to the side for one last monumental smash against his headrest and split all the butterfly stitches open. Blood began to pour down his cheek in horror movie tears fashion, and Salter raised her eyebrows at Lively.

‘Whoever’s in charge of the carpool these days isn’t going to like us very much,’ she said.

They got him into the station fairly easily until the desk sergeant stopped them. ‘You’re not expecting me to process him, are you? He’s straight for the hospital and you know it.’

‘He’s refused medical assistance, but he’s drunk and incapable, needs a few hours in the cells. We’ve got to try to take a statement from him when he’s slept it off,’ Lively said.

‘Stop the bleeding,’ the desk sergeant said. ‘Clean him up. If I’m satisfied, I’ll book him in. Good to see you back, Salter,’ he added.

Lively nodded at her. ‘You go upstairs and report in with the boss. Someone should be back by now. Update the team with what we’ve got. I’ll be up as soon as this mess is sorted. And have a cup of tea. That’s enough for your first morning back.’

‘Right you are, sir,’ Salter said, heading for the stairs.

‘Oh yeah, not arguing with me now. Let me do all the dirty work,’ Lively mumbled.

‘Stubborn and stupid are two different things, Sarge,’ Salter grinned as she disappeared.

As soon as she entered the upper corridor, the buzz from the incident room electrified the air. Ava Turner appeared from the opposite end of the hallway and stopped, a smile spreading slowly across her face as Salter walked closer.

‘Detective Constable Salter, good to have you back with MIT,’ Ava said.

‘Good to be back, ma’am,’ Salter said. ‘There’s a murder, I gather.’

‘Looks like it,’ Ava said. ‘I’m not warning you off any particular duties. You’ve been declared fit to return and that’s good enough for me. Just communicate with me if you need anything. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ Salter said. ‘And congratulations on the promotion ma’am, even if I am a few months late saying it.’

‘I’m not sure congratulations is the right word. Feels more like a punishment most days. Where have you and DS Lively been this morning?’

‘Someone slashed the letter Z into the face of a homeless drug addict. He was found this morning covered in blood. No witnesses, no leads. The victim’s taken a drug – it’s sufficiently strong that he’s still unaware of what’s happened to him. Lively’s downstairs now booking him in as a drunk and incapable, in the hope that we’ll be able to take a statement in a few hours.’

‘Spice?’ Ava asked.

‘That’s Lively’s theory. Paramedics seemed to agree,’ Salter said.

‘The city’s riddled with it,’ Ava said. ‘Let the drug squad know. If there’s a new batch on the streets that’s turning users violent, they ought to start checking it out.’

‘Salter,’ Callanach said, walking out of the incident room to join them. He hugged her and Salter blushed.

‘Sir,’ she said. ‘Nice to see you again, but I’d better get going. I need to write up my notes, and DS Lively’ll go off on one if there’s no coffee ready when he comes up from the cells.’ She hustled away into the kitchenette.

‘Wow,’ Ava said, turning to Callanach. ‘Are you okay? That’s the most emotional I’ve seen you since … ever, actually.’

‘You’re funny,’ Callanach said. ‘Should she be back so soon, though? After all she went through and the loss of the baby.’

‘Give her time,’ Ava said. ‘I suspect she’s pressing the bruise to see how much it hurts. Keep an eye on her. Let me know if you think there’s a problem. Salter’s a good detective. We need officers like her.’

DC Max Tripp poked his head out of the incident room and called to them. ‘Ma’am, we’ve got some background on Zoey Cole and her stepfather, Christopher Myers. You’re going to want to hear this straight away,’ he said.

Chapter Four

Zoey Cole lay on a trolley beneath a sheet. Ava and Callanach stood silently, waiting for Jonty Spurr to join them. A worker from the domestic violence shelter had provided an up-to-date photo, and attended the previous evening to positively identify the body.