satisfaction almost as overpowering as his aftershave. ‘Professor Wilson arrived on the last flight yesterday.’ He checked his watch. ‘PM should be starting in about half an hour.’
‘You’re not flying the body to Aberdeen, then?’
‘The facilities are good enough here. So we brought the mountain to Mohammed.’
‘What would you like me to do?’
‘Frankly, DI Macleod, nothing. I’ve got a perfectly good team here that’s quite capable of running this inquiry without your help.’ He sighed in deep frustration. ‘But HOLMES seems to think you might be able to say whether or not there’s a connection with the Leith Walk murder. And God forbid we shouldn’t do what HOLMES tells us. So why don’t you sit in on the postmortem, take a look at the parallel evidence, and if you come up with anything we’ll give it a gander. Okay?’
‘I wouldn’t mind casting an eye over the crime scene.’
‘Feel free. Detective Sergeant Gunn can give you the tour. The local boys aren’t really equipped to be of much use to us anyway. Except as dogsbodies.’ His contempt for everyone outside of his own team, including Fin, was clear.
‘And I’ll want to take a look at the files.’ Fin was pushing his luck. ‘Maybe talk to some of the witnesses. Suspects, if there are any.’
Smith pursed his lips and gave Fin a long, hard look. ‘I can’t stop you doing that, Macleod. But you might as well know that I expect to have this whole thing wrapped up in a matter of days. And just so you’re not under any illusion, I don’t believe there is an Edinburgh connection.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Call it instinct. People here aren’t very sophisticated.’ He smirked. ‘Well, you’d know that.’ He was tapping his pencil on his desk now, irritated by having to explain himself to a junior officer from another force. ‘I think this is a crude copycat killing. There were plenty of details published in the papers at the time. I think the killer’s a local man with a grudge trying to cover his tracks, trying to make us look somewhere else. So I’m going to shortcut the whole process.’ Fin resisted the temptation to smile. He knew all about shortcuts. He’d learned very early in life that they could lead you off on tangents. But DCI Smith was not privy to such wisdom. He said, ‘Unless the PM throws up something unexpected, I’m going to take DNA samples from every adult male in Crobost, as well as any additional suspects we might come up with. I figure a couple of hundred at the most. Economy of scale. A whole hell of a lot cheaper than a long-running investigation tying up officers in the field for weeks on end.’ Smith was one of the new breed of senior cops whose primary concern was the bottom line.
Still, Fin was surprised. ‘You have a DNA sample of the killer?’
Smith beamed. ‘We think so. Despite local sensibilities, we put out teams of uniforms to search the locus on Sunday. We found the victim’s clothes in a plastic binbag dropped in a ditch about half a mile away. The clothes are covered in vomit. And since the police surgeon is pretty sure the victim wasn’t sick, we have to assume the murderer was. If the forensic pathologist can confirm that, we should have a perfect sample of the killer’s DNA.’
II
In Church Street, and all the way down to the inner harbour, little hanging baskets of flowers swung in the wind, a brave effort to bring colour into grey lives. Pink- and white- and green-painted shops lined the street, and at the bottom of it Fin could see a cluster of fishing boats tied up at the quay, moving with the rise and fall of the ocean. A blink of sunlight caught the white boatshed on the opposite shore, and swept across the tops of trees in the Lews Castle grounds.
‘What did you make of the CIO, then?’ Gunn said.
‘I’d pretty much concur with your assessment.’ Fin and Gunn shared a grin.
Gunn unlocked the car and they got in. ‘Thinks he’s a superstar, that one. My old boss in Inverness used to say of the brass, they’re no different from you and me. They still have to get their legs out of their breeks one at a time.’
Fin laughed. He liked the image of DCI Smith struggling to get his stocky little legs out of his trousers.
‘Listen,’ Gunn said, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the inside line on the pathologist. I didn’t even know he was on the island. Shows you how much they’re keeping
‘That’s okay.’ Fin brushed the apology aside. ‘Actually, I know Angus pretty well. He’s a good guy. And at least he’ll be on our side.’ They backed out into the street. ‘Why do you think Smith’s not attending the PM himself?’
‘Maybe he’s squeamish.’
‘I don’t know. A man who uses that much aftershave can’t be too sensitive.’
‘Aye, right enough. Most corpses smell better than he does.’
They slipped out of Kenneth Street on to Bayhead, heading north out of town. Fin looked from the passenger window at the children’s playpark, the tennis courts, the bowling green, the sports ground beyond and the golf course on the hill behind it. On the other side of the street, tiny shops were crammed together beneath the dormer windows of flats above. It almost felt as if he had never been away. He said, ‘Friday, Saturday nights in the eighties, the kids used to cruise up and down here in their old bangers.’
‘They still do. Regular as clockwork, every weekend. Whole processions of them.’
Fin reflected on what a sad existence it was for these kids. Little or nothing to do, strangled by a society still in the grips of a joyless religion. An economy on the slide, unemployment high. Alcoholism rife, a suicide rate well above the national average. The motivation to leave was as compelling now as it had been eighteen years ago.
The Western Isles Hospital was new since Fin’s day, replacing the old cottage hospital on the hill below the war memorial. It was a fully equipped, modern facility, better than many of those serving urban populations on the mainland. They turned in off Macaulay Road, and Fin saw the low, two-storey structure built in shallow angles around a sprawling car park. Gunn drove to the foot of the hill and turned right into a small, private parking area.
Professor Angus Wilson was waiting in the mortuary room. His goggles were pushed up over his shower cap, his mask pulled down below his chin, pushing out a thick beard of fusewire copper shot through with silver. He wore a plastic apron over green surgical pyjamas covered by a long-sleeved cotton gown. On the stainless steel table in front of him he had laid out plastic sleeve covers to protect his forearms, a pair of cotton gloves, a pair of latex gloves, and the characteristic steel-mesh glove he wore on his non-cutting hand to guard against an accidental slip of the blade. He was impatient to begin.
‘About bloody time!’ A twinkle in his green eyes betrayed the outward appearance he liked to give of bad- tempered eccentricity. It was an image he cultivated as an excuse for the rudeness that was almost expected of him now. ‘How the hell are you?’ He held out a hand to shake Fin’s. ‘Same killer, is it?’
‘That’s what you’re here to tell us.’
‘Godforsaken bloody place! You’d think if there was anywhere in the world you could get fresh fish this would be it. I ordered plaice in the hotel last night. Aye, and it was fresh alright. Fresh out the fucking freezer and into the deep-fat fryer. Christ, I can get that in my own house!’ He looked at Gunn and leaned over the table to pull the folder from under his arm. ‘Is that the report and the photographs?’
‘Aye.’ Gunn held out his hand. ‘DS George Gunn.’ But the professor had already turned away to look at the report and lay out the photographs. Gunn withdrew his hand self-consciously.
‘You’ll find head covers, shoe covers, goggles, masks and gowns in the pathologist’s room across the hall.’
‘You want us to put them on?’ Gunn said. Perhaps, Fin thought, he hadn’t been at a post-mortem in a while.
‘No.’ Professor Wilson wheeled around. ‘I want you to gather them into a little pile and set them on fire.’ He glared. ‘Of course I want you to put the fucking things on. Unless you want to catch AIDS or whatever viral particles might be lurking in the bone dust that’ll fill the air when we take the oscillating saw around the victim’s skull.
