‘There’s definitely something there.’ The IB technician pulled his white facemask off, revealing a big salt- and-pepper moustache and a face like a squeezed sponge.
They’d had to rip the chipboard floor up to get at the concrete underneath, piling the wooden sheets against the walls in jagged layers so he and his assistant could wheel the ground-penetrating radar kit slowly around the part-built house.
Logan peered at the GPR screen. It was a ripply mix of blacks, dark blues, and greens, with an orange and white blob in the middle. Squint your eyes and it could almost be a body, lying curled up on its side. Or a squid. Or a radioactive angry amoeba. ‘What if it’s not?’
Mr Moustache tapped the screen. ‘Head here, legs, and that’s an arm.’
DI Steel shoved Logan out of the way. ‘Let me see…You sure?’
The man shrugged. ‘Eighty percent.’
‘Dig it up.’ Steel hauled at the crotch of her SOC suit. ‘Don’t see why we’ve got to wear these bloody things, like huge great albino bloody Smurfs. Poor sod’s buried under three feet of concrete, what the hell are we going to contaminate?’
‘Because, Inspector,’ came a voice from the doorway, ‘we do not treat our crime scene as if it were the January sale at Primark.’
Dr Isobel McAllister stepped down from the front door onto the bare concrete, carrying a small stainless steel briefcase. She wore the same white paper oversuit as everyone else, but somehow she managed to make it look stylish. She nodded at the moustachioed IB man. ‘Where is it?’
He described a rough oval with his finger.
‘I see. And are we certain the remains are human?’
Mr Moustache shrugged again. ‘Cadaver dogs react to decaying meat, so it could be anything.’ He stomped a bootied foot on the grey floor. ‘Might be a pig, might be a deer, but there’s something dead under all this lot.’
Steel scowled at him. ‘You told me eighty percent!’
‘Yes, but-’
‘Peter,’ Isobel placed her metal case on the floor and popped it open, ‘I need you to help me mark out the body.’ She produced a measuring tape, a box of white chalk, and what looked like a bag full of ten pence pieces. Then she and Mr Moustache laid out a six-inch grid in pale-blue chalk over the rough area of the body, and marked each intersection with one of the shiny silver coins. When that was done they ran the GPR kit carefully across it, Isobel taking notes in a small pad.
‘The body is…’ She pulled a stick of white chalk from the box and, checking her notes, outlined a crouching figure at her feet. ‘Here.’ Isobel smiled down at it. ‘You know, in all the time I’ve been a pathologist, I’ve never seen a body chalked up at a crime scene. Like being on the television, isn’t it?’
Steel leant over and whispered in Logan’s ear. ‘Aye, only a hoor of a lot more boring.’
Isobel selected another stick of chalk. ‘So we need to cut…here.’ A perfect rectangle of red, never closer than twelve inches from any point on the body.
The inspector rocked back and forth on her heels. ‘Right, McRae, you nip out and grab a couple of jackhammers, and-’
‘You’ll do no such thing!’ Isobel clunked her case shut again. ‘I will not have my crime scene turned into a building site.’
Steel cast an eye around the ripped-up floor and exposed wooden frame of the part-built house. ‘Hate to break it to you…’
‘You know what I mean. I want this section of the floor cut away and brought back to the mortuary. We’ll create a secondary crime scene there to examine the remains.’
Logan looked down at the slab. ‘Don’t think that’s going to be possible.’
The pathologist narrowed her eyes. ‘We need a secure and
‘It’s got to weigh, what, half a ton?’
Mr Moustache ran a hand across his bristly moustache. ‘Actually, that much concrete’s going to be closer to two and a bit.’
‘About three times as much as my car. Can you imagine trying to get it down the corridor and into the cutting room?’
Isobel cocked her head to one side for a moment. ‘Agreed. We’ll need a second location. Somewhere with forklift access. Running water. And refrigeration.’ She grabbed her metal case and stood. ‘In the meantime, I want this block
17
A thin stream of misty rain fell through the gaping hole in the ceiling, sparkling in the harsh glare of the IB’s arc lights. Logan peered up through the severed joists at the heavy sky and the huge metal hook lowering down into the house.
Outside, the roar of the crane’s diesel engine had replaced the deafening judder of the jackhammers. So much for Isobel’s insistence that her crime scene wouldn’t become a building site. The foundations were too thick to cut through cleanly, so they’d had to excavate the rectangle she’d marked out on the concrete by hacking a foot-wide trench around it, the rubble all heaped up in the corner against a mound of pink Rockwool insulation.
Nearly a dozen IB technicians stood in little clumps around the outside of the room. A pair of them wandered the ground floor, one with a high-definition video kit, the other with a huge digital camera — its flash flickering in the confined space.
Two IB technicians threaded thick steel rope through four heavy eyelets bolted into Isobel’s concrete slab, then fiddled about with connectors and spanners, fitting a big metal ring to slip over the big metal hook.
DI Steel’s stale cigarette breath washed over Logan’s cheek. ‘Wish they’d get a shift on, I’m bursting for a slash.’
Logan shifted his feet, watching as the IB hooked the block up to the crane. ‘You think it’s him? Polmont?’
‘You’d better pray it is, amount of man-hours we’re wasting on this.’
‘Just seems a bit quick, doesn’t it? They kill him Monday, bury his body in the foundations…what, Monday night? Leave it to set. The soonest they can start building is Tuesday.’
He pointed at the house, the brick-clad ground floor, the gaping hole in the roof where the IB team had to cut away the joists. ‘How did they get all this built in four days?’
‘Kit houses, aren’t they — all prefabricated units. They’re no’ building the thing from scratch, just sticking it together like a big fuck-off Lego kit. Good team of builders, and you’d be moving in before the end of the week.’
‘Right, before we begin,’ Isobel took her place at the headend of the hooked-up slab, ‘I want you all to remember that any evidence we have here will be clinging to the underside of the concrete.
She nodded at one of the albino Smurfs, who unfurled a long sheet of the ubiquitous SOC blue plastic. Another Smurf grabbed the other end, then they both held up a thumb.
‘Norman?’
The tech with the HDTV camera squatted down, focussing on the jagged edge. ‘Rolling.’
‘You may begin.’
One of the IB team mumbled something into a bulky radio handset and the rumble of diesel got louder — the hook slowly pulled upwards, hauling the steel ropes tight. There was a loud
Smurf Number One shouted, ‘Hold it!’ and the crane’s engine eased off, the slab hanging two feet above the rest of the foundations. Then Smurfs One and Two slid the blue plastic sheet under the rectangle, pulling it tight. ‘OK…’
The engine roared again, and the block rose jerkily into the air, clumps of black-brown earth falling in stinking
