‘Eh?’ As he muttered his incredulity, Jack whipped out his warrant card and displayed it; I did the same.
‘We could have been
The plod smiled; personally, I’d have preferred to see a little contrition from him. ‘Tough for them, eh. Sorry, Sarge.’ He chuckled. ‘But I’ve never seen anyone looks more like a polis than you do.’ He pointed into the trees, towards an area that had been taped off, and in which we could see people, moving under lights that had been set up. ‘It’s over there.’
‘What is?’ I snapped at him, irked by his indifference to everything.
‘The body. What did you expect here, son? This is Mortonhall Crematorium ye’re at.’
That much I’d known, but that was all the DI had said. She’d sounded flustered, and that was a first for her, in my experience. As she approached us, holding a crime scene tunic in each hand, she looked less than her cool self, too.
‘Lads, sorry to haul you out past your bedtimes, but this one isn’t the normal run-of-the-mill homicide.’
‘A definite homicide, though?’ Jack quizzed her as he started to climb into the paper suit that wasn’t going to fit him any better than the last one had.
‘He didn’t bury himself,’ she replied.
‘How was he found?’ I asked, looking across at the sterile area we’d soon be entering. ‘This doesn’t look like a place where people walk their dogs.’ The woods seemed too thick, close though they were to the houses that I could just make out on the other side. I sniffed the air and caught the scent of cat piss: but no putrefaction, I noted.
‘He wasn’t. We were told where he was.’
‘We were told. .’ Jack repeated.
She nodded. ‘You heard me right. There was a phone call, an hour and a half ago, on the public line to the communications centre. The caller said that there was a body buried in the woods, and told us precisely where. He even gave map co-ordinates.’
‘And communications called you?’ I knew what he was getting at. We were out of our area.
‘No, I did.’
The voice came from behind us, but we didn’t have to turn to know who owned it, or that he was not best pleased. He joined us, just as I fastened my paper pyjamas. We’d all been advised to walk as if on eggshells around DCS Mario McGuire, our head of CID, ever since his ‘soul brother’, Neil McIlhenney, had shocked the world by moving to the Met.
In truth walking on eggshells around McGuire is advisable at any time. There are a few people in this world on whose good side you always want to be, and he’s one of those for sure. He’s just over six feet tall, and built like a brick shit-house, although he’s always dressed to disguise the fact. He has thick curly hair, jet-black, but with some grey creeping into it, as you’d expected in someone around the forty mark. He’s usually amiable, but as someone once said, ‘If Mike Tyson ever gets into bother in Edinburgh, McGuire’s the man they’ll send to lift him, and Iron Mike will come quietly.’ I took a quick look at him, trying to assess his amiability gauge; it seemed to be still above the danger level.
‘In a week or so I might have called Ray Wilding,’ he said, ‘since this is Gayfield territory, but it’s his first day there as DI and he’s still bedding himself in. Besides. .’ His voice trailed off, letting us fill in the rest as we saw it. My interpretation was that maybe he wasn’t ready to trust Gayfield with anything sensitive for a while.
‘I know what you guys are thinking,’ he continued. ‘People normally bury bodies to hide them from us. They do not call us and ask us to dig them up, and when they don’t do that, they most certainly don’t use a scrambler to disguise their voice.’
‘How long’s it been there, sir?’ McGurk asked.
‘It’s fresh,’ I chipped in. ‘You can’t smell it.’
The DCS leaned forward and tapped me on the chest with a thick index finger. ‘The sergeant may well call you “sir” one day, lad, but not for a while yet. Until then, speak when you’re fucking spoken to unless I tell you otherwise.’ Then he grinned. ‘You are spot on though. . although it was just as possible that it might have been very old. Come on and see for yourself.’
He led the way forward into the taped-off area. The SOCOs were all over the place, some of them working under hand-held lights. I guessed they were looking for traces of the mystery phone caller; people sign their names in the oddest ways these days.
The burial site was located in a small, square clearing, defined by four trees. It was just big enough for the hole to have been dug, grassy but covered in broken twigs and the brown mulch of last year’s fallen leaves. The grave itself had been excavated and the answer to Jack’s question was indeed apparent. The body was fresh; it had been enshrouded in what looked like a white bedsheet; that had been partly opened, enough to let us see that it was clean, and free of insect activity. The exposed torso was also naked, part of a young adult male with dark hair; the hands folded across it had neat fingernails and its muscular definition looked sharp even in death.
‘Okay, Sauce,’ McGuire said, ‘take a bow. He’s fresh all right.’
Emboldened again, I ventured a question. ‘How long’s he been there, sir?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ he replied, ‘ask the pathologist. Can you make an estimate, Sarah?’
I’d been aware of someone else at the edge of the clearing, but I’d been too focused on the body to take in any details. When she stepped forward I had a sudden, strange illusion; that I’d stepped into a television crime drama. The woman was tall, strikingly attractive, and the hair that had escaped from the hood of her outfit was a rich honey blond. Mid-thirties, I thought, in the same ball-park as Becky Stallings. The boss looked across at her, one professional to another, having already been introduced, I assumed, waiting for her reply. It was Jack McGurk’s reaction that set me on my heels: his mouth fell open and his eyes widened, as if a second hand had come down on his other shoulder in the middle of a prostate examination.
‘Hello, Sergeant,’ she murmured, smiling. ‘If it still is Sergeant, that is.’ Another surprise; her accent was American, and a little twangy, like the dead Kennedys. I had a flash of Marilyn Monroe crooning ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’, on old grainy black-and-white film.
Jack pulled himself together. ‘Yes it is. I’m sorry: I didn’t know you were back.’
‘No reason why you should,’ she replied. ‘The university was asked not to make an announcement when I took up my post. I was worried that it might attract the wrong sort of coverage.’
I hadn’t a clue what she was taking about, but I was more interested in the poor sod lying at my feet. I took another look; at first glance I had thought he was unmarked, but second time around I saw a dark discoloration, in the centre of his chest.
‘I’d rather call it a guess,’ she told the DCS in reply. ‘Estimate would be too formal; but I’d say he died around midnight last night, give or take a couple of hours. It was warm last night, so I’d expect that rigor mortis would dissipate at the normal rate rather than more slowly, if he’d been colder in the ground. He isn’t exactly floppy yet, but it’s going. As for cause of death, I won’t know for sure will I’ve seen all of him, but that bruising interests me. It could be post-mortem lividity, but I don’t think so.’
‘Will you do the examination yourself?’ McGuire asked.
‘Unless you want to wait for a couple of days for Master Yoda to come back, yes, I’ll be doing it, with a postgrad assistant. Is that all right with you?’
He nodded, vigorously. ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed.
‘Who the hell is Master Yoda?’ I whispered to Jack. The woman called Sarah heard me.
‘It’s what the students call Professor Hutchinson, our chief pathologist,’ she explained. ‘To his secret delight, I should add, even though they only call him that because he’s very small and looks a bit like the Muppet in
Beside me, McGurk was still tense. Indeed, I’d have sworn he was quivering, slightly; I make a mental note to threaten to shop him to Lisanne over his reaction to the mystery blonde.
But that was for later. ‘Do we know who he is?’ I asked, of nobody in particular.
‘No,’ someone very particular replied, ‘and from the way he’s been left, someone’s keen that we shouldn’t find out too easily.’
I blinked and looked up. The chief constable had arrived quietly, without anyone noticing his approach. He wasn’t suited up like the rest of us, but I wasn’t going to be the first to point that out, and anyway, the SOCOs had been over the area around the grave.
