Close to the Bone

cigarette butts, blown in off the rear podium. He picked his way down the stairs, rang the bell, waved at the security camera, waited for the bzzzzzz. . Then stepped through the door and into the land of the dead.

Today, the land of the dead smelled like bleach and rehydrated curry.

He stuck his head into the staff room.

Miss Dalrymple had her feet up on the coffee table, a Pot Noodle in one hand and a fork in the other. A gossip magazine was spread out on her lap, ‘NICHOLE FYFE: MY SECRET TEENAGE SUICIDE SHAME’. Which explained the scars on her wrist.

Dalrymple shovelled a dangly forkful of noodles into her mouth. The words came out muffled as she chewed: ‘Not here.’

‘Who’s not? ’

‘Dr MacAllister. She’s interviewing candidates to replace our dearly departed Dr Forsyth. He’s not having a leaving do, so there’s no whip-round.’

‘I’m after Dr Graham.’

‘Ah yes, the bone lady.’ Dalrymple popped the fork into the plastic container, then made spidery gestures with her free hand, as if the fingers were sniffing the air for something. ‘She’s managed to break three beakers, two mugs, and knock over a brain bucket since this morning. How anyone so congenitally clumsy can survive day-to-day life is beyond me.’

‘Is she here or not? ’

The fingers formed a knot, then spread out to point towards the cutting room. ‘If she ever offers you a lift, I’d seriously recommend running in the opposite direction.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ The grey terrazzo floor was damp, as if it had been mopped not long ago and hadn’t dried yet. Logan left bleach and detergent footprints all the way down the corridor to the cutting-room doors. Then pushed inside.

The sound of gentle snoring came from the corner. Someone had dragged four chairs through from the staff room, lining them up against the stainless-steel working surface with the backs facing out into the room. Whoever it was lay on their side, cocooned by the two sides, an open newspaper draped across their head and shoulders. Like a tramp on a park bench, but in a mortuary cutting room. The only thing missing was an empty bottle of supermarket vodka.

Dr Graham was almost exactly where Logan had left her — hunched over the necklacing victim’s skull. There wasn’t a lot of the resin cast still visible, instead bands of dark-red clay speckled with tissue depth markers made it look like something out of Hellraiser. Dire Straits burbled out of the mortuary stereo.

Logan switched it off. ‘How we getting on? ’

She looked up, smiled. Then held a finger to her lips. ‘Shh. .’ Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘Dr Ramsey just got off to sleep. Rough night.’

‘Under supervision again? ’

She nodded her head towards the third cutting table, where a partial skeleton was laid out on a blue plastic sheet. ‘Not that I’m complaining. It’s difficult enough to get one job, but to have a second fall right in my lap: how lucky is that? ’

She peeled off her gloves and dumped them in the bin, then crept over to the other bones. The skull sat at the head of the table, missing the top set of teeth. The vertebrae were arranged in a line underneath, with gaps marking the ones that hadn’t turned up on Logan’s roof, but nearly all the rib bones were there, laid out in a disjointed fan down either side. Then the pelvis. And then the two femurs. Dr Graham pointed at the hands: thin cylinders of bone arranged on two sheets of paper, each bit fitting inside the wobbly biro outlines. ‘As far as I can tell, the fingers you found came from the same body. We’re missing the carpals and a couple of metacarpals. And there’s no distal phalanges at all, but fingertips are really small and fiddly so it’s possible they just blew off the roof. Or they were so mangled after being boiled in bleach they just fell apart.’

Logan pulled a photograph from his pocket and placed it on the table beside the skeletal hand. ‘Is this our necklacing victim? ’

‘Ah.’ She frowned at the picture of Anthony Chung. ‘Actually, if everything goes to plan I’ll get the epidermis on the reconstruction tomorrow. It would’ve been quicker, but I had to make the mould, and cast the skull, and examine the new skeleton. .’

‘But it could be him, right? Isobel said the victim had liver damage — and this guy was a serious drinker. Bottle of vodka a day serious. Two: his girlfriend’s obsessed with a book where witch-finders execute people by necklacing them. And three: she suffers from psychotic episodes, and she’s been off her medication for weeks.’

‘Well. .’ Her eyebrows and cheeks twitched, as if there was something wriggling around under the skin. ‘No. It’s not him.’

‘Are you sure? ’

Beneath his tabloid blanket, Dr Ramsey snorted and twitched, making the chairs creak.

‘Shhh. .’ Dr Graham froze, staring at the duty doctor until he rolled over onto his back and the snoring started again. ‘Trust me: this isn’t our victim.’

‘But-’

‘If it was, I’d have expected rounder eye sockets and a flatter front to the skull as well. Plus there should be a rounded palate and the incisors would be shovel-shaped, but our victim’s teeth are spatulate. I know the body would have looked a bit — and I’m not meaning to be racially insensitive here — yellowy during post mortem, but that’s because the blood settles in the areas closest to the ground.’ She picked up the photo and handed it back to Logan. ‘He wasn’t from the Far East. And he wasn’t in his late teens, early twenties, either.’

‘Oh. .’ So much for that theory. It wasn’t Agnes Garfield’s boyfriend. She wasn’t on a psychotic rampage.

Dr Graham patted the clay-covered skull. ‘Our friend here was male, Caucasian, and about forty years old. The remains on your roof, on the other fingertip-less hand, are definitely female, mid sixties, five foot three, and her second and third lumbar vertebrae were surgically fused at some point: that might be worth chasing up? ’

Logan glanced back at the pale-grey bones. ‘How did she die? ’

‘My life coach says I should always turn a negative into a positive. So: there are excellent opportunities there for further discovery.’

‘You have no idea, do you? ’

She scrunched up one side of her face. ‘Well, there’s no knife marks on the bones, or signs of blunt-force trauma, or bullet holes. . To be honest, it’s impossible to tell, especially without the rest of the remains. We’ve got nothing below the knees and we’re missing both arms too — he could have hacked them off and she bled to death. Maybe he drowned her? Suffocated her. There’s no hyoid, so she could’ve been strangled. Or he stabbed her in the stomach. Or made her drink bleach. Or-’

‘Enough, OK. I get the picture.’

Dr Graham shrugged. ‘If you want, I can send a sample off to that friend of mine in Dundee? ’

‘Do it.’

She picked the left femur from the plastic sheet and hefted it like a club, tapping the hip joint on the palm of her hand. ‘I’ll just need you to sign a couple of release forms. .’

‘Yeah, sorry.’ Logan sat on the edge of Dr Forsyth’s old desk, mobile phone pinned between his shoulder and his ear, hunting through his jacket pockets for a pen. Bloody things must be hiding. He pulled out his notebook, his car keys, his warrant card, laying them on the desk beside him. Then a handful of business cards, two packs of individually sealed blue nitrile gloves. Then that white DL envelope Hissing Sid gave him, and then the brown one. .

They sat on the Formica desktop like tombstones.

A female voice dribbled into his ear. ‘. .there yet? ’

Blink. ‘Erm. . I think so.’ The pen was lying sideways in the bottom of the pocket. He pulled it out and got her to repeat the authorization number and scrawled it down in his notebook, along with the Fiscal Depute’s name and the time and date. Covering his arse, just in case. ‘Thanks.’

‘And this isn’t going to take a chunk out of budget? ’

‘Pro bono, apparently.’ He stared down at the tombstones. Puffed out his cheeks. Then picked up the white