Dark Flight Page 2

  There was a forlorn air to the small garden, as though it had once been loved. The remains of spring daffodils poked out from beneath the too-thick hedge, their heads shrivelled and browning.

  A circular bed of spindly roses, badly in need of pruning, suddenly reminded Rhona of her father’s garden on the Isle of Skye. She’d felt ashamed of the neglect when she went back after his death. Somehow, seeing the abandoned garden brought home the reality of his passing. Until then she’d imagined she only had to lift the receiver and dial his number and he would be there to answer it.

  The gate was black metal but hadn’t been painted in a while. Flakes of rust crumbled on touch and sprinkled the concrete path with orange-red dust. She swung the gate shut and crouched on one of the aluminium treads on the short path. The gate was divided in two. The top half consisted of two semicircular bars enclosed within a square. The bottom half was made up of vertical bars, wide enough apart for a small foot.

  Between bars three and four, and five and six, were the imprints she sought. She took a series of photos before she attempted retrieval. The imprints were partial of the weighted soles of shoes pressed between the bars. Crouched on the path, she figured she would be just below the height of a child swinging on the gate. She could hear movement from indoors and spotted the top of Chrissy’s head in the bedroom.

  The kitchen window was left of the path. Assuming the woman had been assaulted at the sink, a child swinging on the gate would have had a clear view of her face when her attacker struck.

  Rhona imagined a scream and turned abruptly, as a child would have done . . . and caught sight of the bones.

  They were lying half hidden among the shrivelled daffodil leaves. She reached out and picked them up, her heart beating with the excited curiosity of a scientist.

  Lying in the palm of her gloved hand, they were immediately recognisable as human half-finger bones, tied tightly together with red thread in the shape of a diagonal cross. The length from the proximal to the distal joint was shorter than her own, suggesting an adult with small hands, or a child. Just below each knuckle, there were three striations cut cross-wise.

  She put the bones in a sample bag, then examined the short path to the front door. The perpetrator could have entered the house this way or used the back alley, which involved climbing a wall. According to Bill there were no signs of a forced entry. So he had a key, or both doors were unlocked. There was no back garden, just a shared area of grass with a wooden bench. If the child or assailant ran out of the front door, then there could be blood on this path somewhere.

  But the path proved to be clear. Her only reward for a careful search was a wad of chewing gum just outside the gate.

  Chrissy appeared at the front door, pulled down her mask, and inhaled deeply. ‘The old woman was incontinent. The carpet’s reeking.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Someone pissed on the body.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Her attacker?’

  ‘Who else would piss on an old woman?’

  Drugs and their metabolities were often detectable in urine for longer periods than in the blood. If the attacker was high on something, they would find evidence of it in his urine.

  ‘McNab wants a word.’

  ‘Right.’ Rhona tried to keep her face expressionless. The attempt wasn’t lost on Chrissy. Not many people knew that piece of Rhona’s history and she wanted it kept that way.

  ‘He’s in the hut.’ Chrissy indicated the mobile crime scene office set up across the road.

  ‘Okay. I’m finished in the kitchen anyway.’

  ‘Ten minutes, then we go for a drink?’ Chrissy suggested.

  Rhona stripped off the suit, boots and gloves, composing herself as she did so. DS Michael McNab. A moment of madness a couple of years back that had lasted three months. Her dad had died and she’d felt like a boat without a rudder. Sleeping with McNab had made her temporarily forget the emptiness. When she broke it off, he was the one all at sea. He got angry. Tried everything to get back into her life. Rhona still felt bad that she had encouraged him to think there was more to them than sex.

  She pulled on her jacket. The spring sunshine had gone and she shivered in the cold April air.

  When she pushed open the door of the hut, she was relieved to see McNab wasn’t alone. Bill Wilson was there, in his hand a mug of coffee with skin on its surface, just the way he liked it.

  McNab had done a good job as Crime Scene Manager. Rhona congratulated him.

  Seated at a computer, he accepted the compliment in silence, an inscrutable look on his face. ‘We always did make a good team.’

  She ignored any hidden message in the reply and asked if there was any word on the child.

  ‘We’ve established the younger victim as Carole Devlin, the old woman’s married daughter,’ Bill told her. ‘She has a boy of six called Stephen. A neighbour says Carole often came to help her mother. She brought Stephen with her.’

  ‘So where is he now?’

  McNab shook his head. ‘We don’t know.’ He pushed a photo in a silver frame across the desk. ‘This was on the sideboard.’

  A live and animated Carole Devlin sat beside her mother on a settee. Between her knees perched a boy, wearing a blue school sweatshirt. He had the creamy chocolate-brown skin of a mixed-race child. Handsome, with big brown eyes and a cheeky grin.

  ‘Is there a dad?’

  ‘No idea. The school badge belongs to the nearby primary. DC Clark is contacting the headmistress. We have an address from Carole’s handbag that could be her own flat. It’s in Gibson Street.’

  Gibson Street was a stone’s throw from Rhona’s lab, about a fifteen-minute walk from the granny’s flat in Dowanhill Road.

  ‘We’ll know more by the strategy meeting tomorrow,’ Bill said

  ‘There’s no sign of the boy, apart from the footprint beside the body and two on the gate,’ Rhona told him.

  Bill said what she’d been thinking. ‘If the attacker took him . . .’

  Neither of them wanted to say it, but they feared the child might already be dead.

  ‘There’s something else.’

  She showed them the bagged finger bones.

  McNab examined them through the plastic, his face puzzled. ‘They look human.’

  ‘They are.’

  Bill gave a weary sigh. ‘So, we have two dead women, one of them mutilated, and a missing child . . .’

  ‘And a cross made of human bones,’ Rhona finished for him.

  3

  THE CLUB WAS beginning to fill up. The band didn’t perform till later. Now the place echoed with shrill voices just released from a day’s work.

  Chrissy and Rhona made straight for the bar. A stout man with glasses and a petite pretty brunette Rhona recognised from the mortuary, moved along a bit to give them room. It was Sean’s night off, or he would have been here already, setting up for the band, his saxophone on its stand in the corner of the stage. Tonight he would be at the flat, cooking a meal. Rhona knew she should have gone straight home, but didn’t want to. Better to sit with Chrissy for a while, until the real world seeped back into her system.

  One thing about her line of work: telling your partner what you’d seen and done in the previous six hours didn’t make for a comfortable evening.

  Guilt made her flip open her mobile. The phone rang out four times then switched to answerphone. She left a message about being kept late at work and rang off.

  The club was busy with Glasgow University personnel, including staff from the nearby forensic medical sciences department and a couple of forensic anthropologists from GUARD, the University’s Archaeological Research Department. This wasn’t a police hang-out, so she didn’t have to face McNab, although Bill, a keen jazz fan, often came in.

  She dismissed thoughts of Michael McNab from her mind. She hadn’t told Sean about that liaison. In fact they never discussed previous relationships, although she
suspected Sean’s list was a lot longer than her own.

  Rhona ordered a white wine from Sam the barman. Chrissy screwed up her face at that, and went for a bright pink alcopop, reminding Rhona that alcohol served that way got into the blood faster, which is what she needed tonight.

  ‘So, what did McNab want?’ Her forensic assistant was nothing if not direct.

  ‘Strictly business,’ Rhona told her.

  ‘While he undressed you with his eyes.’

  ‘Bill was there.’

  ‘I bet that pissed McNab off.’

  ‘He’s a good CSM.’

  Chrissy shrugged and took a swallow. ‘If a little obsessive.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  Chrissy made a noise in her throat that sounded like a grunt of disbelief. ‘McNab has a damaged ego where you’re concerned.’

  ‘I’m history,’ Rhona said firmly.

  It had been stupid getting involved with someone from work. There were lots of affairs in the police force. Unsocial hours, shift work, escape from the horrors of the job threw people together. Most liaisons screwed up the work and the personal life of those involved. It was the only time Rhona had made that mistake and it still bothered her.

  When McNab headed for the Fife Police College, it had seemed a perfect time to end it. Numerous emails and phone calls from him had left her feeling threatened as well as angry. So she’d told Bill in confidence. He must have had a quiet word with McNab because the communication onslaught had suddenly stopped. Now McNab was back in Glasgow and impossible to avoid.

  As Chrissy drained her bottle Sam appeared with another. He flashed her a big dazzling-white smile. ‘I finish in an hour?’

  ‘I’ll be here.’

  Rhona waited until he went to serve someone else, then raised an eyebrow at Chrissy.

  ‘What?’ Chrissy played the innocent.

  ‘You never said you were seeing Sam.’

  ‘I like to give it longer than three weeks before I spread the word.’

  ‘And?’

  Chrissy looked like the cat that got the cream. ‘Well, you know that story about black men . . .’

  ‘Stop, Chrissy!’

  The one thing you had to remember about Chrissy: she always told it like it was.

  Sam had left the wine bottle beside her and Rhona refilled her glass as Chrissy headed for the Ladies. Someone had switched on the overhead television. A news flash showed the photograph of the missing boy with his mother and grandmother. Rhona asked Sam to turn up the sound.

  The report was short, with little detail. A six-year-old boy, Stephen Devlin, was missing, after the grim discovery of the murdered bodies of his mother and grandmother in a flat in the west end of the city. Anyone with any information on the boy’s whereabouts should contact the police immediately.

  Chrissy returned from the toilet and glanced up at the screen. ‘No sign of him?’

  Rhona shook her head. As long as they hadn’t discovered a body, they had to believe the child was alive. Tomorrow, she would study the attacker’s print against the one Chrissy found. If he was carrying the boy as he left, the difference in pressure should be detectable.

  Sam came back to check on Chrissy. She gave him the thumbs up and he deposited another pink bottle in front of her. His ebony skin and high cheekbones gave him the look of an African god. He had told Rhona his ancestors were Fulani, a wandering tribe who herded their cattle through Northern Nigeria and its neighbouring states. He’d been brought up in the northern city of Kano. As well as working behind the bar he played jazz piano a couple of evenings a week and his work in the club supported his medical course at Glasgow University.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Sam about the bones thing?’ Chrissy suggested.

  ‘The bones thing?’ Sam gave Chrissy a suggestive smile. ‘This isn’t another one of your anatomy tests?’

  Rhona didn’t like to imagine what the anatomy tests consisted of. She pulled a notepad from her bag, drew a representation of the crossed bones and pushed it across the counter.

  Sam had a look, his expression changing from humorous to serious. ‘Are they human?’

  ‘I think they are. A child or small adult.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘They were tied like this when you found them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It looks like a juju tsafi to me.’

  ‘Tsafi?’ Chrissy raised an eyebrow.

  ‘A fetish.’ He caught Chrissy’s eye. ‘We’re not necessarily talking sex here.’ Sam smiled. ‘Although they’re often for that.’

  ‘An object believed by primitive people to have some magical power?’ Rhona tried.

  ‘Not always primitive,’ Sam corrected her. ‘Lots of well-educated people in West Africa still believe in witch doctors. Let me show you something.’ He extracted a folded piece of paper from his wallet. ‘My mother sent me this in case I needed a bit of help from the old country.’

  He spread out the paper on the counter. There was a name and address at the top: Mallam Muhammed Tunni Sokoto, 21 Yoruba Road, Sabon Gari, Kano.

  Beneath was a long list comprising fifty-six ways your witch doctor could help improve your life.

  Chrissy ran an eye down the page. ‘Medicine for a commanding tongue?’ she read out.

  ‘Well, you don’t need that one,’ Rhona told her with conviction.

  ‘Mmmm. Now here’s one I like. Medicine for love.’

  ‘How did you think we two got together?’ Sam grinned.

  Chrissy read on. ‘Medicine for a tired penis?’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t need that.’

  Rhona joined in the laughter. ‘So the bones might be some sort of witch doctor medicine?’ she asked Sam.

  ‘Bones are important in juju.’

  ‘There were three deep scores on each bone.’

  He looked startled. ‘Where did you find them?’

  ‘Outside a house.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Beats me. But I don’t pay much attention to that sort of stuff. I could email my mother,’ he offered. ‘She would be the one to ask.’

  ‘What if I send you a digital photo of the bones?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He wrote his email address on the back of her drawing.

  A nasty thought struck Rhona. ‘How do the witch doctors get the human bones to make the fetish?’

  ‘Poor people die all the time in Nigeria. In the cities you find the bodies in the streets. In the UK?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘It would be more difficult.’

  ‘Not to say illegal,’ Chrissy said.

  ‘Would someone kill to get bones for juju?’ Rhona asked.

  Sam looked worried by that. ‘Human sacrifice is the darker side of juju. In black juju, the organs and bones of children are highly prized.’

  On her way to the underground station, Rhona found herself looking at children, reminding herself she had a child, although Liam was a young man now. Eighteen years of age, older than she was when he was born. When she left the hospital after the birth, her heart and her arms were empty. Edward, her lover at the time, had talked her into adoption. They were too young for a child, they had to finish their degrees before they married and had children. There was plenty of time. And she’d believed him.

  Edward did get married, but not to her. Fiona had given him two children. A son, Jonathan, and a daughter, Morag. Rhona, on the other hand, had stayed single and for the most part alone, until Sean Maguire had entered her life.

  She often asked herself what she would do if she got pregnant again. Every time the thought crossed her mind she determined that this time the decision would be hers and hers alone. No one would talk her in or out of anything that important again. Not Sean, not anyone.

  Moroseness settled on her like a thick dark cloud. Bill Wilson would be at home now, in the bosom of his family. Would he tell Margaret what he had witnessed today or would he do as she did? Place that knowledge inside a compartment of his brain and shut the door on it.

&nb
sp; She’d missed the commuter rush and the underground train was half empty. Two young teenage Goths sat opposite, noses, ears, eyebrows and tongues pierced. Satanic symbols hung on chains around their necks. They were laughing together, the sweet reek of cannabis clinging to their clothes.

  Beside them a young mother struggled with a toddler, a buggy, and a girl of about six. The woman had a frazzled air as though her edges were unravelling. They got off at the same stop and Rhona offered to help her up the stairs with the buggy. When the girl slipped her hand in Rhona’s, the trusting gesture unnerved her.

  She was surprised and disappointed when she reached home to find the flat in darkness. She checked her mobile. If Sean had called while she was in the club she might not have heard him, but there were no messages, voice or text.

  Rhona stood in the hall, wishing Chance, her cat, were still alive and running to greet her, his big black body trailing between her legs, tripping her up on her way to the kitchen.

  Sean had encouraged her to get another cat, as though she were replacing a pair of shoes. But Chance’s death was still too raw in her mind.

  The kitchen was as she’d left it that morning, with dishes in the sink and the rock-hard remains of some hastily buttered toast. Any hopes of meeting the scent of garlic and herbs, the open bottle of a carefully chosen red wine, were dashed.

  She tried to remember if Sean had mentioned something he had to do tonight. But nothing came to mind. They normally had an easy routine on his night off, eating a leisurely meal together, then making love. He would play her his favourite jazz tracks and she would dutifully listen, knowing his efforts would never turn her into a real jazz fan. Yet when he played the saxophone, it almost worked: she was seduced by the haunting sound and image, his closed eyes, fingers caressing the keys with the intensity of a lover.

  She admitted to herself that tonight she needed Sean to talk to. She wanted him to enter her troubled body and make her forget today.

  She rang out for a pizza, then poured herself a whisky and water and opened up her laptop. If she couldn’t dispel work from her mind, then she would have to engage with it.

  She went online and typed ‘female genital mutilation’ in the search engine.