Final Cut Read online

  A yellow fluorescent jacket emerged from the darkness. Claire gathered the last of her strength and stumbled like a drunk towards the man.

  ‘My little girl …’

  He caught her in his arms.

  ‘It’s OK. We’ll find her. You need to get out of the wind.’

  The officer put his arm about her shivering body and led her back the way she had come. An ambulance stood on the road behind a police van. The policeman helped her up the bank.

  ‘Leave it to us. We’ll find her.’

  Claire was too weak to argue.

  DS Michael McNab stared into the darkness. This was hopeless. They would find nothing until it was light, but for a missing child they had to try. In the open, exposed to this weather, the girl might not last the night. He had extracted a doll from her bereft mother before the ambulance had taken her away. The dogs had been excited by it, sniffing the ground round the car, taking off into the woods. These dogs were their only hope before dawn.

  McNab stood, rain streaming from his hood on to his face. He rubbed his bristled chin. His eyes felt as if they were full of broken glass. Three nights on the trot he’d been called out. He was beginning to forget what sleep was.

  The wind had dropped a little, but the upper branches still swayed with its strength. The woman had told him a story about a man appearing in her headlights. She’d swerved to avoid him and gone off the road. A bump on the head had left her confused, then she’d remembered her daughter was in the car. The driver of the van had found the car empty apart from the doll. McNab looked down at its dirty plastic face.

  A child was out there somewhere, frightened and alone in the woods. Maybe hurt. Maybe even concussed. McNab consoled himself with the thought that she couldn’t have gone far in the dark in this weather.

  His radio crackled into life.

  ‘We’ve found her.’

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘Alive. You’d better come.’

  As he approached the lights McNab heard a sound like a twanging wire. The closer he got to the torches the more insistent the sound became. The trees eventually parted to reveal a small clearing. The search party stood near a pile of trimmed branches. McNab heard the excited panting of the dogs and saw their breath condensing in the cold air.

  The handler pointed ahead to where a girl sat under a tall pine tree. Flakes of snow drifted down through its branches to settle on her hair. She was humming. McNab wondered whether that had been the noise he’d heard.

  ‘She’s scared. She didn’t want us to go near.’

  ‘Great.’ Children were not his speciality, but he would give it a try. McNab put on his best child-friendly voice. ‘Hi, Emma. My name’s Michael. Your mum sent me to find you.’

  The girl continued humming and didn’t look up. The sound was eerily penetrating. McNab fought a rising feeling of disquiet. What was he worrying about? The girl looked OK. She was just a bit spooked, that was all.

  ‘I brought your doll from the car.’

  After a moment the girl lifted her head and looked in his direction.

  ‘You’ve got Rosie?’

  ‘Would you like me to bring Rosie over?’

  McNab waited, judging when it would be OK to approach. He held the doll up to the light so that the girl could see it, then began to walk forward. That was when he noticed she was cradling something.

  ‘What have you got there, Emma?’

  McNab directed the torch on to the girl’s hands.

  The strong beam picked out a pair of hollow eyes, the curve of a cheekbone. Now McNab was spooked. Where the hell had the kid found a human skull? McNab heard the intake of breath behind him as someone else made out the shape in the torchlight. A metre away now, McNab crouched on a level with the child.

  ‘Where did you find that, Emma?’ he said softly.

  She stared at him. ‘I was lost. I heard them calling me.’

  Something cold and claw-like gripped McNab’s spine. Whatever was happening here, he didn’t like it.

  ‘Did you find it under this tree?’ His eyes roamed the ground round the girl.

  She pointed at the pile of brushwood. ‘In there.’

  ‘What if we exchange Rosie for … that?’ McNab couldn’t bring himself to say ‘skull’.

  Emma thought about it.

  ‘Your mum’s waiting at the hospital for you,’ he tried.

  ‘He killed them. They were small like me.’ Her eyes filled with tears.

  His apprehension was growing by the second. ‘What do you mean, them, Emma?’

  The girl stood up and handed him the skull. Having rid herself of it, she seemed to crumple. ‘I want my mummy.’

  McNab put one arm around her trembling body.

  ‘It’s going to be OK. You’ve been a very brave girl.’

  He waited until the small figure retreated hand in hand with a female officer before he took a proper look. He was no anthropologist but he could tell the skull was human, probably that of a child.

  McNab approached the pile of brushwood. It stood three feet high and double that in width. He’d passed numerous similar mounds in his trudge through the woods looking for Emma. He ran his beam over the heap. It looked undisturbed apart from an opening in the right-hand side.

  McNab was conscious again of the strange humming sound he’d heard as he’d approached the clearing. So it hadn’t been the girl making that noise. He tried to pinpoint where it was coming from but couldn’t.

  He took a GPS reading of the site, then called the station to report the recovery of the missing girl and the subsequent discovery of human remains.

  5

  Despite the mask, the sickly-sweet smell of roasted flesh invaded Rhona’s nose and mouth. Of all the scents of death, this was the one she found most difficult. She kept her breathing shallow and picked her way through the debris until she reached the back wall.

  ‘A member of the public reported seeing flames at nine o’clock,’ Bill said from the open end of the skip. ‘When the engine got here ten minutes later, it was pretty well over.’

  ‘When did they spot there was someone inside?’

  ‘When they turned off the hoses.’

  Once ignited, the fire had had the benefit of a confined space and a strong updraught. The result was both bizarre and horrific. The lower part of the victim was virtually unmarked, yet the head had apparently exploded, coating the nearby walls with fragments of bone and brain.

  Rhona crouched next to the body and began to check for anything that might help with identification. Her thorough search produced an undamaged pack of playing cards from a back trouser pocket, obviously shielded from the blaze by the bulk of the body, and a dog tag round the remains of the neck. Rhona lifted it free and took a closer look. The flat metal disc was blackened with soot but she could decipher enough of the inscription to believe it might be genuine.

  Rhona bagged both items and passed them to Bill. ‘If it is a soldier, the tag will provide us with his identity.’

  ‘OK, where’s the fire?’

  Rhona recognised the voice of Chrissy McInsh, her forensic assistant.

  Chrissy stuck her head round the detective inspector’s taller figure. She was already kitted up, only her face visible, her eight-month pregnancy hardly noticeable in the shapeless white suit. She took one look in the skip then swiftly raised her mask. Even for someone with her experience it wasn’t an easy sight or smell.

  ‘Jesus, how did that happen?’

  ‘You tell me,’ said Bill.

  He gave Chrissy a leg-up. As she landed, flakes of drier ash rose to float around them like black snow.

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘A fireman spotted something when he finished hosing. The guy who mans the site, Steve Fallon, took a closer look,’ Bill said.

  ‘Bet this caused a bit of a shock?’

  ‘Fallon says he’s found everything in these skips, including a newborn baby, but nothing as bad as this.’

  ‘He should try d
oing our job,’ Chrissy said grimly. ‘Do we know who he is?’

  ‘Possibly a soldier.’

  ‘Gone AWOL?’

  He wouldn’t be the first to decide going on the run was better than going back to Iraq or Afghanistan.

  Chrissy regarded the headless corpse with sympathy. ‘So the poor bastard fried here instead of in a tank. Who’s scene of crime officer – McNab?’ Chrissy’s tone softened. DS Michael McNab, once her sworn enemy, had recently been partially forgiven.

  ‘A kid went missing from a road accident. McNab’s at the scene,’ said Bill.

  ‘Please God, no missing kids. Not in the run-up to Christmas,’ Chrissy echoed Rhona’s thoughts.

  Three hours later they were still ensconced in their well-lit skip. Chrissy had the worst job. Scraping the remains of someone’s skull and brains from the inside walls was not for the faint hearted. Rhona concentrated on what was left of the body and its immediate surroundings. The smell of burnt flesh hadn’t lessened although she had succeeded in temporarily blotting it out. That didn’t mean the memory wouldn’t come surging back when she least expected it. Rhona wondered whether that had been the trouble with the dead soldier. Too many memories, too awful to handle.

  The wind was dying down, but the sleet had become heavy rain that beat on the metal roof and turned the skip into an echo chamber. The normal routine was to methodically grid the site then transfer everything to the lab section by section. It was laborious, painstaking work. Two SOCOs were already lifting the material near the open end while Rhona and Chrissy worked close to the body. The biggest headache for forensics was being pressured to allow the removal of the body too quickly. The ideal of twenty-four hours in situ was rarely achievable. The other headaches were where to find a toilet and how to get something to eat. For Chrissy in her present state, both were frequent necessities. It didn’t take long for one of them to manifest itself.

  ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘How can you think of food in here?’

  ‘I’m eating for two, remember?’

  Chrissy stuck her head outside and shouted for the nearest yellow jacket. A policeman approached. The closer he got to the smell, the paler he became.

  ‘Any chance of a chippie? We’ve been in here for hours.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘I never joke about food,’ Chrissy said firmly. ‘I’ll have a double smoked sausage supper. What about you?’ she asked Rhona.

  ‘I’ll wait until I get home.’

  ‘We definitely can’t wait that long.’

  Chrissy sent him on his way with a tenner fished from below her forensic suit.

  ‘OK, now I need the loo.’ She set off towards the Portakabin.

  Twenty minutes later the smoked sausage arrived. The strong smell of vinegar reminded Rhona just how hungry she was.

  ‘Come on, take a break,’ Chrissy suggested. ‘Steve says he’ll brew us some tea.’

  ‘Steve?’

  ‘My pal in the Portakabin.’

  Rhona headed for the toilet first, glad to take off her mask and gloves and wash her hands and face. When she entered the cabin, Chrissy was already transferring a portion of her supper on to a plate.

  ‘I knew you would want some once you smelled it.’

  Rhona took a bite of the smoked sausage. It tasted delicious.

  ‘We’ll have to let them remove the body soon,’ she said.

  Chrissy took a slurp of tea and grimaced. She helped herself to two sugars from an open bag on the table and gave the mug a quick stir.

  ‘So, what do you think? Suicide, murder or plain unlucky?’

  Rhona had been asking herself the same question. She’d found nothing so far to suggest foul play, but lab tests on the debris would confirm whether any accelerant had been used. The presence of an accelerant wouldn’t necessarily mean murder, however. If the guy was troubled he could have set fire to the skip himself.

  ‘Let’s wait and see,’ was all she would say.

  ‘Spoken like a true scientist.’

  Steve was proving to be a perfect host. He produced Jaffa cakes for pudding.

  ‘I took a look at the surveillance tape while I was waiting for you lot to arrive. I spotted the young guy come in. There was also a car parked near the entrance for a while. I gave the tape to your boss.’

  ‘Is there a recording of the fire?’ asked Rhona.

  Steve shook his head. ‘The one camera’s directed on the entrance gates.’

  They reluctantly left the warmth of the Portakabin and went back to the skip. Half the debris had been cleared, leaving a free passage to the body. The duty pathologist had arrived. His job was to establish that a death had occurred, not difficult under the circumstances.

  ‘Is he dead?’ asked Chrissy with a straight face.

  Dr Sissons’ ability to deal with violent death in all its particular Glasgow forms would never be in dispute. How he managed to do that particular job without a sense of humour, black or otherwise, baffled everyone he met, including Rhona.

  Sissons pointedly ignored Chrissy’s joking enquiry – cheeky young women didn’t figure on his radar at all – and continued to study the wall behind the corpse.

  Chrissy threw Rhona a look.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ he finally ventured.

  ‘Me neither,’ Rhona agreed.

  Sissons was an experienced pathologist who’d studied more dead bodies than Chrissy had eaten sausage suppers. If he hadn’t encountered this phenomenon before, few had.

  ‘I’ll deliver his brains later,’ Chrissy promised as Sissons departed.

  Rhona’s assistant invariably had the last word.

  When she and Chrissy eventually vacated the skip, Rhona went in search of Bill. He was standing near the entrance with a figure she recognised immediately. McNab’s expression caused her heart to sink.

  ‘No luck?’

  ‘We found her. She’s fine.’

  ‘So what’s wrong?’

  ‘That’s not all we found.’

  The rain had lessened to a freezing drizzle. Despite the layers of clothing under her forensic suit, the cold was seeping into Rhona’s bones. Her teeth chattered as she waited for him to explain.

  ‘She was about half a mile from the car, sitting under a tree … holding a human skull.’

  ‘What?’

  McNab nodded. ‘You heard right, a skull. Small. Looks like it’s been there for a while.’

  ‘A newborn?’

  The discovery of baby remains was not uncommon. The public would be amazed to know just how regularly tiny skeletons were uncovered, hidden under floorboards, buried in gardens or abandoned in the open. Even nowadays, women still gave birth to babies they or their partners didn’t want.

  McNab indicated a measurement with his hands. ‘About this wide.’

  ‘A child or small adult,’ agreed Rhona.

  ‘The site’s secured. You can take a look tomorrow,’ Bill said.

  They retreated to the Portakabin. Steve had left it open for them, urging them to make tea whenever they wanted. Chrissy had left with the other SOCOs, so it was just the three of them.

  Bill slipped the tape in the recorder. The CCTV footage was grainy and grey but Rhona could make out the gates and the barrier. She saw a figure, blurred by snow, climb the wire.

  ‘Note the time. Nine forty p.m.’ Bill ran it on. ‘Half an hour later the car arrives.’

  The vehicle parked side-on, opposite the gate. In the subsequent few minutes the snow came on in earnest, whipping this way and that in a strong wind.

  Rhona peered at the screen. ‘Is the car still there?’

  Bill paused the tape. ‘Impossible to tell. We’ll see what the Tech Department make of it.’

  ‘You think the car might have had something to do with the fire?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d like to know why it was outside a civic amenity site at that time of night.’

  ‘Illegal dumping?’ sugg
ested McNab.

  ‘Nothing was dumped.’

  ‘It’s a secluded spot. They could have been here for other reasons? Sex, drug dealing. We’re right on the line between Govanhill and Toryglen.’ McNab attempted to smother a huge yawn.

  ‘Let’s call it a day before DS McNab swallows us whole,’ Bill said.

  When they emerged from the Portakabin McNab asked how Rhona was getting home.

  ‘I’ll cadge a lift from someone.’

  ‘I could drop you?’

  ‘OK, but straight home. I need a shower.’

  The wind was dropping, but evidence of its strength was visible in the overturned bins and scattered rubbish. Now and again a sudden dying gust would catch the car, jolting it sideways. McNab said nothing on the way, waiting until they drew up outside Rhona’s building.

  ‘The boss is in trouble.’

  ‘The Gravedigger case?’

  McNab nodded. ‘I thought I’d have been rapped over the knuckles by now. Maybe lost my stripes.’ He smiled cynically. ‘It would have been worth it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I told them the truth, that I assaulted the suspect during the interview. The boss, I believe, is telling them another story.’

  ‘You want me to ask Bill?’

  ‘He might tell you.’

  Rhona wasn’t so sure. She and Bill went back a long way. He was her mentor and her friend. If she had been in trouble, he would be the first to know. But the Gravedigger case was different. The killer had made it personal, threatening those Bill loved.

  ‘What if they take the boss to court?’ said McNab.

  Prisoners brought accusations of assault on officers all the time. It was a hazard of the job. A conviction for assault, if proven, could end a career. Rhona didn’t want to think of that as a possibility.

  ‘I’ll have a word with him.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  McNab looked disappointed as she opened the car door and said goodnight. Rhona understood what he was feeling. At times like this it was difficult to let go. Only those who did what you did understood what you were feeling or thinking. Most nights after work, she and Chrissy would have a drink together, come down from the high their work required.

  ‘Go home. Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.’