Paths of the Dead Read online

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Jolene sounded shocked.

  Amy had reached the park entrance. The summer evening had brought local residents out to enjoy the late sunshine. The scene looked so normal. If anything had happened to Alan in the park, surely someone would have helped him? A collie was running and fetching a ball. Just as Barney would have done. Amy felt a catch in her throat. ‘I’m going home to wait for him,’ she said and rang off.

  When she got back, the house was in darkness. Once inside, she picked up the house phone and began by calling all the hospitals with Accident and Emergency departments. When she had no luck there, she called the police.

  3

  According to the GPS reading, the geocache was definitely somewhere near this tree. Steve checked the massive trunk, running his hands over its surface, looking for a crack or fissure he might have missed.

  Then a thought struck him. What if the cache was buried? He hadn’t noticed any disturbed earth, but maybe someone had hidden it by covering it with leaves?

  He set about clearing the ground in a two-foot circle round the trunk. On the opposite side from where he’d been sitting, the soil was disturbed. Excited now, Steve took his trowel from the backpack and began digging.

  By the time the trowel had revealed the presence of something long and canvas-like, he was already unsure. Most caches were reasonably easy to find once you reached the GPS reading. It only needed enough space for an interesting object and a logbook for you to sign. It looked as though he was unearthing a holdall.

  Slightly worried, Steve stopped to glance about him. The wood was deserted. Few people came this high, preferring to stick to the lower woodland paths and open spaces. He hadn’t seen anyone from the moment he started his climb.

  The holdall was clear of soil now. It looked too big for a geocache, but then again, he’d found one buried in a small suitcase before. He located the zip and cautiously pulled it open.

  Inside were clear plastic bundles, bound up with rubber bands.

  Steve immediately shut the zip and began throwing earth back over it. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. What a fucking fool! He should have realized as soon as he saw it that it was a holdall. Jesus, they would have scouts out checking on it. They might even have someone coming to pick it up at this very moment.

  When he’d scrabbled enough soil back in, he covered it with a thick layer of leaves, shoved the trowel in the backpack and stood like a rabbit caught in headlights, his heart crashing in his chest.

  What the hell should he do now? Forget it ever happened? Or call the police and tell them what he’d found? For fuck’s sake, there must have been twenty packets in there. How much was it worth? He buried that idea as quickly as it came to mind. You didn’t steal from drug dealers, not if you wanted to stay alive.

  He took another look about. He could make out a few strollers below, some with dogs, but up here among the trees there was no one but himself. He checked his GPS, registering where he had found the cache.

  He would have to call the police. Tell them about the drugs. But he didn’t fancy using his mobile. And he didn’t fancy doing it from here. He should find a payphone and call them anonymously. Where the hell would he find a payphone? They didn’t even have them in the pubs now. Everybody had a mobile.

  He could go to a police station and report it. He contemplated that for a moment. Then again, if it went to court, he might have to appear as a witness. Not a happy thought. And he knew what happened to folk who grassed up drug gangs. Somebody would find him out. Then he’d pay.

  Steve moved away from the cache, his heart still racing, his mouth dry. He wanted to tell the police about his find, but he was sufficiently scared of the consequences to be unsure. What if they thought he had something to do with the drugs, or had seen someone plant them there? It would be easier to just walk away and forget it. He wasn’t responsible for doing the police’s job for them. Then another and more horrific idea struck him. What if the police were watching the stash and had seen him dig it up? Maybe even caught him on camera? They would think he was the guilty one.

  He had to get the hell away from there. And fast. Steve took off, heading directly downhill. That’s when he found the dog, or more correctly, tripped over its body in the long grass. It was a black cross-breed and it was dead, blood staining the ground around its opened neck.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d seen a dead animal on the hill, although they tended to be cats, often stoned to death. The creeps that came up here to drink and get high thought killing a cat was fun. Creeps like the ones who’d buried the drugs.

  All the more reason to get out of there. The path he was following split, one side heading towards a small hill surrounded by a ditch. He’d been here before in his rambles. It was a popular spot to use for a geocache. There were five upright stones on the hill’s summit, all around waist height, like a miniature stone circle. He skirted the hill. Normally he would go to the top for a last view before leaving the park, but he had no wish to do that today.

  That’s when he saw a hand on top of one of the stones. At first he did not – dared not – register the fact that it was not connected to an arm. His immediate thought was that it couldn’t be real. But why would a fake hand be sitting on top of one of the standing stones?

  Rather than climb the hill to check, he moved up the outer bank for a better look. From here the second hand was visible on the opposite stone. Between, lay a male figure, face down. Steve immediately linked this image to what he had discovered under the tree and had two thoughts. Maybe the man had interfered with the drugs stash and this was his punishment. And what if whoever did that was still here and watching him?

  He took off then, fear and adrenaline coursing through his veins, galloping down the hill, dodging the trees and springing like a frightened deer, as though death bit at his heels.

  4

  Rhona stopped in her uphill climb and turned to look back. At 600 feet above sea level, Cathkin Braes Park was renowned for its panoramic views over the city of Glasgow, even as far as the craggy summit of Ben Lomond, clearly visible today under an azure sky.

  She took a deep breath of fresh upland air, rich with the scent of the ancient woodland she had climbed through. A good day to be up on the Braes, even if the reason for being here was much darker.

  She had been having a late Sunday lunch at Brel in Ashton Lane when the call came through. McNab had sounded bad-tempered. Not unusual for him, but Rhona guessed a weekend hangover was as much to blame as a call-out. Saturday night they had been celebrating his promotion to detective inspector, something McNab and many others had never thought possible. He’d confided to her in a drunken moment that, having reached this rank, he didn’t really want it.

  ‘You deserve it,’ she’d countered. ‘You’re one of the best cops they have. Awkward, opinionated, self-centred, rude … but good.’

  He’d tried to process the mixed message in his drink-fuddled brain, his face eventually brightening to a winning grin as he decided she had given him a compliment. Rhona remembered thinking she had missed out arrogant and over-confident from the list.

  She looked up, catching the drone of a police helicopter, hovering like a monstrous bluebottle above a corpse. The crime-scene manager had already raised a tent on the summit and a cordon had been erected on the outer side of the surrounding ditch. Chrissy, her forensic assistant, had opted to arrive by helicopter rather than walk from the lower car park. Rhona watched as the helicopter touched down and Chrissy jumped out, ducked the blades and gave the pilot the thumbs-up, before making her way towards the cordon.

  McNab disengaged himself from a huddle of boiler-suits near the incident tent on Rhona’s approach and came striding towards her. Despite last night’s celebrations, he looked his usual self, with his distinctive dark auburn hair and stubbled chin, although at closer quarters the vivid blue eyes were shadowed from lack of sleep.

  ‘Dr MacLeod. Glad you could drag yourself away from your lunch.’
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br />   ‘At least I wasn’t still in bed.’

  He gave her a sympathetic look. ‘I take it you didn’t pull then?’

  ‘Unlike you, you mean?’

  McNab couldn’t resist a self-satisfied smile. ‘Making DI has its compensations.’

  She’d seen the young woman watching McNab in the pub. It was shortly after Rhona had rejected McNab’s romantic overtures. Unabashed, he’d made directly for his more ardent fan. Rhona had watched as the young woman gazed up at that distinctively roguish face, a fact not missed by the object of her admiration.

  McNab caught her thoughtful look and added accusingly, ‘You turned me down, remember?’

  She hadn’t always turned McNab down. At his best, the former DS was a very pleasant way to spend an evening. Although anything more permanent was definitely out of the question. She was spared thinking of a suitable retort to express this sentiment by Chrissy’s arrival. Her forensic assistant, already suitably kitted up, looked from Rhona to McNab and back, instantly assessing the situation.

  ‘You two on speaking terms?’

  ‘As always,’ McNab assured her with his signature grin.

  By her expression, Chrissy didn’t buy that, but decided not to pursue the matter any further, which was unusual for her. Instead she turned her attention to Rhona.

  ‘Okay, boss, wait till you see what’s in that tent,’ she said excitedly.

  Dressed now in the regulation boiler suit, Rhona pulled back the flap and stepped inside. The scent of death was immediately familiar, the death scene not so common, for the tent enclosed what resembled a miniature stone circle, consisting of five upright stones, half human height. Rhona stood for a moment absorbing the scene and registering its smells. She’d asked Chrissy to wait outside, much to her assistant’s chagrin. She wanted to form her own impressions, register her own questions about what had happened here, without Chrissy’s excited commentary.

  The victim was male. He lay on his front, his arms outstretched in what seemed to Rhona an unnatural manner. His face was turned to the right, his eyes closed. He looked to be in his late teens or early twenties. There were no obvious wounds on the body apart from the wrists, from which the hands had been severed.

  The right hand lay atop the eastern stone, the left hand on the western one. Rhona circled the stones, using the metal treads laid down on the grass, observing the body from all directions, before stopping to look more closely at the hands. Just as the arms had appeared to be placed in position, the hands too had been ‘shaped’. The index finger on each was extended, the other digits curled into the palm. The index finger on the right hand was pointing, she estimated, southeast, the left north-west, but they would know better once R2S, the Return to Scene specialists, had captured everything on video and stills and entered it in the crime-scene software.

  She approached the right hand for a closer look.

  The weapon of choice among Glasgow gangs was a blade, which could range in size from a flick knife, via a machete, to a samurai sword. The one thing they all had in common was how sharp they were. The hand had been severed cleanly and, judging by the wound and blood loss, it had been removed postmortem. She checked the left hand and found the same, suggesting both hands had been amputated after death, when the heart had stopped pumping.

  Rhona stepped inside the stone circle and got down on her haunches next to the body. At close quarters, she could see no obvious signs of struggle, nor the means by which he had died, although the natural process of decomposition had already begun. The arms, exposed below the T-shirt, and the legs below the shorts, showed signs of lividity as gravity pulled the blood downwards, producing a dark pink discoloration, similar in appearance to bruising. The areas under pressure, including that part of the face pressing on the ground, were free of hypostasis, suggesting the body had lain here since death occurred. The eyelids were also free of petechiae, tiny haemorrhages under the surface of the skin, characteristic of strangulation or crushing which sometimes gave the appearance of hypostasis.

  Rhona took a series of photographs for her own use. The official stills together with a 360-degree video would be made available on the crime-scene software, but she liked to study her own shots at leisure. Concentrating on the face, she registered that the mouth, partially open, had something wedged inside. Investigating further, she extracted a small flat stone, on one side of which was scratched what looked like the number five.

  Chrissy had decided she’d waited long enough.

  ‘Can I come in now?’

  Rhona nodded at the eager face in the doorway and Chrissy was in like a shot.

  ‘What have you got there?’

  Rhona handed her the pebble. ‘It was in his mouth.’

  Chrissy examined the stone closely. ‘That looks like a five.’ She glanced about her. ‘And there are five stones in this circle.’

  Rhona gave her a warning look, designed to suggest she should refrain from jumping to conclusions.

  ‘I know it’s unscientific,’ Chrissy said, registering the look, ‘but you have to admit it’s weird.’

  Rhona, not to be drawn, reclaimed the stone and put it in an evidence bag while Chrissy examined the nearest hand, which happened to be the right one. ‘You don’t suppose there’s anything in the hands too?’

  It was a possibility that had already occurred to Rhona. And it might explain why the hands had been made into a fist. Extracting the stone from the mouth had been relatively easy despite the onset of rigor mortis. Forcing open the hands was a different matter and best left until the postmortem. Rhona said as much.

  Chrissy looked disappointed, her mind already set on further ‘weird’ discoveries. ‘So, what do you want me to do?’

  Rhona set Chrissy to work on the immediate surroundings, while she began the detailed process of taking samples from the body. McNab had indicated that the duty pathologist had already visited by helicopter and established a suspicious death. It was her role now to collect as much evidence surrounding the death as she could, before the body was removed to the mortuary.

  At such a remote location it would be easy to keep the public and media at bay, but its remoteness generated other problems associated with the length of time necessary to process the scene of crime – such as eating, and going to the toilet. She could only hope the crime-scene officer was on the ball on that score.

  Dead bodies, in whatever state of decay, had little effect on Chrissy’s appetite. In fact, the ‘weirder’ the circumstances, the hungrier she became. In a previous case, where a murder victim’s head had exploded inside a metal skip as the result of a fire, it had been Chrissy who had scraped the residue from the walls. Despite this, she had sent a nauseated constable for a double smoked sausage supper halfway through the proceedings. Chrissy had her weaknesses, but a queasy stomach wasn’t one of them.

  Two hours later, it was McNab’s face at the opening. Rhona gestured that she would join him outside. It was warm in the tent, the run of June sunshine continuing unabated, which was both good and bad. In this temperature the body would decompose more rapidly. But from the point of view of crime-scene personnel, it was easier to be up here on the Braes in midsummer, rather than midwinter in a freezing gale.

  Rhona stepped outside, pulled down her mask and took a lungful of fresh air.

  ‘What?’ she said in answer to McNab’s look.

  ‘Come see what we’ve found.’ He gestured her to follow him across the ditch onto the hillside, where a couple of SOCOs were standing.

  ‘Looks like we have more than one victim.’

  The dog’s body was hidden by the long grass, coated by flies that rose in a buzzing frenzy at their approach. The throat had been cleanly severed, the earth sticky beneath. It was a cross-breed, well cared for, black with a Labrador-type face. Around the neck was a red collar without a name tag.

  ‘Whoever killed our victim got rid of his dog too?’ McNab tried.

  The state of the dog’s body suggested a similar time fra
me. Rhona said as much.

  ‘Have we any idea who the victim is?’ she asked. There had been nothing in the pockets to identify him, mobile or wallet.

  McNab said no.

  ‘How was he found?’

  ‘A guy called the station today, early afternoon. Sounded drunk or terrified or both. Said he saw what looked like a human hand on a standing stone on top of Cathkin Braes. The duty sergeant thought it was a hoax, but sent someone up to check anyway.’

  ‘Did you trace the call?’

  ‘It came from a public phone box south of the park.’ McNab turned his gaze directly on her. ‘Want to know what I think?’

  He wasn’t really asking, so Rhona didn’t bother with a response.

  ‘I think the victim pissed off some Castlemilk drug baron and had his hands chopped off to teach him a lesson.’

  It was a good enough theory. Except for the fact that she believed his hands had been chopped off after death. Rhona told McNab so.

  That surprised him. ‘So how did he die?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, but he wasn’t stabbed.’ The usual method of dispatch in gangland.

  McNab read her puzzlement. ‘What is it?’

  ‘There was a stone in his mouth with the number five scratched on it. And I think the body was placed in a particular position after death. The hands too.’

  McNab thought for a minute. ‘Gangs have signature patterns and habits.’

  ‘I haven’t seen this one before,’ Rhona said.

  Neither had McNab by his expression, then he rallied. ‘High on drugs, they’re capable of anything.’

  That was true too. Rhona changed the subject. ‘Chrissy’s going to moan about eating soon.’

  ‘There’s a food van down in the car park. When can we remove the body?’ McNab tried his luck.

  ‘When I’ve finished with it,’ Rhona told him firmly.

  Rhona sat on a camp stool next to the body and wrote up her notes by the added light of an arc lamp. Alone, Chrissy having departed for home, Rhona relished the quiet she shared with the dead. It was her habit always to write her notes this way. For practical reasons as much as anything. No one wanted to be in here, making it the quietest part of any crime scene. And communing with the dead brought a measure of peace, if not for them, then for her. Her purpose as a forensic expert was to ask questions and to collect evidence, to remain detached and analytical, but it was also in her remit to show respect for the victim, regardless of the circumstances of their death. These quiet moments allowed her to do that.