The Book of Souls (Inspector McLean #2)(10)

‘Dunno about that, sir. I’ve been here over two hours already. Call came in about four o’clock.’

Long before Dagwood had set out for his masonic knees-up. Bloody marvellous.

Knee-high grass and gorse bushes soaked his trousers and shoes long before he made it to the edge of the culvert. A group of people clustered around an improbable Heath-Robinson arrangement of scaffolding poles, light stands and other paraphernalia. Steam rose off the hot lights, adding to the already surreal, hellish feel of the place.

‘Sergeant Price?’ McLean waited while a large, white-haired, uniformed officer turned slowly around, trying not to slip on the wet concrete edge of the culvert. The drop was about ten feet, spate-swelled waters running noisily below, so McLean couldn’t really blame him.

‘About bloody time someone senior showed up,’ was all the greeting the old sergeant gave. That and a cursory nod. McLean tried not to rise to the bait.

‘It’s my day off, OK? I spent the morning in Aberdeen burying Donald f*cking Anderson. So cut the small talk and tell me the story.’

If Sergeant Price was impressed by McLean’s sacrifice, he didn’t show it.

‘Couple of lads out on their mountain bikes saw her first,’ he said. ‘What they were doing down here is anyone’s guess.’

‘They still about?’

‘No. They called in from Temple. You can’t get a mobile signal here. I’ve got names and addresses.’

‘OK. What about the body?’

Price shrugged. ‘See for yersel’. Crime scene’s a’ yours.’

McLean inched slowly to the edge, giving the two SOCOs holding the arc lamps time to shuffle aside. A ladder dropped down to a makeshift platform rigged up over the flowing water, two people kneeling together like penitent sinners, praying before a third. He recognised the balding pate of Angus Cadwallader, city pathologist, and the shiny black bob of his assistant Tracy, but the other person in the threesome was a stranger to him.

It looked like the water had carried her downstream until she had been pinned against a rusty iron grating. Her arms were splayed wide, her legs twisted back underneath her body as if she were posing for some arty erotic photograph. Wisps of green-black pondweed trailed across skin so white it could have been porcelain, and only the ugly dark welt across her neck stopped him from thinking she was merely sleeping.

‘Tony. Good God, could they not have given this to someone else?’ Angus Cadwallader looked up, shuffling carefully off his knees and upright before helping his assistant do the same. Only when he was safely out of the culvert did he finally give McLean a quizzical raise of the eyebrow and add: ‘I thought you were in Aberdeen today. Christ, talk about timing.’

‘I was,’ McLean said, remembering the windswept cemetery as if it had been a lifetime ago. ‘So, what’s the score here?’

Cadwallader pulled off his latex gloves and ran a hand over his wet hair. ‘It’s difficult to say much from where she is. Rain’s washed her down from somewhere upstream, I’m fairly sure. She’s also very clean. Not been in the water too long, though.’

‘Cause of death? Time of death?’

‘Ah, Tony. You always ask, and I always tell you I can’t say. Not now. It looks like she’s had her throat cut, but that might have been post-mortem. As to time, well, it’s cold here, and she’s been in the water. But unless she was kept on ice, I’d say somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours. Thirty-six tops.’

‘What about bruising? Any ligature marks?’

‘She’s ten feet down in a concrete culvert that’s barely wide enough for the two of us, Tony. Let me get her back to the mortuary, then I’ll tell you what happened to the poor wee lass.’ Cadwallader put a damp hand on McLean’s shoulder. ‘We’re not going to find anything here.’

‘You’re right, Angus. I just. Well ...’ McLean tailed off, unsure what he wanted to say. He needed answers, but even he could tell he wasn’t going to get any here. ‘I guess you’d better get her out of there then.’

Cadwallader nodded to one of the SOC officers, who scurried off to get help. They followed him back up through the gorse to the roadside, just in time for another squall of rain. The pathologist hurried to his car, Tracy leaping into the passenger seat without even bothering to remove her white overalls. McLean quickly got into the back seat.

‘It’s not the same, Tony,’ Cadwallader said. ‘This isn’t another Christmas Killer victim.’

‘You sure of that, Angus? It looks pretty close to me.’

‘I’ll get the PM scheduled as soon as possible, but you know what I mean. He’s been locked up since the start of the millennium. And now he’s dead. This is something else. Someone else.’

McLean shivered, though whether it was the cold he couldn’t be certain. ‘I hope you’re right, Angus.’

The lumpy beat of an engine at tick-over and a spiral of steam in the damp darkness gave away Sergeant Price’s position, sitting in the warmth of one of the squad cars. When McLean tapped on the misted-up windscreen, he wound it down with obvious reluctance.

‘It’s your lucky night,’ McLean said.

‘Aye?’

‘I want this road closed for a quarter mile either side of the crime scene. First light, a search team’s going to be back to go over the whole area, and I don’t want anyone to have disturbed it in my absence. OK?’