A Deviant Breed (34 page)

‘Isn’t that Pop’s watch?’

He turned his wrist so she could see it better. ‘Yeah, he wanted me to have it.’

‘Why?’

‘He was worried he’d stick it on a Yankie, or piss it up the wall if I didn’t take it.’

Her eyes welled up. ‘You don’t think he’ll –’  She could not bring herself to say it, and he didn’t want to hear it.  He shook his head but couldn’t be sure.  Surely after Maggie, his dad would not put them both through that again.

‘I wish –’

‘Me too, Zoe – me too.’ 

They finished their meal in silence.

21

He had just joined the A92 heading east for Arbroath when the call came that saw him clamp his magnetic light on the roof, throw a U-turn and head south again.  Whatever Mr and Mrs Vasquez may or may not have told him would have to wait.

The TF officer who had been trailing Vasquez on the bike had been knocked off it and badly injured by a tourist in a hire car who had become confused by a set of temporary traffic lights at a contraflow system.  Posh Spice was first on the scene. She had screeched ‘officer down’, rather melodramatically into her covert mike, as if he had been dropped by a villain’s bullet, rather than a bewildered Canadian septuagenarian in an unfamiliar compact-car with a ‘stick-shift’ and its steering wheel on the right.  Fresh from her first-aid course, Posh Spice diagnosed concussion, but had quietly feared it may be something more serious.  She had been unable to rouse the officer, and he was bleeding from his left ear.

As a consequence of the accident occurring on one of the city’s main arterial routes and in the middle of road-works, it caused gridlock.  Almost immediately, traffic paralysis spread to the adjoining streets and everything ground to a horn-blaring standstill.  Falk was completely hemmed in, and the ensuing chaos had a knock-on effect.  Within seconds DC Donald found himself ensnared as well.  Vasquez’s distinctive cycling helmet disappeared beyond a bus as he weaved unhindered through the chorus of car horns and curses.

Duck, as DC Donald was more familiarly known, pulled over and mounted the pavement.  Ignoring the protests of pedestrians and a car-hating environmentalist in particular, he lumbered off through the crowds to try and salvage the situation. 

Despite his best efforts, the other probationary constable Falk had tagged ‘One Direction’ could not keep pace on foot with Vasquez’s bike.  As per Falk’s game plan, the third car being driven by the second TF officer, covering the opposite side of the campus, proved hopelessly out of position and unable to take up the pursuit, and by the time he had navigated his way around the traffic-jam to Vasquez’s address, there was no sign of him; just One Direction, hands on his knees and head down, sucking in air.  Whether Vasquez knew it or not, he had given them the slip, and appeared to have taken off in a hurry.  His bike had been abandoned on the footpath and his car was nowhere to be seen.

A sweating and breathless One Direction pushed his mike to his mouth and radioed in.  ‘Sorry but we’ve lost him, sarge – we’ve lost him.’

‘
Fuck him!
  How’s Jimmy?’ his TF partner snarled over the airwaves.

***

‘Find him!’ Dunbar yelled as he sped down the M90 at twice the legal speed limit. ‘Oh and, Falk – keep me posted on PC Hewer’s condition.’  That had been an afterthought.  He should have asked before discussing anything else, really.  Some considered him detached; he called it immersed – a singular train of thought; they were probably right though.  But that quality was why he was good at what he did, and after all, he
was
hunting a serial killer.  It was not as if the job was without risk; a TF officer like PC Hewer knew that, he consoled himself silently, if only to ease his sense of guilt. 

As the constable’s plight briefly intruded into his thoughts, Dunbar eyed his phone with a faint smile. He might be a single-minded bastard, but at least he knew the officer by name.  Lower ranks appreciated that.  They might wear numbers on their uniforms but nobody likes being thought of as one. DI Tyler was showing signs of becoming a very effective 2i/c; she had thoughtfully sent him the officer’s name by text.

***

As frustrating as Vasquez giving them the slip was, it was not the reason Dunbar had turned his car around just north of Dundee and raced south again.  Dr Thomas R. Ferguson had failed to return home from a meeting at New College the previous night.  It was very much out of character according to his distraught wife.  The emergency call operator had not made the connection between Mrs Ferguson’s missing person report and the ongoing murder enquiry.  Why would she?  In fact, in accordance with the operator’s manual, she had politely but firmly instructed the missing man’s wife to call back on a non-emergency number.  An adult male, who had failed to return home after a night out, did not, without evidence of foul-play, warrant tying up the 999 line.  Fortunately Neil Conroy had spotted the missing person report on a trawl through the past twenty-four hours incident logs.  It went some way to making amends for his previous, but now possibly fatal oversight. 

‘Find out who else was at that meeting, and who was the last person to see him,’ Dunbar ordered, as he joined the creeping swarm that was commuter hell on the A720 Ring Road.  Even the pulse of his magnetic blue strobe was having little impact.  It was that time of day.  Everybody wanted to be somewhere else, and in the shortest time possible.  Grudging commuters slowly but surely began to edge left and right to allow him to squeeze through, but he was making painfully slow progress.

‘Neil’s already done that, sir,’ Tyler reported. ‘It was one of those meetings about meetings, with some other trustee members according to the college’s diary secretary.  Unfortunately she had no information regarding who attended – just that six gentlemen had.  ‘We’re still trying to track down the guy in whose name it was booked.’ 

‘Okay, oh, and put every patrol down Braur Glen on high alert,’ he added.

‘Sorted!  I’ve sent dog-handlers into the area as well, just in case, and asked for search team officers to be notified that they’re on standby.’

‘Excellent, but tell them to keep it low key, we don’t want to scare the bugger off.’

‘They’ve all been briefed, the area’s ring fenced – well, as far as available manpower will stretch.  We’ve got every spare body I could muster out there.’

‘Good work. I’m chewing my steering wheel on the ring road.  Keep me updated.  If anything comes in that I can divert to instead of crawling into the office, call me, immediately.’

‘Yes, sir – and sir.’

‘Yeah?’

‘The Chief Super and Super will be joining us in the murder room any moment.’

‘
Ach!
  Well, we can all rest easy then,’ he snarled sarcastically.

Funny how they had kept their distance until now; apart that was from the less-than-constructive-tick-box-senior-officers’-review they had conducted.  Positioning themselves either for a share of the laurels, or so as to pass blame if it all went pear-shaped. 

***

By dawn Vasquez’s car had still not been traced, nor had he returned home.  Similarly, nor had Dr Thomas R. Ferguson.

***

Far from where all the police resources were concentrated, a gamekeeper had been checking his pheasant pens near Crosswood Reservoir, in the Pentland Hills.  In a state of near hysteria he had dialled 999 to report a grim discovery – a burnt body chained to a fire-blackened spruce.  The emergency operator had done her best to reassure and gently tease information from him, but suffused by terror and panic his frantic report had degenerated into a tinny nervous chatter.  A recording of their exchange was relayed to the murder room.  It reminded Dunbar of tin cans being dragged behind a car as the bride and groom sped off on their honeymoon.  Despite his babbling incoherence, they had nailed down the location:  a plantation, south of the reservoir – visible from the A70 access gate.

It did not make for easy-listening, and the location and method did not fit the profile, but the mention of chains and death by immolation resonated with both Dunbar and Tyler.

***

A death so deliberate in its cruelty must have arrived agonizingly slowly.  Dunbar hoped that the landowner, whoever it was, would leave the mortally wounded young spruce standing after their grim work was done.  Almost all its needles had been consumed and its lower limbs reduced to blackened tapers.  The bark had been stripped off where the heat had been at its most intense and the dying tree wept sap, as though for both of them.  Reduced as it was to charcoal and soot into its upper reaches, and silhouetted against a dull grey sky, it struck him as a fitting monolith to mark the spot where some poor soul had met a truly dreadful fate.

A chain and sturdy lock held what remained of the body semi-upright against the seared trunk.  The hair had been completely burnt off, apart from a frazzled black patch above the nape of the neck.  Mouth gaping, tongue curled and swollen like a black pudding; pain beyond imagination etched into what remained of the charred face. The flesh was all but consumed over the bottom half of the body.  Blackened slabs of muscle tissue coated in charred, crispy skin still clung on stubbornly above the elbows and ribcage. 

‘Sex?’ He asked, despite being fairly sure of, not only of the gender, but who he was looking at as well.

‘
Ach! 
Thanks, but I dinnae bat for your team, Chief Inspector,’ Laughing Boy replied, with the trade mark fixed grin that had earned him the moniker. 

It was met by a disapproving scowl from Eugene Grant.  Laughing Boy lowered his camera, shrugged and crouched to look more closely at the death mask.

‘My money’s on male.’

‘You’re neither qualified, nor experienced enough to speculate on such details, Duncan.’ Eugene sniffed.’ The dour supervisor eyed Dunbar askance and there was no mistaking its meaning.  It was a territorial warning shot: you do your job, leave us to do ours.  Dunbar blanked him.  He wasn’t in the mood for Eugene’s pompous airs.

‘Whoever it was, they were nae woodcraft experts, sir,’ a ridiculously young looking constable observed, holding up a fragment of timber from the ashes.

‘Leave the evidence be, Constable, and get back behind the tape please,’ Eugene barked, as he lit up the grim scene with an arc light.

Flushed with embarrassment, the young officer replaced it in exactly the same spot, eyed Dunbar apologetically and shuffled towards him.

‘Green wood – bad te light, slow te burn
and
– it makes too much smoke.’ He gave a weak grin accompanied by a Boy Scout salute.  ‘Perth and Kinross Beavers, Cubs and Scouts – had more badges than an American General has medals,’ he added proudly.

It came as no surprise to the seasoned DCI; the lad looked like he should still be in short pants, but he was not about to give him a merit badge for stating the bleeding obvious.

‘On the contrary, I suspect he – they – whoever, knew exactly what they were doing,’ Dunbar countered, staring at the grotesque cadaver.  ‘Green wood was commonly used for burning heretics at the stake – when their tormentors wanted to make sure the condemned lingered in the flames long enough to exact suffering worthy of their sin.’

Not everything Archie English had written had been wasted on him.  The young officer gagged and swallowed hard.  He had been fine from the moment of discovery, better than his more experienced colleague, which had been a relief, it being his first messy one, but the DCI’s observation somehow struck a nerve.  The young officer turned to look back and shivered; funny but until that moment he had barely noticed the cold.

‘Heretic’, not a thought process Dunbar had been working on, but an interesting parallel.  Is that how the killer saw his victims?  Was he pursuing some warped avenging religious zealot?  Behind Dunbar the crunch of leaves heralded the arrival of Falk and DC Reece walking in single file along the common approach path, from the direction of a rutted forest track a hundred and fifty yards away.

‘
Ach!
If you’d told me it was a barbeque, I’d have brought swilly, boss,’ Falk growled, eliciting a snigger from his companion.

‘I see you managed to drag DC Reece out from behind his computer.’

‘Sent Duck on a lap o’ the obs points,’ Falk explained. ‘Make sure the feckers are on their toes.’

‘Duck?’

‘DC Donald!’

Dunbar rolled his eyes.  DC Reece had picked up the moniker ‘Grease’ somewhere along the line as well; probably long before the enquiry had even started.

‘Neil and the DI have got hands enough in the murder room.  Feet on the ground are what’s needed now, sir.’

Dunbar nodded his agreement. ‘We’ll make a DI out of you yet, Falk.’

‘Bad form, letting your boss beat you to the scene, Sergeant,’ Grant sniped.

‘Gimme a break, Huge!  He was closer and gets mileage allowance.  I had to go to the nick first to pick up a pool car and wait for this tired twat tae get his arse out of his pit,’ Faulkner replied with a sneer, knowing how much having his name shortened irritated the haughty scenes-of-crime expert. 

‘Off the nest actually – if ye’get ma’drift?’ DC Reece whispered in Falk’s ear.

Falk half turned and scowled. ‘Away, mon, at that time o’ the –?’

‘Work shifts, don’t we – ships in the night put into port where an’ when they can,’ he explained, with a wink. ‘An’ anyhow, Huge – the boss’s motor’s way more rapid than that clapped out heap we came in,’ DC Reece offered by way of explanation.  Eugene Grant chose to ignore him. ‘Not that I’m suggesting you would break the speed limit, sir,’ he added, exchanging a knowing look, first with Falk and then his boss.

‘As soon as they’re done here, Falk, I want you all over ID-ing this poor bastard,’ Dunbar growled, raking through fragments of fire debris with the tip of his walking stick.

‘It’s him isn’t it, boss?’ Faulkner responded, staring at the contorted black mess that had once been a human being.