Cold Grave (34 page)

‘The road is covered in snow and ice, there were constant flurries on the windscreen, making it almost impossible to see, we were following a hearse, which meant we pissed off every nutter who wanted to drive at a hundred miles an hour despite the conditions, and therefore we were treated to gestures of finger abuse every two minutes. So, yes, a great drive. What have you been doing?’

‘Um, well this morning I was at Peter Bradley’s mother’s house in East Kilbride.’

‘Any use?’

‘Not a whole lot, Sarge. Sorry. Margaret, the mum, was a nice enough woman but she said she hadn’t spoken to Bradley in years.’

‘Did you believe her?’

‘Yes. She seemed really worried at first when I said I was there about her son. I think she thought I was going to tell her he was dead. When I said I was trying to find him, she was so relieved she’d have told me anything I wanted.’

‘So when did she last hear from him?’

‘She said she used to get a Christmas card from him every year but they stopped without explanation in 2004. There would be a different postmark on them every year, all over Scotland and down into England.’

‘Did you get a note of the postmarks?’

Anyone else, providing they had indeed done their job properly, might have been insulted by the question but not Corrieri. Instead she was quietly pleased to have the chance to show her thoroughness. Narey heard the rustle of paper as Julia opened her ever-present notebook.

‘Inverness, December 1999. Dumfries, 2000. Kendall, 2001. Oban, 2002. Aberdeen, 2003. I’ve already contacted the relevant forces in case Bradley has cropped up on their books but nothing back so far.’

‘Okay, good. What did she tell you about Bradley?’

‘Well, she’s his mum so nothing bad. Said that he’d always been “a lively lad”. That was the nearest thing to criticism she wanted to offer. Said he was the life and soul, liked by everyone, no real enemies. I asked her if he had a bit of a temper and she immediately said no. She said it too quickly if you ask me and made me think it wasn’t the truth.’

‘What about the gypsy traveller link? Had she heard about it?’

‘Yes, Sarge. It was all she knew though. She’d heard it the same way others had and nothing more. He hadn’t told her he was getting married or moving away with the travellers. All she knew was that the Christmas cards were signed “Peter and Gaby”.’

‘The gypsy bride?’

‘She assumes so. So do I.’

‘Any friends who might know where he is?’

‘Margaret Bradley said she’d spoken to all the ones she knew and they were as much in the dark as she was. They’d known Peter was seeing someone before he left but none of them had met her and had heard nothing from him since.’

‘So where does that leave us?’

Corrieri sounded apologetic. ‘No further forward. Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise, Julia. You did well. Anyway, we’re inches forward even if it’s only in things we don’t know. At least we now know we don’t know them. Okay, I’ve got to go. We’re about to start here.’

The outer door had opened and Kirsten Fairweather emerged, smiling grimly. Her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail and she had quickly changed into jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and trainers since her drive north with Barbie’s body.

‘Rachel, I know speed is of the essence for you so I’m not going to stand on ceremony; instead I propose to begin the facial recon right away. Seeing as you’re here, you’re welcome to sit in on it.’

‘I’d like that. It would be good to see how the process works. And, well, to be honest, it just feels like the right thing to do. The first step in bringing her back, hopefully.’

Kirsten smiled, more warmly this time.

‘Having seen the skull, I’m confident we will. We’ll need to do some mirroring work of the shattered part of the cranium but that won’t be a problem.’ Kirsten paused thoughtfully. ‘We’re always told you should disassociate and feel no personal connection to the subjects and I’m sure police officers are told the same. But I think I always do at least as good a job if I do feel a connection. And I feel one here.’

‘Me too,’ Narey admitted. ‘I’m a police officer but I’m a person first. And you’d have to have a heart of concrete not to feel for this girl.’

‘Come on,’ Kirsten told her, taking her arm. ‘I think we should go meet her.’

Fairweather led Narey deeper into the department, opening a white door to reveal Barbie’s skeleton laid out on what looked like an operating table. Despite the glimpse when she’d emerged from the frozen earth in Brig o’ Turk, it was still a shock to see their girl lying there, her broken skull smiling up at the ceiling.

The professor went to the side of the lab and produced a hand-held device that looked to Narey like the speed scanners traffic cops sometimes used at the roadside. There were two metallic heads, however, rather than one and she advanced on Barbie’s prone frame, angling the device towards her.

‘It’s a laser scanner,’ Kirsten explained. ‘It’s called a FastSCAN Scorpion. There’s a single-camera version called a Cobra but the dual camera gives us more detailed scans in fewer sweeps and the cameras view the laser from both sides. It’s a great bit of kit: the entire system fits into a briefcase and we can take it anywhere.’

The professor began sweeping the Scorpion across the skeleton, steadily working her way from top to toe.

‘It feeds straight into our computer system as a 3D model,’ she continued. ‘It’s digitising her shape and surface contours as we speak. The areas we’ll have to reconstruct before we go much further are…’ Kirsten paused by the skull and gestured with her finger. ‘Obviously here… and here. The nose is missing, the eye socket badly damaged and parts of the forehead boss and coronal suture are also missing. But we can fix that.’

Narey must have raised an eyebrow at the casualness of the remark because Kirsten hurriedly explained.

‘We will mirror the missing area simply by making a copy of the existing side and creating a symmetrical skull. It’s a bit misleading, as we are all naturally asymmetrical, but it will be close. If we had part of the nose, then we could do the same thing but as it’s entirely missing, we’ll fill it in using one from a template of skulls to get one that fits. It can be very accurate. The good news is that the mandible is intact; the jawbone is the most difficult thing to recreate.’

Narey turned to the computer and saw that a 3D image of the girl was already on the screen. It was a million miles away from Inchmahome.

‘After we fill in the missing areas, we’ll dip into our database of muscles. They are all pre-modelled and we import them individually onto the frame. It’s the musculature map that gives us a detailed image of what she really looked like. That will probably be as far as we get today but I’m intending to come back first thing in the morning and continue from there.

‘We use sets of tissue depth data depending on where the subject came from. Obviously we know Barbie was a white European but if she was black African or, say, Korean, then we have data from there. When we get to that point, you’ll see little pegs over her face representing tissue depth and then we’ll put a layer of skin on top of that.

‘It’s all about using the clues we have. The teeth will tell us about the mouth, for example, and we can create its shape from there. If hair were found, as it was in this case, then we can input its colour and length. If there is clothing, then we can learn about stature. Normally, when we do facial mapping we don’t have as much to work on as we do here. We tend not to know skin colour, fat or thin. We’re in good shape with her, Rachel.’

‘So by tomorrow we’ll see her as she was?’

‘Yep. If we wanted to go all the way and have a 3D animated model, then that would take another two weeks. It can be a bit frustrating. We get from skull to face in two days; one day for muscles, one for skin; but it takes them a fortnight to add colour and hair. I’m guessing you don’t have that long.’

‘No, I don’t. Strange, isn’t it? We wait nineteen years to see her and suddenly we’re in a hurry that could literally mean the difference between life and death.’

Kirsten looked at her in confusion.

‘Not her life obviously, so whose?’

Rachel knew she’d said too much but instinctively she’d trusted Kirsten from the moment they’d first met.

‘Well, that’s the thing; I can’t be entirely sure. But I know if we can find out who she is, then we’ll be a lot closer to finding out who killed her. And if we do that, then we might just stop someone else from ending up the way she did. Put it this way: tomorrow can’t come soon enough.’

Munn’s Vaults on Maryhill Road wouldn’t have been Winter’s first choice for a quiet drink and, coming just a few hours after he’d frozen his arse off at Brig o’ Turk cemetery, it was just about the last thing he needed. Still, he and Danny weren’t out for a social beer so it didn’t matter that they’d be surrounded by tracksuits, baseball caps, aggressive stares and the continual rattle of pool balls. Instead they’d sit quietly in the darkened pub and await their prey.

With its long, low frontage, Munn’s sat opposite boarded-up shops and scruffy tenements. Its neighbours were bookies, off licenses, To Let signs and abandoned buildings. To be fair, it had cleaned up its act from days gone by and the word was that the new owners didn’t stand for any trouble. First sign of bother and the offenders were chucked out and promptly barred from the premises. It still carried a reputation from past regimes that meant some people were wary of crossing its threshold but it was unlikely to put off the kind of person who wielded a samurai sword. Sam Dunbar drank in Munn’s so it was to Munn’s they were going.

They both ordered pints on the basis that it could be a long shift and sitting without alcohol in front of them would send out all sorts of warning signals to the locals. They would think them to be either cops, customs and excise or Christians, and any of those things would mean not being trusted in Munn’s. The pints would be supped slowly, milked for all they were worth, because the last thing that was going to help if they did encounter Dunbar was them being drunk. Everything they knew about him suggested they’d need every ounce of their wits about them.

A hollow-cheeked ned in a blue baseball cap and matching trackies was checking out Winter and Danny from the pool table. He looked like he hadn’t eaten for a month beyond a feast of yum yums or jam doughnuts from Greggs and the odd bag of chips. Being held up by his pool cue and scratching the growth on his cheeks and chin, he seemed to have the idea there was some mileage to be gained from the strangers. He mumbled something to his mate at the table and sidled up to Winter.

‘Awrite, big man? How’s it gaun? Cauld outside, innit?’

‘Aye,’ Winter responded, neither wanting to engage with the junkie or antagonise him. ‘Freezing.’

‘Aye, freezing,’ the ned repeated. ‘Freezing.’

He just stood there, mouth slightly open and eyes somewhere else, waiting for Winter to come back with his contribution to the sparkling conversation. When Winter didn’t oblige, the ned carried on regardless.

‘Game of pool, big man?’

‘Naw, you’re all right.’

‘Gaun, just one game. Play you for a pint.’

‘It’s not my game. Try someone else.’

‘Just for a pint, eh? I’m wasted, like. You’d probably beat me easy.’

Danny put his head forward so it was almost resting on the bar and tilted it so he could look the ned in the eyes.

‘Wee man?’ he growled. ‘Gonnae just piss off, eh? He’s no wanting to play you.’

‘Okay, okay. No problemo,’ the junkie slurred. ‘Not a problem, big man. No worries. What about you then?’

‘What?’

‘You want a game? Play you for a pint, like.’

Danny chuckled despite himself.

‘Naw. Now fuck off.’

‘Aye, aye. No problemo, big man. No problemo.
Asta la vista
.’

With that, the junkie threw his weight to one side, spun on one leg and did a neat volte-face until he lurched back towards the pool table, where he held his arms out wide to his mate. ‘Naebody wants to play me. It’s ’cos ah’m like the Ronnie O’Sullivan of this pool table. Top dog.’

‘Aye, you are that, Spanner, no come on. Hit the baws, eh?’

Danny sipped at his beer and shook his head in mild dis belief at the departing junkie. Harmless enough as long as you weigh more than a bag of tatties and didn’t try to get between him and a strawberry tart or a score of smack. He was just about to share some tales of junkie-baiting in days of yore when the front door opened and a broad figure walked in.

It was the long, black leather coat that caught Winter’s eye first. In an instant, he was back in Mansionhouse Drive, seeing the world through his camera’s timed exposure: the crowd behind the two severed hands; the tallish guy, clad in black hide — the same figure that had just walked through the door of Munn’s.

Danny saw him too and even if they hadn’t both studied Winter’s photograph, it was likely they’d have known their quarry for who he was as soon as he came through the door. There was an air of confidence about Dunbar that translated easily into menace. His eyes immediately scanned the bar to see if anyone was going to challenge him but none was forthcoming. Indeed, there was a noticeable scattering of bodies and the two wasters who had been inhabiting the pool table were suddenly gone as if they’d been picked up by a gust of wind. Dunbar pulled up a bar stool and perched on it, his leather coat almost skirting the floor like a vampire’s cape.

‘Usual?’ he was asked from behind the bar.

‘Aye.’

The barman held a glass under a vodka optic and deposited a double in it before adding a shot of cola and setting it down in front of Dunbar. He shoved a fiver at the barman and waved away the offer of change.

Winter and Danny had made sure they hadn’t looked over at Dunbar. They sipped on their pints and chatted quietly until Danny nudged Winter and nodded his head in the direction of the now vacant pool table. Both men got off their bar stools, made their way to the table and dropped coins in the slot to set up the game. Danny made sure he was noisily enthusiastic about the pots he made and encouraged Winter to do the same. They laughed a lot and jeered each other, successfully managing to sound like a pair of clowns. When Winter won the frame, Danny made a clumsy attempt to hide the fact that he was handing over a tenner, making it very obvious in the process.