Dark Flight (2 page)

Rhona felt her throat tighten. Even after all this time, she had to remember to immerse herself in procedure.
Only that saved her, and the other members of the team, from losing their minds, or their emotional well-being, in the face of such violent death.

The woman’s sweater had been pushed up. Between the shoulder blades, her attacker had carved a diagonal cross. Her legs and arms had been spread in a mirror image of the same shape.

‘Who is she?’ Rhona asked.

‘Not sure yet. The old woman had a pension book. Enid Cavanagh, seventy-eight years old.’

‘Are they related?’

‘We think they might be mother and daughter.’

Rhona crouched and shone a torch between the spread-eagled thighs. A smeared mix of blood and what looked like semen had dried in strips down the pale mottled skin of the legs. She peered more closely, directing the torch on the bloodied vaginal area. The clitoris and adjacent labia had been cleanly removed. The extent of the mutilation made her gasp.

‘What?’

‘She’s been circumcised.’

Bill swore under his breath.

He hated all deaths on his patch, but sexual mutilation suggested a sadist. And any study of the psychology of murder identified sadists as good planners, with a degree of intelligence that kept them one step ahead of the law.

Rhona indicated the contact stain of a long blade on the woman’s discarded underwear.

‘Looks like he wiped the weapon clean on those and took it with him.’

She glanced around the room, trying to get her bearings from the blood spatters and position of the corpse. ‘If he attacked her from behind, he could have avoided the main gush of blood. Which means he could be virtually blood free.’

Rhona shone a light obliquely down either side of the body, looking for foot or knee prints. The beam picked out a partial imprint in the V-shape between the victim’s left arm and leg. ‘Take a look at this.’

Bill stepped across the treads and joined her.

The print was smudged, but distinguishable.

‘This looks like a child’s footprint.’

The colour drained from Bill’s face. He had two kids of his own, teenagers now, but always kids in his eyes. Margaret, his wife of over thirty years, was always giving him a hard time about letting them grow up, especially his daughter, Lisa. Every time Bill was called to a female murder victim, he imagined Lisa in her place.

‘Did she have a child?’

Bill stood up. ‘We’d better find out, and fast.’

Left to her own devices, Rhona began the slow laborious job of evidence collection. She concentrated on the kitchen. Her assistant, Chrissy McInsh, would finish working the bedroom. Two other scene of crime officers were dealing with the remainder of the small flat.

She swabbed the woman’s mouth. Dr Sissons would deal with vaginal and rectum swabs in the mortuary. The tongue was swollen and bloody; her teeth had bitten into it in fright. If the woman had screamed and
there was a child nearby, it might have heard and come running in.

Rhona glanced out of the window. What little light existed was masked by a tall hedge. In the middle of the hedge, a metal gate squeaked back and forth, as crime scene personnel moved in and out.

She had a sudden image of herself as a little girl, swinging on their gate, her mother shouting at her to get off, in case she broke the hinges. Had a child been in the garden?

Once she’d finished with the body, she tackled the rest of the room. It was small, a kitchenette rather than a kitchen. She suspected it had been cleaned recently. Beneath the scent of death she discerned the faint aroma of disinfectant. In the sink, a dishcloth was soaking in bleach and water. A teapot lay open and ready for boiling water, a fresh teabag damp inside. Two china cups and saucers sat nearby. A washing-machine door was partly open. Inside were sheets smelling of old sweat and dribbled urine. The woman had changed her mother’s bed and cleaned the kitchen then set about making a pot of tea. A normal domestic scene one minute, carnage and death the next. Rhona didn’t want to imagine the scenario, yet knew she had to. Understanding the choreography of a crime was as important as collecting the forensic samples associated with it.

She imagined herself standing at the window, maybe checking on a child in the garden. Did the woman hear the intruder in her mother’s room? Rhona listened to the soft movement of Chrissy next door. Only a
narrow hall divided kitchen from front room. Bill had said the television was on when they arrived. Loud enough for the old woman to hear. Maybe the sound had masked her death?

There had been nothing beneath the younger victim’s nails. No skin or hair or blood. When she bagged the hands she could smell bleach from them. It didn’t look as if she’d fought her attacker. Why not?

A knife at her neck, perhaps . . . or to protect her child?

Rhona enhanced the child’s part-print impression with a protein dye and was satisfied she had enough to distinguish pattern, size and wear. A careful examination of the remaining linoleum revealed a poor partial adult print near the door. Maybe Chrissy would have more luck with the beige carpet.

She stepped her way through the hall. Chrissy had finished photographing the bloodstains and was taping the carpet, looking for fibres or residue. A fringe of bright auburn hair was visible beneath the hood of her white suit.

‘How’s it going in here?’

Chrissy glanced up. Without the usual make-up, the face looked five years younger. ‘Fine. Where are you going?’

‘I want to take a look outside.’

Chrissy turned back to the task in hand. Rhona didn’t have to ask her to check for footprints. It was a routine part of the job. Chrissy might have a sharp tongue and a somewhat cynical view of the world, but she was a stickler for protocol.

There was a forlorn air to the small garden, as though it had once been loved. The remains of spring daffodils poked out from beneath the too-thick hedge, their heads shrivelled and browning.

A circular bed of spindly roses, badly in need of pruning, suddenly reminded Rhona of her father’s garden on the Isle of Skye. She’d felt ashamed of the neglect when she went back after his death. Somehow, seeing the abandoned garden brought home the reality of his passing. Until then she’d imagined she only had to lift the receiver and dial his number and he would be there to answer it.

The gate was black metal but hadn’t been painted in a while. Flakes of rust crumbled on touch and sprinkled the concrete path with orange-red dust. She swung the gate shut and crouched on one of the aluminium treads on the short path. The gate was divided in two. The top half consisted of two semicircular bars enclosed within a square. The bottom half was made up of vertical bars, wide enough apart for a small foot.

Between bars three and four, and five and six, were the imprints she sought. She took a series of photos before she attempted retrieval. The imprints were partial of the weighted soles of shoes pressed between the bars. Crouched on the path, she figured she would be just below the height of a child swinging on the gate. She could hear movement from indoors and spotted the top of Chrissy’s head in the bedroom.

The kitchen window was left of the path. Assuming the woman had been assaulted at the sink, a child
swinging on the gate would have had a clear view of her face when her attacker struck.

Rhona imagined a scream and turned abruptly, as a child would have done . . . and caught sight of the bones.

They were lying half hidden among the shrivelled daffodil leaves. She reached out and picked them up, her heart beating with the excited curiosity of a scientist.

Lying in the palm of her gloved hand, they were immediately recognisable as human half-finger bones, tied tightly together with red thread in the shape of a diagonal cross. The length from the proximal to the distal joint was shorter than her own, suggesting an adult with small hands, or a child. Just below each knuckle, there were three striations cut cross-wise.

She put the bones in a sample bag, then examined the short path to the front door. The perpetrator could have entered the house this way or used the back alley, which involved climbing a wall. According to Bill there were no signs of a forced entry. So he had a key, or both doors were unlocked. There was no back garden, just a shared area of grass with a wooden bench. If the child or assailant ran out of the front door, then there could be blood on this path somewhere.

But the path proved to be clear. Her only reward for a careful search was a wad of chewing gum just outside the gate.

Chrissy appeared at the front door, pulled down her mask, and inhaled deeply. ‘The old woman was incontinent. The carpet’s reeking.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Someone pissed on the body.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Her attacker?’

‘Who else would piss on an old woman?’

Drugs and their metabolities were often detectable in urine for longer periods than in the blood. If the attacker was high on something, they would find evidence of it in his urine.

‘McNab wants a word.’

‘Right.’ Rhona tried to keep her face expressionless. The attempt wasn’t lost on Chrissy. Not many people knew that piece of Rhona’s history and she wanted it kept that way.

‘He’s in the hut.’ Chrissy indicated the mobile crime scene office set up across the road.

‘Okay. I’m finished in the kitchen anyway.’

‘Ten minutes, then we go for a drink?’ Chrissy suggested.

Rhona stripped off the suit, boots and gloves, composing herself as she did so. DS Michael McNab. A moment of madness a couple of years back that had lasted three months. Her dad had died and she’d felt like a boat without a rudder. Sleeping with McNab had made her temporarily forget the emptiness. When she broke it off, he was the one all at sea. He got angry. Tried everything to get back into her life. Rhona still felt bad that she had encouraged him to think there was more to them than sex.

She pulled on her jacket. The spring sunshine had gone and she shivered in the cold April air.

When she pushed open the door of the hut, she was relieved to see McNab wasn’t alone. Bill Wilson was there, in his hand a mug of coffee with skin on its surface, just the way he liked it.

McNab had done a good job as Crime Scene Manager. Rhona congratulated him.

Seated at a computer, he accepted the compliment in silence, an inscrutable look on his face. ‘
We
always did make a good team.’

She ignored any hidden message in the reply and asked if there was any word on the child.

‘We’ve established the younger victim as Carole Devlin, the old woman’s married daughter,’ Bill told her. ‘She has a boy of six called Stephen. A neighbour says Carole often came to help her mother. She brought Stephen with her.’

‘So where is he now?’

McNab shook his head. ‘We don’t know.’ He pushed a photo in a silver frame across the desk. ‘This was on the sideboard.’

A live and animated Carole Devlin sat beside her mother on a settee. Between her knees perched a boy, wearing a blue school sweatshirt. He had the creamy chocolate-brown skin of a mixed-race child. Handsome, with big brown eyes and a cheeky grin.

‘Is there a dad?’

‘No idea. The school badge belongs to the nearby primary. DC Clark is contacting the headmistress. We have an address from Carole’s handbag that could be her own flat. It’s in Gibson Street.’

Gibson Street was a stone’s throw from Rhona’s lab,
about a fifteen-minute walk from the granny’s flat in Dowanhill Road.

‘We’ll know more by the strategy meeting tomorrow,’ Bill said

‘There’s no sign of the boy, apart from the footprint beside the body and two on the gate,’ Rhona told him.

Bill said what she’d been thinking. ‘If the attacker took him . . .’

Neither of them wanted to say it, but they feared the child might already be dead.

‘There’s something else.’

She showed them the bagged finger bones.

McNab examined them through the plastic, his face puzzled. ‘They look human.’

‘They are.’

Bill gave a weary sigh. ‘So, we have two dead women, one of them mutilated, and a missing child . . .’

‘And a cross made of human bones,’ Rhona finished for him.

THE CLUB WAS
beginning to fill up. The band didn’t perform till later. Now the place echoed with shrill voices just released from a day’s work.

Chrissy and Rhona made straight for the bar. A stout man with glasses and a petite pretty brunette Rhona recognised from the mortuary, moved along a bit to give them room. It was Sean’s night off, or he would have been here already, setting up for the band, his saxophone on its stand in the corner of the stage. Tonight he would be at the flat, cooking a meal. Rhona knew she should have gone straight home, but didn’t want to. Better to sit with Chrissy for a while, until the real world seeped back into her system.

One thing about her line of work: telling your partner what you’d seen and done in the previous six hours didn’t make for a comfortable evening.

Guilt made her flip open her mobile. The phone rang out four times then switched to answerphone. She left a message about being kept late at work and rang off.

The club was busy with Glasgow University personnel, including staff from the nearby forensic medical sciences department and a couple of forensic
anthropologists from GUARD, the University’s Archaeological Research Department. This wasn’t a police hang-out, so she didn’t have to face McNab, although Bill, a keen jazz fan, often came in.

She dismissed thoughts of Michael McNab from her mind. She hadn’t told Sean about that liaison. In fact they never discussed previous relationships, although she suspected Sean’s list was a lot longer than her own.

Rhona ordered a white wine from Sam the barman. Chrissy screwed up her face at that, and went for a bright pink alcopop, reminding Rhona that alcohol served that way got into the blood faster, which is what she needed tonight.

‘So, what did McNab want?’ Her forensic assistant was nothing if not direct.

‘Strictly business,’ Rhona told her.