Snow Storm (22 page)

“
How do you
know that?”

“
Because this
is the kind of specialised thing they deal with at University
Hospitals Birmingham. This is very precise, not the kind of thing
your parochial surgeon can knock up in an afternoon. You have to go
to the place where they do this kind of reconstruction. It’s the
kind of surgery that generally results from a tour of duty with her
majesty’s armed forces and the associated evils of warfare. It
began with trench warfare on the likes of the Somme. Soldiers’
heads were very suddenly the most exposed part, presumably as they
popped them up in attempts to discover what precisely was going on
in no-man’s-land. Facial trauma became a much more common thing.
Traditionally they used scaffold structures on the outside of the
skull to support the healing bones. More recently these have been
inserted as pins and plates and yet more recently again they
started using a version of the original technique in Iraq and
Afghanistan, where injuries sustained often involve large amounts
of skin. The structures are more malleable, easier to work with.
Everything comes full circle in the end.”

“
So you think
he was a soldier?” Jones asked, trying to absorb this and highlight
the important information.

“
I did.”
Brown replied, “Until I phoned University Hospitals Birmingham and
had it confirmed about five minutes before you arrived.” He handed
her a printout with the deceased’s details; name, age, rank and
back story. “He was a Sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers. IED blast.
He was sitting in a Landrover when it happened. They aren’t the
most heavily armoured things but as luck would have it he was
shielded from the worst excesses of the blast by a colleague who by
all accounts wasn’t so lucky. I imagine you’ll want to contact the
family etcetera, make sure he’s our man, but I’d say the chances of
those x-rays matching anyone else quite so perfectly are pretty
slim.”

She made her
way back to the station with a sense of grim resignation. She would
doubtless have to deal with a bereaved family now, a job she
generally liked to try to avoid, given the gut and heart wrenching
nature of dealing with another human being’s most primal emotions.
It wasn’t natural, forcing people together in such a way at such a
time. She might luck out and find that he had no family but cursed
herself for having such a thought. Who was she to wish that on
anyone? Why had they given such credence to Campbell’s theory? Some
people did just get murdered. That was the one thing culture tended
to like to gloss over, a fact society liked to try to ignore
because perhaps it was more convenient that way. Better that we
should believe our actions lead to something deserved, so we all
stay in line. Morality and even religion, for all its faults, were
very good controls, rules for the masses, but the fact was, bad
things happened to good people too.

She tried to
shake the doubt off. Campbell’s theories, though she hated to admit
it, had a habit of being close to the mark. She would keep an open
mind as always, in an effort to counter balance his dim view of
human nature. Chances were though, the victim was involved in
something he shouldn’t have been. And if Campbell was right? How
had a soldier, already badly injured but having come through the
worst of it, gone so far off the rails as to wind up in all of
this?

How did
society allow this to happen? Was it the result of post-traumatic
stress or some kind of anger he’d come back from a war zone with
along with his injuries? Who knew? Thousands of young people she
supposed.

She stopped
for a fag outside the station before entering. Really she felt she
could do with a vodka to go along with it but gone were the days
when she could handle an afternoon on anything other than soft
drinks. Maybe it was less about ageing than the intensity of the
job. Her afternoons seemed to be very full.

“
You alright
hair?” was what Campbell greeted her with when she walked back into
the incident room.

She chose to
pretend she had ignored this, surreptitiously checking her
appearance with the mirror app on her phone to avoid doing anything
that would imply he’d caused her anything more than a second’s
instinctive annoyance, and found nothing amiss. She looked in his
direction and found he was looking up at her from his chair
expectantly, like a dog looking forward to a game of
fetch.

“
What?” was
all she could come up with, though she injected as much scorn as
she possibly could into that one word.

“
Just, you’ve
been spending so much time with the boss lately.” He looked
conspiratorially at DS McKay who continued to act as though he was
alone in the room, determined not to play ball. “Me and John here
thought we should christen you hair.”

“
I see.” she
answered, thinking anything but. “I’ve not been spending that much
time with him.”

“
Oh I don’t
know hair. I think you’re maybe protesting a wee bit too
much.”

“
Ok,” she
shrugged, playing along on the basis he just might shut the fuck up
quicker. “What does that have to do with my hair?”

“
Not hair,”
he boomed, nudging a still seemingly oblivious McKay in an effort
at boisterous solidarity. “H A R E as in Burke and. A regular pair
of resurrectionists you two.”

“
Oh I see.”
She replied. “Well I hope you didn’t spend all morning on that
one.”

“
No concern
of yours if I did,” Campbell huffed. “You’re not my boss yet
lassie.” Looking for one last chance of back up from McKay, which
was consistently absent, he returned to his paper.

“
No,” she
agreed, before making herself a cup of tea without offering one,
just to make the point. “Not yet.”

********************

Davie wasn’t having the
best of mornings. First of all the Bobcat had started playing up
again, hydraulic problem or something, which meant he couldn’t
reply on its loader to do the donkey work and would have to start
carting bales to bed up the cows by hand. Colin had buggered off
with the quad bike, taking that option out of the game too, so it
was all down to muscle, the old fashioned way. His dad said it
would do him good. About time he did some exercise that didn’t
involve pulling levers, pushing throttles or lifting
pints.

To be fair he
wasn’t in the best condition these days, should never have jacked
in the rugby this year but they’d dropped him from the first team
and even though he knew he was taking a hacksaw to his nose just to
piss off his face he still had his pride to think about.

Looking at his dad’s
belly was enough to remind him that you really did need to keep
active. Even then you probably couldn’t rely on exercise too much.
You probably needed to cut out the chocolate biccies at eleven
o’clock too, judging by the way the fat ginger yin’s gut was
starting to stretch at the poppers on his boiler suit. Surely the
old boy should just go for a bigger size and stop kidding himself,
trying to hold it all together with a big belt he’d brought back
from a trip to California many moons ago when he was still young
and not out of touch the way he was now.

Not that Davie would
attempt to tackle him, even now. He’d never admit it, but the old
yin still put the fear of god in him, towering above as he seemed
to, even though they were technically the same height and Davie
probably had a year or twos growth left in him if he could only
give up the fags.

He tried
texting Andy a few times through the course of the morning but
nothing doing. Huffy bastard. Alright, so they had to leave him
there when those Polish boys had given chase, but there were a few
of them and they looked like they meant business. They had taken it
all a bit seriously if he thought about it. It had only been a bit
of fun. Not like anyone meant any real harm was it? Fair enough
they had kind of battered Andy, or at least knocked him out and
left him to sleep it off but the guy probably did deserve some kind
of revenge. He had lost his two front teeth after all. He shouldn’t
think that way though. Andy was a mate and you should always stick
up for your mates. Even if they were being particularly whiney you
had to have their backs.

Still no response though,
even after he’d kept his mobile on all night, turned the ringer up
just in case, still nothing. Maybe he’d been in such a huff with
them he’d just phoned that sister of his to come and pick him up
before they had plucked up the courage to go back looking for him.
He might have said though. Would have saved them some time. She
could pick Davie up any time she liked. Not that it was likely, she
was a couple of years older and a couple of light years out of his
league. What could you do though? You couldn’t write yourself off
like that. You had to keep trying.

He decided he’d text Andy
again one last time and leave it at that. If the huffy wee bugger
didn’t want to play ball that wasn’t Davie’s problem. Some people
just needed more of a sense of humour about them.

Edwards was starting to
outstay his welcome. It wasn’t so much that he did or said anything
to make him any more annoying that the average career hungry
wannabe top-dog. It was more the fact that he seemed to believe and
embrace his own hype so wholeheartedly. It was more what he didn’t
do or say in terms of his dealings with everyone around him that
had the effect of making him an irritant. He was like an eyeful of
chilli pepper, or maybe more like an eyeful of annoying
condescending bastard.

It was implicit, Burke
supposed; the air of grandeur and unquestioned sense of entitlement
that can only be instilled from a young age.

Whatever;
common decency dictated he should at least try to be tolerant,
which was how they wound up in The Cask and Barrel, hanging off a
pair of pint glasses, filled only with coke, owing to the time of
day.

“
I need this
James, like you wouldn’t believe. Everything’s contracting. Know
what I mean?”

Burke had a feeling he
did.

“
Everything’s
being centralised, we’re all set to be one service and it won’t be
long before the axe falls, you mark my words. First we’re part of a
bigger beast, Police Scotland, one force, which could seem ok for
movement and progression, seamless transition to different roles in
different areas but you know there won’t be the opportunities,
that’s the thing. They’ll be cutting expenses as always and this
whole independence thing looming.” He snorted. “That’ll cut us off
from everything if it happens. I’m off. I’ll tell you that
much.”

“
Really?”
Burke heard himself say a bit too enthusiastically.

“
Yes.”
Edwards replied, dragging out the vowel as he clearly thought for a
second and decided to confide his monumental plans. “Serious
Organised Crime.”

“
Serious
Organised Crime?” Burke repeated, losing the will to live with
every syllable as he looked longingly out of the window at what
seemed to be welcoming drizzle right then.

“
Yes. Serious
Organised Crime. The UK’s very own answer to the FBI or who knows,
maybe Europol. You have to think big.”

“
Europol.”
Burke repeated, wondering how bad pneumonia really was.

“
Shouldn’t
feel like a big fish in a small pond anymore. That’s the whole
thing for me James. We’re part of a bigger world, a global
village.”

Burke noted that he could
make a suggestion for village idiot if required, should the vacancy
become available.

Edwards sat up as though
addressing a much larger audience, which was no small achievement,
given the size of the booth they were in. “Let me ask you this Jim.
What’s the most important factor in getting on in any
business?”

“
Knowing how
to make a decent cup of coffee?”

“
I’ll give
you that.” Edwards conceded as he pulled a pen from his pocket,
looking as though he was about to move this lecture along into one
involving diagrams on the table, but instead merely attempting to
use it as a pointing device, though directing it at nothing in
particular. “But before that.”

There was a pause as
Burke wondered whether he was actually supposed to answer what may
or may not have been a question, realised he was and then fought a
mini battle in his own head; one where he resolved not to utter the
phrase “I don’t give a shit” purely on political
grounds.

“
It’s not
what you know…” Edwards encouraged, seemingly unaware he was
simultaneously encouraging the urge Burke had to break his nose or
at the very least stamp on his toes before repeatedly jamming his
fingers in a door. Instead he decided to frown in a way he felt
sure suggested a state of abject confusion but equally could have
conveyed constipation or the onset of coronary arrest.

“
It’s… who…“
Edwards continued in the manner of a school teacher who has lost
all sense of irony and self-respect.

“
You bribe.”
Burke suggested.

“
Might help
to grease the wheels I’m told but I couldn’t possibly comment. I
was going for ‘who you know’”

“
I see,”
Burke replied. Not like he was a detective inspector or
anything.