Snow Storm (3 page)

He woke with
a start when he realised it was the phone ringing and dived across
the bed as Rachel rolled over threatening to wake up. The first
instinct on being phoned at this time was to wonder if someone had
died. In this case they had.

“
What the
absolute fuck?” he asked in an outraged half-whisper before
apologising to the despatcher on the end of the phone while she
fumbled around wondering whether to respond to this particular
question or not.

He set the espresso
machine off to make a triple while he staggered around trying to
wedge himself into a pair of ever tightening jeans and narrowly
missed smacking his head on one of the thick posts at the foot of
the bed. He wondered if it was inappropriate, wearing a Thundercats
t-shirt, albeit under a hooded top and a three quarter length
jacket.

The body had been found
by revellers staggering home around an hour ago, left out in the
open on waste ground.

Western
harbour had been built in the early 2000s in an effort to cash in
on Leith’s up and coming status as the new place to be and develop
the waterfront by ramming it full of glass and concrete.
Unfortunately it seemed Leith was still up and coming and many of
the flats were starting to look less than the stylish contemporary
living spaces the estate agents liked to brand them.

A recession and stalling
recovery meant there was plenty of waste ground in the area and a
surplus of now cheap accommodation readily available to
whoever.

Dr Brown had the honour
of being on call again this morning and looked like he was
somewhere else.

The body lay
face down on the broken concrete. From what Burke could see he was
black, twenty-five to thirty-ish, tall, well-built and recently the
victim of a fairly brutal strangling. The neck had a deep open
wound running round its full circumference. Blood had congealed as
it ran down the victim’s hooded top but notably not onto the
concrete.

“
As you can
no doubt see he’s been moved some time after death,” the Doctor
said, confirming Burke’s suspicion. “Not that they’ve been overly
concerned about hiding him.”

“
I’m starting
to think bodies are like buses,” Burke said, trying to get a closer
look at the face. “That’s a fairly serious cut.”

“
My guess
would be some form of garrotte,” the Doctor replied. “Something
like cheese wire.”

“
Must’ve
stung a bit.”

“
Possibly not
that much depending on how quickly they severed the carotid artery.
More likely he bled to death than suffocated.”

“
Happy days.
Any idea as to the time of death?”

“
Not more
than three hours. A bit fresher than yesterday’s
effort.”

“
You can say
that again. Busy couple of days for you.”

“
Well it is
the funeral season.”

He made his way back to
Gayfield Square, placed his head on folded arms and fell into
unconsciousness for a solid hour.

The cold woke
him. He made another coffee and turned on his PC. He googled
garrotting and was immediately given the dictionary definition
along with a Wikipedia page dedicated to the subject and a series
of black ink illustrations in the images section, their period
indicating it was not exactly a popular pastime of late. Wikipedia
seemed to think it was primarily an assassination weapon although
it had been favoured by the Spaniards as an execution method for
around seven hundred years or so. The Inquisition naturally
featured in many of the illustrations.

He found himself
wondering about mechanics of it all; how it was possible to do that
sort of damage to a neck without inadvertently severing a couple of
your own fingers using cheese wire? You would probably have to wear
gloves. Maybe that pointed to something professional. He knew from
experience it was possible to slice up your fingers just trying to
snap a piece of thread, though truth be told he knew from
experience it was possible to do many seemingly innocuous things
and injure yourself through sheer pathological clumsiness, like the
time he’d stepped off a boat, forgetting it hadn’t yet docked and
got up close and personal with the Irish Sea.

He couldn’t
find links to any particular organised crime persuasion that liked
to use this method of dispatch but found a BBC news article about a
study finding strangling was not usually linked to organised crime.
No joy. He knocked his head slowly on the desk and then something
caught his eye. He looked up to see a concerned looking DC Jones
looking at him. She was back.

“
You ok
boss?” she asked.

“
Fine,” he
replied, unsure if you should invent some kind of reason or
justification for effectively drumming your head of a desk -trying
to get the circulation going on a cold morning maybe- and drawing a
blank. “You?”

“
Good thanks,
yeah,” she replied dumping a bag of what seemed to be everything on
the floor and arranging an array of Danish pastries on her desk.
She should really be fat he thought before remembering that people
had said the same about him five years ago. They never appreciated
their metabolic rate, the youth of the day.

He watched out of the
corner of his eye as she rearranged her desk, trying to marshal the
brightly coloured picture frames and stationary into some kind of
order before her day officially began, like some kind of modern
superstition or maybe just a slight case of OCD. He himself had
never been able to find a happy organisational medium and tended to
go through phases at both ends of the spectrum, though as he grew
longer in the tooth he suspected the slobby chaotic end of the
spectrum was starting to look more like home.

She was young
and keen, still having the idea she could make a difference, not
yet at the stage where she would become jaded. That came with time,
along with the cynicism and the sensation of swimming through
treacle.

Slowly the office began
to fill up and he felt like a little normality had resumed. The
routine of this place, if nothing else, was a kind of constant, as
much as it could be in this job.

He’d arranged a briefing
for nine thirty regarding yesterday’s bag of fun and would at least
enjoy seeing their faces on breaking this latest development. Not
that he had any reason to suspect they were connected.

He
commandeered a copy of The Metro in an effort to check the latest
which was of course not a lot. Snow was still predicted and a
debate raged as to whether this time the authorities were prepared.
Ah the excitement. Why was it that these days he seemed to find
everything the media said like some kind of Chinese water torture?
It was always the same thing; over and over, repeat, ad infinitum,
ad nauseum.

He wanted a
break. Or did he? He wasn’t sure he knew what he wanted
anymore.

They convened in a
meeting room, the temperature of which was always the subject of a
debate but which was a welcome relief from the dose of the shivers
he seemed to have acquired.

Things
started well enough, though there wasn’t a lot to go on the team
were keen to get their teeth into this one.

It seemed no one had seen
anything of the bag prior to the discovery of its decomposing
contents.

“
Any joy with
CCTV?”

“
None boss,”
DC Quinn replied in his thick Glaswegian accent. “There are
obviously cameras on the roads either side and at the schools and
HQ but none that actually focus on what’s happening on the street
itself.”

“
Any way we
could spot if anything took longer than expected from one end to
the other?” Burke asked, knowing as he did that there was an
additional problem.

“
I’d wondered
that myself,” Quinn answered. “Problem is there’s a lot of parking
there so there’s a potential for everything to be mis-timed.
Someone parks for a bit, someone else dithers looking for a spot,
that kind of thing.”

“
Joggers?
Cyclists?”

“
Plenty but
no-one with a sports bag like that, although most of them had
rucksacks, commuters running to work that kind of
thing.”

“
Ok. Go back
through it. Check for anything that takes a bit longer. Possibly
something that comes in out of sequence if you see what I mean, a
car maybe comes in in front of another and exits behind it,
anything we can go on.”

Quinn started to scratch
his nose either in nervousness or -more likely Burke thought-
frustration as his cheeks turned slightly pink and he stared at his
diary.

“
Ok, the
witness?”

“
Nervous
wreck boss, understandably,” DS McKay piped up, his voice a couple
of octaves lower, doubtless from another night spent sinking a few.
His eyes were heavily hooded under a mass of wrinkled bare scalp.
“Seemed a harmless enough laddie, works as an accountant in
Canonmills, walks through the park every morning to get there. He
spotted it on Friday morning as you know and only checked it
yesterday out of misguided curiosity.”

“
Could have
been worse though,” snorted DC Campbell from the other side of the
table. “Could have been a kid that found it. Should be strung up,
the bastards that did it.”

So Campbell was back
too.

“
Possibly,”
McKay carried on as Campbell folded his arms and shook his head in
over hammed moral outrage. “Anyway getting back to the facts boss,
he really didn’t have anything useful to add.”

He then told them about
the latest addition to their case load. A couple of them already
knew. News travelled fast in the station. Murder still carried some
currency despite the public perception of the crime levels sky
rocketing in the city.

He put this
out there and left it hanging, gauging their different reactions,
letting them run with it.

Some thought nothing of
it. “Coincidence” McKay said. “Sometimes you just get a rash of
these things.”

“
It’s a
revenge killing boss,” Campbell announced. “You know yourself,
these flats are full of immigrants, Eastern Europeans. One of
theirs gets popped or in this case carved up and they decide to
take matters into their own hands. It’s like the wild west down
there.”

DC Jones
snorted and shook her head.

“
What?”
Campbell asked.

“
Been reading
a bit too much Daily Mail again?”

“
I’m only
telling it like it is down there. It’s all very well you telling me
what I can and can’t say just cos you’ve done a degree in under
water basket weaving for lesbians but this is a murder
investigation.” Campbell replied, folding his arms and staring at
the table in an instant sulk.

“
Ok, that’s
the theory from the far right,” Burke interjected in an effort to
dissolve the tension and get the discussion back on topic. “Any of
you lily livered lefties want to throw something into the
mix?”

They didn’t. McKay and
Quinn looked particularly puzzled. More fool him to put them on the
spot.

“
In which
case I vote we proceed as normal and treat these as two separate
investigations and as mine is the casting vote, well, you get the
picture. That said, as DC Campbell is so intent on chasing up his
crack pipe theory…” He timed this so they would laugh. “I’ll
indulge him in it for the rest of the morning. He can find out
anything he can about garrottes and try to avoid going down the
line of the Spanish Inquisition, much as I know he’d love it to be
a Catholic conspiracy.” They laughed again at this and even
Campbell grudgingly smiled, though Quinn and McKay still looked
confused.

“
Any other
business? Well, back to the grindstone I guess.”

As the fourth generation
to take the reins at the family firm, an old Etonian and recipient
of The Law Award for Legal Personality of the Year 1992, Rupert
James Farquhar the third always felt he knew a thing or two about
duty. Responsibility for one’s position, the good name of the
family and the firm was a heavy burden but one he and his
forefathers had borne stoically through two world wars, a
depression and a slow but steady erosion of the older better ways.
Time was one knew one’s place in the world and accepted it with the
good grace God or whoever ran the bigger picture
intended.

But times were changing.
His son for instance did not inhabit the same world much less share
the same values or even the traditional family Christian
name.

Sarah had of
course insisted it was all old hat. No one was called Rupert
anymore she had informed him. He’d wanted to insist, wanted to put
his foot down but after 23 hours of labour he was just too tired to
argue and relented. And so the boy was called James. It would prove
to be the thin end of the wedge.

In truth if
he was properly honest with himself, and at a time like this he may
as well, it had all begun and ended the night he met her. Right
there and then he had lost every skirmish they would ever engage in
during the war of attrition that was their marriage.

It had been vanity all
along he knew. He had ignored the advice of family and friends. He
had allowed himself this error of judgement instead of listening to
advice, his conscience or reason of any kind.