The Blood of Crows (40 page)

Moffat and his friend were simple, their bodies shattered by the impact of a bullet at high speed and the accompanying pressure wave.

He was looking across at Alessandro Marchetti’s skull now, on its stainless-steel platter. It was largely complete, as was the jaw – apart from a few baby teeth. He took a sip of his coffee, feeling his age, trying not to think about the bigger picture. He was unhappy – no, uncomfortable – with the case the team was working on. Anderson had nearly been killed … or had he? The first bullet would have sliced through Moffat’s brain long before the sound could register, and the second man would have been dead before he heard it. Anderson had been tied to a tree, unable to move. The sniper could easily have taken him out with a clean shot.

But he hadn’t.

And whoever put Costello down the shaft wanted her to find the remains of the boy. But they also wanted her to get out, so she could report what she had found.

O’Hare had no intention of taking the bodies of Graham Hunter and Jason Purcie from their final resting places, but Wyngate had tracked down Hunter’s post mortem file and had got the photographs from a storage facility in Inverness. O’Hare himself had obtained the photographs of Purcie, shot on duty up on the Campsie Fells, within his present jurisdiction. Jason Purcie had been shot with a .303 bullet, probably from a Lee–Enfield rifle. There was a good selection of not-so-glossy black-and-white photographs, and the striations on the bullet were clear. He texted Matilda, who no doubt would have her eye glued to a microscope in the university building across the street.

How Hunter came to meet his fate on the hill was less clear. His body had not been found until four months after he was reported missing. O’Hare looked at the map, at where the body had been found, and the site of the higher bothy. O’Hare pondered Hunter’s erratic behaviour. Had he stumbled and fallen earlier on the way up to the bothy, maybe hit his head? The resulting slow bleed in the brain might have made him act so irrationally. Would Carruthers have recorded that in his journal? But that was nobody’s fault. If the diary was deemed so important, it must threaten to reveal something someone wanted hidden – something about the way Hunter died.

And O’Hare only had one conclusion to come to. Hunter had been murdered.

He put down his coffee and fiddled with the photographs of the remnants of Hunter’s skull, looking for evidence of foul play. Weeks under water, depredations by wildlife, then an old-fashioned scrub by a mortuary assistant, had left the bone fragments clean, shiny and difficult to fit. He tried moving the pictures about, using different focal lengths, different positions, but achieved nothing.

He heard Matilda come in, and looked up to see her smiling at him quizzically.

‘Why not come into my parlour?’ she asked. ‘And bring those pictures with you.’

3.45 P.M.

A few Bentleys had made it along the old road and up the drive without totally wrecking their suspension, and the
noise of a helicopter overhead heralded the arrival of somebody else important. Anderson looked around in amazement. He’d never been at a gathering like this before. Lots of the male guests were in kilts, and the women were struggling in unsuitably high heels.

An eldritch wailing sounded from the terrace where a piper was tuning up to serenade the assembled guests, and a bodhrán player was carefully letting the skin of his drum stretch in the sun, adjusting to the warmth.

Batten had phoned, telling him in a low voice that he had the all-important diary for 1996. ‘And the missing pages from 1977,’ he added jubilantly.

Anderson’s immediate response had been one of panic. ‘Now you’ve got all that, you’ll be a target. Say nothing to anyone,’ he warned.

But Batten knew the danger he was in. ‘I’m going back right now, on a crowded bus. I’ll read it when I get there,’ he answered, his voice quivering.

‘OK, but let me know when you get there safely.’

‘Good news?’ asked Costello, as he finished the call.

‘I think so. Mick has the missing diary.’ He looked up at the blazing blue sky, shutting his eyes against the sun. ‘I wish the weather would break. Then the case will break, and all will be well.’

‘I’d stay off the champers, if I was you.’

‘Who are we keeping an eye on?’

‘The glorious Saskia over there. She and her dad are the reason we are here, we just need to pin it together. What we really need is some reason to allow us to search her room, and take a look at that memory stick.’

‘Will we get a reason?’

‘Oh, I’ll get a reason all right!’

‘Aren’t you just a little worried that we’re out here on our own? Aren’t we being a wee bit foolhardy?’ But Anderson’s questions were almost playful. The weather was glorious, the champagne was cold, the salmon was fresh and he had his old sparring partner back. Just for that minute, Australia could take a running jump.

‘We’re not on our own. Howlett said he would send a few reinforcements. I’d say anybody not getting pissed on the Pimm’s and champers is one of ours.’ Costello frowned dourly at her orange juice. ‘So, that’ll be me, then,’ she muttered.

Another helicopter flew over the head of the glen, making people look up. It flew down over the river then started to lose height, ready to land.

‘Your friends are on the move,’ Anderson said. The Three Graces, all looking rather wonderful, were strolling arm in arm down towards the helipad.

‘They’re going to get their Louboutins dirty. It’ll take more than a few days’ worth of sunshine to dry out the bottom of that mire,’ Costello said, with a sour hint of Schadenfreude.

‘Has anybody tracked down Drew?’

‘Not yet. Jim Pettigrew’s been keeping an eye out for him all day.’

‘He’s obviously not well. Why can’t the bloody school get a specialist to look at him?’

‘Rhona says it’s complicated. Schools are worse than us for bureaucracy. Seems the Warden can’t take action without informing the parents. In this case, his parents don’t want to believe there’s anything wrong. Meanwhile,
Drew’s slowly going off his head. The school can’t just chuck him out; he has to be collected,’ said Costello, stealing a chocolate strawberry from a passing waitress.

‘I don’t think “slowly going off his head” quite describes it. He’s obviously very sick.’

‘Well, we can’t touch him. I think Pettigrew is waiting until he does something wrong before we can intervene.’

‘Do you think that’s why Howlett sent you hereinitially?’

‘No. That was Rhona’s misinterpretation. We’re here to look at Saskia and to see her father. End of term’s the only time her dad would be here, good time to catch him. I choose my words carefully.’

Anderson rolled his eyes. ‘So, apart from champagne and strawberries, do we have a game plan?’

‘Well, I don’t think Drew was one of the people who grabbed me last night. But he’s out there on his own, planning something. Who knows?’

‘Oh well, we’re in for a good night, then.’ Anderson cast his eyes around, looking for the extra security Howlett had promised.

He couldn’t see any.

3.50 P.M.

‘Now what we do is scan in the pictures of the bone fragments one by one, and press some buttons,’ said Matilda. ‘Good of them to be all together like this, after being in the water for so long.’

‘If someone smashed your skull with a blunt instrument,
Matilda, the
galea aponeurotica
, the tissues of your scalp, would hold the fragments together – apart from at the site of impact, where there would be a depression. And that depression would have a precise and recognizable pattern. They might not have been too hot on that in 1977.’

O’Hare looked around him, feeling a bit like a dinosaur. He had to admit, he was impressed by the set-up, and by the standard of contamination control, if nothing else. He and Matilda were both gowned, while more caps and gloves hung on hooks on the wall. And he could see a second row of hooks through the glass panel of the airlocked door. He wondered what was through there. One of the best DNA labs in the world, he guessed. The microscopic traces of Alessandro’s DNA would be in there, being ‘bred’ and duplicated until there was enough to get a profile.

‘And then we play at jigsaws.’ Matilda was using a mouse to move each skull fragment to the centre of the screen. A curtain of pixels fell and then rose. The bones were outlined in bright blue now. She went through them all – sphenoid, parietal, occipital, frontal, then the smaller fragments. ‘So, we now have a 3D image of each. And look what else we can do.’ She clicked on each piece, picking it up and dropping it into position on a skull facing to the left. Then she highlighted it and turned the image round.

‘Now we just slot in the right parietal,’ she said to herself. ‘Or what’s left of it.’

‘Forced trauma, weighted, slightly pointed,’ said O’Hare. ‘Definitely not self-inflicted. Hunter was hit with something.’

‘Or impaled on it as he fell.’ Matilda shrugged. ‘But now I’m going to show you the really big trick.’

Another few buttons, another few clicks, and the right parietal filled the whole screen, the broken edges of the bones jagged, like the outline of a blue glacier. The pixel curtain worked its way down again. Another few taps, and an image appeared.

‘The computer is giving you its best guess at what shape made that injury – something long, slim, pointed. The white band at the top is definite, the yellow band is predictive. Ring any bells? Recognize it?’

O’Hare peered more closely, recognizing a shape he had seen many times. ‘I think I do. Google a few ice axes for me, then let’s see what your wee machine will do.’

4.45 P.M.

Mulholland parked the Audi and went into the Blind Pig. He ordered a Coke and took it to the window seat, where huge open panels let in the fresh air. He could have done with a double vodka. But if he was caught driving with that inside him, not getting his stripes back would be the least of his problems.

He sat and thought about Lynda Osbourne, and the conversation he’d just had with her father. He could see where the problems lay. Adult rape victims found it hard to give the police enough to build a case. But a tearful child – with a father determined that someone should be nailed for what he’d done, and a cop with a paedophile in his sights – was going to say what she thought they wanted to hear. Lynda’s dad had handed Mulholland a photocopy, a little girl’s drawing of a wee stick figure in a dress, and a huge dark figure
looming over it. The drawing was shockingly graphic. Mulholland shut his eyes. If that was what had happened, would she even have wanted to remember clearly?

As their conversation went on, Osbourne had sounded less certain. He was nervous that Fairbairn had got out, but also seemed less sure of himself. Eventually, the reason emerged. ‘Lynda saw an old photo in the paper a week or so ago. The man who died in the fire at the old Apollo – she said it was the man who molested her.’

Billy Biggart. Who had been at the fair. Who had been a ‘big man’. Who was now dead.

And Fairbairn had now disappeared.

Mulholland tried not to think of Osbourne’s parting words. ‘DCI McAlpine and me, we did the right thing. Justice is justice. Does it matter who it’s for?’

They’d stitched up Skelpie Fairbairn.

And Anderson had been complicit. He had broken the law, betrayed his duty as a police officer to collect corroborated evidence and report it, not to pick and choose whatever was needed to make a case. Mulholland downed his drink. He would betray his own duty as a police officer if he picked and chose who to report for breaking the law.

And Anderson had.

The icing on the cake was that this would get him his promotion back.

6.00 P.M.

Batten sneaked into the bottom end of the lecture room and pulled out a seat. He had the diary, covered with a
copy of the
Sun
, and he had a bottle of Coke and a sausage roll. This was going to take a long time. When he returned, he had started with the pages torn from the now-missing 1977 diary, and had lost himself in the story.

The five men had gone out on Thursday the 6th of January, allowing two days to get up to the hill and two days to walk back out again. There was a lot of predictable stuff in the first few pages: they had been heading up to somewhere Batten couldn’t pronounce, and the weather was bad and was going to get worse. Carruthers was the voice of caution, constantly doubting if they should be going at all. The narrative implied Moffat was keen to press on, insisting there would be nothing they couldn’t cope with.

He flicked over a few pages of anecdotes about meals eaten and distances covered. On Friday the 7th Carruthers was writing light-heartedly about Purcie trying to light the Primus stove, and there was a slight undertone of Moffat needling Hunter. Then there was a gap of a few lines, and the handwriting changed, the tone changed:
Don’t really know what to write. Don’t really know what happened. Hunter has gone missing. He just upped and offed. It’s five a.m. and none of us are asleep, we are listening to the wind, knowing that he’s out there.

Batten turned back to the earlier part of the day before:
Moffat’s winding up Hunter.
He read the early pages again with more care, making notes and calculations as he went. The weather was bad, Moffat was the one who was keen to go higher
–
closer to the stack Hunter had fallen from. During the hike MacFadyean was striding out, Purcie and Hunter together at the back. Batten noticed the pattern in the writing: Moffat alone, MacFadyean and
Carruthers as a pair, Hunter and Purcie as a pair. Carruthers noticed more than once than Purcie and Hunter were close:
Made their beds next to each other. I’d never noticed the relationship before.

Batten read on, wondering about the relationship between the two young men. Homosexuality wasn’t illegal in 1977, but what would it have meant for two cops in Glasgow back then? If they were a couple, the bond between the two men was very close. Purcie would not have walked off that hill reflecting on the loss of a colleague, but in mourning for a lover.