The Book of Souls (The Inspector McLean Mysteries) (34 page)

McLean stood in the doorway of the CID room, looking out over the collection of empty desks. Grumpy Bob hunched over a printout, lines of red ink scrawled through where he'd eliminated people from his investigation. He put down the phone and stretched back in his chair, protests coming from both spine and seat.

'Finished, near as dammit.' He dropped his pen down on the sheet of paper, rubbed at tired eyes. 'Ritchie's gone to the bank to meet up with their HR person. Said they'd go in special. But we've pretty much covered everyone she knew.'

McLean looked over in the direction of the whiteboard wall, where Grumpy Bob had nodded. The photograph of Trisha Lubkin had been tacked up alongside Kate McKenzie and Audrey Carpenter, a little further apart than the two of them. He had little doubt that soon she'd be moving much closer. They really ought to have moved everything to a proper incident room by now, if there was such a thing going spare in the station. And it wouldn't be long before top brass started making unhelpful suggestions. If they backed it up with a promise of more manpower, he'd be the last to complain.

'Well, there's really not a lot more we can do right now,' he said, glancing at his watch and wondering where the day had gone. 'CCTV on the brae's too crap to lift number plates, and there's nothing as useful as a car stopping to pick up a pedestrian anyway. No-one saw anything, no-one heard anything. I hate feeling so bloody useless.'

'We'll get him, sir.'

McLean looked at his old friend, noticing that what he hadn't said was 'we'll find her.' He knew how to read the signs too, and didn't like what they said either.

'Bugger this, Bob. Let's go to the pub.'

~~~~

49

With hindsight, it had perhaps been a mistake drinking with Grumpy Bob. They'd not managed to persuade anyone else to come along; too many sore heads after hogmanay. So it had been just the two of them, revisiting old haunts and falling into bad old habits. The kebab had tasted good at one in the morning; well, they always did. Now though, his mouth felt like some small creature had crawled into it, given birth to a horde of tiny demons, and then died.

The bedside clock said half past six. Today he was meant to be having the day off, but that was before Trisha Lubkin had gone missing. Sighing, he rolled over, sitting up on the side of the bed. Rubbed at his scratchy chin. Might as well get up, then.

As he stood in the shower, letting the hot water pummel some life into him, McLean tried to massage the thickness out of his head that was more due to lack of sleep than anything else. All things considered, he didn't feel too bad. Probably because he and Grumpy Bob had only been on the beer. No late night ramble back to the flat to murder a bottle of whisky until the wee small hours. And there was only so much of the gassy pish they tried to call ale in half of the city's pubs that you could drink in an evening before you exploded.

In the kitchen, Mrs McCutcheon's cat stared at him from her perch on the counter beside the stove as if to say 'what time do you think this is to be up and about?' He ignored it, making coffee as strong as he could stomach, taking his time over cornflakes and toast. If he ever remembered to actually shop for food, he might have had bacon and eggs for breakfast.

It occurred to him as he filled his mug for the second time that he should have been more hurried. A woman missing, presumed kidnapped by a copy-cat killer. Normally he'd have been at his desk within minutes of waking. Well, maybe not minutes, now he no longer lived within walking distance of the station. But niceties like coffee and breakfast had never really bothered him before. They were things to pick up on the way, consume whilst working. Now he was taking his time. Killing time. Waiting.

And when the phone rang five minutes later, he knew why.

'They've found a body, sir. Up in the hills near the A7. Place called Nettlingflat.' DS Ritchie sounded like she should have joined him and Grumpy Bob on their pub crawl.

'Trisha Lubkin,' McLean said.

'It's only just come in, sir. We've not had an ID yet.'

'It's her, Ritchie. I'm sorry.'.

'I'm just heading out there. You want DS Laird on it too? I know it's your day off, sir.'

'No, don't bother Grumpy Bob.' Judging by the way he'd been singing just five hours earlier, the detective sergeant wouldn't be much use anyway. 'Swing past here on your way. I'll take the lead on this one.'

He hung up, placed the phone down on the kitchen table and stared at the cat. It stared back at him, unblinking as he drank his coffee and waited.

*

In summer, the A7 was a wonderful road for a leisurely drive. It cut south over the Midlothian plain, bisecting the Moorfoot hills on its way down to the border towns. Reiver country. Large stretches of it were open to moorland on either side, barely a tree in sight to block the view. Or the wind.

In winter, when the snows came, it was a complete pig. Not aided by the fact that the pool car DS Ritchie had liberated was in dire need of a new set of front tyres. At least the heater worked, demisting the windscreen and giving them a clear view of the snowplough gritting truck as it widened the single-lane track already cut through the drifts. They still missed the signpost the first time, having to turn around in Heriot and head back. A police Land Rover indicating ahead of them showed the way, and they slithered up a treacherously steep track to a collection of cottages clustered around rusty corrugated-iron clad sheds and a large farmhouse.

Somehow the SOC transit van had made it up the track, along with two squad cars. McLean showed his warrant card to the uniform who'd drawn the short straw and was busy marking out the perimeter of the crime scene with police tape.

'Where's the action, constable?' He shivered as the wind cut through his heavy coat, jacket, shirt and skin, heading straight for the bones. The constable didn't say anything in reply, perhaps reasoning that to open his mouth would mean to lose valuable body heat. Instead, he nodded in the direction of the largest of the cottages, up a short rise. At least he had a hat on, which was more than McLean had thought to bring.

The snow on the bank had been thoroughly trampled. At the top, he could see that it formed the edge of  a narrow burn. Icicles hung from snow-capped rocks in the gently trickling flow, and a little way upstream, where the farm track crossed a deep-sided cutting, an old stone bridge arched over still water. A huddle of bodies clustered around the edge, keeping close for warmth. As he approached, one of them turned, revealing the be-scarfed and hooded form of Angus Cadwallader.

'Ah, Tony. I'd wish you a happy new year, but this doesn't seem the appropriate place.'

McLean nodded his agreement. 'What've we got?'

'Mrs Milner in the cottage called us about seven this morning, sir.' McLean recognised the young constable who had shown him Audrey Carpenter's body laid out just below the reservoir not five miles from here. Talk about a baptism of fire. 'She lets her dogs out every morning when she gets up. Normally they come in again after five minutes, get their breakfast. Only today they wouldn't come when she called. She found them down here. And this.'

McLean looked down at where the young constable was pointing. Ice rimed the edge of the water, pooled into a natural pond under the bridge, and through it, piercing it, a naked body was caught in a frozen moment of agony. His initial reaction was one of gut-tearing horror, even though he knew that the woman had been dead before she'd been put there. Something about being trapped under ice struck a chord of fear in him as primal as it was irrational. She lay face-upward, her hair splayed out around her head like a halo and then frozen in place as the ice re-formed around her. The rest of her body was partially obscured, but he could see that she was naked. And he didn't need a photograph to confirm her identity. He'd known all along.

~~~~

50

'Can't have been in the ice more than a couple of hours. She's barely started to freeze herself.'

McLean stood in the clinical, clean setting of the city mortuary as Angus Cadwallader began his initial examination of the dead body. Trisha Lubkin looked even colder laid out on the stainless steel table than she had done in the ice. Only her red hair gave her any colour, and even that looked dead. The gash that ran from ear to ear under her chin was pale, washed clean by the man who had killed her.

'Can you hazard a time of death?'

Cadwallader grimaced. 'Difficult. She'd certainly been dead enough for her internal organs to cool to ambient temperature. But that was hovering around zero anyway, so there's none of the other indicators. Might as well have put her in one of those drawers.' He nodded towards the lines of chill cabinets and their grim contents.

'But you're going to give it a shot, eh?' McLean tried a grin for his old friend, unsure whether he managed to pull it off. He certainly didn't feel all that cheerful.

'I have to hedge my bets, Tony. But between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. Unless she was kept somewhere really cold after death. You know, like in a frozen stream. But if we're working on the assumption this was the same man as killed Kate McKenzie and Audrey Carpenter, well, they'd only been dead about twelve hours when we found them.'

'Cause of death?'

'Give me time. But again, it looks like the cut to the neck. Severed pretty much everything down to the vertebrae. She'd have bled out fast, death would've been quick.'

Cadwallader continued his examination, peering closely at Trisha Lubkin's hands, her fingers. He used a slim tool to scrape away cells from under her nails, handing the samples to the silent form of Tracy, his assistant. Slowly he worked his way around her body, coming finally to her head. McLean stood still, watching and waiting for whatever tiny clues the dead woman might yield up. There was really nothing else he could do.

'This is interesting.' Cadwallader peered closely at Trisha's forehead. 'Tracy, the magnifier please. And dig out the x-ray of her skull. Frontal.'

He took the proffered glass and bent over the body, then went over to the x-ray light box when Tracy had sorted out the correct sheet. McLean followed, the faintest glimmer of hope in him at whatever it was the pathologist had found.

'There's very slight bruising to her forehead.' Cadwallader pointed to an indistinct area just above the point between the eye sockets on the x-ray. McLean couldn't make out anything. 'And here we can see tiny microfractures in the bone around her orbits and sinus cavity.'

'So she banged her head on something?'

'Not exactly, no.' Cadwallader went back to the body laid out on the slab, pointed a latex-gloved hand at the points as he spoke. 'There's ligature marks on her wrists and ankles. She was tied up for quite a while. If she'd fallen or been pushed over, even whilst tied up, there'd be bruising somewhere else. A hip maybe, a shoulder. I'd be surprised if her nose wasn't broken. But there's nothing.'

'So what are you suggesting?'

'You'll be familiar with the term 'Glasgow Kiss.' Cadwallader smiled.

'She headbutted her assailant?'

'Not long before she died. And quite hard, too. If her own damage is anything to go by, her killer's going to be sporting a right shiner. I'd be surprised if he didn't have to see a doctor about it.' The pathologist turned back to his subject, a warmth coming into his voice as he addressed her. 'It's a shame it didn't save you, but well done my dear.'

*

'You busy, constable?'

McLean stuck his head around the door into the CID room, noticing as he did that the photograph of Trisha Lubkin had been moved on the whiteboard. Now she stood together with her fellow victims, united by violent and untimely death.

'That depends on who's looking for me sir.' DC MacBride looked up from his computer and stifled a yawn.

'Don't joke about it. You might prefer to be working the drugs case right now.'

'Why, sir? What do you want done?'

'I want you to get in touch with all the hospitals and GP surgeries in the district. If you can find any, get some uniform to help. Find out who's been in for a broken nose in the last four days.'