Where the Bodies are Buried (6 page)

‘I told him he couldn’t find it on a map.’

‘Can find it on my sat nav tonight, though. Capletburn Drive, Gallowhaugh. Think it’s a light industrial estate. Appropriate.
Nobody lives in gangland: they just work there.’

‘No,’ Catherine disagreed. ‘Plenty of people have to live in gangland. Just none of the gangsters.’

They drove along the dual carriageway, heading east through Shawburn, grim tenements and post-war mid-rises on either side.
It all seemed so placid, so still, and at such times Catherine couldn’t help but wonder about the lives that were led behind
all those closed curtains.

Laura was glancing left and right with eager curiosity at what flanked her route. She had not long transferred from Lothian
and Borders, her command of both the local geography and local colour still in its rudimentary stages.

‘You been to Gallowhaugh before?’ Catherine asked her.

‘No. What’s it like?’

‘You ever come across a place that looks really depressing and run down, then you hear people say it’s a real shame what’s
happened to it, because it used to be so much better?’

‘Aye. I grew up in one.’

‘Well, nobody says that about Gallowhaugh. It was always rough as a crab’s arse. Apache territory for decades.’

Laura had programmed the address into her sat nav, but there was no need for precision navigation to isolate the locus. Never
mind GPS systems, there was so much illumination around the spot that it was probably visible to the naked eye from space.
The place was lit up like Blackpool, the oscillations of blue lights on the tops of police cars sparkling amidst the white
glow of portable floods. The crappy wee
sixties-built parade of shops must never have looked so interesting, especially from the rear, where the action appeared to
be. The floodlights were set up in a lane running parallel to the parade, backing on to a quadrant of converted garages that
constituted the light industrial estate Laura had referred to.

The lane was wide enough for a single vehicle, even if, as was probable, that single vehicle happened to be a bin lorry. A
brick wall separated it from the industrial units, while to the south, on the Shawburn Road side, the shops’ back doors opened
directly on to the thoroughfare. It ran roughly east–west for a hundred and fifty yards, exits either end, no direct access
to the converted garages unless you had a ladder.

Laura parked across the road from the Capletburn Drive end of the lane, having carefully steered her vehicle around the two
squad cars that were blocking access from the main road through Gallowhaugh. There were two uniformed officers further securing
the entrance, albeit crowd control was not going to be a problem up a back alley in the early hours of the morning. There
was one male and one female officer. The latter was just a young girl, not long in the job. She was trying to look professional
and composed, and earning pass marks from Catherine, who was sharp enough to recognise the tear-streaks on her face. She’d
been there herself, once upon a time. You learned to put on your game face, especially as a female officer, hiding your true
responses, scared that people would think you couldn’t handle it. Then after a while, you no longer felt a response worth
hiding, and you realised that what you should have been scared of was discovering just how much you
could
handle.

‘First cold one?’ Catherine asked her, offering an inviting smile.

She responded with a shy nod.

‘Not exactly vanilla,’ her older colleague added by way of support and explanation. ‘She’s doing fine. I’m PC Jim Keeney,
by the way. My colleague’s PC Jacqui Malone.’

‘I’m Detective Superintendent McLeod. This is DI Geddes. Men in white here yet?’

‘Ten minutes ahead of you,’ Keeney reported.

‘Who is it? Cal O’Shea?’

‘Couldn’t tell you, ma’am.’

‘Short guy, looks a bit like a corpse?’

‘I’d really rather not—’

‘Was he eating?’

PC Malone nodded, looking queasy at the thought. ‘Mars bar. Don’t know how anyone could.’

‘No, me neither, but that’ll be Cal.’

Catherine saw Bill Raeside approach from further down the lane, silhouetted theatrically against the lights in a tableau of
dramatic portent that seemed to be straining the bounds of incongruity. Raeside’s presence usually served as a comforting
reassurance that nothing either dramatic or portentous was going to happen, and that if it ever did, he’d be an incidental
background detail rather than bathed in light at the centre of the picture.

She had often heard Raeside referred to as ‘part of the furniture’ in CID, which she took to indicate both his longevity and
the apparent absence of career momentum. The piece of furniture he made her think of was a slightly careworn but particularly
comfy old couch. He was a human comfort zone: dependable, predictable and unflappable, a safe pair of hands but not exactly
the lateral thinker who could make a crucial connection, or the driving force whose infectious enthusiasm could reinvigorate
a flagging investigation. His easy-going (some would say over-easy-going) nature meant he wasn’t resentful at being overtaken
on the career ladder, and he never had a problem taking orders from younger officers, male or female. She’d heard it uncharitably
suggested that he’d be happy taking orders from a nine-year-old as long as it meant he didn’t need to make a decision, but
from what Catherine could see, he was just a guy who liked doing his job and didn’t want that job to change. Poor soul had
lost his wife to cancer a couple of years back, and a few people had expected him to take an early retirement package, but
many that knew him were unsurprised when he stayed on. With his kids having grown up and left home, he had very little else,
apart from an Alsatian dog named Fritz, to keep him company.

It was serendipitous that he’d been the first available CID officer on scene, as this was the ideal kind of job for him: no
initiative required, just calm management of the situation until superior officers took charge.

‘Guy from the Chinese takeaway found the body about quarter to one,’ Raeside said, escorting Catherine and Laura along the
lane on quiet feet, like it was a church and he an usher. They were still twenty yards away, but Catherine thought she could
feel the heat from the lamps, supplementing what was already a muggy August night.

‘He was emptying his bins, getting ready to lock up for the night. Thought it was a jakey dossing down. Turned out it was
a bigger sleep than that. I was in the area, so I’ve been here since about fifteen minutes after the initial call. I IDed
the guy right away. That’s why I sent it up the chain. This is no jakey. Aftershocks could be seismic.’

‘Who’s the lucky winner?’

Raeside stopped next to a roller-shuttered rear doorway and turned to face Catherine.

‘One James McDiarmid, esquire.’

‘As in James McDiarmid, first officer of the Fallside Fleet?’

‘If Gallowhaugh’s own Patrick Steel is the admiral, aye.’

‘You absolutely positive?’ Catherine asked, requiring confirmation before she let her mind begin to race.

‘I’ve been lifting him since he was in short trousers, and he was a bam even then. He’s not looking like his passport photie,
I’ll grant you, but it’s him, no question whatsoever: James Allan McDiarmid. Aka Jyzer, aka Jai.’

‘Nobody in Glasgow gets called Jimmy any more, eh?’ Laura asked.

‘It doesn’t appear to be on-trend these days,’ Catherine replied. ‘Our apologies. It’s a scunner when a place doesn’t live
up to all the things you’ve heard about it. I’ll never forget how crestfallen I was the first time I went to Edinburgh and
I never got to meet Harry Lauder.’

‘He used to be known as Jammy when he was younger,’ Raeside added, resuming progress along the lane. ‘Wasnae very jammy tonight,
by the nick of him.’

Catherine was only a few yards from seeing for herself. The floods were trained on a concrete enclosure for housing the parade’s
bins, a sour scent of rotting vegetables wafting on the warm air. She was grateful for the brightness of the lights, which
always gave an artificially clinical appearance to a corpse, like she was already seeing it on a slab. The true horror was
always in the context: death where there should be life, the puddle of blood on the living-room carpet, the body in the long
grass next to the swing park. Lit up harshly, a murder scene looked like a murder scene, a place of work for Catherine, the
start of a new journey.

Her view of the locus was obscured by two Forensics personnel in white oversuits. One of them alerted the other to her approach
with a slight nod and the second turned around, giving her a drily ironic grin, the closest thing to a formal greeting she
could expect under the
circumstances. It was, of course, Cal O’Shea, accompanied by Aileen Bruce, and Cal was, of course, chewing.

There was once a time when Catherine would have considered it unthinkable for anybody to eat in the presence of a corpse,
in or out of a pathology lab, but she had become used to the sight of Cal munching his way through snacks and sandwiches as
he updated her on his findings. He was shorter than her by a good three inches and built like a whippet, yet he always seemed
to be hungry. Must be the permanent motion, she reasoned. He was never still, a mercurial, restless energy about him that
presumably burned up a lot of fuel. Either that or he had a whole colony of tapeworms.

Cal took a step to the side, away from Aileen, and thus revealed the main attraction.

‘Some state for one guy, eh?’ Cal suggested.

‘That your professional assessment?’

‘No. Speaking as a doctor, I have to confess I fear the worst.’

McDiarmid was lying in a heap between two bins, like another piece of trash waiting to be disposed of. Catherine had often
taken an odd kind of solace from considering her job analogous with that of the binmen in Glasgow. No matter how hard you
worked, there was always more waiting for you to clear up when you went back in the next day. That thought could sometimes
wear her down with fears that her efforts were futile, but then she’d remember that if nobody showed up to do her job, or
the binmen’s, the whole city would become choked with garbage, poison and disease.

McDiarmid’s legs were splayed beneath him like a marionette at rest. He looked so much smaller than Catherine remembered,
devoid of the energy and latent aggression that must have amplified the impact of his presence. She thought of how tiny her
boys always looked when they were sleeping compared to when they were bouncing off the walls during the day, then promptly
tried to banish the image. Not here, not now.

Too late.

Have you seen a dead body?

Fraser’s voice got into her head before she could stop it, in the same way that the worst possible thing you might say could
sometimes leap to mind in a sensitive situation. She had read that certain mechanisms of the brain could not distinguish between
positive and negative, so the very awareness of what it was she didn’t want to think about would
in fact provide the impulse that conjured it up. This scene was everything she wanted to protect her boys from, everything
she didn’t want them to know about the world and, most particularly, about herself.

‘Single shot to the forehead,’ Cal told her. ‘Close-range, execution-style, resulting in an exit wound you really don’t want
to see. No ligature marks or other evidence of restraint but plenty of facial injuries and defensive bruising to the forearms.
He had the resistance beaten out of him instead, so he’d sit nice for the man with the gun.’

‘I’m guessing very little blood?’ Catherine suggested. ‘Indicative that they had their party elsewhere and just dumped the
empty back here when they were finished.’

‘Spookily prescient, Superintendent McLeod. As ever.’

Cal liked to remark that Catherine ‘creeped him out’ with certain of her deductions, and tended to sound like he was only
half-joking when he did so. He wasn’t referring to Holmesian leaps of logic or an ability to observe what others had missed,
but the insights she often gleaned merely from imagining the view from inside the killer’s head. Catherine had subsequently
made a point of playing up to this, endeavouring to turn a half-joke into a full joke. It seemed the best way of covering
up the fact that she was a little uncomfortable about Cal alluding to her having such a facility. A guy who spent all day
around dead people finding
you
creepy was wisest written off as a joke. The other implications were best not dwelt upon.

‘Hardly,’ she replied. ‘You don’t light a guy up on a dry summer’s night around the back of a shopping parade that houses
two takeaways and a late-night supermarket. Somebody’s bound to notice something, even in Gallowhaugh.’

‘And yet by the same token, even abandoning the body here exposes the perpetrator to a measure of risk. Are we to ascertain
that there was some benefit or significance accruing from the choice of location?’ Cal was speaking rhetorically, familiarly
hamming up the professorial patter as though to patronise the daft polis.

‘He owns the tanning salon next door to the Chinese,’ said Raeside. ‘He was dumped next to his own bin.’

‘Ah, so the deceased was in the health and leisure industry?’

‘Tangentially,’ Raeside replied. ‘More the pharmaceutical end. The salon was a money-laundering front. Punters pay cash, you
inflate the number of punters, suddenly your drug takings are legit.’

‘You’re right, of course, Cal,’ said Catherine. ‘They could have
dumped him anywhere. Burnt him, buried him, made sure he was never found. Instead they left him round the back of his own
premises, like rubbish for the borough men to lift.’

‘You know,’ Cal observed, ‘there are a select few semiologists who might be able to decode some kind of message in that.’

This is Glesca, Catherine thought. We don’t do subtle.

‘Aye,’ said Raeside. ‘Somebody’s telling Paddy Steel his tea’s oot.’

‘Begging the question, Bill, given that a blind man could see this is gang-related, when you sent this up the chain, why didn’t
you take it to Locust?’