Still Life Page 2

  A hurt look sprang into his eyes. ‘Have I done something to upset you?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’ She hoped that would do it, but no. He had to persist.

  ‘Then what is it? I don’t want us to keep secrets from each other.’

  Karen pushed herself more upright on the feather pillows. She didn’t want to discuss this in a slouch. ‘Tomorrow morning, the man who killed Phil is being released from prison. I want to be there.’

  ‘What are you planning?’ Anxiety vibrated from Hamish as if he were a freshly struck tuning fork.

  ‘Nothing. I want to see where he’s living, that’s all.’ Now she’d said more than she intended. ‘And I don’t want company.’

  ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

  Before she could respond, Karen’s work mobile rang. Automatically, she reached for it on the bedside table. ‘DCI Pirie, Historic Cases Unit,’ she said.

  ‘Good morning, DCI Pirie. This is Sergeant Pollock from Barrack Street in Perth. We’ve got a walk-in this morning that I think is more up your street than mine. Any chance you could come up and help us reach a decision?’

  Karen felt a familiar prickle of interest and turned away from Hamish. ‘Could you give me a wee bit more to go on?’

  ‘Well, it’s like this.’ He spoke slowly, keen to make sure he got his points across. ‘A member of the public came in and made a report at the bar. Her sister died in an RTA a few weeks ago and she’s just getting round to sorting out the deceased’s house. There was a camper van in the garage that the woman says definitely didn’t belong to her sister. She took a look inside and there’s skeletonised human remains in the back of the van. Now, the fact that they’re skeletonised says cold case to me and my boss. So we thought we’d cut to the chase and get you involved from the start.’

  ‘Are you telling me you’ve not already got a team on site?’

  A pause. ‘We’re a bit stretched today, to be honest. We’ve got a royal visit, not to mention an armed robbery at a club last night.’

  Karen sighed. ‘And a skeleton isn’t time-sensitive, right?’

  ‘Well, it’s not going anywhere, is it?’

  In spite of her irritation at the lack of urgency, Karen was eager to be involved from the start. She never lost sight of the lives devastated by the cases she found herself investigating. But that didn’t mean she didn’t get a buzz at the thought of a new case to unravel, a mystery to explain, an aching gap in some strangers’ lives to fill with answers. ‘We’ll meet you at the house,’ she said. ‘Ping the address to my colleague.’ She ended the call and was about to make another when Hamish put a hand on her arm.

  ‘You’re not going to work?’

  ‘It’s a new case that looks like a cold case. I need to attend the scene.’

  Hamish sighed and fell back on his pillows. ‘I can’t compete with the dead.’

  She turned and kissed him. ‘It’s not a competition, it’s an obligation.’ And then she was out of bed, self-conscious in her nakedness. ‘I’ll have a shower then I’ll be out of your way.’

  In the bathroom, she called her bagman, Detective Constable Jason Murray. ‘Morning, Jason. Sorry to screw up your Sunday but we’ve got a new case. Meet me at the office in twenty minutes.’

  ‘OK, we going anywhere interesting?’

  ‘Perth.’

  ‘Suspicious death?’

  ‘Correct. We don’t get many of those in the petty bourgeois capital of Scotland.’

  3

  North Woodlands Crescent was a short drive from one of the big roundabouts that interrupted the dual carriageways sweeping round Perth, carrying traffic to more urgent destinations in all four points of the compass. Substantial whitewashed bungalows sat on their individual plots behind sturdy evergreen hedges trimmed to uniform heights. It had the air of a street determined that nothing should disturb its equilibrium. Nobody here would be having to call the police about rowdy teenagers doing drugs, or domestic disputes that spilled out beyond trim front doors, or joyriding car thieves doing wheelies on the litter-free streets.

  ‘This is the kind of place people get totally outraged about a murder on their doorstep,’ Jason remarked, pulling into the kerb behind a marked patrol car. ‘Like it’s a personal insult.’

  ‘We don’t know that it’s a murder yet,’ Karen said.

  ‘Fair enough, boss. But tucking a body away in the garage isn’t how most people react to natural causes.’

  He was, she thought, definitely becoming both more insightful and more confident. Karen allowed herself a moment’s pride. Supporting Jason to be the best he could be was a cause Phil had recruited her to. Slowly but surely, the Mint was getting there. She grinned. ‘I don’t know. It is Perth, after all. Could be death to your social standing to admit to having a body in the boot.’

  A uniformed sergeant emerged from the patrol car and raised a hand in greeting. He waited for them to approach then said, ‘DCI Pirie? I’m Sergeant Pollock. We spoke on the phone.’

  ‘Still no detectives on the scene? Or CSI?’ Obviously they did things differently in Perth.

  ‘I spoke to my inspector, he thought we should wait to see what you thought. It’s not like there’s going to be a hot pursuit or anything.’

  ‘It might have been an idea to get a forensics team out. It doesn’t matter whose case it ends up as, we’re going to need a full sweep of the scene.’ Karen spoke mildly but Pollock caught her grim expression.

  ‘Do you want to do that first, then? Before you take a look?’

  ‘Call them. While we’re waiting for them to get here, DC Murray and I will get suited up and assess the scene. And then we’ll want to talk to the woman who made the discovery. Is she down at the station?’

  Pollock shook his head. ‘We let her go home. She was pretty shaken up, you know? I thought she’d be better in her own house, rather than here or sitting in an interview room for who knows how long.’

  It wasn’t what Karen would have done, but she was getting the message that Barrack Street definitely wasn’t on the same page as the Historic Cases Unit. She hoped their response to live cases was more by the book. ‘What’s the name of the householder?’

  ‘Susan Leitch. She’s the one who was killed in the RTA. The woman who made the discovery was her sister, Stella. Also Leitch. Neither of them’s got any previous, not even a speeder.’

  Ten minutes later, clad in rustling Tyvek and blue plastic shoe covers, Karen and Jason made their way through the front door and down the bland carpet of the hallway into a tidy kitchen. Karen clocked the assortment of oils and spices by the hob, the stoneware jar of utensils and a row of cookbooks with dinged corners and cracked spines. It looked like a place where cooking actually happened. In the far wall, a solid door opened on to a double garage. Their eyes were drawn to the half-uncovered VW classic camper van, but Karen forced herself to take a look around the rest of the space. First impressions were often a reliable indicator when things were out of kilter.

  A rack for two bikes was fixed to one wall but only one bike hung there, a sturdy mountain bike with fat tyres and a mount for an electric motor. On the floor below it, the motor was plugged into a charger. Next to the bike rack was a board that held an array of tools that Karen assumed were the sort of thing you needed if you were going to take care of your own bike, rather than wheel it round to the local bike shop every time your brakes squeaked.

  ‘You know anything about bikes, Jason?’ she asked, without much hope.

  ‘Only the kind with engines, boss.’

  On the opposite wall there was a workbench with an assortment of tools for minor DIY and maintenance – screwdrivers, adjustable wrenches, a couple of hammers and a hacksaw. Neatly stacked next to them, half a dozen paint tins, clearly partly used. By the looks of things, Susan Leitch was a well-organised woman. None of the signs of
chaotic behaviour that often characterised domestic crime scenes. If that was what this was.

  Karen crossed to the camper van, noting that the one tyre she could see was flat and looked as if it had been like that for a long time, to judge by the distressed state of the rubber. She opened the driver’s door with as little contact as pos­sible. Stella Leitch had doubtless destroyed any fingermarks there might have been, but it never hurt to follow forensic protocols. Karen stuck her head in and sniffed. There was a faint smell of musty decay, but not the overwhelming stench produced by a rotting corpse. She noticed the passenger window was open an inch or two, which, coupled with the passage of time, would account for that absence. Keys in the ignition still.

  She peered over the seat but couldn’t see much of the main cabin. ‘I’ll have to go in,’ she said, preparing to clamber on to the driver’s seat.

  ‘There’s a side door that lets you in, boss,’ Jason pointed out. ‘Maybe it’s unlocked too?’

  Karen backed out. ‘We should wait for the CSI team. But the sister’s already disturbed the cover.’ She considered for a moment. ‘Get your phone out and take pics all round the van, so we’ve got a record of how it was mostly left before the sister shifted it. And don’t forget the number plate.’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ Jason said. ‘At least, not on the front.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Karen said, moving to the rear of the vehicle and carefully lifting the tarpaulin. ‘Same on the back. Somebody was thinking this through. OK, on you go, get the rest of the pics done.’

  She stepped back and waited. A score of clicks later, she gingerly moved the tarpaulin away from the side door and tried the handle. It opened easily, sliding back on well-oiled runners.

  On the floor of the van lay a disarticulated collection of bones, the skull with its corona of shed dark hair towards the front end, the scatter of tarsals and phalanges pointing towards the rear. Maggot pupae cases, like macabre Coco Pops, were scattered everywhere around and among the bones, evidence of why the body was stripped clean of flesh. It looked as if the victim had fallen or been placed on their side. What was clear from the first glance was that ‘victim’ was the right word. Across the back of the skull was the jagged crack of an obvious depressed fracture. Someone or something had hit this person very hard indeed.

  The incongruity of the human remains was made more poignant by the tidiness of the rest of the van. Everything was stowed in its proper place; books on a shelf, clothes in slatted plastic boxes in an alcove, artist’s paints and brushes in a custom-made caddy. A few watercolours of lochs and mountains were tacked on the front of a cupboard. To Karen’s untrained eye, they looked like the kind of generic painting stocked by every Highland craft shop she’d ever been in.

  She withdrew her head from the van. ‘We definitely need CSI. And River.’

  Back at the car, stripped of her protective suit, Karen made the call. Fortunately, Dr River Wilde was in her university office in Dundee rather than the lab or the lecture theatre. Karen briefed her on their discovery. ‘Can you free yourself up for a wee trip to Perth?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure, these bones aren’t going anywhere. I’ll be with you within the hour.’

  Reassured that the remains in the VW were in the best hands, Karen brought Pollock up to speed. ‘You’ll probably want to get some PCs up here to guard the scene, keep the nosy neighbours at arm’s length.’

  ‘Not to mention the bloody citizen journalists,’ Pollock grumbled.

  ‘And ask the techs whether they can find the VIN. Somebody’s removed the number plates, but they might not have known to erase the identification number. Even if they tried, the lab has ways of revealing it. Once the CSIs have done, Dr Wilde will want the remains uplifted to her mortuary in Dundee,’ Karen continued. ‘She’ll liaise with your officers on that. We’re off now to talk to the sister. Thanks for bringing us in so early. That way, nothing gets lost in the cracks of a handover.’

  ‘Aye, well, it’s not often we get something that’s so obviously a cold case from the get-go. Let me know if there’s anything you need back-up on.’

  As they headed for Stella Leitch’s address, Jason said, ‘This is a funny one. Why would you keep a body in your garage?’

  ‘River always says that murder’s easy. It’s getting rid of the body that’s hard. It looks like Susan Leitch hadn’t figured out what to do with the second part of the deal.’

  ‘I get that, boss. But this is just bones now. Could you not smash them up with a hammer and take a wee bag at a time down to the beach and chuck them in the sea?’

  ‘It’d be worth a try, I suppose. But you’d have to be pretty cold-blooded to do that. Especially if the person you’d killed was somebody close to you. Even serious gangsters employ people to do their body disposal for them. They call them “the cleaners”.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  Karen shook her head. ‘Wish I was, Jason. It’s apparently considered a skilled operation. There was a case a few years ago, down in England, where bits of a body kept turning up all over the countryside. I think by the end there were body parts discovered in five or six different force areas. They eventually did nail the guy responsible, but the full story didn’t come out in court. Apparently the organised crime gang responsible for the murder had fallen out with their regular cleaner because they thought he was charging too much. So one of the eejits in their gang thought, “How hard can it be?” and took on the job for a fraction of the fee. And it turned out he was rubbish at it. Rubbish to the tune of fourteen years inside.’

  ‘You’re not serious? How d’you know that?’

  ‘Because it was one of River’s cases. When they went to the pub afterwards to celebrate the guilty verdict, one of the serious crime squad guys told her the back story.’

  Jason shook his head. ‘How do you get a job like that?’

  ‘I don’t think they recruit at careers fairs,’ Karen said drily. ‘I’m guessing Susan Leitch discovered that getting rid of the body in your VW wasn’t as easy as she thought.’

  4

  Monday, 17 February 2020

  It was barely half past six in the morning, but already the traffic heading into Edinburgh on the A71 artery was sclerotic. Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie was glad to be travelling in the opposite direction, moving steadily if not swiftly. She’d worked her way across the waking city to the background murmur of a playlist as familiar as the streets themselves. Music had never been that big a deal for her, but when she’d lived with Phil, he’d gently eased her into his preferences. Now, when she was off duty and didn’t have to keep one ear on the radio, she always returned to the playlist he’d imported to her phone. Elbow, Snow Patrol, Franz Ferdinand. The lyrics had made little impression over the years, but she liked to hum along to the tunes.

  Out of habit, she flicked glances to either side as she drove, alert to anything out of place. The houses on her left looked substantial, but that was an illusion. In reality, they were blocks of four flats, two up and two down, built when social housing was a public good taken for granted. They’d been sold off years before, the clue to their private status being the different colours and styles of front doors. Karen didn’t begrudge their occupiers the chance to own their own homes; what she minded was the politicians’ failure to replace what they’d sold off. She hoped they saw the city’s growing homeless population as a reproach, but mostly doubted it.

  At a break in the row of houses, she turned left into a narrow roadway lined with thick hedges, their winter foliage copper brown. Straight ahead, a modern frontage, all bulletproof glass flanked by solid pillars and cement blocks designed to look like dressed sandstone. A casual observer might have taken it for the offices of a minor insurance company except that where the logo should have been, bold black letters read ‘HMP EDINBURGH’. A second look, and the high concrete wall stretching far into the darkness w
ould have hammered home what the acronym stood for – Her Majesty’s Prison.

  Karen swung left into the car park. She was early enough that the slot she’d previously identified as perfect for her needs was still empty. She was driving her personal car this morning. Nobody would take her five-year-old Nissan Juke for a police car, not even an undercover one. Phil had always taken the piss out of her for her choice of wheels. ‘The Nissan Joke,’ he’d dubbed it. But this morning, it was the perfect camouflage.

  As the minutes ticked past, a trickle of cars turned into a stream. Some were clearly prison staff, driving round to their designated parking zone. Others stopped near Karen, there for the same reason if not the same purpose. Some of the drivers and passengers stepped out into the cold morning, drifting towards the prison buildings, clouds of warm breath mingling with steam from vapes and smoke from sparked-up cigarettes.

  They obviously hadn’t done this before, she thought. Seven o’clock might be the official time for prisoner release, but that didn’t mean the ones they were waiting for would walk out of the doors on the stroke of the hour. There was paperwork to be done. Medications to be issued. Property to be checked. The welcoming committees would be lucky to see their loved ones by half past seven. By eight, there would be a ragged procession – mostly men, a few women – re-emerging into the world, clutching their black bin-liners and trying not to look as disorientated as they felt.

  Karen didn’t mind the wait. She’d been preparing for this moment for years, turning over what it might demand of her. If revenge was a dish best served cold, then the timing was spot on. An extra half hour or more was neither here nor there.

  So focused was she on the prison frontage that the opening of her passenger door physically startled her. She whirled round in her seat, fight or flight pumping through her reptile brain. Heart pounding, she registered who was climbing into her car and felt her muscles relax. ‘What the fuck, Jimmy? You trying to give me a heart attack?’