Prostitute. She couldn’t say the word. Dark images of men jerking against her daughter’s thin, wasted body filled her head.
‘My baby. My baby,’ she muttered.
The vodka hit her stomach and came back up minutes later. Nora barely made it to the kitchen, launching herself at the sink, as the regurgitated alcohol burned its way back up her throat.
When she felt steadier, she went outside and walked purposefully to the tree house. At the foot of the steps was a bench where you could rest against the trunk. Nora leaned back and clasped her hands to stop them shaking. The most important thing was that Terri was still alive. She had to believe that. The police were worried for Terri’s safety and were looking for her. A photo would be on tonight’s news.
It was such a small and fragile hope to cling to.
Nora thought of David. How would he deal with his daughter’s face broadcast to the nation, the details of her heroin addiction exposed? Worst of all, how could David cope with the knowledge that his daughter was a prostitute?
THE HANDBAG WAS
a designer copy. Something you could buy from a stall at the Glasgow Barras for a couple of pounds, made by some poor soul in China for starvation wages. Inside was a wallet, with sixty pounds in four tenners and a twenty note, and about two quid in change. The various side pouches contained a few receipts, mainly for food, a couple of Tesco vouchers, and a snapshot of Leanne Quinn and Terri Docherty, faces squashed together in a photo booth. There was also a picture of a small brown dog, looking inquisitively up at the camera, which looked as though it had been cut from a magazine.
The mobile phone had been almost completely crushed by the car, which had marked the bag with muddy tyre tracks. It had been given to the Tech department to extract Terri’s address book. Bill scanned the subsequent list. Leanne was there and Terri’s mum. The rest were men’s names, most of them probably nicknames to protect the ‘innocent’.
Glasgow men were estimated to spend around 6 million a year on prostitution. More graduates bought sex than those who hadn’t had the advantage of a university education. Bill had read all the statistics.
None of which made it easier to understand. He had a daughter, the same age as Lucie Webster. The same age as the missing girl. Bill was sickened by a sudden image of his daughter Lisa, lying on the cold earth, her bra tight around her neck, her body punctured and raped by the heel of her shoe. It made his blood run cold.
‘Sir?’ DC Clark brought him back to the moment. ‘Leanne Quinn’s here.’
Leanne scanned the list. As she turned the page, her hand trembled.
‘We didn’t talk about the punters much. I don’t know everyone on this.’
‘What about Wednesday nights? Did Terri have regulars then?’
‘An old guy. He smelt of piss. He called her Marie. Terri said it was his dead wife’s name. She felt sorry for him.’
‘What was he called?’
Leanne pointed halfway down. ‘Geordie.’
Bill put a cross beside it. ‘Anyone else?’
‘Cee Dee. He has a stall at the Barras. Gives us free CDs and DVDs. Every Wednesday night.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘There was a guy every other week. Terri was really upset the first time he showed up.’
‘Why?’
‘She said he’d been her guidance teacher in secondary school.’
‘What?’
‘Terri knew him right away, but she said he pretended not to recognise her.’
‘Is he on the list?’
‘He didn’t use his real name. He called himself something out of a book or a film, Terri said.’ Leanne found it and pointed. ‘That’s it I think.’
‘Atticus?’
‘
To Kill a Mockingbird
,’ DC Clark offered.
‘I know where it’s from,’ snapped Bill.
Leanne identified two more. A young guy called Gary, who came up from south of the city twice a month, and a posh bloke calling himself Ray.
Leanne sagged back.
‘Did Terri ever say anything about a punter hurting her?’
‘They all think you’re shite. Some pretend not to, to get what they want. A few get off on pretending to be your friend.’ She paused. ‘They’re all abusive, one way or another.’
Bill was silent for a moment. ‘We’re advising that the women stay off the streets until further notice.’
Leanne gave a small, strangled laugh.
‘Too late for Terri.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘If she was alive she would have contacted me.’ Leanne hugged herself. ‘We were getting out. Two more months, that’s all we needed.’ Her body seemed to fold in on itself.
‘Are you okay?’
Leanne’s face had drained of colour. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t look fine to me,’ Bill said. ‘Have you had anything to eat today?’
Leanne shook her head.
‘Take her to the canteen,’ Bill told Janice. ‘Make sure she eats something.’
During a post-mortem, the mortuary harboured a smell Bill would never get used to. He had never been sick, or fainted, or had to leave, but it had been a close shave on occasion. Work on the second body, or what was left of it, had taken time. Time to determine the obvious scientifically. The victim had most likely died of strangulation.
The lower half of the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, but striated marks on the pelvic bones suggested the heel of the shoe had been used to stab the victim. For this one, there would be no gentle closing of eyes, no masking of wounds with the pristine whiteness of a sheet. No one to tell them who she was.
‘Female, approximately twenty,’ Sissons told Bill. ‘Five foot two inches tall. Long blonde hair. Under-nourished.’
A fair description of most of Glasgow’s young prostitutes.
‘Nothing that could help identify her?’
‘You could try dental records. She’s had some work done, but it looks pretty old.’
THE BRA WAS
black nylon with a lace covering, the details of size and make no longer legible on the frayed label. It was clean and smelt primarily of deodorant, although there was something else in the scent she still couldn’t distinguish.
Rhona held the bra over paper and used a fine-haired brush to dislodge any loose trace evidence, then taped it to lift any other residue, concentrating on the knot. Trace material depended a lot on the recipient surface and the nature, duration and force of the contact. The murderer had exerted a lot of pressure when he had twisted the rough lace, so he should have left traces behind.
Rhona’s careful harvest was rewarded with abundant skin flakes for DNA testing, and something else, which proved to be a little more unusual. She examined the printout of the chemical breakdown of the sample. Sodium chloride, sulphate, calcium, potassium and magnesium. There was no doubt what it was.
Rhona looked up as a pale Chrissy emerged from the washroom, after a bout of morning sickness. It had been like this every day for weeks. Rhona wasn’t allowed to say anything, her words of comfort freezing
on her lips under Chrissy’s glare. Having made up her mind to go through with the pregnancy, Chrissy wasn’t looking for sympathy. Rhona had wondered if lab work was triggering the bouts of nausea, or at least exacerbating them. Chrissy had dismissed the idea.
‘I’m sick at the same time every morning. It doesn’t matter where I am.’
Ten minutes later Chrissy was serving up coffee and hot buttered rolls, the colour back in her cheeks.
‘Right, where are we then?’
‘Exactly where we were yesterday, with one exception,’ Rhona said. ‘Magnus was right. There was something unusual on the bra.’
‘What?’
‘Traces of salt.’
‘Salt? You mean table salt?’
Rhona shook her head. ‘Not pure sodium chloride. I checked the constituents. This was sea salt.’
Chrissy looked puzzled. ‘Why would there be sea salt?’
‘You remember the smell Magnus talked about? It was a mix of diesel and salt, the smell you get around harbours.’
Chrissy looked thoughtful. ‘It’s something, I suppose.’
‘There’s also the matter of the slipknot.’ Rhona told Chrissy the story of Magnus’s experiment in the bar.
Chrissy smiled. ‘Wish I’d stuck around to see that.’
‘I tried to retie the knot, before I began headspace analysis to test for diesel. It wasn’t easy tying it with a bra. A single piece of cord would have been much quicker.’
‘So the bra was significant.’
Rhona nodded. ‘The diesel was red, the stuff used in boats or farm machinery. It’s basically the same as heating oil, but contains a colourless marker, quinizarin, and is coloured with CO Solvent Red 24 to distinguish it from the white diesel you get at roadside pumps. Red diesel has a lower tax tariff, which means it’s much cheaper.’
‘So someone who works with boats, with a bra fetish?’
‘Points that way.’
They were prevented from further discussion by the ringing of the lab phone.
Bill’s voice was grim. ‘We’ve found another one. She’s buried at the eastern end of the graveyard.’
Bill met Rhona at the Bridge of Sighs. In the near distance, dogs and handlers were strung out across the Necropolis.
‘We’ve been over this place twice already. I don’t know how the hell we missed her.’
A third of a dog’s brain is devoted to scent. Police dogs could be trained to sniff out almost anything, but they weren’t infallible.
‘How deep is she buried?’ Rhona asked.
‘Not deep, but she’s been there some time. Looks like the gardener’s been trimming the grass over her.’
‘No wonder the dog didn’t spot it the first time.’ Rhona wanted to show her support. Bill wasn’t personally responsible for every rogue body they found buried in the graveyard.
Bill glanced around the well-kept green lawns that separated the rows of ancient stones and mausoleums. ‘How many more are out there?’
‘I think we should get GUARD to take some aerial photographs. Recent burials will show in the colour of the vegetation.’
Bill looked impressed. ‘Bloody ironic, looking for bodies in a graveyard.’
To cheer him up, Rhona told him about her harvest of skin and salt.
‘The boat connection could be significant, if we come up with a suspect. We ran the DNA profiles, identified from the different semen deposits through HOLMES. No matches,’ Bill said.
‘Maybe we’ll get a match from the skin flakes.’
The truth was, if the perpetrator wasn’t on the DNA database, and wasn’t a regular punter, the chances of finding him at all were remote. Bill departed for the station, where they had three of Terri’s regulars waiting to be interviewed.
The tent was up, a forensic team already combing the surrounding area. Chrissy had stayed on at the lab. Someone had to process the mound of material that was threatening to swamp them.
Inside the tent, McNab was in deep discussion with Judy from GUARD. Rhona had a feeling it wasn’t about the body, at least not until she walked in. A slight flush crept across Judy’s cheek when she spotted Rhona, and Rhona wondered if she and McNab might have indulged in more than an after-work drink. Judy covered her embarrassment by urging Rhona over to
view the remains, while McNab slipped past her with a twinkle in his eye.
‘I see you and McNab hit it off.’
‘He’s a funny guy,’ Judy volunteered.
‘Hilarious.’
Rhona pulled up her mask and knelt on the soft earth. Judy had dug away the surface covering, revealing the putrefied remains of a woman bearing all the hallmarks of the previous two victims; a brassiere ligature, a black high-heeled sandal jammed between what remained of her thighs.
Judy indicated a stack of turf alongside. ‘He must have cut the turf, then replaced it when he was finished. You can make out the discolouration of the grass caused by the decomposition.’
Rhona leaned closer to the body. The face was a creamy white waxy colour, the classic image of a ‘soap mummy’. A combination of warm wet earth, lack of oxygen, alkaline soil and plenty of fatty tissue had resulted in the formation of adipocere, a process whose advancement could tell them how long the body had been in the ground.
‘I’d estimate he buried her approximately four to six months ago,’ said Judy.
Which meant the killer had been working his patch possibly as far back as the start of the year.
A shadow loomed over them. Neither had heard Magnus enter the tent, so engrossed were they in their discussion. He wore a forensic suit, his long hair tucked inside the hood. Rhona caught Judy’s disconcerted look.
‘Judy, this is Professor Pirie. He’s a criminal psychologist.’
Judy managed to keep her expression blank, no easy task as Magnus began to sniff the air like a bloodhound.
‘Ammonia with a touch of cadaverine and putresine,’ Judy suggested with a smile.
‘Not an ideal combination,’ countered Magnus, holding out his gloved hand to grasp Judy’s firmly.
Rhona watched them eye each other up and wondered if Magnus had had time to do his homework on Judy. She got her answer almost immediately.
‘Weren’t you involved in the excavation of a mass grave at Hatra in northern Iraq?’
Judy looked surprised but flattered. ‘Yes, I was.’
Magnus frowned sympathetically. ‘A terrible business.’ Unlike the Balkans, where mass graves contained men of fighting age, Hatra had been filled with women and children shot through the head.
Magnus stared down at their latest find. ‘How long do you estimate she’s been there?’
‘Four months, at least.’
‘The intervals are getting shorter.’
‘If there are no more bodies,’ said Rhona.
Magnus threw her a worried glance. ‘You have evidence of more?’
Rhona felt a twinge of guilt at her need to challenge Magnus. She felt herself needled by his constantly thoughtful air, as though he had inside knowledge of the killer.
‘We missed this one. We may have missed others,’ she suggested.
Magnus contemplated that in silence. ‘I don’t think he’ll kill here again, since he left the last body above ground.’ He turned to Judy. ‘Was there anything about this grave that suggested he wanted us to find it?’
Judy thought for a moment. ‘There was a turf loose when I got here. I assumed the handler had done that. I could check with Michael,’ Judy offered, then looked flustered at her indiscreet use of McNab’s first name.