The Blood of Crows (29 page)

‘He was.’

‘But let’s assume for a minute that he really wasn’t, as the law has it at this present time. That means that Lynda Osbourne was assaulted by somebody else. I bet that somebody was Billy Biggart, that Skelpie took the fall for him.’

‘But Biggart wasn’t a paedophile. He was a vile human being, but not that.’

‘You think that’s too much of a stretch for a man who will film it? Make the cake but not taste it? No way. And, if not, then why has Biggart covered his legal fees until now? It could account for the phone chatter between them.’

‘Vik, we are not opening all that up again.’

Mulholland punched the wall gently. ‘But it
is
all opened up again. And you need to be proactive to circumvent –’

‘Circumvent what? The case went in front of a jury, fifteen men and women. I didn’t say Fairbairn was guilty, they did.’

‘You made sure they didn’t hear all the evidence.’

‘That’s bullshit, Vik!’

‘Look, I’m just trying to make this right,’ Mulholland argued. ‘Why was that mobile left in plain sight like that, away from the fire? Most people would stamp on the phone, destroy the SIM, flush it down the loo. Everything else in the flat was destroyed, but that was kept safe – almost like some kind of gift you were meant to find. Whoever left it knew how much information we could get from it.’ He turned from Anderson to shout, ‘They knew what she would get from it,’ at Matilda, who was scurrying across the car park from her own lab. The way she turned and trotted over reminded Anderson of Nesbitt.

‘What?’

‘Can I have a word, DCI Anderson? I mean, not here …’ Matilda’s pinched face was pale, her brow furrowed.

Mulholland, who had been standing there, smiling, said with exaggerated politeness, ‘Do you want me to make myself scarce?’

‘Yes, please.’

Anderson and Matilda walked into the main hall. ‘So, what can I do for you?’

‘I wasn’t sure about this at first,’ she said. ‘So, I ran it twice to make sure.’ She pushed the file over to Anderson, who opened it.

He spent a minute or two comparing two sheets of paper, looking from one to the other in disbelief. Anderson didn’t know what he was looking at, but as far as he could tell the bottom graph matched the top one. He knew that was important, but couldn’t figure out why. ‘So? They both look exactly the same.’

‘That’s because they are. They’re a direct match, a
perfect DNA match,’ she said, slightly exasperated. ‘I took a sample from the cuts of carpet from the Marchettis’ flat – there was enough there to get a reasonable profile using a low-platform technique –’

‘Good for you,’ said Anderson, feeling rather threatened by her youth and determination. ‘And we’ve a match? Piacini is still alive?’

‘Oh, he’s alive all right.’ She pointed to the name on the bottom graph. ‘Alive and living under the name of Cameron Fairbairn.’

4.00 P.M.

Colin Anderson had a sore ear. He would never again suggest, even politely, that Matilda McQueen might have contaminated a sample. She had been furious. And loud. Now he had one photograph of Tito Piacini in front of him and one of Cameron Fairbairn. The eyes were the same.

She was right.

For the first time, Anderson thought he might be getting ahead of the game.

Fairbairn had been in on the kidnap. Eric Moffat was the man in charge. It had been planned to damage the families, to allow the present state of criminality. And a member of the O’Donnell family had struck back hard.

But where was Howlett in all this? He could see a cop of Howlett’s age knowing the families of organized crime personally. It was how things worked in those days. And if
it kept scum like Fairbairn off the street, who could say they were wrong?

Anderson looked around the deserted room. The computers were all hibernating – even their geometric gymnastics had ceased. He flicked through his notes, Batten’s untidy handwriting in green pen giving him a few tasty details about Carruthers’ medical history. Batten had concluded that Thomas Carruthers was not the same man after 1977. Something had happened that had stopped him drinking – maybe something that had occurred while he was drunk.

Anderson looked at the Post-it note that had been left on the telephone, not dated, time-stamped or signed. The handwriting suggested it was also from Batten, who probably didn’t know any better. Mary Carruthers had phoned in to say she had found the missing diary from 1977.

A wee job for Lambie, thought Anderson.

4.45 P.M.

‘Am I disturbing you two?’ Anderson said to O’Hare and Matilda, who were leaning over a table in the lab, heads down, looking at something of great interest, so absorbed that they didn’t appear to have heard him enter.

‘You can disturb us any time you want, because I was just about to phone you,’ O’Hare said. ‘Just wait to hear what else Matilda has discovered.’

‘Well, you found it,’ she said, beaming up at the pathologist.

O’Hare had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed. ‘It’s your story. You tell it.’

‘Well, after looking at that film Howlett showed us, we tried a Quasar machine on Rusalka to try to photograph a fingerprint from the skin of her neck, but it was too late. She’d been in the water too long. But we did try. Then we did a much deeper search into the body cavities. Want to have a look down that microscope?’

Anderson leaned forward and looked. There was a single hair root, its bulb cut to a sharp end to harvest the DNA for analysis. Anderson withdrew from the scope and looked from Matilda to O’Hare and back again.

‘Is that the DNA of Tito Piacini? Cameron Fairbairn, or whatever he’s calling himself? Oh, please tell me it is.’

‘It is,’ said Matilda. ‘And we can do even better. High up in her nasal cavity were some cotton fibres. As you know, on the microscope they match fibres from the towel you brought from the flat next door to Biggart’s. So, we can put her and Fairbairn together at the scene. I don’t think he’s going to walk away from this one.’

Anderson straightened up, feeling both revulsion and relief run through him. ‘OK, I think it’s time to pick him up. But I’ll tell Howlett. He needs to take on the media on this one,’ he said.

‘And tell him I can make all this evidence stand up so that Mother Teresa would be convicted on it,’ said Matilda with a wide grin.

The door opened and a nervous-looking Wyngate appeared.

‘Don’t worry, there are no dead bodies here,’ said O’Hare. ‘Well, not in one piece, anyway.’

‘Can you help me with this, Prof? Maybe you too, Matilda? I’m trying to trace what happened to a cop called Graham Hunter. Does that mean anything to you? He went missing up Seana Bhraigh in 1977.’

Anderson looked up. ‘Really? Go on.’

‘Hunter? Hunter? A cop? Was there a delay in finding that body?’ asked O’Hare. ‘Before my time, and not my jurisdiction but yes – I’ve heard about it. The body had been lying in a lochan for a good few months and was only visible once the water level dropped. He fell from an outcrop of rocks, something like that.’ He stretched his spine, both palms kneading the muscles in the small of his back, then said, ‘I can’t now remember what the enquiry said at the end of the day, but it was winter, and a hill-walking trip with some colleagues went wrong. It happens all the time. It took his colleagues days to walk out safely and then, once the body was found, there was a disputed cause of death. It was ruled death by misadventure. But did the head injury cause him to topple off the summit, or did he fall and hit his head on the way down? No definitive answer.’

‘But you do remember it?’ asked Anderson, intrigued.

‘It’s the sort of thing we talk about down the pub, we sad gits. I’ll track it down for you, if you want. It wasn’t one of mine; I’m not that old. I take it from your enquiry that something about that case might be relevant now.’

‘Maybe. And while you’re at it, Prof, can we go for Jason Purcie, killed by a gunshot wound to the head on the Campsie Fells later the same year? Both friends or colleagues of Carruthers, both died in 1977 – the year that something stopped him drinking.’

‘Well, I was directly involved in a review of the Purcie case. Why are you not going through normal channels? No, don’t answer that. But even seasoned old pathologists like me are not totally insensitive to violent death. A young, intelligent police officer gets shot in the head on duty while out on a team search. Can’t recall who they were looking for, but it was somebody armed and dangerous. It was a high-velocity shot, and you don’t forget them. As far as I remember, the bullet was never matched to any weapon in the database, though the database was still fairly rudimentary back then. In fact, the whole investigation simply ran into a dead end at every turn. Anyway, we delivered our report, the enquiry was carried out, and the verdict was “killed by person or persons unknown”. It’ll all be on record.’

‘Both connected to Carruthers? Get on to it, Wyngate.’

Anderson was halfway to the door when O’Hare shouted him back. ‘Do you also wish to know that Mr MacFadyean was an insulin-dependent diabetic? He picked up his insulin script regularly at the McCrory medical practice in Balloch. I tried to trace the home address – the GP has an address for him, but he doesn’t live there. And he had an appointment every three months, which he always kept, so they never needed to write to him. He did once tell the nurse that his home life was complicated, so if they needed to write to him to use the post office in Luss, as they knew him. She said there are a few homes high in the glen where the people come down for the mail to save the postie a long drive.’

‘So, if Luss is his post office –’ Anderson walked over to the Ordnance Survey map on the wall, and put one finger
on the village of Luss on the west shore of Loch Lomond, and another on Balloch to the south ‘– and his chemist is at Balloch, he must live up the glen somewhere. He was walking back from a funeral, let’s say with a drink in him, when he was killed. So, he must have been close to home.’

‘Our Mr MacFadyean certainly went to great lengths to be public when he was public, and to disappear when he wanted to disappear.’

‘Septic tank,’ said O’Hare, suddenly. ‘He could have wood-burning stoves, a generator, and a natural water supply. And the council tax list might give you an address but not a location. But the company that deals with the septic tank will have a map.’

5.00 P.M.

Leaving O’Hare and Matilda, Anderson phoned Lambie, to tell him to go and get the diary from Mrs Carruthers. ‘I’m sure what we want is in there,’ he said. ‘There’s a connection with Moffat, MacFadyean and Carruthers which might spread to two other dead cops – a Jason Purcie and a Graham Hunter.’ In his mind’s eye he could see Lambie scribbling it down.

‘Well, Jennifer’s cooking something special tonight, so can I pick it up on the way home, bring it in tomorrow? I know what you and Batten are looking for, so I’ll have a quick read tonight with a nice glass of wine and present you with the edited highlights.’

‘Of course. I’m going to go home too and have an early night. I think last night is starting to catch up with me.
And tomorrow we’re going out to the post office in Luss, so that will be a nice wee day trip for us.’

‘I’ll be sure to wear my kilt – if I can get into it.’ Lambie rang off and Anderson made his way towards his car. It was leaving five o’clock and he was dog-tired. He was going to sit in the garden with a pint of cold beer.

And if Mr Lomax got out his bloody lawn mower, he was going to shoot him.

5.30 P.M.

Rosie could hear crows cawing out in the woods. She had no food left, and no water. Her throat was parched, and the skin round her mouth had cracked open and was bleeding. She was trapped in her bed, and the skin of her hip and thigh had been damp for days now. The urine was burning into her, and she could feel painful blisters forming, yet she couldn’t stop her body weight from crushing them. Her hands were scaly, and her fingers were turning blue, her nails black. It felt as if a thousand ants were biting at her feet, burrowing in between her toes and working their way up. The flies laid their eggs in her flesh, uninterrupted. There was a clapping of black feathers at the window, and she could make out the crows on the ledge outside. They could smell the sweet stench of rotting meat.

She was dying from the outside in.

She wondered where the boy had gone, and then she heard the familiar thunk-thunk as he came in through the window and dropped down on to the worktop. She had been thinking about him – she was sure now it was a ‘him’.
Singular. He must be slim to get in that wee window, but tall to be able to reach it from outside. One thing she did know about him – he was young.

And here he was now; she could sense that he had come into her room. She closed her eyes. It was a routine now. As long as she let him do what he wanted, she would stay alive. He cleaned her, he gave her water, he brought her a banana, an apple, some cake wrapped in a paper napkin that looked as though it had been carried about in his jacket pocket. But it was food – and with water and food, she was thinking again. Survival depended on her establishing a relationship with him. And all the time, subtly, she was gaining information. It afforded her some pride that she was starting to see herself in the role of a black widow spider. Once he was expendable he would be terminated, but for now she needed him in order to stay alive.

He was standing here, in her room, not speaking, hardly breathing. He smoked, she knew that. He was light on his feet, he never spoke, he wore leather even in this weather. And he was starting to smell.

She had tried to speak to him, but got nothing. This time she tried again. ‘Hello.’ She said it as a greeting, not a question. Something that didn’t need an answer.

She heard him come up behind her, felt the cover on her face. It was an old tea towel this time, one he had used before – she recognized the shamrock pattern. But he then walked back out to the little hall. She heard him start to go through drawers and cupboards, carefully. He wasn’t ransacking the place. Rather, he seemed to be looking for something. She had been stuck on her left side for years
now, only able to move when Wullie was there to lift her flesh, so she had no idea what Wullie kept in the rest of the house – all she knew was what she could see from her bed. Everything else was a mystery.