The Blood of Crows (37 page)

Bones.

Small human bones.

She sat and gazed at them, totally mesmerized, for a few minutes. Then she carefully lay down on her side and reached out towards the hint of gold gleaming in the torchlight.

She knew she had been drugged. And that some drugs can wipe the short-term memory. She had to remember this, had to obtain proof that she had been here, proof of what she had found. Just as she brought the little medal within reach, the torch beam picked out something else that made the blood almost stop in her veins. Hooked round the farther metal stanchion was something that looked all too familiar – a pair of handcuffs.

Stretching her arm out as far as she could get it to go, she managed to slide the very end of the torch under the fine gold chain, and with infinite care tugged it towards her, trying not to dislodge the little bones. Yes, she was disturbing a crime scene, and she’d get into trouble for it.

On the other hand, she might never get out of here at all. And in a hundred years’ time her own bones would be found, her skeletal hand still clutching Alessandro Marchetti’s gold St Christopher medal.

11.55 P.M.

Anderson watched the minute hand move on to twelve, joining its mate at the bewitching hour. He closed his eyes, letting his head fall back against the sofa cushions, enjoying the tick of the clock and the gentle snoring of Nesbitt in the corner. He wondered if he could train the dog to bite Mulholland on demand. He always knew that his constable was a career cop. If he saw a way to make his name, why should it matter to him that it would be at the cost of his boss’s career? They had worked together for six years or more. Six years. It meant nothing. Loyalty meant nothing. No loyalty as deep as the Molendinar for cops – there was more honour among thieves.

His thoughts were broken by the sound of Brenda coming downstairs, her gentle footfall on the carpet. He heard Nesbitt’s tail tap on the floor as she opened the door.

She perched on the arm of the sofa, wrapping her dressing gown round her, pulling her knees up to her chest. ‘You awake?’

‘No,’ he said, patting her on the knee.

‘How are you feeling now?’

‘Kind of numb, I suppose.’

‘Are you thinking about David Lambie?’

‘Mostly,’ he answered, with partial honesty.

‘Because you should be.’ She paused. ‘When all this is over, do you think we could plan a holiday? Not to go now, but plan it, for Christmas. I feel we have hardly seen you this summer.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. It’s all been a bit horrid.’

‘And it is not over, is it?’

‘No.’

‘We don’t have to live like this. We can have a new start.’

‘I know.’ He opened his eyes, staring at the ceiling. ‘Yes, I know.’

She reached for his hand and wrapped her fingers round his. ‘And another thing – all these Russian gangsters. Do you ever stop to think that one day they might come after you? After all, they came for David. I wasn’t going to say it, but it could have been you out there. And then where would the kids and I be? I know it’s your job, but is it worth it?’

‘How do you know about Russian gangsters?’

‘You think just because you walk about half blind, half asleep, everybody else in this family does. We watch the news, we read the newspapers. You need to leave the job.’

He sighed. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said again.

‘So, are you coming to bed?’

‘I’ll come up soon.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

He rested his head against the back of the sofa, closed his eyes, and thought very seriously about ignoring his mobile as it rang.

Sunday

4 July 2010

4.00 A.M.

‘Stay still, will you?’

‘I don’t like people sticking needles in me. What are you doing?’

‘I need to get bloods off you, one sample every ten minutes.’ O’Hare held up a syringe and bent down to find the vein. ‘Matilda needs these samples, so be quiet.’

Costello was lying on her bed, seething. ‘Why am I stuck here?’ Downstairs, the door was wide open, and she could hear the crackle of a radio – somebody was standing guard at her front door. She was being kept in her room, under supervision, while out in the early dawn forest there was a hive of activity. O’Hare kept insisting that she needed to rest. But she didn’t. She had got herself up out of the drain, she had staggered high enough up the hill to get a signal on her phone, and she had made it through the forest and back to the road. Then she had waited in the dark, marking the spot where she had left the treeline.

After twenty minutes, Pettigrew’s car had pulled up. He had a map of the old drainage pipes and tunnels, and all the shafts – gated shafts, lidded shafts, open shafts, closed shafts – were marked and numbered with an army of little ticks and crosses advancing across the map, showing how far the recommissioning work had progressed. Before
driving her back to the school, he laid the map out on the bonnet of the car and talked her through how she had got out. From her description, he seemed to know whereabouts she had been. Shaft 36A was the one Pettigrew put his finger on first, then he circled 37 and 38. But she couldn’t pinpoint exactly where she had been.

O’Hare made her jump by sticking another needle in her elbow.

‘You do realize you were drugged, don’t you? That stuff they put in your mouth? You’re lucky to be alive. Do you think you’ll ever learn to do your job and keep out of trouble?’ O’Hare was speaking while filling up phial after phial of blood, peering through his reading glasses and then writing labels.

‘Bollocks,’ Costello growled. ‘And I’m not sure I really was in trouble.’

‘No, Costello, you were drugged, blindfolded and put down a hole. The same shaft that … You were put down that hole and left there. It was very dangerous – one wrong move and you would have been off that ledge.’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ She folded her arms defiantly. ‘There was a wee chain. And I was left a torch, so I could see. That was Alessandro Marchetti, wasn’t it?’

O’Hare unpeeled a small sticking plaster and put it on her arm. ‘I can’t answer that yet. It’s getting light, so I’ll go out there as soon as I know you’re OK.’

‘Wait – I’ve just remembered something.’ She shifted her hip and dug into the front pocket of her trousers. ‘I thought maybe the drug would wipe my memory, so I took this. As proof.’

She held out her closed fist, and O’Hare opened his
hand. She dropped the gold chain and medal into it. Then she picked up the book from her bedside table and held it out to him.

He looked from the medal to the photograph of Alessandro and back again. Then he smiled sadly. ‘Yes, this probably is proof. I’d be surprised if my examination finds anything to contradict it.’

‘And there were handcuffs.’

‘Handcuffs? Where?’

She pulled herself up on her elbows. ‘The platform they left me on was bracketed to two metal poles up against the wall. The handcuffs were on the one opposite. And –’ she shut her eyes, straining to remember ‘– they were hooked round a long bone. It was too big to be an arm bone. It must have been a shin bone –’

‘Because his hands would have been too small,’ O’Hare finished for her. He pushed her back down on to the pillow. ‘Don’t think about it.’

‘But you know what that means? It wasn’t just where they put the body. He was alive when they put him down there! And they just left him to die in the dark, where nobody would hear him. I was down there, and it was a horrible place. Prof, he was six years old!’ She sat up, then tried to stand up but had to sit back down again. Her head thought it was a good idea while her legs had made a decision to stay where they were. ‘One thing I’m sure of,’ she said. ‘The people who did that to Alessandro are not the people who put me down there. Somebody led me to that … place … to find him.’

O’Hare sat down on the bed beside her. ‘And why would they do that?’

Costello screwed her face up, thinking hard. She rubbed her forehead with her wrist, making her fringe stand on end. ‘Look, they never meant me any harm. Someone said, “Don’t hurt her.” It was –’ she searched for the right word ‘– gentle. I don’t know … it was kind of … I mean, I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t pushed or manhandled; I was just moved along. They guided me down the ladder carefully … the torch, the chain … They were intended to help me get out. The cover wasn’t locked.’ She repeated. ‘Oh, yes, I was taken right to the place where the body was. I was meant to find it.’

‘And why would they do that?’ asked O’Hare again. ‘Apart from the malicious pleasure of proving that bloody Sangster woman wrong.’

Costello’s grey eyes opened wide. ‘Because the drain was about to be recommissioned. It would have been filled with water, flushed through. Those small bones would have been washed away like twigs. He would have been lost. The truth would have been lost.’

8.00 A.M.

The lecture room was quiet, with a cool stillness in the air. No students, no cops, no computers, no phones, just the gentle drone of the traffic outside. Mulholland was sitting with his feet up on the desk, skimming through the reports about Lynda Osbourne. He had intended to go home the night before, but there had always been another page, another statement to read. His mind abhorred disorder, so in the end he had pulled out a clipboard, fixed a sheet of paper to it, and started to write and cross-reference.

The 22nd of July 2005. Midsummer, he told himself, a hot day. The park around the Botanics would have been sweating with people. There’d have been ice cream vans, a puppet show, hot dogs, a man making hats by tying balloons together.

Lynda’s parents had taken their wee girl to see the fun. The whole family had seen the bus driver and waved hello to him. Then they had met some friends, who wanted to talk about arranging a birthday surprise. So the friends’ two boys were given some money and told to take Lynda and buy ice creams. But the boys had met some pals from school and had left Lynda to join the queue on her own. They’d seen her go to the front to join a man she seemed to know. Their description of him matched Fairbairn. But a short while later, they’d lost sight of her and run back to their parents.

Ten minutes later, wee Lynda was found wandering out from the trees.

Mulholland looked at a plan of the park. The little girl had gone away from the crowd, and a tall man – Mulholland checked a few eyewitness statements, and they all said tall – was seen following her. But few people would describe Skelpie Fairbairn as tall. In fact, the man was marvellously average. Yes, Fairbairn admitted, he was there, saw Lynda in the queue, and bought her an ice cream. He said he’d watched as she went back to join the two boys. Then he’d returned to the pub on Great Western Road. Two dubious characters, Wood and McAdam, had each given a statement to back him up. And a statement was a statement. The timing was a little inconvenient, out by about ten minutes, but nobody really believed the two
guys. Most important, none of the investigating officers believed them. Or maybe they did, and realized it was too convincing to put in front of a jury, so they buried it. And that could well cost Anderson his career.

Mulholland drew a big question mark, and read on.

Lynda was very quiet after they found her, her mum and dad said, but she knew she’d done wrong to wander off – and anyway, it had been a long day. So, they took her home, tired and drowsy. Her mum took her upstairs and popped her into her bath. It was only when she was putting Lynda’s things into the laundry basket that she found the blood on her knickers, by which time a whole load of evidence had been washed away.

Lynda’s clothes were examined. Fairbairn’s DNA was found on her dress, but he claimed he’d licked his finger and scooped up a spilled drop of raspberry topping. The defence argued that she knew the bus driver and, at six years old, was more likely to describe somebody she knew than say it was a stranger.

Mulholland looked again for any indication that the two statements from the guys in the pub, McAdam and Wood, were ever put through to the defence by the fiscal. He didn’t find anything. Deliberately and thoughtfully, he wrote the words ‘cover-up, evidence disregarded’, and saw his own promotion. Though some, he thought, would say there were a few wee girls out there now who might be six feet under if Fairbairn had been out for the last four years.

He shrugged to himself and flicked through more statements, loads of photographs. He soon realized that, for all the stuff in the file, what wasn’t there was much more significant. There’d been no timed walk of the route
Fairbairn said he’d taken to go back to the pub. And there should have been. He came across some page-filler photographs taken throughout the day by the photographer from the
West End News
, and pored over them, studying faces in the crowd, particularly the queue for the ice cream van. And there, near the trees, eyeing the queue, was the figure – the
tall
figure – of Billy Biggart.

Mulholland picked up the phone and called ACC Howlett.

9.30 A.M.

When Anderson arrived at the lecture room, he had a brief word with O’Hare, who reported that the compliance effect of the R2 might be working off and that Costello was getting stroppy again.

Batten and Wyngate were already there. In the car park he had phoned Helena, but the call went straight to her voicemail. He didn’t know what to say. He stuttered out a few words, and rang off.

Wyngate looked up as he came in. ‘Still no sign of Mrs Carruthers, sir. Do you want us to go out to the solicitor’s office and have a look? A uniform went round yesterday and said it was all locked up. Do you want us to track down a keyholder?’

‘What does the sister say – Rene?’

Wyngate shrugged. ‘She’s not making much sense, just knocking on her sister’s door every two minutes. But the neighbour has been phoning us. She’s worried because Mary rarely leaves Rene alone, for obvious reasons.’

‘Just try to find her as soon as you can. We need to know more about that missing diary.’ He sat down heavily. ‘Anybody heard how Jennifer’s doing?’

‘I think she’s gone into hiding, courtesy of her father.’