Troubled Waters (5 page)

‘No. One, two, three . . .’

To their unspoken relief, pieces of the carcase did not drop off or fall to bits in their hands, as each had imagined might happen, and between them they managed to manoeuvre it successfully into the dinghy. There it rested, in an unnatural pose, legs propped upright against one of the wooden seats, shoeless feet pointing heavenwards. With all the exertion involved, sweat poured down the photographer’s brow as he sat, leaning back in his seat to recover his breath, cap now in hand, his bald pink pate exposed to the falling snow. At that moment, a wave caught them broadside and he shouted ‘Shit!’ Two minutes later, a couple of pairs of gloved hands helped them unload their icy cargo onto the Safety Boat, easing it gently onto the floor of the cabin.

‘OK?’ the Captain shouted, ‘everyone on board?’

‘Aha,’ Gav bawled back. ‘Go canny though, or she’ll roll about the deck like a ball.’

With the Captain’s skilful hand on the throttle, the steady phut-phut of the diesel engine changed seamlessly, first, to a constant thrum and then to a full-blown roar
as the craft’s seven hundred horsepower engines started pounding through the waves, making a bee-line for the Hawes Pier. Just as the sun was peeping shyly over the horizon, they drew alongside it with their cold cargo, and wasted no time in unloading it.

No sooner was the body lying prostrate on the bare stone, than the first of the day’s commuter trains rattled its way across the Railway Bridge, heading southwards towards Dalmeny, the Gyle, Haymarket and, finally, Waverley. The passengers within it, asleep, bleary-eyed or blinkered by their newspapers, were unaware that the speck visible hundreds of feet below them was the waterlogged corpse of a woman. One of them, reading the report in the
Evening News
on the homeward journey, realised what he had witnessed and felt a strange glow of pleasure at his involvement in the drama.

3

Dr McCrae, a slight, effete-looking little man with a permanently dripping nose, was hunched over the body. It had been moved to a cramped backroom in the lifeboat building, a tarpaulin spread underneath to protect it from further contamination. The dead woman lay on her back in a pool of seawater, sightless eyes open, arms stretched wide as if she had been newly removed from her crucifix. The Forensic Medical Examiner’s inspection was almost complete, and with exquisite gentleness, he lifted the head off the canvas sheet and began to part the tangle of matted, dark hair at the back of the skull.

‘That’s more like it . . .’ he muttered to himself, continuing with his task, easing more strands free and, finally, lifting his glasses and the thin gold chain attached to them and putting them on his nose. His face was now only inches away from the dead woman’s skull. After less than a minute, he nodded as if he had found what he was looking for and took off his glasses, resting them on the top of his head, loops of chain now dangling below his ears like gypsy earrings.

‘Anything?’ Alice asked.

‘Aha. She’s got a large contusion over the back of her scalp. There are grazes, too, over the knuckles of both hands, the face, back of the hands . . . and a corker of a black eye. See?’

‘Did she drown?’

‘Think that would that follow, do you, Inspector? You’ll have to wait until they’ve got her on the slab to answer that mystery. But the trauma to the head, the black eye – that’ll certainly give everyone pause for thought.’

The doctor rose, carefully brushed the knees of his white paper suit clear of detritus, latched his briefcase and led the way out of the makeshift mortuary. As they hit the fresh air, snow was still falling around them, but now against a backdrop of dawn sky in which pinkish hues merged into a watery grey background. As if noticing the drifting flakes for the first time, the doctor held out his arms, child-sized palms upwards, allowing them to land on his gloved hands.

‘Every single one unique,’ he said, ‘just like us . . .’

‘The lucky ones among us may last that little bit longer. That injury to the back of her head – have we any clue as to the cause?’ Alice asked.

‘None whatsoever, at present. It could have come from a blow, damage sustained in the Forth, underwater rocks, a pier or something – a fall? Only the Good Lord knows. Once she’s on the slab, as I said earlier, we’ll maybe get a better idea.’ He paused, glancing at the drops of melted snow on his right glove, sniffed, then added, ‘Now, if there’s nothing else, I’m off to the Inn for a café latte, a croissant and, possibly, a kipper. The witness is there.’

‘What a good idea,’ DC Cairns interjected. ‘It’s been a long night. I’ll be having the porridge, followed by . . .’

Alice’s phone went and she clamped it to her ear, a finger to her mouth to silence the constable.

‘How did you get on?’ the Fiscal asked. His voice sounded weary, hoarse, his question tailing off into a bronchitic cough.

‘We got on fine. We’ve got the body back, it’s on its way to the mortuary now and Dr McCrae’s just given it the once-over.’

‘Was there anything obvious on the rock, anything much to see there?’

‘No. Jim Scott took shots of everything, yards of video footage too. Then we just had enough time to bundle her onto the boat before she was carried away in the rising tide.’

‘What does Dr McCrae say?’

‘Dr McCrae says,’ she replied slowly, looking at the diminutive doctor quizzically and reading his moving, but silent, lips, ‘suspicious – we’re to treat it, for the moment, as suspicious.’

‘Okey dokey,’ the man replied, ‘but I don’t think I’ll come out to South Queensferry for that, Alice. Not this a.m. After all, there’s no scene, nothing more to be made of the body – nothing, really, for me to see or do just now. Have you spoken to the mortuary? With this nasty bug, I should be in my bed. You’ll keep me informed, eh?’

Without waiting for her reply, and coughing noisily as if to impress his state of ill-health upon her, he terminated the call.

‘Yes, suspicious, for now,’ Dr McCrae said, starting to amble towards the public road, adding ‘and that’ll have been Derek Jardine, I’ll be bound? The lazy good-for-nothing! Surprise me – tell me he is going to attend the scene?’

‘He says there’s no . . .’

‘What is it this time, I wonder?’ the doctor cut in, lips pursed tight. ‘A cold, perhaps? A tummy bug? Never mind the fact that we can’t exclude homicide yet. What the heck. I was saying that your witness is in the Inn, by
the way. I saw him there when I was waiting for you to come back. The fellow that found her, he’s near the bar.’

‘Are the kippers good? I think I’ll have a kipper,’ DC Cairns mused, returning eagerly to the subject of her forthcoming breakfast and rubbing her hands together in anticipation.

‘Loch Fyne,’ the doctor replied, ‘I checked.’

‘No, not for the moment you won’t, I’m afraid, Liz,’ Alice cut in. ‘Later, maybe. The woman was found near the bridge. We’ll need to check that she wasn’t a jumper.’

‘A what?’

‘Didn’t you know? This place,’ the doctor observed, wiping his nose with a red hankie, ‘is Suicide Central. At least, it used to be.’

‘We’ll need to check that she didn’t jump off the bridge. While we’re here, get them to show you the CCTV footage. If she did, chances are they’ll have got her on it. One other thing, Dr McCrae . . .’

‘Yes?’ the man was looking to his left and right, preparing to cross the road, but at the inspector’s words he paused.

‘Do you think she’d been in the water long?’

‘It can only be an impression at this stage, mind. The mortuary boys will be able to tell you properly. But, no, not very long, not judging by the state of her fingers and her toes. I’d say a day, a couple of days at the very most? They’ve got wrinkles on them, but not that much. And there’s no obvious sign of separation, sloughing – dermis from epidermis – when the skin comes off the flesh, you know, like a sock or something. Or, classically, like a serpent shedding its skin. I’d say a day, no more.’

Ewen Macdonell sat at a table by the open fire, his hands round an empty coffee mug. An oil-streaked orange waterproof hung from the back of the wooden chair and he was chewing gum, an old piece, unaware that his jaws were even moving. Between his fingers, he rolled the foil in which it had been wrapped to and fro, making it into a minute silver worm. He looked as reliable and straightforward as an Airedale terrier; his shaggy grey eyebrows overshadowing his eyes, making them appear more deeply recessed than they were. In the buzz and warmth of the hotel, in the brightness of its lights, the discovery of the body seemed a remote experience, one which might, almost, have happened to somebody else. He had, as he had recently texted his wife, ‘got his head round things’. Consequently, when he spoke to the policewoman it was without emotion, in a matter-of-fact manner relating everything that he had seen.

‘No,’ he continued, ‘I can’t say for certain whether or not she was there when I first landed. The generator’s too far away. Everything in that part’s in shadows, the torch-beam’s all you’ve got. She could have been there, I could have missed her. I wasn’t looking.’

‘But once the lighting was on?’ Alice asked. Disconcertingly, although she was on dry land, sitting opposite him in another wooden chair, she felt as if she was still at sea, still in motion, having to balance herself against the rolling of the waves.

‘I could easily have missed her first time round. I must have, if she was there,’ he replied. He moved his chair further away from the fire and crossed his legs, trying to protect the inside of his calves from the blazing heat.

‘How long were you on the rock?’

‘I was there about half an hour, maybe a little longer. I was supposed to check the scaffolding before the team
dismantling the lighthouse set to work. They were worried, with that last storm, you know, that it might have come loose, got damaged or something. It’s a dangerous enough job already without that happening. The buggers collecting me were late . . .’ He dropped his silver worm on the floor, caught her eye, then stooped to retrieve it.

‘You don’t think that in the time between your original landing and your return to the spot, the body could have been brought there somehow?’

‘Other than by the tide? No one else came to call, if that’s what you mean. It’s a tiny place, you’ve seen that for yourselves. I’d have noticed another boat drawing up.’

‘Did you touch her?’

‘Only for a second, just her face. Just really to see what she was . . . if she was alive,’ he replied, shuddering, remembering suddenly the feel of the cold, wet skin on his fingers. The dead flesh. Picturing her lifeless face, he could feel his composure crumbling. Unthinkingly, he raised the empty mug to his lips as if to take a sip.

‘More coffee?’ Alice asked.

‘No, I’m awash,’ he replied, lowering it again, his jaw working overtime on the gum, embarrassed that a stranger should witness his distress. ‘Jesus . . .’ he murmured, overcome again, losing the battle and covering his eyes with his hand.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine, I’m fine.’

He began rummaging in the side pocket of his coat, looking for another piece of gum, but his fingers found something else.

‘I got this,’ he said, offering an irregularly shaped badge to the policewoman. It was made of white plastic and looked broken. Only the central section and the clasp
behind it remained intact. On the fragment was printed ‘O-O’, and below that ‘AN’.

‘If you’d drop it in here,’ she said, holding out a polythene bag and, once he had obeyed, sealing it up. ‘I’ll need to take your prints, a DNA swab, purely for eliminatory purposes.’

‘No problem,’ he replied, nodding his head but looking oddly anxious, immediately speculating on where precisely the swab was to be taken from.

‘You found it on the rock?’

‘Yes. It was just beside her, beside her right shoulder. A two-pound coin fell out of my pocket and when I bent to pick it up I saw that badge thing. It’s light, I was worried that . . . I don’t know, that it would be swept away, blown away or something. I thought you’d need to see it.’

‘Did you find anything else?’

‘No. And, to be honest, I didn’t look, either. I got spooked . . . she’s the first body, dead body, I’ve seen.’

‘Right, well, thank you very much for all your help. I’m sorry you had to be the one to see her, find her.’

‘How do you do it – how on earth do you do this job?’ he asked, looking at the tall, dark-haired woman seated opposite him with genuine curiosity. Attractive as she was, she wore no ring. Despite everything, he had noticed that much. And she could not be much older than Ella, forty-five at a push, and here she was spending her days dealing with the stuff of his nightmares, most people’s nightmares. He would go home, kiss his wife, maybe go on a long bike ride, ruffle the twins’ soft hair and forget all about pale-faced corpses and icy flesh. Or try to.

‘It’s all I know, and . . . she was someone’s child,’ she replied, rising to go, surprising herself with her own answer.

‘So, you have children?’ he persisted. Their shared experience of the corpse, the cold and the wet meant, in his mind, that the barriers were down, that truths, as opposed to pleasantries, could be exchanged. For him, the paramount importance of the living, the loved, had been reinforced by his encounter with the dead and, for some reason, he wanted to hear her affirm that and agree with him. He wanted her to have the same comfort.