The Book of Souls (Inspector McLean #2)(76)
In winter, when the snows came, it was a complete pig. Not aided by the fact that the pool car DS Ritchie had liberated was in dire need of a new set of front tyres. At least the heater worked, demisting the windscreen and giving them a clear view of the snowplough as it widened the single-lane track already cut through the drifts. They still missed the signpost the first time, having to turn around in Heriot and head back. A police Land Rover indicating ahead of them showed the way, and they slithered up a treacherously steep track to a collection of cottages clustered around rusty, corrugated-iron sheds and a large farmhouse.
Somehow the SOC Transit van had made it up the track, along with two squad cars. McLean showed his warrant card to the uniform who’d drawn the short straw and was busy marking out the perimeter of the crime scene with police tape.
‘Where’s the action, constable?’ He shivered as the wind cut through his heavy coat, jacket, shirt and skin, heading straight for the bones. The constable didn’t say anything in reply, perhaps reasoning that to open his mouth would mean to lose valuable body heat. Instead, he nodded in the direction of the largest of the cottages, up a short rise. At least he had a hat on, which was more than McLean had thought to bring.
The snow on the bank had been thoroughly trampled. At the top, he could see that it formed the edge of a narrow burn. Icicles hung from snow-capped rocks in the gently trickling flow, and a little way upstream, where the farm track crossed a deep-sided cutting, an old stone bridge arched over still water. A huddle of bodies clustered around the edge, keeping close for warmth. As he approached, one of them turned, revealing the be-scarfed and hooded form of Angus Cadwallader.
‘Ah, Tony. I’d wish you a happy new year, but this doesn’t seem the appropriate place.’
McLean nodded his agreement. ‘What’ve we got?’
‘Mrs Milner in the cottage called us about seven this morning, sir.’ McLean recognised the young constable who had shown him Audrey Carpenter’s body laid out just below the reservoir not five miles from here. Talk about a baptism of fire. ‘She lets her dogs out every morning when she gets up. Normally they come in again after five minutes, get their breakfast. Only today they wouldn’t come when she called. She found them down here. And this.’
McLean looked down at where the young constable was pointing. Ice rimed the edge of the water, pooled into a natural pond under the bridge, and through it, piercing it, a naked body was caught in a frozen moment of agony. His initial reaction was one of gut-tearing horror, even though he knew that the woman had been dead before she’d been put there. Something about being trapped under ice struck a chord of fear in him as primal as it was irrational. She lay face-upward, her hair splayed out around her head like a halo and then frozen in place as the ice re-formed around her. The rest of her body was partially obscured, but he could see that she was naked. And he didn’t need a photograph to confirm her identity. He’d known all along.
50
‘Can’t have been in the ice more than a couple of hours. She’s barely started to freeze.’
McLean stood in the clinical, clean setting of the city mortuary as Angus Cadwallader began his initial examination of the dead body. Trisha Lubkin looked even colder laid out on the stainless-steel table than she had done in the ice. Only her red hair gave her any colour, and even that looked dead. The gash that ran from ear to ear under her chin was pale, washed clean by the man who had killed her.
‘Can you hazard a time of death?’
Cadwallader grimaced. ‘Difficult. She’d certainly been dead enough for her internal organs to cool to ambient temperature. But that was hovering around zero anyway, so there’s none of the other indicators. Might as well have put her in one of those drawers.’ He nodded towards the lines of chill cabinets and their grim contents.
‘But you’re going to give it a shot, eh?’ McLean tried a grin for his old friend, unsure whether he managed to pull it off. He certainly didn’t feel all that cheerful.
‘I have to hedge my bets, Tony. But between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. Unless she was kept somewhere really cold after death. You know, like in a frozen stream. But if we’re working on the assumption this was the same man as killed Kate McKenzie and Audrey Carpenter, well, they’d only been dead about twelve hours when we found them.’
‘Cause of death?’
‘Give me time. But again, it looks like the cut to the neck. Severed pretty much everything down to the vertebrae. She’d have bled out fast, death would’ve been quick.’
Cadwallader continued his examination, peering closely at Trisha Lubkin’s hands, her fingers. He used a slim tool to scrape away cells from under her nails, handing the samples to the silent form of his assistant, Tracy. Slowly he worked his way around the body, coming finally to her head. McLean stood still, watching and waiting for whatever tiny clues the dead woman might yield up. There was really nothing else he could do.
‘This is interesting.’ Cadwallader peered closely at Trisha’s forehead. ‘Tracy, the magnifier please. And dig out the x-ray of her skull. Frontal.’
He took the proffered glass and bent over the body, then went over to the x-ray lightbox when Tracy had sorted out the correct sheet. McLean followed, the faintest glimmer of hope in him at whatever it was the pathologist had found.