Bred in the Bone (6 page)

She exited the changing rooms with her old clothes in the new bags, estimating from the reports that she would have time to hit the John Lewis make-up counters and let the demo girls do their worst.

Collette gave her a brief assessment as she left, succinctly passing her judgment in merely two words: ‘Hello boys.’

Jasmine just about managed to keep a smile off her face. Part of her was delighted, while another part told her she was going to hell for this.

Hidden Content

Catherine saw Forensics finally pull up at the rear of the forecourt. She guessed they had been held up in the tailback, without the blue light to clear a path. She went outside to meet them, leaving Laura and Zoe to work on Rose Royce.

Beano was standing out on the pavement close to the exit. Catherine assumed he had walked Mrs Chalmers over there so that the ambulance would spare her – and him – a view inside the Bentley, but he was beckoning Catherine with a wave.

‘We might have caught a wee break,’ he said as she approached. ‘Mrs Chalmers was right about what she heard. Look.’

He squatted down at the end of the dwarf wall, where it resumed on the left-hand side of the exit towards the dual carriageway. It comprised red brickwork beneath a series of light grey slabs, the nearest of which was unique in having been painted white. Presumably this was to denote the inside border of the exit, or perhaps someone had intended to paint the lot and then decided he couldn’t be arsed.

‘The paint’s quite fresh, and it’s had a bash,’ Beano said, picking at it with his fingers to illustrate where it was already coming away. ‘So there will be a scrape and a transfer of paint on the left-hand flank of the shooter’s vehicle. Match the samples and we can place it here for sure.’

‘Well spotted,’ she told him. ‘And here’s just the people to tell.’

Beano glanced across to where the pathologist Cal O’Shea and his assistant Aileen Bruce were pulling on plastic overalls.

‘Yeah, I’ll direct them to the paint and you direct them to the birthday boy.’

Poor Beano. As murder scenes went, this was hardly the set of a Rob Zombie movie, but he was suffering all the same. To be fair,
it wasn’t as though he had the screaming heebie-jeebies; he’d just be a lot happier once the body was covered by a sheet.

‘Officer Thompson, why don’t you take Mrs Chalmers down the road to a coffee shop and wait there until she can get someone to drive her home and sit with her?’

‘Oh, no,’ Mrs Chalmers insisted, as Catherine anticipated she would. The straight-arrow types never wanted to make a fuss, even when they were suffering from borderline post-traumatic stress disorder. ‘I can drive myself. I’m fine.’

‘I’m sure you are,’ Catherine told her. ‘After witnessing something like this, people are sometimes so fine that they drive through a red at the first set of lights and head straight into the oncoming traffic. Go with Officer Thompson. Call someone who can come and get you.’

Mrs Chalmers rather feebly nodded her assent. The scenario Catherine had just painted must have struck her as all too plausible and she suddenly didn’t feel quite so sure of herself.

Beano gave Catherine an appreciative look.

‘When does this stuff stop freaking you out?’ he asked quietly, out of the witness’s earshot.

‘You’re doing fine, Beano,’ she assured him with a pat on the arm.

He didn’t point out that she hadn’t answered his question.

That was because she didn’t like what the answer said about her. She didn’t know when the sight of a murder victim had stopped bothering her, and hadn’t even been conscious at the time of passing through such a watershed, but she knew it had been a very long time ago. Of course, every so often one could get under her skin, but she couldn’t have said when that had last happened.

The sight of Stevie Fullerton buckled up and buckled over in his Bentley certainly wasn’t going to do it. Her great fear, of course, was that now nothing could.

She was always more vulnerable to these thoughts when Cal O’Shea was present. The pathologist liked to joke about how sanguine she was around murder scenes, which was generally interpreted as a humorous play on the gags and remarks he had to
endure about spending his days cutting up dead bodies. He liked to make out that he found her intimidating and ‘spooky’. This could also be interpreted as deflection, but Catherine was never sure to what extent he was actually joking. Cal had this penetrating and inscrutable gaze, the kind that felt like he could see beneath the skin of the living as analytically as his scalpel let him reveal the secrets of the dead. It piqued a paranoia that he could see inside her, and she was afraid of what he might have found.

She thought Aileen was moving a little deliberately and wondered if she’d done her back, then she turned just enough for Catherine to notice the protuberance that was nudging her overalls. Of course: she remembered hearing that Aileen was pregnant, but it had been a couple of months since she’d seen her.

It briefly struck Catherine as quite jarring to see a bright young woman, blossoming with child, spending her day focused upon a murdered corpse. Maybe that meant she wasn’t totally numbed to the horrors after all.

It seemed incongruous but, on reflection, imminent new birth around recent death was pure cycle-of-life stuff. The wean was in the womb, for God’s sake. It wasn’t like Aileen had taken along a five-year-old on Bring Your Daughter To Work Day.

She spent a few minutes catching up, asking how Aileen was getting on, trading a few stories about the debilitating effects of having placenta-brain. Cal left them to it, heading off to get started.

When Catherine broke off from chatting, Cal seemed to have disappeared. She walked carefully around the forecourt, tracing an imaginary perimeter surrounding the victim, and found him crouched down at the open door of the Bentley.

‘Are you going to introduce us?’ he asked without glancing back. ‘He’s rather shy. Perhaps if you broke the ice . . .’

‘My apologies. Stevie Fullerton, this is Cal O’Shea. Cal O’Shea, this is Stevie Fullerton. You might want to wish him many happy returns.’

‘Oh, it’s his birthday?’

‘His forty-ninth and last.’

‘Some way to give a guy his bumps,’ Cal observed. He was
leaning carefully into the car without touching anything, looking up at Fullerton’s bowed head.

‘Aye. Four bullets to the chest at close range.’

‘And, it would appear, one to the middle of the fore . . . Oh no, I’m mistaken. Goodness gracious.’

Cal had this idiom of exaggerated politeness that he sometimes engaged as a means of undercutting the crudeness of the language whenever a group of cops were in conversation, but it also tended to kick in when he was genuinely surprised.

‘What is it?’ Catherine asked.

‘Come closer and you’ll see.’

Catherine approached gingerly, stepping through the puddle of evaporating suds and leaning over Cal’s back.

He cupped Fullerton’s head with one gloved hand, then took a pencil and delicately used it to brush away a lock of hair that had been overhanging the victim’s brow.

‘I thought it was another gunshot wound, but rather the gunman appears to have drawn some kind of symbol on Mr Fullerton’s forehead using his blood. No idea what it signifies, but happily it’s not my job to find out.’

Catherine looked at the symbol, crudely smeared in dark, dried blood, and suddenly felt as though the disused petrol station was on board an oil tanker pitching in stormy seas. Something inside her lurched and she felt for a horrible moment like she was going to faint. She stumbled forward a little, her hand reaching out to rest upon Cal’s back for balance.

Now she knew what it felt like to be Beano. If he had still been here she could have told him that, regardless how many murder scenes she had attended, this one had rendered her officially spooked. She just couldn’t tell him why.

‘Are you okay?’ Cal asked, turning around.

Catherine stood up slowly, wary of exacerbating her light-headedness.

‘Just got a wee bit of a fright there. Wasn’t expecting to see something like that, that’s all.’

‘Changes the picture somewhat, albeit only a little. What we
have now is a gangland execution latte given extra flavour by a little squirt from the ritual-killing syrup dispenser.’

Catherine exhaled in a long controlled breath, composing herself as she heard the clack and splash of Laura Geddes hurrying towards her. Laura looked fit to burst as she approached, but her news was jolted into a holding pattern by whatever she saw in Catherine’s face.

‘You okay, boss? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. Like Mrs Chalmers was fine. ‘Cal here just showed me a wee macabre flourish to the killer’s handiwork. I’ll tell you in a minute. Have you got something for me?’

Laura’s expression said
Do I ever
, but Catherine couldn’t read whether this was a breakthrough or a complication.

‘DVLA came back on the plates. One of them is the registration of a green Land Rover Defender, and it’s not been reported stolen.’

This was good news, but it didn’t account for Laura’s expression. There was something more.

‘Whose is it?’

‘The owner is listed as a Mr Tron Ingrams. Better known to you and me as Glen Fallan.’

The Sacrifice

Sparks danced in the cool morning air, golden flecks turning silver as she held the steel to the turning stone. She worked the pedal with her left foot, angling the blade first towards then away from herself until the cutting edge gleamed for a deadly few millimetres either side of the tip. It had to kill with one blow, and she knew that every turn of the wheel would later concentrate a little more lethal pressure at the end of the arc when she swung from her shoulder and brought the blade to bear. Every flex of her calf muscle in driving the pedal down was thus a kindness, a courtesy.

The sun was low and bright, prompting her to shield her eyes until she reached the relief of the shadow cast by the coop. It was noticeably colder there too, the finest of hoar still dusting the moss-choked grass where the shade had preserved it. It was like two states of being, two realms, existing side by side, utterly different and yet separated by nothing, borders denoted only by their distinction. The bright realm was dazzling, vibrant in its colours, welcoming in its greater warmth. The shadow realm was cold and muted, yet it protected the fragile, gossamer adornment that coated each blade of grass and contoured each barren rut like a sculpture.

She cast a glance across to the house, then walked back into the sunlight from where she lifted the chopping block and the bucket, carrying them back with her into the shadow. She placed the block amid the whitest patch of hoar, at the dead centre of the shade, and rested the cleaver against it, handle up.

Bracing herself for the smell, she opened the coop and stepped inside. It was one mercy of the colder weather: the reek was always that bit less volatile, fewer molecules excited by heat and borne into the air by convection currents. The place seemed quiet, just the sounds of pecking and scratching from its occupants, as though
they were all too wrapped up in their own concerns of a Saturday morning to be bothered with squawking to their neighbours.

‘Maybe have a blether later, once I’ve got all this pecking and scratching out of the way,’ they were perhaps thinking. That’s what she was like, anyway. That’s why she was tending to this before going over to see to the horses. She always preferred to get chores out of the way before turning to pleasures; even with a list of duties, she would tend to them in ascending order of palatability. Her sister was the exact opposite, an arch-procrastinator who seemed unburdened no matter what was piling up on her plate. She wished she was the same, more able to live in the moment, but she knew herself well enough to understand that this was just how she was made. She couldn’t relax and enjoy anything while there were responsibilities still waiting to be met. In the short term, that meant killing a chicken for Mum before going to the stables, and in the long term it meant that for weeks, even months she had been unable to see past sitting her exams. So much so, in fact, that it was at her parents’ insistence that she was going out tonight when her instincts and conscience were angrily dictating that she could not afford to let up on her studies even for one evening.

She found the hood hanging by its strap on the hook where it was supposed to be. That was because it was her who did this last time; Lisa seldom took her turn, and when she didn’t manage to wriggle out of it she usually found some way of making everybody think it would be simpler in future just to do it themselves. ‘Losing’ the hood had been a case in point.

She chose a candidate with little deliberation and popped the hood over the hen’s head. It was a small thing, but it made the whole undertaking so much easier, a fact presumably not lost on Lisa when she failed to return the hood to its rightful place. It made the birds more placid, sometimes rooted them to the spot, sparing the time-consuming and temper-shredding (not to mention dignity-rending) farce of chasing the chookie around like Benny Hill. But perhaps more importantly, it spared her from looking it in the eye between that moment of choosing and the bird’s imminent end on the block.

That was why they hooded prisoners before the gallows, blind-folded men in front of the firing squad. People thought it was a courtesy to the condemned, so that they wouldn’t have to literally face their death, but it was actually for the benefit of the executioners. How could you shoot somebody while you looked into their eyes? How could you watch a person be hanged if you could see the agonies racking their face?

They should bring it back, people kept saying. People who had never killed anything, not even a chicken.

She took the bird outside briskly, entering an almost automatic process from the moment the hood was in place and her grip firm on the hen’s neck. There would be no dallying, no ponderance, only the swiftest of action. She was at the block in moments, where she held the bird by its legs and tail in her left hand, its neck straining back against its body as soon as it touched the wood. With her right hand she reached for the handle of the cleaver, always keeping her eyes on the bird, and in a practised movement drew it up and decisively down, severing the head completely. A streak of red violated the purity of the frost, and she let a little more spill in a deliberate arc before bringing the twitching bird into place above the bucket. She stared at the spray and the arc, like some runic symbol whose meaning she could not read, all the while continuing to hold the bleeding carcass over the bucket. She admired the rune’s grace and simplicity, imagining herself the keeper of something truly ancient that was sacred to this spot and this act, unchanging over centuries.

She could feel the bird buck and spasm, the muscle reflexes pulsing against her grip, and as she looked at the crimson pattern stark against the whiteness, she felt a small burning echo of shame. She recalled with guilt the time something truly was imparted to her from a previous generation, when her father taught her and Lisa how to do this.

Lisa had been eight and a half, she seven. There was never any question of her waiting until she was Lisa’s age for her chance to be taught or even permitted to do anything: she always had to have a go at the same time, compelled from as young as she could
remember to prove she was as big, as fast, as strong, as clever as her older sister.

Dad hadn’t expected either of them to manage it by themselves, but he knew it was important to make them part of this, so that they would be prepared when that time did come. What he clearly didn’t expect was their reaction. She had insisted on going first, as usual, and had been accommodated, as usual, by a father happy to follow the path of least resistance and an older sister who was in no rush to be at the front of this particular queue. Dad made her grip the bird in both hands, showing her how to hold it against the block and very carefully ensuring both bird and daughter were steady before bringing down the blade.

She recalled a pulse of tense anticipation as he swung, her hands squeezing reflexively tighter, and of jolting fright as the impact seemed to pass through her, from the ground at her feet and the warm body in her grip, then a relieved kind of elation mixed with a brief feeling of achievement. She remembered giggling a little, nervously, in the stillness of the moment. Then the bird jerked back to life in her hands and she lost her hold in her startlement, allowing it to drop to the ground, where it proceeded to hare off in the direction of the stables.

Dad was trying to inoculate them against the horror and instil a solemn sense of purpose to the act. However, he was a bit late: they must have seen their mum do it a hundred times, initially paying fascinated attention as they stopped to stare, later merely aware it was going on in the background of whatever game they were playing.

She remembered that the first time she saw a chicken’s head severed and roll off the block, she had felt much as she did when she was shown a magic trick: a mixture of surprised delight and confusion as she tried to reconstruct the action and the outcome. But once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. They were already inured to the blood, albeit there remained something incredible about the speed of the transformation from living state to dead, side by side, bright realm, shadow realm.

Dead chickens running around with their heads off was altogether
new, and, for a while at least, hilariously so. She and Lisa went charging delightedly after it, shrieking with laughter and excitement as it veered erratically across the grass. Between them they signally failed to corner the fugitive, which only came to a stop when it ran full-tilt into the side of the stables, a conclusion to the chase that precipitated further hysterics from its two pursuers.

The laughter stopped abruptly when they turned around and saw the thunderous glower across their father’s face. He didn’t need to say anything: in that moment, they understood immediately that what they were doing was wrong, and on an instinctive, fundamental level
why
it was wrong. No, he didn’t need to say anything, but he said plenty nonetheless. If he wanted to ensure that she never forgot his words, then he did his job well. She could recall them still, almost a decade later. His voice was calm, measured, a man who knew the need to scold had been obviated by a mere look, and who wanted his girls to listen, not cower.

‘We’re taking this creature’s life to preserve our own. Killing something is a sacrifice – it’s always a sacrifice, and a sacrifice should be solemn. We’ll live off this creature today and tomorrow too. We owe it our gratitude and we owe it our respect, our courtesy . . . and our kindness.’

She remembered looking down at the headless body, now lifeless on the ground, and weeping. She didn’t feel bad that they had killed it, but for the indignity of the chase.

That was why she had glanced towards the house before moving the block and the bucket, and felt an echo of that shame as she contemplated the rune. She wanted to see what the blood looked like against the frost, but she didn’t want anyone to notice that this was what she was doing. It was merely an echo of shame though, not shame itself, because this wasn’t to disrespect the act of sacrifice. She was making it feel like a ritual, because ritual served to remind her of the significance of actions that had become almost automatic.

She would remember the rune always, she decided: this cold morning, this sunshine, this symbol in blood newly imbued with meaning. And she was right, but not for the reasons she envisaged in that moment.