The Reborn (24 page)

He recalled with horror everything he’d done since entering the house. The door handles he’d touched. Oh God, he’d touched Melanie, and been sick in the bathroom. His DNA could be on the towel.

He stood frozen.

They would forensically examine the room and the body and find his DNA. They would blame him for Melanie’s death.

He forced himself to calm down. All that stuff was fiction. Most of it anyway. He would wipe the door handles with the towel, and Melanie’s arm and mouth. He would rinse the bath again and take the towel with him.

He used the towel to turn on the water full blast. Once he was convinced the bath was clean, he wiped the tap. Then he wiped every surface he thought he might have touched, including door handles.

Melanie was proving more difficult. He would have to approach the body again, which he really didn’t want to do. He wondered if he should use the damp towel or get a dry one? He knew you should rub fingerprints off with a dry cloth, but what about skin? Could they find his fingerprints on her? Or maybe flakes of his own skin?

His brain couldn’t cope with the question.

In the end he decided to use the towel as it was. He forced himself forward and knelt down by the body. Was it his imagination, or had she grown cold and stiff since he’d run into the bathroom?

Her arm felt very thin, the wrist as narrow as a child’s. He turned the hand palm up and saw there was something drawn on it. It was a daisy. Someone had drawn a fucking daisy on her hand. There was no blood, no signs of a struggle, but Melanie hadn’t just died because something went wrong with the pregnancy. Someone had murdered Melanie and drawn a daisy on her hand.

Before Kira, he had never seen a dead body. Now he had seen two in the space of a week. The dead Kira haunted his dreams, and now Melanie would join her. He smothered a small sob as he reached out and scrubbed the towel backwards and forwards over the girl’s partially open mouth.

Rising swiftly, he stuffed the towel inside his jacket. He had to get out of here before someone came home. He slipped out of the door, avoiding the handle, and stood for a moment on the landing. When he heard nothing, he headed down the stairs.

30

Rhona had vowed to concentrate wholly on the outstanding lab work for the duration of the morning. Over lunchtime she would attempt to find out what had happened to McNab’s body after she had last seen it. She was still using the past tense in her thoughts about him, and was determined to keep it that way.

In the cold light of dawn, Petersson’s suggestion that McNab might have survived seemed hardly credible. That wasn’t enough for her; she would have to prove it wasn’t true. But that would come later. At the moment she was intent on finding out whether David had fathered Kira’s child.

In paternity suits, a blood sample was normally taken from the umbilical cord immediately after the birth. A test was performed under controlled circumstances, the results of which could be used to determine paternity. In this instance, she’d taken a sample soon after arriving at the scene.

She studied the pattern of alleles produced from DNA profiles of Kira, the baby and David.

Locus D3S1358 gave the child’s genotype as 16,17. Allele 16 must have come from Kira, but 17 certainly didn’t come from David. This effectively excluded David from being the father. The pattern was repeated throughout the table. She had the genotype of the father of the missing foetus, but it wasn’t David. The result also indicated that Kira had given birth to a baby girl.

Rhona thought back to the video of the Reborn, dressed in a pink sleep suit with a daisy motif. It was common now to be asked if you wanted to know the sex of your baby, and Bill had told her that Kira’s mother had ordered the Daisy doll. Maybe Maria had known Kira was going to have a girl.

She would feed the DNA results on the baby’s father into the national database where they would be compared to known sex offenders, although the facts up to this point suggested that Kira had deliberately got pregnant.

David definitely wasn’t the father, but his actions that night were still under scrutiny, not least because of the shark skin dentricles found on his jeans. She hadn’t identified traces of saliva in the environs, so whoever delivered the baby hadn’t cleared its airways in the tent. Her hope of obtaining a DNA profile of the assailant that way had met a dead end.

Despite all their efforts, she and Chrissy still had nothing that could be linked to an assailant apart from the yak hair, the dentricles and the likelihood they were capable of mirror writing.

Rhona tried the city mortuary first because she was known there and her seemingly casual request wouldn’t appear odd. Her luck was in. The mortuary assistant on duty was Sandra Boyce, someone she knew personally. She fed her the usual story about studying the bullet casing and wanting to see the results of the internal injury.

‘They didn’t bring him here. Last I heard, the body went south. Something about it being part of a SOCA case.’

That seemed hardly credible. The post-mortem for a death on Scottish soil should have taken place here. Trying not to sound too aghast, Rhona thanked Sandra for her help.

‘To be truthful, I was relieved not to be involved. It was too close to home.’

Rhona agreed with her. She rang off. If the mortuary wasn’t able to supply her with what she wanted, the next step was the hospital. She realised she had no idea which hospital McNab had been taken to, although she’d assumed it had been the A&E department at the Royal Infirmary. Getting information from the hospital wouldn’t be as straightforward as phoning the city mortuary. They weren’t going to tell her anything over the phone, no matter who she was. She would have to make a visit.

The drive across town gave her time to wonder what the hell she was doing. It would be easiest to meet up with Bill in private and tell him the whole story, taking a chance on him thinking she had lost her marbles through grief, guilt or a mixture of both. The alternative would be to confide in Chrissy, who would no doubt track the required information down in half the time it would take her. But something stopped her. A much-used phrase of her mother’s came to mind:
Least said, soonest mended
. Dragging others into this meant admitting she gave credence to Petersson’s arguments. When she had hooked up with the journalist, it was in the hope that he would discover enough to nail Kalinin. Now she was faced with something else entirely, and she had no one to blame but herself.

What if she dragged Bill and Chrissy into this, and it all went pear-shaped? She didn’t want that to happen, particularly after the disciplinary proceedings Bill had had to endure. No. She would make her enquiries alone, or just with Petersson. No one would be exposed, except herself. After all, she wasn’t the first bereaved person to wish someone alive again.

Her route to the Royal Infirmary took her into the area where it had all begun. Duke Street, the derelict Great Eastern Hotel, the Molendinar burn, the Necropolis. All haunts of the Gravedigger, whose vengeful actions against those who had caught him had poisoned all their lives.
Every contact leaves a trace
. It seemed Locard’s exchange principle applied to more than just physical evidence.

She went straight to Accident and Emergency and was relieved to find it wasn’t busy. Her enquiry at reception took her into an office where, once her identity was properly established, she was put in the charge of a woman called Eileen, who would check back on the records of that night for her.

After around ten minutes’ searching, Eileen discovered three gunshot admissions that night. Two men and one woman. All three had been taken to surgery.

‘Can you give me their names?’

‘Who are you looking for?’

‘Michael Joseph McNab.’

‘That’s one of them.’ Eileen flipped through a few screens. ‘I’m sorry. He died during surgery.’

Surgery? Rhona felt her heart lurch. ‘You mean he was alive when they brought him in?’

Eileen studied the screen. ‘It says he was revived in the ambulance and taken to the operating theatre.’ She regarded Rhona sympathetically.

‘How long did he live?’

‘The time of death is given as 12.27.’

Rhona thanked her and left. As she exited the building, an ambulance drew up, lights flashing. Immediately a paramedic threw open the back door. He was joined by the driver and they quickly lifted out a figure on a stretcher. It looked serious. She watched in morbid fascination, rewriting what she’d believed until now to be the story of that night. In this version, McNab was the live body on that stretcher, his heart shocked into beating in the ambulance, only to have it stop again on the operating table. So Petersson had been right about one thing. The rest of his story – McNab’s recovery and retreat into hiding, SOCA’s involvement, Slater’s cover-up – were all figments of Petersson’s imagination.

As the doors sucked shut behind the paramedics, Rhona roused herself and began to walk briskly away, not caring where she was heading, only knowing that she couldn’t get behind the wheel of a car in her present state of mind.

She gave the cathedral a wide berth and went up the road that led across the Bridge of Sighs and into the Necropolis. When she reached the top, she leaned back against the nearest stone edifice and fought to collect her breath and her thoughts.

Suddenly she realised what had been niggling at her since she left the hospital. At first she’d only registered that McNab had been revived in the ambulance and then died on the operating table. Now the memory of one small detail displayed on that computer screen flashed into her mind.

McNab couldn’t have died on an operating table in the Royal Infirmary at twenty-seven minutes past midnight, because at that precise moment she had been holding him in her arms.

31

Bill was eating dinner with Margaret and the kids when the call came through. He vacated his place at the table and went through to the hall. As he closed the door behind him, he caught a glimpse of Margaret’s concerned face.

‘Detective Sergeant?’ He kept his voice low.

‘Sorry, Sir.’ Janice always started with an apology. She knew the moments with his family were precious, so if she had had to call him at home it must be serious.

‘We’ve received a call from Mrs Jones, Melanie’s mother. She found Melanie when she got back from her trip.’

‘Dead?’ said Bill.

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Like Kira?’

‘No. The foetus hasn’t been removed. But there’s a mark on her hands that looks like a daisy.’

‘I’ll be there shortly.’

Bill observed the girl he’d questioned only the day before. She lay on top of the bed, fully clothed, as though she had simply dozed off. There was no evidence of a struggle, no obvious injuries, no blood. In his time on the Force he’d rarely visited death scenes that looked as peaceful as this one.

Sylvia Barnes, the pathologist, was there already. She rose from her position next to the bed.

‘What happened?’ Bill asked her.

She indicated the girl’s eyelids, where tiny haemorrhages spider-marked the pale skin. ‘There are also pressure marks on her chest. Nothing on the neck, so she probably wasn’t strangled.’ She pointed to the large, square pillow that lay alongside. ‘I think she was probably held down and suffocated with the pillow while she slept, but we’ll find out for sure at the post-mortem.’

‘There was no attempt to remove the baby?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘There is this, however.’ She turned Melanie’s right palm outwards, exposing a crude attempt to draw a daisy. ‘Looks like the deaths are linked.’

‘Or someone wants us to think they are,’ he said. ‘What about the timing?’

‘I gather the mother spoke to her late morning, but didn’t get a reply at two p.m. She found the body at six thirty p.m. when she got home, and thought Melanie was sleeping until she touched her hand. The time frame corresponds to the body state. Melanie probably died in the last four to six hours.’

Bill stood for a moment, understanding how Melanie’s mother might have convinced herself that her daughter was asleep. He would have done the same. Yet something happened to a body when life left it. The stillness of death was unique. Mrs Jones may have prayed that her daughter was only sleeping, but Bill suspected she’d realised the truth even before she’d touched her.

Mrs Jones looked like an older version of Melanie. She was slim, pretty and impeccably dressed. Shock had drained her face of colour so that her discreetly applied make-up seemed overdone. She was sitting on the sofa her daughter had used when Bill had interviewed her. A female constable sat alongside, a comforting hand on the woman’s arm. When Bill asked what had happened, Mrs Jones confirmed the story he’d already heard.

‘When I tried to call her the second time, I assumed she was resting. She’s been sleeping a lot lately. I thought she was asleep when I went into the room,’ she faltered. ‘Then I realised there was something odd. She was so still. I touched her hand and it was cold. I called 999. The paramedics were here in minutes, but they said Melanie had been dead for some time.’ Her voice broke.