The Skeleton Road (5 page)

A
lan Macanespie scratched his belly through the gap in his shirt buttons and slurped milky coffee from a cardboard carton. Theo Proctor’s lip curled in disgust as his colleague belched sour breath across the table. ‘You are disgusting, you know that?’ The Welshman waved a hand in front of his face and reached for his bottle of mineral water.

‘Just because you’ve no idea what a Saturday night’s for doesn’t mean the rest of us have to behave like we’re a bunch of choirboys.’ Macanespie shifted in his chair, his stomach following his movement like a sine wave of fat. ‘After listening to that twat Cagney yesterday, I needed to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. I’ve got better things to do with my Sunday morning than deal with this pile of crap.’ He scowled at a stack of folders piled on the table by Proctor’s hand. The loser’s hand that Cagney had dealt them had left him feeling bitter and insecure; unless he could see some light at the end of the tunnel that wasn’t an oncoming train, he felt he was staring at an undistinguished and premature end to a pretty low-key career.

Proctor laid a slim hand on top of the pile. ‘No, you haven’t. Not if you want to keep your pension. Cagney’s got it in for the likes of us. He’s got a chip on his shoulder and he thinks the only thing us hard-working grunts are any use for is to make him look good.’

Macanespie snorted. ‘He’s got his bloody Savile Row suits for that.’

‘And he wants the bosses to think those bloody Savile Row suits are where he belongs. So he needs results and if he doesn’t get them, he’ll have to hang somebody out to dry – and I sure as hell don’t want it to be me.’ Proctor flicked his laptop open and tapped it into life. ‘After WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, the one thing they’re all paranoid about is leaks. And let’s be honest, you can’t look at what’s been happening on our watch and not think somebody’s been taking the law into their own hands.’

Macanespie burped again, glaring at the coffee carton as if it were somehow responsible for his own lack of finesse. He ran a hand over his ginger stubble and sighed. ‘And nobody gave a shit. Getting rid of that human sewage was doing the world a favour.’

‘You’d better not let Wilson Cagney hear you say that.’ Proctor frowned as he summoned up a spreadsheet. The fine black hairs on the backs of his bony fingers made them look like magnified insect legs as they scuttled across the keys. ‘You’re single, Alan. You’ve no kids. You might have nothing ahead of you but drinking yourself into an early grave, but I’ve got to think about Lorna and the girls.’

There was a stony silence. Macanespie was motionless, his face revealing nothing of what was going on inside. Proctor had gone too far. For years, he and Macanespie had worked well together because they’d maintained a studied indifference to each other’s faults. It was like a marriage in a Catholic country before divorce had become legalised. They were stuck with each other and so they’d made the best of a bad job, pretending their mutual contempt didn’t exist, avoiding comment on the personal habits they despised. Proctor had never criticised Macanespie’s drinking or his disgusting departures from what the Welshman considered obligate personal hygiene. For his part, Macanespie had tolerated finicky behaviour that he reckoned was borderline OCD and never complained about Proctor’s perpetual displays of family photographs and endless tedious narratives about the brilliant, beautiful, erudite, talented paragons that were his daughters. That effective concordat had been blown out of the water by Wilson Cagney’s display of gunboat diplomacy. Now it seemed Proctor was happy to throw him under the bus, his sole justification the failure of Macanespie’s last relationship to go the distance. Probably, the Scotsman thought, he’d always been jealous because the fact that Macanespie hadn’t been married meant she hadn’t been able to take him to the cleaners after the split. Served her right. Macanespie had asked her to marry him more than once, but she’d always sidestepped the offer. So she walked out the door with no more than she walked in with. But Proctor, he was stuck with the prim and proper Lorna till death. Served him right, frankly.

Macanespie cleared his throat. ‘Remind me. What are we looking at?’

‘Over the past eight years, there have been eleven instances of an ICTFY target being assassinated within days of when they were due to be arrested.’ Proctor called up another screen and frowned at it. ‘The paperwork had been processed, the operation had been ordered. But in the gap between set-up and execution —’ He flushed as he realised the inappropriateness of his choice of words.

‘— there was an execution,’ Macanespie blurted, only too predictably. Sometimes he couldn’t help himself. That Scottish black humour just wouldn’t sit quietly in the corner. ‘And how many of those cases were ours?’

‘Eight had Brits leading the investigation. The other three had Brits on the team.’

‘The same Brits?’

Proctor ran his finger down the screen. ‘Doesn’t look like it. Alexandra Reid was second string on two cases then led one. Will Pringle led three, Derek Green led two and helped out on a third, and Patterson Tait headed up the other two. So we can probably rule them out as our vigilante. But we’ll have to work our way down the totem pole in every case to find the common factor. The mole.’

Macanespie grunted. ‘You’re kidding, right? You’re not seriously talking about embarking on the biggest waste of time this side of the 1987 Labour Party election campaign? We all know what this has been about. It’s been a kind of ethnic cleansing of scumbags. Scrubbing the Balkans clean of the gobshites that made it hell on earth in the nineties. You know and I know the top name in the frame for all of these assassinations.’

Proctor breathed heavily through his nose. He pursed his lips and scowled at his computer, stabbing the keys as if they were Macanespie’s eyes. ‘We don’t know that,’ he growled.

‘“We don’t know that,”’ Macanespie mimicked in a mimsy voice. ‘It’s been common knowledge round here for years, Theo. Don’t start pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.’

‘It’s just rumour and gossip.’

‘Rumour and gossip that nobody’s ever contradicted in my hearing. The Balkan boys, they all give a nod and a wink whenever people start going on about what a funny coincidence it is that another sadistic fucker with a war crimes record as long as your arm gets the wooden overcoat before we can get him into custody.’

Proctor shook his head. ‘Doesn’t make it the truth. It’s just a good story.’

‘It’s a story that fits the facts. That’s why it keeps coming up again and again.’ Macanespie began ticking off the points on his fat fingers. ‘Who knows all the key players from way back when? Who’s the kind of great big fucking hero that half the bloody Balkans would lie their slivovitz-guzzling heads off to protect? Who shouted his mouth off to every news organisation that would listen about how useless ICTFY was before he went underground just a matter of weeks before the first assassination?’

Proctor realigned the edges of his pile of files. They didn’t need it. ‘You’re talking about Dimitar Petrovic.’

‘Exactly.’ Macanespie stuck two thumbs up and grinned triumphantly. ‘You always get there in the end, Theo. Takes some pushing, but you always get to the top of the hill.’

‘As usual, Alan, you’re completely missing the point. Even if you’re right about Petrovic – and I’m not conceding that you are – even if you’re right, it still doesn’t get us off the hook. Wilson Cagney probably knows all about Petrovic already. Petrovic isn’t the issue here. The issue is where Petrovic is getting his information from. Somebody’s pointing him in the right direction, Alan. And from where Cagney’s sitting, it looks like one of us or else somebody very bloody close.’

T
here was good news and bad news. Annoyingly for Karen, the good news came first. Although that got the day off to the right sort of start, it made the bad news all the more of a disappointment.

The plus side of the ledger came from the fingerprint officer who had picked up the card from the CSI assigned to the skeleton. Karen had left the house before River was awake, taking a travel mug of strong coffee to kickstart her synapses. She could have checked out the forensic progress by phone, but she liked to eyeball the techies whenever she could. She’d always had the knack of flattering them into going the extra mile for her. And when you were working cold cases on the smallest of budgets, that extra mile could make all the difference.

So early on a Sunday morning, there wasn’t much traffic and she made record time to the brand-new Scottish Police Authority’s Serious Crime Campus. It sat in what Karen liked to think of as Scotland’s answer to the Bermuda Triangle – the godforsaken area that lay between the M80, the M73 and the M8. It had been christened the Gartcosh Business Interchange to make it sound exciting and dynamic. It would, she thought, take more than rebranding to wipe the local population’s memory of the massive strip mill and steelworks that had employed getting on for a thousand men whose working lives had effectively ended when British Steel closed the plant in 1986. A generation later, the scars remained.

The new building was a dramatic addition to the view. Its white concrete and tinted glass exterior looked like giant barcodes embedded in the landscape at odd angles to each other. The first time she’d seen it, Karen had been baffled, tempted to dismiss it as a piece of self-indulgence on the part of the architects. But Phil, who’d been reading about it online, had explained that it was in the shape of a human chromosome and that the barcode effect was meant to represent DNA. ‘It’s a metaphor,’ he’d said. Grudgingly, she’d accepted that since part of the building would be housing the forensic science arm of Police Scotland, there was a point to the design. She was just glad that nobody was suggesting she should work inside a bloody metaphor.

One good thing about Sunday was the parking. The government wanted everyone to be green and use public transport to commute to work. So when new buildings went up, it was policy to create far fewer parking spaces than there were employees. According to one of Karen’s former colleagues, Gartcosh had two hundred and fifty spaces for twelve hundred employees. But those employees had mostly been relocated to Gartcosh from somewhere else in the Central Belt. And very few of those somewhere elses had public transport links to Gartcosh. ‘Some folk get to their work before seven o’clock, just to get a parking space,’ he’d told her. Others swore a lot and churned up the grass verges of the surrounding roads. It wasn’t going to change government policy, but it did make them feel better.

Inside the building, everything was shiny and new except for the people. They were as dishevelled, nerdy and grumpy as ever. Fingerprint expert Trevor Dingwall still looked like he’d been reluctantly rousted out of a pub football game. St Johnstone FC away shirt, baggy sweat pants and oversize trainers might have looked passable on a student. On a paunchy balding beardie in his forties, they just looked depressing. Karen found him in a corner carrel in an almost deserted open-plan office, hunched over an array of tenprints.

‘See this job? It never ceases to amaze me,’ was how he began the conversation.

‘Good to see you too, Trevor. What’s on the amazement agenda today, then?’

He pushed his glasses up his nose and peered at her. ‘How long do you reckon that body’s been up on the roof?’

Karen rolled her eyes. Why could nobody get to the point these days? Everybody seemed determined to turn the most straightforward of conversations into performance art. ‘As things stand, the best estimate I’ve got is between five and ten years.’

Trevor nodded sagely. ‘Like I said, amazing. The CSI said it probably started out inside a pocket, but when the fabric rotted away, it ended up leaning against the wall, at an angle. So one side was kind of protected, if you see what I mean?’

Karen saw what he meant. In her mind’s eye, she could imagine the dark red plastic card propped against the wall, left stranded as the material of a hip pocket decayed around it. ‘Uh huh. So, what have we got?’

‘Two fingermarks. Probably index and middle finger.’

OK, Karen thought. Fairly amazing. ‘What’s the quality like?’

‘Actually, surprisingly good. Flat surface, not handled too much. It didn’t take much processing to get them either. To be honest, I thought it would be more of a challenge.’ He looked disappointed.

‘Next time I’ll try and come up with something a bit more worthy of your skills.’

Oblivious to her irony, Trevor pressed on. ‘If I had to guess, I’d say he was handed a room key at the hotel check-in. Maybe used it once then stuck it in his pocket. There’s traces of what might be a mark on the other side, possibly a thumbprint, but it’s too degraded to get anything from it.’

‘So, the prints you did get – have you run them?’

‘I input them before I went home, had them running overnight. And they came up clean on the IDENT1. So your body has no criminal record here in the UK. And that’s it, I’m afraid.’

Good news, bad news. Karen sighed. ‘OK. Thanks anyway. Can you pass the card on to the digital forensics team? I need them to look at the magnetic strip, see if we can get any details on that.’

‘Already done it. I dropped it in after I’d lifted the prints.’

‘I’ll pop in and see what they’ve got to say for themselves. Thanks, Trevor.’

‘No bother.’

Karen was halfway to the door when she stopped, struck by a thought. ‘Trevor, do the military keep fingerprint records at all?’

He frowned. ‘What, you mean of serving soldiers? No. They print insurgents when they’re somewhere like Afghanistan, so they can check out likely lads that they pick up at checkpoints or in raids afterwards. But that’s about it.’

‘What about the security services? Do they print people they have working for them? I’m thinking foreign nationals.’

Trevor’s bushy eyebrows jerked upwards. ‘Now you’re asking. I’ve never come up against anything like that. Any reason why you think your skeleton might be one of them?’

‘The anthro thinks his early dental work happened in the old Eastern bloc. I just wondered if he’d been working for us.’

Trevor sniggered. ‘More likely a Polish plumber than a spook.’

Karen sighed. ‘You’re probably right. Except why would a Polish plumber have a bullet in his brain at the top of the John Drummond?’

An unconcerned shrug. ‘They’ve got gangsters, just like us.’

‘Great. That’s all I need – an excursion into East European gang-bangers,’ she groaned. ‘As if we don’t have enough home-grown hard men.’ But she made a mental note to talk to the squad who dealt with organised crime among the immigrant communities of the central belt.

Walking through the building to the digital forensics department, Karen was struck by a dramatic view of the distant Campsie Fells. That was one of the things she loved about living in Scotland. The landscape was always butting in, showing its face in the most unexpected of places. Really, it wasn’t surprising that so many foreigners came here intending it to be a way station on their journey, only to find that they wanted to stay. Was that what had happened with the John Drummond skeleton? Had he come here for whatever transient reason then been sucked in to a different kind of life? Or had it been a life on the wrong side of the tracks that had brought him into her orbit?

Karen pushed open the door into the reception area of the digital forensics lab. There was nobody behind the desk, but a sign instructed her to ring a bell on the wall. She’d almost given up hope when a door opened to reveal a broad-shouldered young woman in a muscle vest and magenta jeans with a pimped-up shock of platinum blonde hair and a nose stud. Karen immediately felt dumpy, unfit and uncool under her fierce scrutiny. ‘I’m DCI Pirie,’ she said, determined to seize what initiative she could. ‘Historic Cases Unit. I’d like to talk to someone about a piece of evidence we submitted to you yesterday.’

The woman shifted a wad of chewing gum from one side of her mouth to the other. ‘I’m Tamsin Martineau and I’m the one you need to talk to,’ she said, an Australian accent evident even in those few words. ‘Come on through.’

Karen followed her into a room dimly illuminated by computer screens. ‘I know it’s early days, but I was in the building.’

‘No worries,’ Tamsin said, settling into an ergonomic chair in front of a work station that featured three monitors and various black and silver boxes whose function was a mystery to Karen. ‘Drag up a chair.’

Karen brought over the nearest simple chair and sat down. ‘Is there anything you can tell me?’

The words were barely out of her mouth when she regretted them. Tamsin smiled like a woman who’s just been handed the keys to somebody else’s sports car. ‘Well,’ she said, drawing the word out tantalisingly. ‘Let me see.’ And she was off. ‘Your CSI said he thought it was a hotel key-card, and I’d put money on that myself. Theoretically, the card could still hold some data. But that data isn’t going to be much use to us. It’s not going to say, “No-Tell Motel room three hundred and two for the night of June twentieth in the name of Mr Bojangles”. No such luck. Truth is, it’s unlikely to contain much except a random string which matches the access key for the relevant hotel door at the time in question. If we got really lucky, it could also have markers that would indicate the nature of the booking.’

‘The nature of the booking? What, you mean how it was booked? Like, phone or Internet?’

Tamsin gave Karen an impatient look, as if she were a small and stupid child. ‘No, I mean like, was it room only, or bed and breakfast, that sort of thing. Whether they’re allowed to charge to their room. Which would indicate that the hotel’s done a pre-authorisation on a credit card. Whether or not they have access to any additional facilities like a gym, a pool, an executive lounge. That in turn would help you narrow down which hotel the key-card is for.’

‘Right.’ Karen felt on safer ground here. ‘Like, if he had access to the gym and the pool, it’s not likely he was staying in a guest house in Leith.’

‘Got it in one. There might even be an expiry date and time, which’d give you a window on when he checked in. The only problem would be that the data held on these cards is almost always encrypted. They use a master encryption key which is unique to the property and set when the key system is installed. On the plus side, the encryption key is usually pretty short by modern standards. And because there aren’t too many manufacturers of these key-entry systems, there’s not so many algorithms to factor into the equation. So somebody like me can bust the encryption wide open in a couple of weeks or so.’

‘A couple of weeks?’ Karen couldn’t hide her disappointment.

‘Come on, Detective. You know that’s no time at all in my world. Hardcore decryption can take bloody months. But anyway, all of this is aca-fucking-demic. Because your key-card’s been sitting out in the open and most of the magnetic strip has flaked off like dandruff on a jacket collar.’

Dismayed, Karen said, ‘Bugger.’

‘Well, yes and no. There’s a bit of data that I’ve been able to pull off it. And it turns out to be worth a lot more than whether or not Mr Bojangles had access to the executive lounge…’ Tamsin paused expectantly.

Karen knew what was expected of her. ‘Really? That’s amazing. What did you manage to find out?’

‘Here’s the thing. If you jam a couple of cards together in your pocket, sometimes the data from one magnetic strip gets picked up by another. And that’s what happened here. Mr Bojangles obviously had his bank debit card snuggled up to his hotel room key. And some of the info rubbed off. It’s your lucky day, Detective.’

‘Have you got a name?’

Tamsin shifted her chewing gum again, taking her time. ‘As good as. Just call me your fairy godmother, Detective. I’ve got a sort code and the first five digits of the account number. I don’t think you’ll need an expert code breaker to sort that one out for you when the banks open in the morning.’