Watcher (13 page)

Cumberland Street, Edinburgh
Tuesday 25 December, 11.45 p.m.

‘Happy Christmas, Brodie.’

‘If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have answered the door,’ I snapped.

Glasgow Joe lay back against the railings and smiled apologetically. ‘Happy Christmas, darlin’.’ He smelled of whisky.

‘You’re repeating yourself. Is that old age or drink?’ I snapped.

‘Brodie … it’s the season of goodwill … peace to all men. Are you inviting me in?’ He stepped forward. The light shone directly on him and I saw lines on his face that weren’t there before. He looked exhausted. I couldn’t turn him away, really; we’d shared too much.

‘What are you? A stranger? Do you need an invite to come into my house? Before you’d have walked straight through.’ I turned my back on him and walked into the hallway.

‘Before what, Brodie? I can’t assume anything about you now,’ he slurred. I dreaded to think how much he must have consumed to get into this state but I was just relieved I hadn’t picked up the tab. Mind you, Joe could go into any pub in certain parts of Edinburgh and have them queuing up to buy him alcohol.

‘You need some coffee.’ He dutifully followed me into the kitchen, banging off the walls in the hall; he was swinging more than an IKEA wardrobe. I switched the kettle on, not wanting to wait for the espresso machine to heat up. He needed strong black coffee inside him immediately. Joe opened the fridge and rooted around looking for food. It was well stocked since my flatmate Louisa had come to stay. There was no doubt about it, she looked after her men well and I knew she considered Joe to be one of her men. That was why she always encouraged Jack, I guessed.

Joe found a leg of turkey left over from the Christmas dinner that Louisa had cooked for her parents; she was determined to prove her independence to everyone, as if there was a shred of doubt left. I sometimes worried her father would hear about her antics but she seemed to think whatever he thought of her behaviour was his problem.

Whenever I’m in a confined space with Joe, I’m so aware of his size – he seems to fill the room. Tonight, the kitchen smelled like a distillery.

I tried to encourage him to sit but he continued to stand, smiling like an imbecile.

‘You hurt me, Brodie McLennan.’ He waved the turkey leg reproachfully in my direction. ‘… Did … don’t try to deny it.’

I pushed and shoved in an effort to get him safely into a chair. He was determined to stand, in spite of this fact; he would slide a few steps down the kitchen worktop before regaining his balance. Tired out, I sat down and drank my coffee.

‘You hurt me, Brodie McLennan.’

‘I heard you the first time – you’re like a stuck CD.’ Joe wandered over, placed his hand on my hair and rested on it: the weight was crushing.

‘But I’m not kidding. You did. I saw it in your eyes. You thought I was selling people out – that’s not the case, Brodie. How could you ever think that about me?’ He slumped heavily on the chair next to me, his kilt lifting well up his thigh. I knew Joe was a true Scotsman, so I pulled it down. ‘Don’t go trying to take advantage of me when I’m drunk,’ he laughed, breathing a fine mist of Islay malt on me. ‘Oh go on then – you know I’d let you.’ His voice was suddenly serious.

I backed away – I knew that him being drunk gave me the perfect chance to find out exactly what his relationship with DI Bancho was; maybe he wouldn’t clam up.

‘What have you been doing with Duncan Bancho anyway?’ I asked. ‘You know I hate him.’

‘You know what your problem is? You hate too many folk. Duncan’s not that bad. He’s trying his best to save those lassies.’

‘What’s that got to do with you?’ I poured more coffee into his cup.

‘His investigation is being hampered outside and inside the force. Half his colleagues are desperate to see him fall on his face … and no one on the streets will speak to him, so I go round the brothels and see what I can find out,’ he told me.

‘Hard job but someone’s got to do it sort of thing?’

‘When did you get bitter like this, Brodie? I’ve never had to pay for sex in my life. Not financially anyway …’ He stared at me as he made the last comment. ‘I’m not so hard up that I’d take a freebie from some poor Polish lassie just to make myself feel better.’

He was in a huff. Pushing his chair back from the table, shakily, he got to his feet.

‘Sit down and behave, Joe. What did you come to say? Apart from Happy Christmas – again.’

He waited a few moments before answering, and his eyes cleared as he spoke. ‘I’m frightened for you, Brodie, and for Connie. It’s probably just my imagination, but I wanted to catch the bastard to keep you both safe … then I got to know some of the girls that Duncan was talking to.’ I couldn’t keep the look out of my eye. ‘No – not in that way. These girls, they’re not like Kailash’s girls; they’ve been sold in a market like bloody slaves.’ He stood up and walked over to get himself a glass of water; evidently he’d decided it was time to sober up.

‘Did you know Bancho and I went to Bucharest a couple of months back?’

I felt numb; I really didn’t know anything about him any more. I shook my head.

‘I heard a rumour that the Ripper attacked a girl … but she survived. Brodie, somewhere out there is a girl who can nail the bastard; she’s seen his face. Well. Bancho I needed to find her but she just disappeared … we thought she might have gone back to Bucharest … so we followed up that lead, unofficially of course.’

‘Did you find her?’

‘No, I’m still searching.’

All the colour drained from his face. He looked guilty. Something had happened in Romania.

‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’

‘Yeah … I was offered a thirteen-year-old redhead for twelve hundred pounds. But that’s not the saddest thing … I wouldn’t have been her first owner.’ He hit his big fist off the table. ‘The government is doing fuck-all about it.’ He shook his head in disbelief, unshed tears filled his eyes.

‘And what did you do?’

‘Kailash and me bought her.’

The surprise showed in my eyes – just how close was he to my mother?

‘Her name is Angelika – we bought her pal as well. Took them out to a charity who keep them safe, send them to school. That’s the tip of the iceberg though, Brodie; there are bloody thousands of children being trafficked as sex slaves into Britain alone.’ He placed his head in his hands. ‘With all this going on in the world, is it wrong for me to worry so much about you and Connie?’

I heard the front door opening; voices told me it was Louisa and a beau. They also hit the wall several times before falling in the kitchen door. I had warned her about binge drinking – her small body couldn’t take it; her bones were brittle and I didn’t want her snapping a thigh bone. She was far too good in court to be languishing at home. It turned out that Louisa was sober but Chris Martel, one of the young advocates she was seeing, was not.

‘Happy Christmas, Joe,’ she said, climbing into his lap. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. ‘We’ve got company, Brodie,’ she told me. ‘Room for another one in here?’ She jumped off Joe’s lap, shrugging her shoulders, and grabbing Martel’s hand and a bottle of Dom Perignon out of the fridge. She ran as fast as her little legs would carry her – which wasn’t very fast – and bumped into Jack as he came in the door.

‘This is embarrassing …’ he said.

The nosy wee minx lingered in the doorway to see if there would be blood. Suddenly sober, Joe stood up. ‘Not at all, Jack, I was just leaving.’ He almost seemed resigned.

‘I’ll see you out,’ I said, feeling guilty and not knowing why. After all, he’d been the one to divorce me years ago. I didn’t want to be the sort of bride who appears in tabloid papers getting married for the fifth time to the same man, although, secretly, I suspected that could be Joe and me. The night air was cold and starry. ‘How are you getting home?’ I asked. He hit his thigh. ‘Shanks’s pony – the walk will do me good, give me a chance to sober up, and think. I don’t know what possessed me coming here.’

‘You know perfectly well what was on your mind,’ I said. I couldn’t deny the electricity. Joe was cute when he was drunk, and cute isn’t a word that could often be used to describe him. I felt a pull in my stomach.

‘I only came to give you your Christmas present. I’ve bought you one since I got a paper round when I was twelve – did you think I would forget this year?’ He pulled out a small red box from Hamilton & Inches, jewellers with a royal warrant.
Oh God, what if it was a
ring?
I needn’t have flattered myself. Nestling on the velvet was a platinum locket. Joe struggled with his big fingers to open it.

‘The photograph was Connie’s idea.’

Joe, Connie, and Greyfriars Bobby in the middle, grinned out at me.

‘She says you’re Bobby,’ he laughed.

‘Thanks. I seem to recall you said I was like Greyfriars Bobby too.’

‘Not any more. Bobby was faithful to the man he loved, remember. The one man. Goodnight, Brodie.’

With that, he left me standing on the doorstep.

Aching for him.

Pathology Department, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary
Wednesday 26 December, 2 p.m.

I didn’t have to be here; post-mortems were not necessarily part of my job description. God knows I hate them. So why was I following the putrid stench of death? I’d like to say it was because I’m a masochist, but the truth is more unpalatable: I’m a smart-arse. If I wasn’t there, some detail could be missed or ignored; in other words I was here because I need to win. I could be honest with myself – my need to solve the case was probably greater than my need for justice. The matter of possibly finding some evidence to show that Thomas didn’t kill Katya was a bonus. Did I think I was indispensable? Well, Lavender constantly reminds me that the humansized fridges in Patch’s department are filled with indispensable workaholics like me.

I clumped along the corridor in my bike boots. The only way to salvage this miserable excuse for a Boxing Day would be to ride the Fat Boy down to North Berwick, somewhere clean where I could feel the wind in my hair; somewhere I could smell salt, not decomposing flesh.

Patch had called at eight that morning, more or less as a professional courtesy – and to wish me ‘Happy Christmas’. He had been asked if he would come in on a public holiday and perform two autopsies. My client was only charged with the murder of the girl who fell from the castle battlements.

Money talks and Adie Foster, through the good offices of the chief constable, had persuaded the Crown Office to have the autopsy on a public holiday. Patch likes nothing better than to delve around in cadavers so he didn’t object.

Pushing the swing doors open I clung to one nugget of information – the temperature in the Thistle Chapel was cold enough to have prevented the body decaying too badly. In spite of the smell, I hoped that meant that the brain hadn’t turned to mush, or that when Patch touched the hair it wouldn’t come away in tufts bringing bits of scalp with it. I’d seen this before and it always turned my stomach.

Patch was already at work, and sounds of Elvis singing ‘Suspicious Minds’ echoed around the sterile room; dressed in green scrubs and white wellies, the pathologist pulled his mask down.

‘No rest for the wicked – get over here,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got. Technically, Thomas Foster isn’t charged with this murder, so I just started before you got here.’ Patch’s baby-blue eyes were wide with curiosity and, dare I say it, delight. Sometimes, I just couldn’t understand why I was so fond of him.

Bancho was there, of course. ‘What have you found?’ he said.

Mihaela’s naked body was laid out on the cold metal gurney. The sight of it wiped the smile off my face. I recognized her from the babushka’s photograph – just. Her skin, which had been creamy white, was now greyish-green, and the freckles on her face were gone. Cruelly, her eyes were open – and looked like black pools of pain. Her long red hair was spread out, the ends hanging over the edge of the gurney, knotted together and stained black with blood. Most pathologists cover the cadavers with a crisp white linen sheet, but, even with the dead, Patch’s bedside manner is lacking. I suppose if the body had been covered, the mess might have shocked me more.

‘These purple bruises …’ He pointed to marks on her face and neck, and then looked at me. It was his way of keeping my mind off my heaving stomach.

‘Those marks indicate she was alive at that point?’ I ventured.

‘Correct – she has a cocktail of drugs inside her including benzodiazepine. It’s a hypnotic that would have allowed him to torture her for up to five hours. It relaxed her muscles so she couldn’t fight back – but she would have felt everything.’

‘And that’s the same as the other victims?’ Bancho asked, and Patch nodded at him.

My eyes scanned down the body at all the purple bruises. ‘She was alive while all that was done.’ Patch nodded again.

‘Her throat was cut – and her tongue has been pulled out by the root. It’s taken some doing … so again he’s used a serrated knife, but his intention is to make it look torn,’ Patch said, barely looking up as he took scrapings from beneath Mihaela’s nails. Her hands were manicured, the red polish was chipped, and, as the pathologist handled the fingers, the skin became baggy. After a period of time, skin slips in the direction of gravity – Patch calls it ‘de-gloving’ and it was what was happening now. ‘The skin was removed from her left knee, as if she had been kneeling on it too long,’ he told us.

‘It’s your fucking sicko client’s signature, Brodie,’ muttered Bancho. ‘He takes young redheaded girls, drugs them, strips them … fillets them …’ He stopped to hold his breath and control his heaving stomach, and, shaking his head, looked over again to Patch who was following his own strict procedure. His routine ensured that he missed nothing; now he was collecting samples of hair. A clump came away on a two-inch-square piece of scalp. It looked like a ghastly divot of grass. Undisturbed, he said: ‘It’s nasty the way he sews their eyes … she’ll go to her grave that way – the skin’s too delicate to remove his handiwork.’

I didn’t comment on the purple bruising round her sockets. Patch placed her hair on an instrument tray; his gloved hands were covered in what closely resembled faecal matter, as he walked decisively up to the bloodied stumps that passed as ankles.

‘He hacked the feet off, ante mortem.’ He pointed to some more purple bruising.

‘What about DNA?’ I asked.

‘We have DNA samples but they are no good without a suspect.’

Bancho said, smugly looking towards me, ‘But now we have Thomas Foster – everything has changed.’

Patch snorted and walked over to a gurney that was covered by a sheet. Bancho followed him, so I fell into step – this was Patch’s domain and even the police didn’t take liberties here. Bancho waited for Patch to reveal to me what was under the sheet. With the flourish of a magician he pulled it off. Luckily, he didn’t shout ‘abracadabra’. I was expecting another dead girl, but what I got was a pig. It’s incredible how big they are – the surprise was clear on my face.

‘Pig skin is the closest you can get to human skin. I’ve been experimenting on what kind of knife made the marks.

‘I have a whole collection here, everything from bread knives to military issue. But I can’t find anything that comes close and that’s extremely unusual.’

He poked about the dead sow, indicating markings on the skin. I felt sick. I dreaded that one day I’d end up on Patch’s table, naked and vulnerable, with pathology assistants laughing at my body, just like anyone else’s. Sometimes I cursed myself that I spent so much of my living time with Patch. I had no doubt that he would do my autopsy himself if he outlived me. His strict Wee Free upbringing means he believes the body is a shell, and he would be the one to carve up my shell if he could. He’d see it as his duty – both to me and God. Perhaps that’s why I get upset when I’m in here; I look to see the soul of the deceased and it’s just not there.

‘Come over here,’ said Patch, walking to a side table near Mihaela’s body. He picked up a pair of feet and waved them about like a bargain hunter in a shoe shop.

‘Can anybody spot what’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘Simple question. Simple answer.’

Bancho looked blank. The condition his stomach was in he couldn’t risk getting any closer. His reaction stoked my courage. I moved towards Patch. I stopped short of touching the feet, ignoring the smell as best I could. I got in close.

He was right. It was simple.

‘Two left feet,’ I said. ‘They’re two left feet.’

This was no eureka moment.

Somewhere out there was a dead girl we hadn’t found yet.