Dying Light. Stuart MacBride
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up and down at her feet. A young uniformed constable snapped to attention as DI Steel approached.
‘It’s OK,’ said Steel, digging out another cigarette, ‘you don’t have to curtsey.’
Grinning, the constable told them how Mrs Hendry had guided him to the spot and he’d called for the Identification Bureau as soon as he’d seen the case. A duty doctor and pathologist were on their way. As was the Procurator Fiscal.
‘Good boy,’ said Steel when he’d finished. ‘If I was DI Insch, you’d get a sweetie.’ Instead she offered him a fag, much to his horror. Surely it wasn’t right to smoke at a crime scene. What about contamination? ‘Aye, you’re probably right,’ said Steel, puffing away. They got Mrs Hendry to go through her version of events again. No she hadn’t touched anything; well you weren’t supposed to, were you? Not when you found a dead body in a suitcase.
Steel waited until Mrs Hendry and her little monster-dog were escorted from the premises before slouching into action.
‘Right.’ She grabbed a boiler suit from Rennie, leaning on Logan for support as she tucked her trousers into her socks and clambered into it. Once they were all suited up, only their faces showing, she stomped over to where the IB team had almost managed to get the tent erected. The air was thick with flies. ‘You lot going to be all bloody day?’ she demanded.
A thin man with a dirty-grey moustache scowled at her. ‘This isn’t easy, you know!’
‘Blah, blah, blah. You opened the suitcase yet?’ Not bloody likely was the loud reply. You never knew which pathologist you were going to get these days, and if it was that MacAlister woman you’d get your testicles in a jar for messing up her crime scene. So that suitcase was going to stay locked until she, or the duty doctor, got here. Steel stared at the red fabric case. ‘Just like Christmas Eve, isn’t it?’ she said to Logan. ‘The present’s right there under the tree, you know what’s in it, but you’re not allowed to open it till Santa’s been. Don’t suppose a small peek would hurt though, would it…’ She made for the tent’s open door, but Dirty Moustache stopped her on the threshold.
‘No,’ he told her. ‘Not till the pathologist gets here!’
‘Oh come on, it’s my crime scene! How the hell do you expect me to catch the bastard if you won’t let me have a poke about?’
‘You can poke about all you like when the pathologist says so. Until then this area will remain sealed. And anyway,’ he pointed at the cigarette bobbing away in the corner of the inspector’s mouth, ‘there’s no way you’re getting in there with that!’
‘Oh for God’s sake…’ And with that DI Steel scuffed off to smoke her fag and sulk in peace. Ten minutes, one and a half cigarettes, later there was a cry of ‘Hello?’ and the crunch and snap of someone pushing their way through the branches.
It was the new deputy PF, already done up in her scene-of-crime boiler suit, complete with matching blue shoe covers, even though the rest of her party was still in their regular clothes. The real PF followed her, deep in conversation with Dr Isobel MacAlister – the Ice Queen cometh – while Doc Wilson stomped along at the rear of the group, not talking to anyone and scowling at Isobel’s back.
The PF gave them a grim smile, asked to be brought up to speed, then suited up and disappeared into the SOC tent, taking Isobel and a reluctant Doc Wilson with her, leaving her deputy to fidget at the entrance to the stinking blue plastic grotto as Dirty Moustache refused to let her into the crime scene. ‘You’ve trailed every bit of grit and dirt and God knows what else in from wherever you got changed!’ he said, pointing at her protective suit and booties. ‘You’ll have to get on a new set.’ Blushing furiously she stripped off, revealing a sombre black suit and canary-yellow blouse. The outfit, combined with Rachael’s beetroot face and curly red hair, made her look like an angry bee. DI Steel left her to it, dragging Logan with her into the crime scene.
There were hundreds of flies in the SOC tent, buzzing and swooping in the foetid air, making Logan’s skin crawl. The sunlight, stronger in the clearing than it had been in the forest proper, made the plastic sheeting glow, tainting everything a sickly blue. Looking a bit like Smurfs in their white over suits, the IB technicians kept a respectful distance from Isobel. Just in case. The video operator went in for a couple of long panning shots before settling down behind her left shoulder so that he could get a good view of the case’s contents when it was opened. The photographer flashed away, the sudden clack and whine making everything jump into full colour, before fading back to shades of blue. There was a rustle of plastic and Rachael, dressed in a brand-new set of coveralls, poked her head into the stench then joined Logan and Steel at the back of the tent, looking on as Isobel examined the case.
‘It appears to be a mid-range suitcase. Relatively new,’ said Isobel, for the benefit of the tape recorder whirring away in her pocket. She tried the catch: it was locked so she made one of the IB team cut the thing out. Telling him, at least seven times, to be careful. At last the lock was sitting in an evidence pouch and Isobel grasped the lid of the suitcase. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got…’
The smell was instant and overpowering. Logan had thought it was bad before, but with the suitcase opened it was a hundred times worse. The thing was relatively watertight and half-full of viscous, stinking liquid, surrounding what looked like a torso. Two foot long. That meant it was an adult. Logan couldn’t see any breasts, so it was probably male. Unless they’d been cut off. The skin was black with hairy mould, slick with slime.
There was a sudden movement at his side as Rachael slapped a hand over her mouth and nose and scrambled out of the tent. Logan couldn’t blame her. His stomach was rapidly working its way to the same conclusion.
And then Isobel spoke: ‘Son of a bitch…’
Logan was almost afraid to ask, ‘What?’
She sat back on her heels. ‘Literally. This torso.’ She pointed at the swollen, rotting lump of meat, crammed into a suitcase and hidden beneath a tree in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere. ‘It’s not human.’
There was silence in the tent, broken only by the buzzing of flies. Thick, fat bluebottles that settled on the decomposing torso. Feeding. It was Logan who asked the obvious question, ‘What do you mean, “It’s not human”?’
‘Well, for a start it’s completely covered with hair.’
Logan peered into the stinking suitcase. Isobel was right: what he’d taken for black, furry mould, was, in fact, fur. Genuine, bona fide fur. ‘If it’s not human, what is it?’
Isobel prodded the torso, less careful with it than she would have been with human remains. ‘Has to be a dog. Maybe a Labrador? Whatever it is, the SSPCA can deal with it.’ She stood, wiping twin trails of slime down the front of her boiler suit.
‘But why is it here? Why go to all this trouble to hide a dead dog?’
‘You’re the detectives, you tell me. Whatever the motivation, these remains aren’t human. Now if you’ll excuse me I have real work to do.’ She swept out.
Logan watched her go, bemused. ‘When did this become my fault?’ he asked Steel. The inspector just shrugged and buggered off outside for a cigarette, closely followed by the Procurator Fiscal. Logan shook his head. ‘Doc? You want to hazard a guess?’
Doc Wilson scowled. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said, ‘it’s beneath the great pathologist to examine a dead dog, but it’s OK for me to do it, is it? I’m a doctor, no’ a sodding vet!’
Logan gritted his teeth. ‘I just want someone to tell me what the hell is going on! Do you think you could get off your prima donna horse for five bloody minutes and actually help for a change?’
Everyone else in the tent suddenly took an all-consuming interest in their shoes as Logan and the duty