Dark Flight (11 page)

They exchanged amused looks. The freckled one emitted a high-pitched giggle.

The tattooed one spoke. ‘Rare plants, is it? That’s funny. We’re here looking for pussy.’ He punched his mate’s arm. ‘Here, pussy, pussy, pussy!’ he said in a high miaowing voice.

The freckled one gave a low excited growl. They exchanged looks then walked purposefully towards her.

Rhona turned and ran. With a whoop of delight they followed.

The assault was vicious, intrusive and over in seconds. As they passed her on either side, one shoved his hand between her legs, the other grabbed her breast. Rhona squealed in pain and outrage. Then they were gone, catcalling as they ran up and over the railway bridge to the other side of the river.

Frustration and fury swept through Rhona, intensified by her sense of her own vulnerability. She felt violated and utterly impotent.

She leaned against a low wall and took a series of deep breaths until her heartbeat slowed and her limbs ceased their trembling. Bill was right. She shouldn’t have come alone.

Thinking that made her angrier still. This was nothing to do with the case. An assault like this could have happened anywhere, at any time. It could, but it hadn’t, until now.

When McNab appeared from the shadow of the
bridge, she was absurdly grateful. She had to stop herself running and embracing him.

There must have been something in her stance or the expression on her face, because he upped his pace as he came towards her.

‘You okay?’

‘I had a slight run-in with a couple of teenage boys.’

McNab knew her well enough to recognise a lie. He was already pulling out his mobile. ‘Description?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Description,’ he insisted.

‘White tracksuits, checked caps.’ She gave a laugh. ‘Which describes half of Glasgow.’

The laugh didn’t fool McNab. ‘You should have waited for me.’

Rhona didn’t want to discuss that. ‘Now you’re here, can we make a start?’ She didn’t mean it to come out as irritated as it did.

He snapped the mobile shut. ‘A team’s on its way. But yes, we can make a start.’

She covered her discomfort by fetching her forensic case from the car. McNab waited for her by the ruins. By the time she returned, she had regained her composure. Seeing McNab as a knight in shining armour had unnerved her. She wanted him at a professional distance, nothing more.

‘It’s a large area,’ he said on her return. ‘What are we looking for?’

‘I want to locate the plants. For Abel to have traces in his pocket, he must have been pretty close to one.’ She showed McNab the printout. ‘It won’t be in flower yet
so just look for low-growing leaves like these. There’ll be no plants around it – it doesn’t like competition.’

‘A bit like myself.’

It was an awkward attempt at a joke, or a harking back to old times. Either way she didn’t acknowledge it. Rhona made a show of pulling on a set of latex gloves.

‘I’ll find the plants and take soil samples. I suggest you check out the buildings.’

He took what amounted to an order with good grace.

She moved in the general direction of the bing. Patches of fresh grass and weeds were clearly visible among the garbage and piles of tyres. If they thought the boy was here, they would have to lift the tyres and go through all the piles of rubbish. It wasn’t a nice thought.

The undergrowth became patchy because of poorer soil. This was the bugloss’s natural habitat. Ten minutes later she struck lucky, spotting a plot of the telltale leaves near a weird structure like a concrete cylinder with a single door and an inverted cone as its top. It was far enough away from the farm buildings to suggest it played some part in the nearby mine.

The cylinder was part buried in slag at one side, the bugloss scattered over it. She climbed the slag, extracted a plant and a sample of the surrounding soil and bagged them. From her vantage point, the ground near the door looked disturbed by what might be a set of wheels. Glancing back the way she’d come, she could make out a set of parallel lines running from here through the short grass to the tarred track and the railway bridge.

A vehicle had crossed the waste ground to this cylinder and not long ago.

Common sense told her that with all the dumping going on, that wasn’t unusual. Instinct told her something else.

She took photos of the tracks from above, then came closer and took some more. Normally she would lift a print immediately, but she desperately wanted to take a look inside the concrete cylinder. If she were careful she could reach the door without disturbing the evidence.

McNab was nowhere in sight, which probably meant he was inside one of the farm buildings.

She listened at the door. The last thing she wanted was to disturb another drink and drugs party, but the only sound was the drip of water.

The handle turned easily enough but the wood was swollen with damp and the door jarred against the bottom half of its frame.

Rhona put her shoulder to it and gave a short sharp shove. The door resisted the first time, but gave on the second try.

A fetid smell rushed out to greet her. Urine, fresh faeces and the stench of decomposition.

THE SMELL WAS
strong enough to make her gag, but her desperation to see what was in there was greater than her desire to vomit.

Light from the open door was dull and grey, reaching in only a few feet. The rest was thick darkness. She resisted the temptation to rush in. If this was a crime scene it had to be preserved. Whatever was generating the smell had been dead for a while, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t also something alive in there.

‘Stephen?’

The steady plip of water was the only answer to her call. She opened her case and took out a forensic torch. The beam lit up what looked like a small white shoe lying on the concrete floor.

McNab responded immediately to her frantic shout. She watched as he sprang across the waste ground, leaping the piles of rubbish with the ease of a hurdler. He had always been fitter than the rest of the squad, but he must have been in training during his spell at the Police College. He was barely out of breath when he reached her.

His anxious glance moved from her shocked face to the open doorway. ‘Is it . . .’

‘I can see a child’s trainer but it’s too dark. I don’t want to go in before I put on a suit.’

He peered in, registering the ominous smell. ‘I’ve got crime scene gear in my boot. I’ll go and get it.’

‘Don’t use the track in case of tyre evidence,’ she said, as though McNab needed to be told his job.

‘You sure you’ll be all right here?’

Distress at the possible contents of the building rendered her voice sharp. ‘Of course!’

He scanned the waste ground as he left, obviously checking for her earlier assailants. The feeling that he was watching out for her only served to make Rhona feel more vulnerable.

She was pulling on the suit as the threatening sky let go in a sharp burst of rain, plastering her hair to her head and running down her face. Forensically, rain was bad, washing a site clean of evidence. The weather had stayed pretty dry since Stephen’s disappearance. That had been their only real luck . . .

Street lights on the distant River Road popped on, bathing it in orange, as McNab’s headlights emerged from beneath the railway bridge. The car swerved to avoid a pile of tyres on the remains of the tarred surface then swung left onto the waste ground. If McNab reached her without a puncture he was doing well.

He stayed clear of the rutted track, weaving between clumps of bushes and piles of rubble, the back axle jumping violently up and down, and finally drew in behind the building.

She waited for him to lay metal treads as far as the door. When he was finished she handed him a suit. ‘If
you’re coming in you’d better put this on.’ It was her way of saying she didn’t want to go in alone.

McNab drew on the suit and pulled up the hood, leaving the mask dangling around his neck.

He produced two high-powered torches, handing Rhona one. It felt heavy and solid. She pressed the switch and a strong beam of light sprang on.

‘We should call Bill.’

‘I already have,’ he told her. ‘There’s the usual rush-hour traffic on the M8. They’ll be here as soon as they can.’

McNab stood back, letting her go first. She ducked under the lintel, hearing him grunt as he ducked and followed her. He directed his beam at the centre of the floor.

The trainer lay on its side, a smear of mud on the white surface.

She swung the beam across the floor, holding her breath.

There was no body.

She heard a muttered ‘Thank God’ from McNab. Rhona wasn’t so relieved.

‘Check the walls,’ she told him.

Both circles of light danced the back wall together.

‘Jesus.’ McNab’s voice was a hiss. ‘What the hell is that?’

The rectangular brick construction was about three foot high and two foot wide. On its surface sat two candles. Between them stood some kind of animal skull, wrapped in barbed wire. There was a red diagonal cross painted on the wall above.

Rhona directed her beam to the left as McNab moved right. There was nothing but concrete wall glistening with water that trickled down in green and slimy trails. Apart from the single shoe and the strange altar, the place was empty.

McNab fetched another couple of treads and laid them in a path to the back wall. He stepped across first then held out his hand. Rhona took it and joined him. They both stared down at the grey bony object on the makeshift altar.

‘What kind of animal is it, do you think?’ McNab looked to her for guidance.

‘I don’t know – maybe a sheep or goat.’

Rhona took some camera shots. The flash lit up rusting barbed wire and four six-inch nails that were driven through the bone.

She turned it and took some more shots from a different angle.

‘The smell’s stronger here,’ McNab said. ‘Where the hell is it coming from?’

He was right. They had grown gradually used to the scent of decomposition. But it was stronger in the area of the altar. The skull was old and clean, washed almost white and there was nothing on the floor or the walls to explain the smell.

Rhona bagged the skull and the candles, then bent closer to the bricks. ‘It’s coming from inside the altar.’ She placed the bags at her feet and examined the bricks. ‘They’re not cemented together.’

She pulled at the top front one and it slid forward. She removed it and placed it carefully on the ground.

The smell rushed out at them.

She heard McNab smother a gag.

‘Use the mask!’

Officers’ vomit was not welcome on a crime scene. The bile was full of DNA.

Above the hastily pulled-up mask, McNab’s eyes were watering.

‘Maybe you’d better wait outside,’ she suggested.

He shook his head.

The space left by the top brick was too small for the torch. McNab held it for her while she removed two more.

This time she could shine her torch inside.

The altar appeared to be built around a hole in the ground filled with stagnant water. A long grey thing floated on its surface.

‘What can you see?’ he muttered through the mask.

‘Dirty water. And something that looks like a stick.’

She caught it with her gloved hand and pulled it towards her.

The resulting sensation was both peculiar and horrific. The surface of the object seemed to part from the whole, stripping down its length like a snake discarding its skin.

She let go and quickly withdrew her hand, realising with sickening certainty what she had grabbed. Disintegrating skin and hair stuck to the pale latex of her glove.

‘It’s a dead dog,’ she told him. ‘The stick was its tail.’

Lamps had been rigged up inside the concrete structure. It was like illuminating a grave: harsh, unrelenting and without respect.

Chrissy’s face was a livid white. In the forensic suit she looked ghost-like, a wraith in a tomb, as she finished sampling the damp walls.

From somewhere in Rhona’s memory came the thought that in African culture, buildings were made circular to prevent evil spirits from lurking in the corners. But within this cylinder, evil was in the very air they breathed.

The altar had been dismantled and the dog’s body removed. There had been no other body parts in the hole, human or otherwise.

She had collected human faeces, both fresh and old, from the foot of the wall, which also smelt strongly of urine. This place had been a prison, but the lack of blood suggested it had not been a place of torture or death. The red cross on the wall had been made with ordinary household paint.

The shoe could be a match to the ones worn by Stephen. That was all they’d found of the missing boy. Their one stroke of luck: the trainer had a Velcro fastening and everything stuck to Velcro.

‘I could do with a drink,’ Chrissy exclaimed with gusto. ‘A big one.’

‘Me too.’ Rhona rolled the latex gloves off her hands.

They had gone over the building with a fine-toothed comb. Collected plenty of material, none of it pleasant. And none of it seemed likely to lead them to Stephen.