Dark Flight (19 page)

‘The university gave him compassionate leave to go home to Kano.’

‘I had no idea.’

‘He didn’t tell you?’

Mr Kirk shook his head adamantly. ‘He told me he had bought a flat in Athole Gardens and was moving in immediately. I was quite angry. It takes time to advertise for a new tenant.’

‘When did he leave?’

‘A week ago.’

Bill glanced up the wrought-iron staircase. ‘Has anyone been up there since?’

‘I’ve been away at a conference. I flew back late last night. I’ve not had time—’

‘We’d like to take a look.’

They followed him up the staircase. He was making small irritated noises in his throat, intimating his displeasure at the world in general and his absent tenant in particular.

He paused on the halfway landing. ‘I’ve forgotten the key.’ He tutted as though it was their fault. ‘I’ll have to go back down for it.’

Bill stepped to one side to let him pass, then went on climbing. At the top was another landing. A well-built and tasteful extension created a single-door entrance to what had originally been the upper rooms of the two-storey house.

Mr Kirk came bustling up to join them. ‘Of course, he forgot to leave his set of keys, which means I’ll have
to have the locks changed.’ He threw his glance ceiling-wards in disgust.

Bill held out his hand for the key. ‘If you don’t mind, Mr Kirk, it would be better if you waited downstairs.’

The man looked as though he might argue, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have to leave for work in an hour,’ he warned them.

They waited for his footsteps to descend then Bill turned the key in the lock.

The scent of fresh blood and body waste was obvious.

‘Bloody hell,’ Bill muttered.

Rhona pulled the door shut. The last thing they wanted was Mr Kirk catching a whiff of what was in here and coming up to investigate.

‘We’d better dress up before we go in,’ she advised.

She handed Bill a forensic suit.

The hall floor was sanded wood with multiple layers of varnish, glinting like honey in the soft glow of half a dozen embedded ceiling lights. A blue runner carpet ran up the centre. Bill followed the smell to a part-open door.

He was as tense as Rhona was, his neck beating a raised pulse to match her own. Her imagination was working overtime, creating a series of pictures, most of them involving the inert body of a mutilated child.

The door swung open on a sitting room. Morning light rimmed the closed wooden shutters. Bill felt for a light switch and she heard him draw a deep breath against what was coming.

Malcolm Menzies lay curled in a pool of blood and
urine, tracksuit bottoms at his ankles, his hands clutching his scrotum, like a footballer in a defence wall. Blood was sprayed widely over the surrounding surfaces. But the worst thing of all was the look on his face.

Shock and pity flooded Rhona’s senses, followed by guilt. When Malchie’d licked his lips and pointedly looked at her crotch, Rhona had wanted him dead. Now he was, she wished she’d never harboured such thoughts.

Bill’s voice betrayed a similar frame of mind. ‘They got to him before we did. We’d better get a pathologist out and inform the fiscal office. This is turning into an episode of
Taggart
,’ he said grimly. ‘We poke our noses in and the body count doubles.’

Bill went to inform Mr Kirk he had a dead body on the premises. The resulting wail was loud enough to carry upstairs and through two doors. Five minutes ago, all Mr Kirk had to worry about was changing the locks.

Rhona undid the catch on the shutters and folded them back on their hinges, letting a wash of grey light fill the room. Beyond the glass, Byres Road was nose to tail in traffic, the pavements a stream of people walking to work. A vision of normality in stark contrast to the contents of the room.

Malchie had been last seen by his mother the previous day, when he assaulted her and took her money. Rhona knelt in the rigid curve of the body. Rigor mortis invariably began in the jaw and neck muscles, then worked its way downwards to affect the arms, trunk and legs within twelve to eighteen hours of death. But it was highly unreliable in timing death.

She studied the face. The look of terror was straight out of a horror movie, an impression accentuated by the opaque quality of the staring eyes and the stiff set of the jaw. In rare instances, cadaveric spasm occurred immediately after death, mimicking the onset of early rigor mortis. No one knew why it happened, except that it was linked to extreme fear.

The reason for Malchie’s terror was displayed on the makeshift altar. His genitals had been cut off, tied together and placed in front of the skull of what looked to be a small mammal, wrapped in barbed wire – an offering to whatever hellish deity the murderer worshipped.

The act of mutilation and its associated shock may have killed him, but the killer had made absolutely sure.

A knife had been thrust up and under the lower back rib and into the kidney. Quick and efficient. But you needed strength and accuracy to do it properly. Hit a rib and the force would come back at you with the recoil of a gun. Whoever knifed Malchie was a skilled killer.

In death, Malcolm looked his real age. Sara had said her son was frightened.
He used to be like that when he was a wee boy. Always frightened
.

And he had certainly had something to be frightened of.

Rhona began to process the body, taking as many samples in situ as possible. There were no obvious defence marks on Malcolm’s hands or arms, suggesting he hadn’t put up much of a fight. The furniture
wasn’t disturbed either. Which might mean he had been knifed in the back first and then mutilated.

She tried a closer look at the knife wound, but it was impossible without moving the body. Rhona sat back on her ankles. Sissons would have to deal with that.

It was then she noticed something small wedged between the upper arm and the floor. Rhona extracted it with her gloved hand. The object was the size and shape of a large clove of garlic, but brownish-red in colour.

It was a nut of some kind. She sniffed it. She had never seen one in real life, but it looked like pictures she’d seen of a kola nut. The end had been chewed to release the juice rich in caffeine and other stimulants. Her Nigerian research had been peppered with references to the kola nut, its associations with religion, social etiquette, health and sexuality.

She was pretty sure Malchie hadn’t been the one chewing the kola nut, and saliva was a great source of DNA.

Rhona sampled the end of the nut and bagged it, then went back to study the tale told by the trail of blood.

IN OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES
, Chrissy’s expression might have made Rhona laugh. ‘Don’t say, “What are you doing here?”’ she begged.

‘I’ll keep that for later,’ Chrissy warned her, running a practised eye around the room.

The body had already been taken to the mortuary. Rhona had watched it pass Mr Kirk’s horrified eyes. Renting again would likely be impossible after the story hit the papers. On the other hand, he could be bombarded with weirdos who wanted to live in a flat where a murder had taken place.

Needless to say, Mr Kirk had not left for work as intended. Instead, he was holed up in his flat with a male friend, who was there either to help soothe his nerves, or else hear all the gory details.

Chrissy had appeared at Ashton Road shortly after Rhona called her. The church samples were on their way to the lab and Helen had been left at the church to catch any late arrivals.

McNab followed Chrissy into the room. Judging by their reaction to one another, Rhona suspected they had shared transport. She wondered how McNab had dealt with Chrissy’s acid tongue and frosty demeanour.
Forgiving and forgetting were not Chrissy’s strong points. Loyalty to her friends was.

‘How did he die?’ Chrissy asked.

‘Fright, by the look on his face.’

Chrissy glanced at the altar.

‘Someone cut off his penis and testicles and laid them there,’ Rhona explained.

‘Ouch!’ Chrissy watched McNab flinch at that bit of news. He didn’t move to shield his vital parts, but he looked like he wanted to.

‘They made sure he was dead by knifing him in the kidney.’

Chrissy shook her head in disbelief. ‘He was a wee shite, but I wouldn’t have wished that on him.’

‘Me neither,’ Rhona said fervently.

‘Now we know that Malchie was mixed up in some way with the murderer.’

‘Or murderers,’ Rhona corrected her. ‘If Olatunde is involved and he left for Nigeria a week ago, he didn’t kill Malchie.’

‘This case is doing my head in,’ said Chrissy.

‘Fortunately you and I just do the forensics, so we don’t have to solve it,’ Rhona reminded her.

‘Don’t forensics always solve it?’ said Chrissy sweetly, for McNab’s benefit.

He looked set to argue, but thought the better of it. ‘Where’s the boss?’ he asked instead.

‘He left with the body,’ said Rhona.

Chrissy waited until McNab had departed, before she spoke. ‘Sam turned up for a DNA test.’

‘And?’

‘I got Helen to do it.’

Rhona caught the worry in Chrissy’s voice. ‘That was the right thing to do,’ she assured her.

A flicker of worry crossed Chrissy’s face. ‘What if Sam is involved?’

‘Do you have any reason to think he is?’

Chrissy shook her head. ‘It’s this church thing. I’m not sure about the pastor.’ She struggled to find words to explain why and finally settled for, ‘He’s too sincere.’

‘Sincere?’

She frowned. ‘You know, like Tony Blair.’

Rhona laughed. ‘Now you have got me worried.’ But she took Chrissy’s words seriously. Chrissy was a good judge of character. If she didn’t trust Pastor Achebe, there was a reason for it, even if it was subconscious. ‘What does Sam think about him?’

‘Sam says the pastor teaches that love is greater than hate.’

‘You can’t fault that.’

Curiosity, Rhona told Chrissy, had taken her through the entire flat while she waited for the crime scene personnel to arrive. The rooms were all spacious, tastefully decorated and furnished. Mr Kirk was a landlord who took his role seriously. The kitchen was well equipped and looked recently installed with oak cupboards and marble worktops.

None of the rooms gave the impression that a family with a six-year-old child had lived there. Rhona spent some time in the smaller bedroom, looking for evidence
of Yana. The only result of her thorough search was a white ankle sock with a pink frill jammed between the bed and the wall.

All bedding and towels had been removed, denying her a good source of DNA. The dishwasher had also been run, removing any human imprint from the dishes and cutlery. When she checked with Mr Kirk, he told her he’d arranged for his cleaning lady, Mrs Wright, to come in while he was away.

‘She always cleans thoroughly between tenants,’ he assured her. ‘No one wants someone else’s hair in their bath,’ he added with a grimace.

The linen had been sent to the laundrette. The place swept, hoovered and dusted. The scent of bleach still lingered in the kitchen and bathroom. All evidence of the Olatunde family had been wiped away.

Rhona left Mr Kirk on the phone to his insurance company, trying to find out if they would cover the cost of a new sitting-room carpet. She didn’t envy him the task of describing what had happened to the current one.

Mr Kirk was correct. Mrs Wright was thorough. There were no hairs in the bath. The plughole of the shower cubicle was another matter.

With a pair of tweezers, Rhona carefully extracted a long thin string of soapy hairs and bagged them. They might help produce a DNA profile for the members of the Olatunde family.

Her next bit of luck was the toilet seat. Someone had lifted the lid and left a print. If Mrs Wright was as meticulous as she appeared to be, she would surely
have wiped the toilet seat. Which meant the print was put there after the big clean-up.

Sara Menzies stood among the crowd outside the police cordon. Rhona was unrecognisable in the white suit and mask as she exited the building, but something drew their eyes together and she knew that Sara was aware that it was her. She pulled off her hood and slipped down the mask.

Sara’s terrified expression eerily mirrored her son’s.

Rhona spoke to a nearby constable and asked him to let the woman through the cordon. ‘It’s the boy’s mother,’ she said.

He glanced over at the tragic figure in the crowd. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

Sara walked towards her like a robot. ‘I saw the news. It’s Malcolm, isn’t it?’

Rhona took the woman’s arm as her legs buckled under her. ‘Help me get her inside,’ she told the constable.

The sight of grief is compelling, sweeping other emotions aside. Mr Kirk let them into his flat without question.

‘This is the victim’s mother,’ Rhona explained. ‘She’s just found out her son is dead.’

He led them past his open-mouthed friend into a small sitting room that looked out on a back garden. A bird table piled with seed was being guarded by a belligerent robin, keeping chaffinches and tits at bay. The robin’s breast was the blood-red of winter, his warning chirp unnaturally loud in the tense silence.

Rhona helped Sara to a chair and watched as she collapsed into it.

She crouched in front of Mrs Menzies, whose blank eyes and ashen face made her look suddenly ten years older. ‘I’m so sorry, Sara.’ The only words we can use in these situations, but they sounded bland and inadequate.

‘How did he die?’

Rhona kept it simple. ‘A stab wound.’

‘Can I see him?’

‘He’s at the mortuary. I’ll take you there.’

Sara was shredding a paper hanky on her lap. ‘I should never have gone to the police.’

She met Rhona’s eye. They were complicit in this, both of them. She wasn’t blaming Rhona, but she wanted an acknowledgement of that fact.

‘We didn’t kill Malcolm,’ Rhona said. ‘We were trying to save him.’

Sara touched Rhona’s head, like a mother would a child who simply didn’t understand what the world was really like.

‘They found out about the phone,’ she said.